Individ has a post up that mirrors what I’ve been feeling for the past couple years but was having a hard time articulating…

I try to be a pretty tolerant guy. Tolerant of different views, different lifestyles, different cultures. But one thing I’ve always had a tough time of it with is collectivist ideology. Not the people necessarily, your average person who ascribes to such modes of thought tends to be no different from others in a lot of respects. Now, the people in power, and some of the people on the dole can be a different story. But for the most part, I approach debating and questioning them as I would a child who hasn’t carefully reasoned out his stance. Not because they’re inferior intellects, but rather because, like an intelligent child, they seem to have formed their opinions without all the facts and without carefully following their reasoning through to the end. Not to mention just a touch of the ‘It shouldn’t have to be that way’ mentality, even when it’ll always be that way. Karl Popper, the philosopher best known for his work on the nature of science, addressed this in his opus The Open Society and Its Enemies, in which he showed the basic flaws of Marxist theory, although as he said himself, he was sympathetic to said mode of thought.

I’m not sympathetic to it. I believe it wrongheaded; it violates everything from the basic biological tenets of behavior to the natural processes which created such a wondrous thing as complex social behavior to the innate diversity and uniqueness of every individual. Yes, it is born of good intentions. But if I recall correctly, that’s what the road to hell is paved with.

Of all the wrongheaded claims that collectivists make, the most transparently wrong is that they love America. They don’t. Not in anything more than the superficial way that I love my mustang. Or watching Shakira shake it in Hips Don’t Lie. They ‘love America’ so much that they want to change the very things that define it:

Listening to them prattle on is like watching Amanda Peet try to change everything about Jason Biggs in Saving Silverman. Now, I’ve never been in love, but I’ve been close a couple times. And it strikes me that if you truly love someone, you wouldn’t want to change their core identity. You might fuss about details like their habit of using the couch as a clothes hamper, or the fact that they never want to go see the new guns and glory action movie with you, but you don’t try to change who they are. Yet ever since Franklin Delano Roosevelt (hah, got the first name right this time) tried to redefine the word ‘freedom’ in 1934 that’s exactly what ‘progressives’ have been up to.

What is America, what is it that makes us different from other nations? Our founding philosophy. Now, there have been other populist revolutions and other countries in which oppressive governments were thrown out. From the French Revolution to the November Revolution the fragmentation of the USSR. But all of these, though catalyzed by the same types of injustice that drove us to enter the Revolutionary War, were underpinned by a very different way of looking at the people. All of these, in some way or another, were collectivist (mainly socialist) efforts, and thus largely about removing one statist government from power in order to implement a different sort of statism, which often enough turned out to be just as oppressive or stifling as the one that preceded it. What makes the American Revolution and the country that followed it so different is that this was a conflict of individualists against statists, about those who saw government as a tool of the people instead of the other way around.

What makes our country America are the ruminations of Thomas Paine in Common Sense. It’s the Federalist papers. It’s the long tradition of classical liberal philosophy. It’s the principled, reasoned, and articulate stance on individualism that no collectivist has ever managed to approach in detail, coherence, or viability. It’s the impassioned speech of Patrick Henry declaring no alternative to freedom but death. It’s George Washington crossing the Potomac and Thomas Jefferson pulling the world’s most famous all-nighter to write the Declaration.

To quote Individ at length, this is what loving America is about:

As anyone who reads this blog knows, I am an Americanist in philosophy: I stand for the people. If you stand for each individual, if you respect people as individuals, then you are are an individualist; and an anti-collectivist. If you are an American (and when I say that, I mean by philosophy): you stand for individualism; you stand for personal responsiblity; you stand for free markets; you stand for freedom from government; you stand for small government and low taxes; you stand for gun rights, and for all unalienable rights.

I proudly fly an American Flag outside my house, all year long. But I fly it NOT out of support for government; I fly it out of support for an ideal, for the American Philosophy. What a precious and rare thing it is. And I cry tears of blood when I think of how few truly appreciate the few remaining tattered freedoms we still have, the sliver of waning liberty that we still possess. As true Americans we are supposed to Hate Government, and Love Country.

‘Progressives’ have tried to change everything. There is nothing American about ‘People For The American Way’. There is nothing American in their ideology, their speech, or their behavior. Although I guess the flags they fly help to assuage their consciences just a little. But worst of all they try to tell us that rather than remaining true to being a country founded upon Freedom From Government, we should become a country that espouses ‘Freedom’ Through Government. They are not patriots, they do not think like Americans. Now, their heart might be in the right place, and in a couple of instances they might even have a point, but that doesn’t change the fact that what they believe in isn’t the America that men have fought and died from 1776 until today. They want to change every principle that defines our country as they vilify those of us who remain true to its ideals. If that’s love, I don’t want to see what hate looks like.

Original Announcement 

Remember posts are due Wednesday at midnight-ish.  I’ll have the carnival up by 6am EST Thursday.  Please post a link to it if you’re a contributor or just interested to see how the carnival does.

Best way to submit is through the Blog Carnival form.  Or you can email me directly if you prefer.

We have somewhere between 10 and 20 posts at the moment although some of the heavy hitters *pointed cough* have yet to submit anything.

New World Man has it this week.  Interesting presentation and a lot of interesting submissions as well.

By far my favorite was a post called ‘The Nature Of Self Interest’ by some guy.  I don’t know what it is, but week after week he consistently presents lucid and engaging commentary on the philosophical aspects of politics.  Another post that New World Man put in the category of abstract and liberty-centric that I really enjoyed: Liberty Corner’s discussion of the idea of Cosmic Justice and its role in the development of ‘progressivism’.
The standout as I see it, both in topicality and presentation was  ‘Biggest Step Is Mastery‘ by Et Tu Bloge.  Goes along with what I’ve been saying this entire time about the whole language thing.  If there’s no incentive to learn english, and no penalty for not learning english, we’re going to create an underclass.  I’ve seen it in other countries.  I don’t want to see it here.  So remember that instead of your silly ‘appreciate diversity’ and ‘cultural oppression’ garbage, why don’t you instead say ‘we want to keep them from achieving what they’re capable of…and then give them social welfare handouts’.

The host has a two parter on the problem with letting 9 judges decide what’s constitutional, which brings up the mercurial nature of the supreme court, the comparative ease with which they can make a drastic change in law, and the near impossibility of reversing those changes.
Other good stuff in there as well.  Go.  Read.

Interesting

Most people know that the appendix is a vestigial organ, a remnant of an intestinal system that in our ancestors was much, much larger. Plant material, particularly leaves, is hard to digest. Mammals can’t even do it if it weren’t for gut flora (bacteria) that breakdown the cellulose and other fibrous tissue for their own energy needs. Once broken down into smaller, more absorbable and digestible products, we can use it. But even with the aid of the bacteria, it’s still not particularly easy. So animals that rely on high fiber plant diets for their sustenance tend to have long intestines. The length means there’s more bacteria to do the initial breakdown, and more surface area to absorb the remnants. You can contrast this with meat eaters. Meat is much more readiliy broken down and absorbed, which is why carnivore guts are a lot less complex and a lot less large.

Just think of the complexity of the ‘four-stomached’ cow versus the simple, almost straight-line gastrointestinal path of the cat. All primates rely heavily on fruits and leaves in their diet. Humans, believe it or not, aren’t any different in this regard. Most of our calories should come from non-meat sources. But we don’t place anywhere near the emphasis on folivory that say colobines (leaf-eating monkeys) or even other apes do. So we dont’ need that much gut. Unfortunately, because of the way natural selection works, we end up with a useless remnant that only serves to make us sick.

But is it really completely useless? Chris Wanjek points out that it isn’t quite the layabout we’ve made it out to be:

Biologists in the early 20th century surmised that the human body had over 100 useless parts left over from our more ape-like lifestyle a few million years ago. The parathyroid was one such organ, now known to regulate calcium-phosphorous metabolism. The appendix was another…

As quickly as 11 weeks after conception, the appendix starts making endocrine cells for the developing fetus. Endocrine cells secrete useful chemicals, such as hormones, and the appendix endocrine cells secrete amines and peptide hormones that help with biological checks and balances as the fetus grows.

After birth, the appendix mainly helps the body stave off disease by serving as a lymphoid organ. Lymphoid organs, with their lymphoid tissue, make white blood cells and antibodies.

While this is true, the appendix’s endocrine cells don’t secrete any different hormones than the rest of the gut. And while it’s full of lymphoid tissue, so is the rest of the gut as well. I know this because I consistently failed to identify them properly on our histology final. And while it may or may not provide a better ‘training ground due to various aspects of its organization…

The dirty gut is a good training ground for young white blood cells. The appendix, with its sac routinely collecting and expelling foodstuffs, exposes the white blood cells to myriad bacteria, viruses and drugs passing through the gastrointestinal tract. This way, the white blood cells learn to fight potentially deadly bacteria, such as E.coli.

…I’m not sure just how important that really is to overall immune function.

The gut is a highly specialized and complex organ system. It has its own separate nervous system, an amazing range of hormonal functionality, forms an important part of the immune system, and, of course, digests our food. The appendix has lost the latter function, but retained the rest. Which doesn’t necessarily make it an important part of the body, just means that it’s only truly vestigial in one respect.

But he does bring up some interesting uses for the appendix when it comes to reconstructive surgery:

In the not-too-distant past, zealous doctors would remove the appendix during other types of surgery—to get it “out of the way” just in case it would some day become infected. The philosophy was: The appendix is useless; I’m already elbow-deep into this person’s gut; why don’t I just snip the appendix now.

But no more.

Doctors now realize they can use the appendix for reconstructive surgery. In one type of bladder “replacement” surgery, doctors take part of the intestine to form a bladder and use the appendix tissue to recreate a sphincter muscle, which can contract and open the bladder when urinating. Similarly, the appendix is used as a substitute ureter, a tube that carries urine from the kidneys to the bladder.

Good stuff.

This is the second installment of the series on Evolution, Economics, and Political Philosophy, the introduction of which can be found here.

Introduction
Actually, I probably could have titled this ’self-interested nature.’ Self interest doesn’t quite make the world go round, but it certainly makes us go round. Beyond DNA and various parts of our molecular machinery, self interest is the unifying theme of all living organisms. Selfishness is why evolution has produced such myriad forms as the Mantis Shrimp and the Scaly Anteater.

Some have accused me of being a neo-Randian, of worshipping at the altar of selfishness even as they deny its very existence as our primary motivator. The self-interested nature of all living beings is morally neutral. It isn’t something to deify as anarcho-capitalists do, or to vilify and attempt to expunge as collectivists do. It exists, it is the single rule that all life obeys. It is responsible for our greatest masterpieces and our worst catastrophies. Mother Teresa was motivated by self interest as much as any Fortune 500 executive. Self interest just is.

Modeling Behavior: The Assumptions Behind Game Theory
The assumption that individuals will act in a self-interested and rational manner has allowed the study of behavior–both human and animal–to move beyond the nebulous world of thoughts and feelings, archetypes and motivations, to a predictive model of behavior. While not as refined or determinate as physics or chemistry, mathematical models of behavior are capable of astonishing accuracy when it comes to predicting the choices we make both conscious and unconscious. John Nash of Beautiful Mind fame, and sociobiologists John Maynard Smith and Robert Trivers are a few of the great names out there when it comes to the mathematical modelling of behavior.

Any explicative theory or paradigm is built upon certain assumptions. Game theoretics and other mathematical models of behavior are dependent on the following three:

• 1. Individuals will always act to further their own interests

• 2. Individuals will act in a rational manner

• 3. Individuals are party to all necessary information to make an informed decision

To present this from a Platonic point of view, if the model is the perfect form, the real world is the slightly bastardized expression of it. In other words, these conditions don’t always hold true. Humans aren’t completely rational, and natural selection isn’t rational in the least, merely appearing so when looked upon with a teleologic perspective . And we are never possessed of perfect information; at some level, our cost/benefit analysis is never going to be 100% accurate. We can never quite know whether what we think is a winning choice actually is. The idea of imperfect information is a pretty basic one, and needs little further discussion other than to understand that there is always uncertainty in decision-making. Rationality, however, is a topic worthy of further discussion at a later point.

The high fidelity of these models in predicting behavior is what lends credence to the assertion that self interest is ultimately our sole motivation. The only other major paradigm that has been asserted is group selection (in sociobiological literature); its political equivalent–one which it enjoys an incestuous ideological and historical relationship with–is collectivism. For the past 200 years, group selectionists of every stripe–sociobiological, economic, and political–have tried to assert the viability of this selective domain, and have continued to fail in presenting any evidence for its existence.

Given this long history of failure of the group selectionist paradigm and the equally long history of success of that of the individualists, it is probably safe to say that self-interest is our primary motivation. However, another thing one must remember about models is that in addition to the fact that their assumptions aren’t ever completely fulfilled, they are often narrower in scope than the real world. By this I mean self interest is a wide-ranging and broad concept that cannot be reduced simply to maximization of economic wealth or reproductive gains. Mere observation makes it patently obvious that very few individuals’ lives revolve around either of those goals.

Self Interest Defined
The truth is that self interest manifests itself in everything from the food we eat to our education to our work ethic. Major failings of both libertarian and mixed model ideologies is that they over-estimate the importance of economic (material) wealth. Many libertarians believe that ‘the market’ will solve all problems. Many leftists believe that no one would want to stay on welfare, the standard of living (material wealth) being so low. However, few individuals would feel adequately compensated for the loss of a child if they received in return every cent they had spent raising him. And many people don’t believe that leaving welfare and getting an entry-level job in order to increase material wealth only incrementally is worth the 40 hours a week of exertion.

While it would be nigh on impossible to catalog, model, and codify all the various avenues in which self interest expresses itself, understanding the ways in which self interested behavior impacts social and political systems is considerably easier. Although imperfect, a useful classification arises if we define selfish behavior as either acting at an internal or an external level. Internal self-interest is about ‘feeling good’. External self-interest could be conceived of as ‘being superior’. The former, of course is about the position the individual sees himself in, while the latter is about how others perceive the individual in question. The primary internal interest is maximizing comfort. Whereas the primary external interests are power and influence. Wealth actually contributes to all three; serving to grease the wheels as it were.

Comfort is fairly self-explanatory. While many dream of a mansion, a summer home on the spanish riviera, a supercar, and a yacht, most aren’t motivated to turn this dream into reality. People are quite content with reasonably comfortable accomodation, a trip every year or two, and a car that gets the job done. While what they define as adequate may vary, few would need to become highly paid executives, plastic surgeons, or hollywood entertainers to achieve their relatively modest goals. Most people are content not to find themselves wanting for any of life’s basic and not-so-basic necessities.

While obviously wealth is necessary to achieve all of these material goals, after a certain point, such wealth becomes superfluous. At that point, the marginal utility of undertaking extra work, vying for promotion, getting more training, is considerably less. The attendant increase in comfort just isn’t worth the extra work.

Influence–an external interest–is perhaps the most nebulous. The academic who after 10 years of schooling and postdoctoral work is making about as much as an electrician and considerably less than a plumber. Who nevertheless spend 60, 80, even more, hours a week relentlessly pursuing research. Who takes off for the wild jungles of Brazil or Africa to make notes on what a monkey is doing every minute of every day for a year. He’s driven by the desire to be influential, at least in the limited circle of individuals engaged in similar pursuits. George Soros pouring millions and billions into moveon.org and Air America, he too is thirsting after such a title.

Power differs from influence in that power is a more direct attribute. The prince under Machiavelli’s tutelage was a man questing after power. Machiavelli’s primary concern was influence. The man behind the man on the throne. Frederick Delano Roosevelt, though, was a man after nothing more than power. From his assumption of Emergency Powers to his dramatic expansion of the Executive, to the fact that he fully intended to continue being elected president for the remainder of his life, there can be little doubt that no matter what other motivations he had, power was clearly one of them. Some would say the same of George W. Bush’s recent expansion of Executive–indeed all goverment–power.

It would be a fair assumption to say that there are scarcely few elected officials at the national level who aren’t drawn to the position out of some desire for power and influence. The same could be said of those in the upper echelons of civil service as well. Teasing apart influence and power can be a difficult proposition at best, but is more or less unnecessary to the understanding of the operation of political systems. Influence manifests itself through its effects on the projection of power; so one merely needs to look at power and how it is distributed and used to understand the contribution of both. As in comfort, wealth is clearly involved in attaining and maintaing both influence and power. Here, however, the marginal utility of increased wealth is considerably greater, to look at the interplay of wealth and power in the legislature alone.

Conclusion
The distribution and control of wealth is all too often the centerpiece around which political systems are drawn. As I’ve attempted to show in the preceding paragraphs, this view is at once both myopic and overly constrained. Wealth is merely the currency through which one’s aims are realized. It is the motivations of comfort and power that we need to understand. It is these which people thirst for, and which they will attempt to gain, often enough at the expense of others.

In order for a government to be stable, in order for the people under said government to be free of oppression, the political system under which it operates must be constructed to be proof against the depredations of those who would obtain their material wealth from the pocketbooks of others, as well as against those who would use the power of the government to oppress the very people it was meant to keep free.

The next installment will cover cooperation. How self interest is ultimately the motivator behind it, and how group selectionist and collectivist paradigms will always fail to incite cooperation, instead tending toward exploitation of the few against the many.

Yup.  Just ‘Why Fat People’.  Why do they exist?  Why is it so hard for some to lose weight while others have trouble gaining it?  Well, quite frankly it’s because the human body is an evolved construct.  It evolved under certain circumstances and is best adapted to a certain pattern of activity.  It’s been tens of thousands of years since we left that adaptive zone, more or less, but our bodies haven’t changed all that much.  Partly this is because unlike other animals, we left that adaptive zone by way of technology instead of changes in our bodies.  From about 1.8 million years ago with the rise of Homo ergaster through around 60,000 years ago (the Middle-to-Upper Paleolithic), hominid technology; what little there was, was pretty crude.  Instead of taking us beyond the capability of other animals, it merely allowed us to break even with the carnivores.  You see, as monkey playing wolf, we didn’t have sharp teeth and claws.  Our primitive wooden spears, hand axes, and cutters served as prostheses.  But, as Neandertals dwindled and modern humans expanded their range, newer, more advanced tools came to the fore.  These novel tools did take us beyond the capabilities of other omnivorous mammals.  It made hunting, gathering, virtually everything involved in living easier.

That technology is one of the reasons our bodies haven’t had to change that much.  We’re simply less likely to die from things that would kill other animals.  A wolf that can’t run fast won’t eat.  A man that can’t run fast can just hurl a spear.  And, because that technology acts as a prop, it’s allowed us to accrue all sorts of genetic and developmental baggage that makes us in many ways less healthy than we were 40,000 years ago.  From the hafted tools our umpteen-great grandfathers used to the computers many of us spend most of our time on, technology has made us fat.  What follows is partially science, partially scientific-informed speculation.  In other words, while a lot of what I’ll be presenting is fact, a lot is only likely, or merely plausible.

The most important thing to understand about the human body is that it’s an evolved construct.  By this I mean it’s a pretty jury-rigged affair when all is said and done.  A complex and marvelous mechanism, but shoddily put together nonetheless.  Anyone who’s studied Engineering Control Theory would be appalled by the lack of logic of the body’s mechanisms of homeostasis.  What I mean by this is that things that are clearly inter-related from an external perspective aren’t necessarily from an internal perspective.  The relationship between food intake, energy expenditure, and body composition is one of the most counterintuitive, complex, and just plain retarded systems in the human body.  Which might explain why weight control is one of the most difficult things for us to do.

Diet Composition 

It would make sense that we eat more food when we expend more energy, food being the primary source of fuel for us.  And, that’s a relationship that tends to hold true.  The converse would also make sense, that we eat less when we do less.  Unfortunately that isn’t quite the case.  Our hormonal control systems for appetite and activity are separately maintained, with different ’set points’, different degrees of sensitivity, and different timelines of adaptation.  While they do talk to each other, think of them as a long distance relationship rather than a codependent couple.

First, let’s start with food intake.  Clearly, how much you eat is a part of the weight equation, but its role is often far overstated.  There are a lot of fat people who eat too much.  There are also a lot who don’t.  And, we all know the rail thin guy or girl who eats 4000 calories a day and can’t put on a single pound.  Clearly, food isn’t the be all end all.  When I hear about friends who spent weeks, months or even years on one of those super-restrictive 1000-or-fewer calorie diets, I cringe with sympathy.  They were misled.

Diet is extremely important to weight loss and maintenance, but not so much the amount as the composition.  In fact, low-cal diets can make weight loss harder than if one were to go by a regular 2000 calorie daily regimen.  We must ask ourselves what hominids evolved to eat.  They are descended from monkeys, which means largely fruit-eating (and occasionally insect, lizard, and egg eating) mammals.  Other apes and a couple types of monkeys are known to scavenge and hunt occasionally (1-4% of their diet by weight).  So there’s little doubt that hominids were doing at least that.  And, there’s very good evidence that hunting and scavenging became a much more important (some would say dominant) aspect of their lives well over one million years ago.  Hominids in this respect were probably a lot like the wild social canids (wolves, jackals, etc) in their omnivorous nature.  A typical temperate or tropical canid diet can be 40% or more plant product by weight.

And then we can look at intestinal length.  The longer the intestine, the more comes from plants.  Cows have looong intestines.  Monkeys and most apes have shorter ones.  Humans are shorter than other primates.  Canids are shorter than the above.  And cats are shorter than the rest of these guys.  In other words, we’re very much in the middle.  We’re not carnivores, we’re not frugivores.  We’re omnivores.  We need a lot of sugars from fruits and other plant parts.  And we need a fair amount of protein (from meat, generally).

Which brings us back to the importance of diet composition.  Humans are limited not by their fat intake (for the most part), but by their carbohydrate and protein intake.  You need carbohydrates to fuel the body.  They’re what we’re most efficient and fastest at processing.  Fat has more energy per gram, but it’s harder for us to start using it.  Just think about that intestine length.  We need a lot of sugar in our diet.  And we need protein.  Although protein can be metabolized as an energy source, mostly it goes to repair, rebuild, and renovate the body.  Exercise, metabolism, basically everything we do causes our cell machinery to wear down a bit.  That machinery is made up of proteins.  Keeping ourselves in top form requires enough protein building blocks coming through our digestive system to undo that damage and a little extra to build bigger and better machinery.

Just about the only thing muscles and the brain run well on are carbs (other parts of the body, like certain organs, do better with fats).  Starving your body of them will only destroy your body’s ability to do any work at all.  And without protein, you’ll basically find yourself falling apart from the inside out.  Some of the stuff I’ve seen and read about what happens in a vegan’s body is nothing short of shocking.  Same can be said for those who get most of their calories from meat and none from vegetables.

Old-school hunter gatherer hominids probably burned roughly 3000-4000 calories a day of food.  We can estimate that based on what modern hunter gatherers expend.  That’s what the human body expects to come through it.  Any less than that, and you’re operating in fuel starvation mode.  Any more than that and you’re flooding the system with more than it wants.  In starvation mode, your body shuts certain things down to conserve energy, and decreases the ability of other parts to exert themselves.  In other words, it’s not burning as much as it used to, at least partially negating the effects of caloric reduction.

What’s more, because as I said, activity level and diet don’t perfectly correlate, the super-low calorie diets can shut down so much of your body’s machinery that you actually put on fat because the reduction in energy expenditure has dropped more than the reduction in energy intake.  And that’s just talking basal, cell-level, non-activity-dependent expenditure of energy.  Of course, caloric reduction also affects one’s ability to undertake activity and thus expend energy, which brings us to our next major topic.

Activity Levels 

As I said in the introduction, our activity levels and behavioral energy expenditure are considerably lower than they were in the prehistoric days.  I used to get in one to two ‘antisocial’ days when I was in graduate school.  On these days I used to strap on a backpack holding roughtly 60lbs of granite and walk 20-25 miles through the streets of London.  Beyond giving me a much needed chance to unwind and lose myself in physical exertion, it gave me a taste of what daily life would be like for an early hominid.  Based on archaeological remains, we surmise that hominid groups would travel anywhere from 10 to 30 miles in a given period.  Furthermore, these finds lead use to believe that they butchered their prey away from their campsites, meaning that, like little old me, they were toting a load for at least part of the journey.  I was also a pretty good model because at 5′11″ and about 200lbs I was more or less a walking facsimile of Homo heidelbergensis, the first of the hominids with brain sizes about like ours.

These were 4000 calorie days.  But the interesting thing was that not only was I eating a lot on the walking days, I was eating around 3300 on the non-walking days.  And not gaining weight.  Now, leading a much more sedentary lifestyle with little or no exercise (just like I was 5-6 days out of the week in London), I’m down to 2600-2700 calories a day at a steady 210lbs.

Basal Metabolic Rate

Strange you say? Not especially once you think about it.  It all has to do with arousal.  I don’t mean the dirty kind, or mental alertness, but the readiness of your muscles and supporting tissues to leap into action.  Immediately after blasting through a set on the bench at 100% intensity, you’ll probably notice that your muscles are warmer.  Your muscles are metabolizing more sugar, doing more work, and in consequence, releasing more heat as a waste byproduct.  Your ability to do work is dependent on the level of this metabolism.  The more carbohydrates your muscles are turning over, the more you can lift.  Now, getting your muscles primed and ready to do 100% intensity can take a while can’t it?  That’s why we warm up.  We’re increasing the level of metabolism in our muscles before we actually start doing work with them.  But even when we’re just sitting there doing nothing, our muscles and other tissues are metabolizing substrates, burning energy.

This is our basal metabolic rate.  Your BMR depends on a number of factors ranging from genetics to diet composition (more sugar, higher BMR, to a point).  Another factor it depends on is how warmed up you are when you’re doing nothing at all.  You can think of this as priming.  Different people have different levels of priming, some of it genetic, some of it having to do with expectation of activity (not activity level).  I’m naturally pretty well-primed.  My warmup tends to be flexing and shaking a bit and then getting right to it.  Which is why with less than an hour of real exercise a week, I still eat close to 3000 calories a day.  Other people aren’t quite so lucky, but even they can change their level of priming based on the body’s unconscious expectation of activity.  This is the reason I ate more even on my non-walking days back in England than I do now.  My body was under the influence of both my genetic priming, and my activity-based priming.  My body expected to be worked hard and was maintaining a higher level of readiness, which of course burned more energy.  Think standing to attention versus at ease.  Both you’re completely stationary, but one’s much easier to maintain than the other.

Conclusion

I’m going to tie all this together with a car analogy.  Cars have an air/fuel ratio they like to maintain.  For cruising it’s generally about 14.7:1 air/fuel by volume.  Less air and you’re lean, more air and you’re rich.  Both result in loss of power and efficiency.  If we think of dietary composition the same way, too little carbohydrates and too little protein can be just as damaging.  It’s important to maintain a good ratio to keep the car operating at a good level of efficiency.

Now, while all cars do best with a single air fuel ratio, the total rate of flow they do best with can be worlds apart.  The rate of fuel flow my Mustang has the best fuel efficiency at comes at around 77mph.   Whether the rate of fuel flow is higher (faster speed) or lower (slower speed), my Mustang gets worse efficiency.  It’s much the same for people, eating less can be just as bad as eating more; under either condition, our ‘rate of fuel flow’ causes us to be in a suboptimal position.
I don’t know how many of my readers have ever drag raced, but there’s a thing you do called power-braking.  When you’re at the tree (the lights that tell you when to go), you put your left foot on the brake, pressing down harder than you would at idle.  Then with your right you gas it.  Depending on the car, the brakes, the horsepower, and the tire, you try to get to the highest RPM’s without either your tires spinning or your car moving.  You’re not going anywhere, but you’re burning a lot more fuel than you do at idle.  Why?  Because when the green hits on the tree, and you let go of the brake, you’re that much further into the efficiency zone of your engine.  Priming.

Air/fuel ratio.  Fuel flow rate.  Idle RPM’s.  “Work smarter, not harder”, as Uncle Scrooge from Duck Tales was fond of saying.

Brad over at Unrepentant Individual asked me to join The Liberty Papers.  The Liberty Papers is a community weblog founded by Eric of Grumbles Before The Grave.  It’s definitely an honor to be asked to be a part of that group and I’ll try to do my best.  Probably a long-ish piece a week that for whatever reason (not quality) I don’t feel like posting up on this blog.  Anyway here is my bio.

And I just put up my first post, dealing with the retardation of the Jefferson Scandal.

The money quote:

What we couldn’t expect is that while our ire was (rightly) directed at Jefferson–and at corruption in the legislature at large–our supposedly representative officials had taken umbrage that one of their own was treated like an ordinary citizen. Note that, one of their own. They reacted not as stewards of our will and desire, but as people in power.

I call BS. The study does say that they can guage our testosterone levels from our faces. To which I say of course. That’s kind of a ‘duh’. Signalling theory predicts that various aspects of our bodies serve as visual markers of aspects of our internal condition, particularly with regard to reproduction and health. Examples include the link between waist-hip ratio and fertility, and facial symmetry as a signal of health and a bountiful juvenile growth period.

Beyond determination of basic secondary sex characteristics (external genitalia, body hair, fat and muscle distribution, boobies, etc.), estrogens and androgens also affect the degree to which we express those things. “He has chiseled features,” or “she has a jaw like a man,” are cases in point where testosterone is concerned.  Guys with baby faces and girls that don’t have hairy arms are examples of low testosterone.  Or, take a look at the faces of pro wrestlers who aren’t fat like John Cena (i think that’s his name).  Their faces almost look like caricatures of male-ness because nearly everything they do has a stimulatory effect on testosterone release.

But this part:

“Women’s ability to estimate men’s interest in infants from face photographs is perhaps the most novel finding to emerge from the study,” researchers wrote in British journal the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.”

This I find a little more sketchy.  Testosterone has little to do with paternal care from my readings (and this is what I research, albeit at the wild animal behavior level).  Instead what matters is prolactin levels.  Obviously from the root stem we get that its a hormone involved in milk production.  But it’s also vital to the initiation, maintenance, and focus on parental care in both males and females.  Good dads in the animal kingdom have high prolactin levels.  And considering that some animals with very high prolactin levels also have high testosterone levels (alpha male capuchins, wolves, and, well, me), I’d think that we can safely say there isn’t that much correlation between the two.  And because prolactin levels only increase when babies are around, there’s little reason to believe that it affects appearance in a way that could be guaged by the study.
This is speculation but what I think we’re seeing is a secondary cultural effect.  Our culture has created an expectation that males with high testosterone are whores with little interest in long term relationships (especially at the college level).  And in consequence, low testosterone males have chosen the alternative mating strategy of appearing to be nurturing and caring.  Having recently left undergraduate study, I can attest that this does indeed seem to be the case.  Not only do males feel like this is the way they should behave, females assume this is how males will behave as well.

Being a big aggressive looking male, most people assumed I was a manwhore, where nothing could be further from the truth.  And to this day, most people laugh or look in disbelief when I tell them with 100% certainty that I want to be a child and adolescent psychiatrist.

Like I said, I see plenty of high testosterone aggressive males all over the animal kingdom who are great fathers.  In fact, low testosterone males in a lot of taxa actually choose the ‘hit it and quit it’ method when it comes to making babies.  An example are orangutans. The big 200lb honkers with the big old fleshy cheekpads are the ones with high testosterone.  While they aren’t particularly good fathers, they do at least stay around the females they mate with.  There are other males, though, who have low testosterone, so low in fact that they pretty much look like females.  They’re the sneaking type, even going so far as to rape the females.

It happens in fish too, who actually can be good fathers.  The big aggressive males make a nest, fight off all comers, and take care of babies.  ‘Sneaker’ males are about the same size as females and don’t fight or defend territory, instead they try to fertilize eggs laid in a big male’s nest before he has a chance to.  Again, they don’t parent.

Where am I going with this?  Nowhere special.  Just making the point that although my dispossesion is a bit like Marv from Sin City, I love kids.

Today’s thought isn’t mine. It’s Terry Pratchett’s. For those of you who don’t read the Discworld series, start. It’s set in a fantasy world, just because it makes the absurd easier to write about. (Kinda like the social commentary in Futurama. The setting made it funny while still poignant. Same deal here) Anyway, Ankh-Morpork, the city where a lot of his stories are set, could best be described as an almost anarchic benevolent dictatorship. The dictator, or Patrician, is a man named Lord Vetinari. Known for what he doesn’t do, which is cause harm. Without further ado:

‘I’m sure we can all pull together, sir.’

Lord Vetinari raised his eyebrows. ‘Oh I do hope not, I really do hope not. Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions.’ He smiled. ‘It’s the only way to make progress…’

Any commentary would be superfluous. And now it’s time to turn a 20,000 word master’s thesis into a 4,000 word paper. Only to be rejected because I don’t have a PhD. Fun times will be had by all.

Interesting new treatment. Basically they implant a device that stimulates your vagus nerve at periodic intervals. The vagus has all sorts of connections all over the place, from your voicebox to your heart to most of your digestive tract. Interestingly, a lot of vagus nerve terminals release serotonin as their neurotransmitter, just like the brain neurons implicated in control of mood and depression. What that has to do with anything? I couldn’t tell you. Most can’t at this point.

This is going to come as a surprise, but I’m not summarily giving the Indian Cowboy stamp of disdain to this somewhat drastic procedure. This is for two reasons:

1) It’s only indicated in people for whom nothing else works.

2) The lead times between procedure and onset of relief on this are significant and long enough that it’s unlikely to be abused.

With 300 million people in this country alone, there will be organic, idiopathic causes of brain disease. It’s just a fact of life. While I think the number psych treats this way is significantly overstated, they do exist, and we need to be able to do something for them. This is the kind of stuff that is perfect for them. It actually rewires these peoples’ brains to respond like a healthy person’s.

With most therapies, whether behavioral, pharmacologic, or ECT, we tend to see improvement 3-12 weeks after starting. However with VNS (Vagus Nerve Stimulation), the lag time approaches 1-2 years. I’m going to turn to the articles to give you a better understanding of what’s happening before I add in my own thoughts

Article 1:

Patients in the study generally responded around 12 to 24 months after beginning the treatment. Dr. Charles Conway Saint Louis University presented his research results Thursday at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association.

The most surprising finding from the study, conducted by Conway and physicians from Washington University in St. Louis, were the long-lasting benefits of the treatments.

“There are a number of subjects who have gone into remission and stayed in remission for the past four or five years,” Conway said.

Very promising. It’s the nonresponsives and the ones who turn to pharmacology who tend to have the highest rate of relapse, as he said. Which means they tend to do the most damage to themselves and their families in the interim. It’s very encouraging that we now have a way to treat those who we’re just unable to get through to.

Conway studied the neuroimages of the patients undergoing the treatment. He noted that the brain reacted systematically to the vagal nerve stimulation, and by the end of the two years patients were experiencing a significant decrease in activity in the prefrontal region, which is more active in patients with depression. The studies suggest that the brain is experiencing long-term changes.“The areas that are going activation and deactivation are all areas we know to be involved in depression,” Conway said. “What appears to be happening is further in the treatment it’s almost as though there is some brain adaptation to the stimulation.”

And let’s flesh it out a bit with a quote from Article 2:

When Dr. Conway examined the neuroimages of four patients 24 months after they began receiving vagal nerve stimulation, he found brain activity that was similar to what doctors see in patients who have received ECT. “There actually appears to be decreased activity in regions of the prefrontal cortex, which is very much parallel to the findings of treatment response in ECT, and the opposite of findings seen in medication-response to depression.”

He found unexpected action in the prefrontal cortex of the brain that is similar to brain activity in depressed patients immediately after they have received ECT and before its effect wears off.

First, I have to snigger at the remark Dr. Conway said, about medication-response to depression looking opposite of a healthy and an ECT brain. Told you they were just covering up the real problem.

Anyway, ECT is generally considered the most effective treatment for depression. After it, your brain looks normal under a PET scan. It’s just that it doesn’t last long. What they’re finding is that after you wait that average of 21 months (which kinda sucks) your brain looks normal, just like it does immediately after an ECT. Which is another part of the reason I don’t mind this so much. It’s making your brain look normal, instead of covering up one abnormality with another drug-induced abnromality (see previous paragraph).

Now, the most interesting thing about all of this is the difference in times between most psychiatric therapy and VNS. The VNS time of 1-2 years instantly make me think of recovery of function after a stroke. It’s an almost perfect fit. In other words, VNS looks like a neuroanatomical, self-healing cure. Instead of a neurophysiological, self healing cure we tend to see with CBT, acceptance therapy, or drugs. The difference is that in the latter, we’re not looking to change the way the nerves connect to each other, just the way they function and fire. In the former, the brain is literally rewiring itself. This is why when a person has a stroke and loses the ability to speak, he can re-learn using different brain areas. I’m not 100% sure that’s what’s happening with VNS, but I’d put a small flutter on it.

Go. See. Puke.

I know I never shut up about it, but that’s because it’s an important point. Collectivism is based on the false, unproven idea of ‘group selection’. That animals work for the good of their social group or their species, instead of just themselves. There are, however, two situations where you can end up with what looks like a collective:

1) When all the animals in the group are closely related to each other. In this case, what’s good for the group is the same thing as what’s good for you. Because everyone in the group is related to you, by helping them, you’re helping what amounts to a part of yourself. Still not group selection.

2) When an individual needs a group for selfish reasons. Now this is a bit more confusing, but I’ll use one of my infamous hypothetical monkey examples (people who know me in person are running now). So imagine you’re a big strong male monkey. You’d be alpha male if you were in a troop without a problem. What’s going to limit how many babies you have? The number of females in the group. The more females in a group, the more you can impregnate at any one time, the more who will have babies during a given period with you as alpha, etc. In other words, if by your own action you can keep a larger group cohesive, you’ll make a lot more babies. Now, because you’re putting a lot of effort into the maintenance of the group, it can certainly look like you’re doing things for the good of the group. But of course nothing could be further from the truth. You’re doing it for yourself. So you can make babies.

Group selection has never been proven, never been shown to exist. I doubt it ever will. Group selection is prone to all sorts of problems including cheaters, defectors, exploiters, and lazy bastards. Actually the last two aren’t technical terms, they’re terms I use when I talk the politics of the Left and why it will never really work. They’ve been obsessed with group selection, ‘progressivism’, and all those other funny little terms that talk about ‘group consciousness’, or people ‘pulling together’. Unnatural, the lot of it. Many biologists over the years have taken this leftist interest in ‘the collective’ and attempted to search for it in biology, probably most famous among them Teilhard de Chardin. And of course almost every leftist political theorist from Karl Marx onward has attempted to look to nature to justify his belief in people working together ‘for the good of the species’.

This article represents egregious egregiousness on the part of both journalist and study author. An attempt to allow their political ideology to influence their science. In this way it is no different from the transgressions of the Intelligent Design, and indeed the methods both use aren’t too different from the other group.

This next part was probably just a misunderstanding on the part of the journalist:

Writing in the journal Nature today, the team reports that studies of lab-grown yeast populations suggest the benefits of cheating are eventually counterbalanced by the costs. This contradicts classic evolutionary theory, which states that in a competition for common resources the long-term winner will always be the individual acting selfishly rather than the one working as part of a group.

Actually many individuals act in a selfish manner while participating in the maintenance of a group.  If they didn’t, that would mean us sociobiologists have wasted the past 40 or so years.  Which would kinda piss me off.  No, evolutionary theory states that those organisms acting in a self interested manner will leave behind more offspring than those who act solely ‘for the good of the group’ (who will eventually eliminate themselves).  Selfish animals form groups, selfish animals help maintain groups, selfish animals help increase the prosperity of groups.  But they do it because it benefits them to do so.

Now on to study design:

In one corner were the ‘cooperators’, which produce energy efficiently by taking in sugar slowly and fully converting into energy all that they ingest. This method maximises resources available to the group by avoiding any waste.

Against them were the ‘cheaters’, which produce energy rapidly by quickly taking in all the sugar they can and only partially converting it into energy. While this ensures swift energy production for the individual, it is a wasteful method that reduces resources available for the group as a whole.

Before I get any farther I’m going to predict that ‘cooperators’ do better than ‘cheaters’.  And that they’re going to use this as evidence that ‘group selection’ or working for the good of the group or altruism or whatever they want to call it is valid.  They can go screw themselves.

To pre-empt them, I’m going to attempt to discuss the real differences between ‘cooperators’ and ‘cheaters’.  These are single-celled organisms, not exactly the most complex of social creatures.  And as the researchers mention the only thing that was different was how these guys metabolize resources.  The ‘cooperators’ do it nice and slow with a minimum of waste.  The ‘cheaters’ do it pretty dang fast.  Now the difference between these two has nothing to do with group behavior, but the efficiency and amount of waste.    ‘Cooperators’ are more efficient, turning more of the substrate into energy, and producing less waste.  They grow slower, but can grow for a longer period of time.  ‘Cheaters’ can grow faster initially because they metabolize things a lot faster.  But because they are a lot more wasteful, they end up freeing less total energy.  In addition, metabolic waste products are usually poisonous for most organisms.  So ‘cheaters’ are poisoning themselves.

Notice that there was nothing in the above that had anything to do with group living?  It’s simply two alternate feeding strategies, stable slow growth vs. exponential growth followed by a plateau.  What does that have to do with cooperation or cheating?  Nothing.  Bastards.

And he’s about to trot out his little political point:

“This evidence that a cooperative group can resist invasion by exploitative cheats is unexpected and gives us greater insight into how cooperation evolves. This is important because we live in a world in which cooperations exists at every level, from genes working together to build functioning individuals to individuals forming societies.”

The researchers suggest that the ideal organism type would be one that can switch between selfish and efficient metabolism. Dr MacLean adds:

“While microbes are obviously not capable of rational thought, they can change their behaviour rapidly in response to simple environmental cues. The possibility that one type could become both a cheater and a cooperator depending on what’s needed at the time is intriguing. We hope examining social conflict at the level of individual cells will shed more light on this.”

I’m dumbfounded Mr. Teilhard de Chardin, jr.  Dumbfounded.  You’ve tried to define ‘cheater’ as self-interested and ‘cooperator’ as group selectionist, and then tried to prove your point with an irrelevant experiment.  You, sir, I just don’t even know what to say.

So I got this Union of Concerned Scientists email today. The subject was, get this: “Defending Science From Political Interference.” Oh my god, I nearly died. If there is one thing the UCS is, it’s politically biased. They are a bunch of socialists and ‘environmentalists’ (note that that’s different from conservationist) with PhD’s. They then try to imply a correlation between the two.

Why am I on their mailing list? Because they’re a pretty big voice, and occasionally even a blind man can paint a mona lisa. Some of their more conservation-oriented stuff is pretty good. Like their defense of the Endangered Species List as ‘developers’ tried to destroy its intent for financial gain, Bush and the Republican Party of course proving to be all too willing to allow it.

But considering that UCS was, is, and will always be about political interference, by its very nature the UCS is a tainted organization:

UCS was founded in 1969 by faculty members and students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who were concerned about the misuse of science and technology in society. Their statement called for the redirection of scientific research to pressing environmental and social problems.

Hard to stay apolitical if we’re talking about ’social problems’. In fact once you use the phrase ’social problem’, no matter what position you take on how to fix it (or whether to ignore it) you’ve made a choice to become politically biased.

Conservation? Ok. Sustainability? I’ll give you that, even if the way they approach it is contradictory (increase population and wealth while decreasing consumption? Something doesn’t add up). But World Peace? Very scientific. Or just look at their mission statement:

Established in 1969, we seek to ensure that all people have clean air, energy and transportation, as well as food that is produced in a safe and sustainable manner. We strive for a future that is free from the threats of global warming and nuclear war, and a planet that supports a rich diversity of life. Sound science guides our efforts to secure changes in government policy, corporate practices and consumer choices that will protect and improve the health of our environment globally, nationally and in communities throughout the United States. In short, UCS seeks a great change in humanity’s stewardship of the earth.

Oh yes, the scientific nature of this organization is practically dripping from these very pages. Spare me. Please. One of my pet peeves is when people in a position of trust or authority misuse it. Whether it’s one of the many ‘Doctors [who are neither scientists nor social engineers] for x’ groups or ‘Mothers [who all need therapy] against y’, it’s wrong.

UCS is as guilty as anyone of this when they pontificate on and on about ‘nuclear war’. Last time I checked, taking a position for or against the existence of nuclear weapons isn’t scientific. Granted I’m not a nuclear physicist, but I do know a couple. I don’t remember them talking about the partial differential equation that could tell you whether it was a good or a bad idea.

Neither do I remember where in my scientific training government regulation of fuel economy was discussed. I certainly don’t remember the part where decreased gasoline prices, and decreased percentage of household income spent on gasoline would somehow increase our incentive to move off oil (yet that’s what UCS supports).

I could keep going on but I think I’ve made my point. Beware of false authority and anyone who claims to be unbiased. And if you excuse me I’m going to have to go puke. The lack of integrity among both scientists and doctors makes me sick.

False Induction

You know what really bugs me? Elitism. Not all of it, only the unjustified kind. Justified elitism is your basic meritocratic thinking: “I have achieved/accomplished/finished this, I therefore hold in a higher regard those who can do this than those who can’t.” That’s one thing. Then there’s unjustified elitism, such as “I am an atheist and he isn’t. Because there is no proof of god, this means I’m smarter than him.” Or “I’m ‘progressive’ and he’s ‘conservative’. He doesn’t support government-mediated social welfare and entitlements. Therefore he is a petty-mined, unintelligent, uncharitable bastard.”

It’s not quite the same thing as racism or prejudice. Instead it represents a failure of inductive reasoning. Person A takes a position on a specific subject. Person B takes this position and then generalizes it into an overall assessment of Person A’s character, intellect, or other personal characteristics.

In other words, it’s like trying to figure out the composition of an entire forest by looking at a single fir tree.

Overgeneralization and Oversimplification
Other than the fact that I’m sick of this false elitism being perpetrated all over my backside, what’s really scary about this mode of thought is that it hampers open communication and understanding of the complexity and nuances of ideas. So lets leave behind elitism for a minute and focus on the twin foibles of overgeneralization and oversimplification.

Nothing illustrates this better than the idea of the Party Line. ‘Oh you voted Republican? You must not be a conservationist.’ Or ‘Oh you’re a Democrat? Gun-grabbing hoplophobic eunuch…’

You can see the problem already. It’s attempting to impute an Either/Or where none should exist. Can you link conservation, gun control, drug legalization, and social welfare together logically? Not especially. Which might explain why I see no problem with supporting two of them and being vehemently opposed to the other two (guess which ones).

Whether it’s the two party system or the innate desire to label someone either ‘us’ or ‘them’, I couldn’t say. What I do know is that this tendency destroys our ability to question our own stance and understand the other guy’s, whether political, scientific, personal, or professional. This tendency to oversimplification means that instead of the four positions mentioned in the last paragraph, we see only one, whether referring to ourselves or to our political opponents. Attack one, attack them all. To put this into context, say Person A attacks Person B’s position that all handguns should be banned. ‘A’ presents a well-reasoned argument that may have had some sway over Person B if he hadn’t gotten all defensive and closed himself off to the merits of Person A’s case immediately. Why did Person B get so defensive? Because when Person A attacked one of Person B’s many political opinions, Person B felt like Person A was attacking not only his entire political ideology, but also his personal character. Person B was oversimplifying his own political views into a single artificially monolithic construct.

Turning this around, imagine that Person A expresses a distaste for the Intelligent Design. Person B then makes some remark implying Person A is of a decidedly leftist persuasion, like himself. Person A takes umbrage and decides to start a movement called Conservatives Against Intelligent Design (launching at the end of the month-ish). In addition to making a total ass of himself, Person B has alienated a lot of people who, like Person A, aren’t particularly socialist, but aren’t ID supporters either. Best case scenario is that people like Person A no longer voice their opinions, fearing they’ll be lumped in with people like Person B. Worst case is that people like Person C, who was on the fence about evolution-creation but was definitely conservative, and Person D, who’s a political opportunist, throw their hats in the ring in support of ID (I’m pretty sure this is the real reason for the strength of the ID movement). They’ve taken advantage of Person B’s conflation of one issue with an entire ideology and used this as a weapon against B. They’re not taking the opposite position on that issue in order to say ‘Hey we’re different from this guy.’

Oversimplification and overgeneralization are bad no matter how you look at it. But ignoring all the strategic pitfalls you may find yourself in by engaging in false induction, at its most basic it is a crime against reason: It prevents you from being honest in your assessment of the beliefs, opinions, and contentions of everyone including yourself.

The Sin Of False Pride
I’ve got no problem with pride, so long as it’s deserved. As my best friend and I used to say back in high school “It ain’t cocky if you can back it up.” Of course, that was our excuse for being egomaniacal twerps who deserved a good ass-kicking and never got it. But anyway, the thing about pride is that it’s generally contingent upon a perception of achievement or superiority. The problem I see today, the problem I mentioned in the first paragraph, is that either the perception is false, or the achievement/superiority is much smaller in reality than it is in the individual’s mind.

People who possess otherwise fine minds allow unreasoned and often silly propositions to piggyback their way into their ideology along with one well-reasoned. As is seen all to often in scientific circles, a man can develop one of the most important theories in sociobiology while simultaneously supporting crackpot conspiracy theories. The brilliance of one does not somehow invalidate the wrongheadedness of the other. Granted, that was an extreme example, but many scientists seem to not dwell even a second on the many inconsistencies between the various philosophical theories underlying leftist concepts (’the collective’ and ‘maslow’s heirarchy’ being foremost among them) and what science actually says about individual behavior. They imply that being ‘experts’ or ‘having proven themselves’ by getting a PhD, their political stance must be as reasoned as their professional and scientific opinions, when nothing could be further from the truth.  These are the same people, after all, who don’t understand the distinction between positive and negative liberty, or that between a classical liberal and a conservative.
Or a leftist may imply that because he voted for social welfare, he’s a more charitable person than the next man. He’s taken a simple proposition; that he supports government-mediated charity whereas the other man doesn’t, and extended it to imply that the other man doesn’t believe in charitable works whatsoever.

Or the conservative might look upon my own stance on marriage, drugs, or freedom of expression and declare that I am an immoral hedonist while he’s a sparkling beacon of tolerance, brotherly love, and non-judgmentalism. He’d be just as wrong as the men in the other two situations.

So long as we allow this false pride in ourselves and in others to go unchecked, we will never have a free exchange of ideas, we will never be able to argue on the merit of the positions themselves, and we will never find our way past the flawed positions that all political ideologies flow from.

Linky

Whales, ichthyosaurs, flightless birds, all beg the interesting question of why a taxon would seem to move ‘backward’ evolutionarily? Why would a mammal or reptile leave the land they’d evolved to conquer, only to become ocean-bound like their fishy ancestors once again? Why would a bird forego the use of his wings, choosing to run across the open African plain in a manner not too different from his bipedal dinosaur ancestors? Doesn’t make sense, doesn’t fit in with our idea of ‘progress’, of the evolutionary chain of being, of animals somehow evolving in a certain direction.

This is because evolution doesn’t work that way. Natural selection is by its very nature both directionless and purposeless. When we see trends in evolution, such as the increase in intelligence in primates from prosimians through humans, this is merely because intelligence, up through now, has been selected for. It needn’t be that way, however. Some species of monkey are as smart as any ape, some apes are as dumb as your average monkey. The hominid lineage didn’t have an increase in brain size over other apes for anywhere from 4-6 million years, depending on who you ask.

In other words, mammals were bound to land simply because up through that point, those who’d used that strategy had had left behind offspring. When the whales’ ancestors found an open niche, they lept in feet first and never stopped paddling (with their front limbs anyway).

More than 50 million years ago the ancestors of whales and dolphins were four-footed land animals, not unlike large dogs. They became the sleek swimmers we recognize today during the next 15 million years, losing their hind limbs in a dramatic example of evolutionary change.

“We can see from fossils that whales clearly lived on land - they actually share a common ancestor with hippos, camels and deer,” said team member Martin Cohn, Ph.D., a developmental biologist and associate professor with the UF departments of zoology and anatomy and cell biology and a member of the UF Genetics Institute. “Their transition to an aquatic lifestyle occurred long before they eliminated their hind limbs. During the transition, their limbs became smaller, but they kept the same number and arrangement of hind limb bones as their terrestrial ancestors.”

They weren’t using their back legs, so they lost them. There was no advantage to keeping them, and probably a disadvantage in terms of drag and developmental costs that meant those with smaller hindlimbs did better than those with fullsize ones. It might have been an increase in locomotor efficiency (needing to eat less while moving the same distance), predator avoidance (smaller limbs=faster), or prey acquisition. Whatever it was, small hindlimbs just worked better. Which is exactly what we saw in Ichtyosaurs as well. But as these researchers point out, for the first 15 million years or so it was just that; small but otherwise anatomically generic legs. The interesting part comes in the transition from a ‘full’ mammalian leg to actual reduction in the number of bones that make up the leg itself.

The new research shows that, near the end of 15 million years, with the hind limbs of ancient whales nonfunctional and all but gone, lack of Sonic hedgehog clearly comes into play. While the animals still may have developed embryonic hind limb buds, as happens in today’s spotted dolphins, they didn’t have the Sonic hedgehog required to grow a complete or even partial limb, although it is active elsewhere in the embryo.

The team also showed why Sonic hedgehog became inactive and all traces of hind limbs vanished at the end of this stage of whale evolution, said Cohn. A gene called Hand2, which normally functions as a switch to turn on Sonic hedgehog, was shown to be inactive in the hind limb buds of dolphins. Without it, limb development grinds to a halt.

“By integrating data from fossils with developmental data from embryonic dolphins, we were able to trace these genetic changes to the point in time when they happened,” Thewissen said.

In developmental biology we learn that patterning of the axes, organs, and skeletal structures is dependent on a variety of molecular signals that turn genes on and off, telling them where to do their work and how long to do it. Sometimes they tell something to start growing, sometimes they tell something to keep growing, and sometimes they tell something to stop growing. Sonic hedgehog (Shh) is one of those molecular signals which is expressed all over the place, but in the case of limb development is responsible for keeping a limb bud growing.

Up until the very end of those 15 million years, the whale had a pretty generic developmental expression of Shh, maintaining and allowing all four limb buds to fully mature. Even if the hindlimbs were pretty pathetic, they were the real deal. But at some point, whales’ ability to express Shh in the hindlimb buds was lost. So while the hindlimb buds could start, they couldn’t finish the job. This is why if you look at skeletons of some whales (notably the baleen whales), if you’re lucky you can still see vestigial remnants of hip bones and occasionally even the heads of the femurs. It’s a situation not all that different from that found in snakes, with some still having vestigial hip spurs while others show a complete loss of the pelvis.

I don’t have the patience or the free time to bother trying to convince closed minds about evolution, but obviously the existence of vestigial structures in whales, snakes, humans, and all sorts of other taxa is good evidence for evolution, not to mention providing interesting context as to the complexity and essential randomness of evolutionary process.

I’ve got number 48 in two weeks, but today it’s being hosted by Left Brain Female, who calls my own submission ‘delightful’ and ‘well worth the time to read’. Can’t say I disagree there. (Did I mention I’m an egomaniac?)

Anyway, I particularly like the post from Pubcrawler (go to the carnival to get the link, if I link it directly, I’m taking away from Kay’s hard work). He discusses Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms and its first application. He points out the idiocy of the reasoning for the judge’s correct ruling and goes on to discuss how the logic used by the cities suing these firearms makers ties right back into the fact that social welfare will always result in limitations on the choices we’re allowed to make.

The Radical Libertarian offers up an interesting take on ‘privatizing’ the main government responsibility (protection), could improve matters for all of us. He’s a bit extreme for me usually, but nonetheless tends to be thought provoking. This essay is no exception.

Rick Sincere has a good post up as well. Nothing new, nothing earth shattering, but a well written piece illustrative of many of the problems with ‘central planning’ and the leftist co-option of words turned on their head.

Fun times.

Linky

Honestly there ain’t no such thing as excessive biodiversity, like the country song goes “It’s like too much money, theres no such thing/Its like a girl too pretty, with too much class/Being too lucky, a car too fast…” The more biodiversity, the more branches on the cladogram, and the more fun you can have figuring out why things branched when and where they did. And what differences those branches represent. But when you have a surprising amount of species density, even for tropical climes, it’s something that must be explained.

The long separation of Madagascar from Africa and India explains only some aspects of the island’s endemism. Even more intriguing is that many of these plants and animals have very small distributions on the island, something that is called micro-endemism.

For the first time, this new research presents a comprehensive theory explaining how so many animals came to be limited to such small geographic areas across the island, which lies off the eastern coast of Africa. In some lowland areas of the island these animals tended to be isolated by the configuration of certain watersheds, and this isolation led to speciation, the evolution of new species.

Madagascar is I’m told a beautiful place, but there just isn’t much left of it after 20,000 or so years of us playing invasive species to our hearts’ content. It’s a place where you can see lemurs fill all sorts of niches that other prosimians could only dream of. Like being awake during the day. Or in the case of the recently extinct Giant Lemur, living off leaves and reaching a size that most apes rarely do. At close to 6′ and 180 lbs, this guy was bigger than a lot of us.

You can even see the Aye-aye, ‘closely’ related to lemurs (closer than anything else but still at least 10 million years of separation, IIRC):

(from the wiki)

If you look closely at his hand you’ll see a finger that looks like it has a thin pointy spike at the end, compared to the fleshy pads at the tips of his other fingers. That’s not a congenital malformation; he uses the big fleshy finger to tap on the outside surface of hollow logs, listening for insects inside. He’ll then stick the pointy one in there and dig them out. These guys are absolutely captivating to watch in a good zoo habitat.

Enough about my primate obsession. The point is that in the space of one (admittedly big) island, you can see more diversity in primates than you can in India and Southeast Asia. This holds true for lots of other taxa as well.

Recently scientists have made strides in explaining this biodiversity:

Using an analysis of watersheds in the context of paleoclimatic shifts, the authors provide a new mechanistic model to explain the process of explosive speciation on the island. Existing data show that substantial climatic shifts took place during the end of the Tertiary, as well as more recently during the Quaternary. The latter period is also known as “The Age of Man.”

When the climate was dry and cold, considerable portions of the Earth were covered by glaciers. On Madagascar, habitats at higher elevations would have remained more humid, as compared to the drying-out of more lowland areas. Therefore, groups of animals tended to “retreat” to higher elevations along riverine habitat that would have remained relatively humid during these periods of climatic change. The animals that did not “retreat” tended to be left behind in small, limited geographic areas where river sources commenced at relatively low elevations. Since they were isolated, those populations that were able to survive were more likely to develop into new species.

This is a modification to the old ‘Island Forest’ theory that’s been around much longer than I have. The big thing here was that they were able to back this up empirically by reconstructing the process of ‘island formation’ and the fact that they posited that in addition to the highland ‘island forests’ everyone’s known about, they mention that you can get even smaller ‘lowland forests’ as well. Which helps explain the micro-endemism. Basically, when everything is nice and tropical, you get one big forest. But as things got a little colder (and less humid because cold air can hold less water than warm air) the one big forest turns into many little forests with tracts of savannah between them. These ‘little forests’ provided the geographic isolation necessary for allopatric speciation. Then, when it got all pretty outside again, and the little forests grew and grew until they turned into a big forest once again, you had all these separate species where there’d once been one.

This is a particularly powerful theory when it comes to explaining the minimal variation in behavior and functional morphology yet large (almost extreme) variation in appearance between closely related species that now have nearly contiguous distributions. Sexual selection (which tends to be the reason animals get flashy) was responsible instead of natural selection. They kept living the same way, but the females in different areas decided they’d rather see their males have mustaches, or shiny red coats, or maybe white mohawks (all of which you can see in marmosets and tamarins).

Good stuff.

To feed your newfound interest in Madagascar, I’d head here and here. Sorry I can’t help with book recommendations. My interest in madagascar and micro-endemism is pretty new.

Sexy

Here’s a pic of the 2.5″ barrel version:

And the 6.5″ barrel:

Slightly awkward looking guns, but a neat concept nonetheless. I’m not sure what to do with these, but I do like strange and interesting firearms. And this and the Thunder-5 both qualify

As I mentioned, the .45LC/.410 concept has been tried before in a revolver:

also available with a .45-70 cylinder, which is a plus as far as this recoil masochist is concerned. But the Thunder-5 is just a bit too goofy looking, not to mention the fact that it’s way too hard to find information about who’s making it and what else they’ve done. I love the concept, love the availability of .45-70 cylinders, but I think I’ll have to pass.

It’s also been tried in derringers (from Bond Arms and American Derringer) as well. And the concept is a pretty cool one, but I finally got to heft one of those at the gun store the other week, and I gotta tell you, they ain’t the dainty little things you picture when you think derringer. Nope, these are big honkers in the same class as the Para Warthog and J-Frames. At that size, I’ll take the slight tradeoff in caliber and power to carry a .357/.38 snubbie instead.

Back to the Taurus, it can shoot 2.5″ .410 shells, .45LC (I don’t see why it can’t handle .454 Casull or .460XVR cartridges unless it just can’t handle the pressure), and supposedly even .44-40, a rifle cartridge. The latter is particularly strange as .44-40 bullets have a diameter of .427-.430 depending on who you ask, compared to the .454 for the Colt round. That’s a big enough difference that accuracy pretty much has to suck. Don’t know what’s at work there.

Still, cool gun. I’m anxious to try one out using both .410 and .45LC. And find out why I can’t fire .460XVR from it.

Idealism
A quick romp through this little spot on the web would quickly reveal that I’m nothing if not an idealist. Idealistic about politics, about medicine, about science, even about my car and about guns. But it’s a funny thing about ideals; they never quite have a one-to-one relationship with the real world. The less electronic tomfoolery in a car, the better, I say. Yet at the car I drive has one of the more advanced automatic transmissions on the market, and an electronic throttle body (Throttle cable? Kickdown cable? What?). Therapy before pharmacology is my motto, yet I’m in school to become not a clinical psychologist but a psychiatrist, who differentiate themselves from the former primarily in their ability to dispense street drugs with fancy labels.

But such things are comparatively minor compared to how a liberty-oriented individual is forced to operate in this most statist of all worlds. Just as a surgeon must sometimes remove part of the body to save a life, we may sometimes be forced to advocate legislation where we’d rather none exist whatsoever. Beyond that, we must occasionally push for a direct curtailment of liberty in order to protect that which remains. This situation is best articulated in a quote I’ve seen, roughly paraphrased:

We’re at an awkward point in American history. It’s too late to work ‘within the system’. But it’s too early to pull out the guns.

The Problem
The essential problem is that once government has become involved in the regulation and restriction of various aspects of behavior, it is almost impossible to remove government interference from the picture. Furthermore, once involved in a given area, it becomes easier and easier for government to increase its scope and breadth. In other words, free societies will inevitably spiral downward should something occur to upset the balance between individual liberty and government control (as happened after Reconstruction, Roosevelt’s ‘Great Experiment’, Johnson’s ‘Great Society’, and the increasing trend for theocrats and ‘mixed economic model’ advocates to make up the bulk of mainstream political thought).

A complicating factor has to do with people themselves; their attitude toward liberty and government, the superficiality of thought, and the inherent tyranny of democracy. I’ve often thought that many in Europe (as in England, where the backs of their passports bear testimony to this) haven’t yet learned the difference between subject and citizen. Although they participate in democracies, they seem to have an unthinking, unfeeling belief that no matter what one speaks of, ultimately it is government’s responsibility to handle matters. It’s all too reminiscent of the days in which a serf would trade his freedom, his land, and the fruit of his own labor for the knowledge that his feudal lord would protect him. From the speeches of Frederick Delano Roosevelt declaring comfort to be a primary responsibility of government to the political landscape today, where the Democrat platform largely consists of how many ways and how extensively they can interfere with our lives ‘for our own good’. And the Republicans little better with their ever more invasive ‘national security’ programs and insistance on legislating against actions that, though dubious in morality, have little or no effect on others.

In the stark language that I’d use it’s easy enough to see the problem that lies in this mindset. However, it’s all too easy to present it in such a way that it sounds oh so good. Which is exactly what FDR did when he essentially sold us on socialism. A lot of people don’t understand why I vilify the man so much. There is no doubt that the man was between a rock and a hard place during the Depression, there isn’t any doubt that some kind of governmental interference was necessary to bring us out of the doldrums. But the way in which he did it was reprehensible. As I was telling Intellect Impure a few nights ago, it reminded me of the way doctors used to function back in the day.

From the first day of medical school onward it’s been beaten into our heads that we do not make decisions for patients; we educate patients about their choices and help them choose their own path. This runs counter to the way it used to be, with the doctor telling you what was to be done, telling you that you needed it, and then doing it. Indeed, letting the patient know what was going on was more a courtesy than part of allowing him to participate in his own health choices. Personally, I’m glad it’s changed.

The doctor used to operate on the principle of unquestioned authority; he simply knew what was best for you whether you agreed or not. Depending on the situation, the patient was all too happy to leave the decision-making and disease management in the doctor’s hands. I imagine being told you have a life-threatening disease can be very daunting indeed, and the ability to leave your health in the hands of someone with more knowledge and skill can be a very comforting thought. There is a problem with this, in that, although the doctor may have your best interest at heart, he’s making the cost/benefit decision for you.

I remember when I had a meningitis scare and mom (a doctor herself) dragged me off to the emergency room at 3 am. The resident on duty handed me some gloopy orange colloid and told me to drink it before mom could stop and ask what it was. After she’d inquired about associated side effects , the resident calmy reported that there was a chance that I could bleed out through my GI tract. Now, if mom had had a chance to get a word in edgewise, she might’ve been able to tell the doctor that when I did get sick (fairly rare), my fevers tended to skyrocket, no matter how minor the infection. She might’ve asked the resident to tell her just how sure she was that I had meningitis before giving me the stuff. Like I said, it’s a good thing that the doctor now dialogues with the patient about treatment.

And this was the problem with FDR’s ‘Great Experiment’. He simply told us ‘Government knows best. We will take care of you. Just put those blinders back on and let us worry about it.’ And so the veritable litany of alphabet agencies was brought into existence from the Works Progress Administration to the Rural Electrification Administration (which still exists, by the way). The way he expanded federal control over our lives was to couch it in the language of a caring authority. He told us of the benefits, he told us that government had a responsibility to take care of us, he used the language of a doting, authoritarian figure to seduce us into serfdom. But he never told us about the costs, he didn’t tell us that because of his transgressions we’d find ourselves wading through the sort of red tape that caused the revolutionaries to take up arms against an oppressive government 150 years before him. And worse, he told us that through government control we would become ‘more free’.

And it is the same sort of language that continues to pervade statist political talk today. “We need to establish this government program for your own good,” they tell us, never asking if the benefit of comfort is worth the cost of freedom. Words are all too pliable, and definitions that were held constant for thousands of years were in the blink of an eye turned on their head in the first half of this century. ‘Freedom’ became a property that required an active role on the part of the government, ‘rights’ could only be produced by taking from the pockets of men the fruit of their hard-earned labor. In short, liberty was transformed into comfort. And so we lost the ability to perceive our freedom taken away bit by bit as government expanded its role in our lives.

It is a central conceit of economic theory that individuals will act in a rational manner. Yet in certain aspects of life, we consistently fail to do so. Beyond the fact that reality is filtered through the imperfect perceptive abilities of the human brain, we are simply too emotional of creatures, too sentimental, too susceptible to romantic ideas. And so, although rationally none could argue that the ‘liberty’ and ‘rights’ that statists speak of represent neither liberty nor rights, such strains of thought will remain and probably continue to expand in popularity. The idea that you can be protected from the slings and arrows of fortune, that someone else can be responsible for your safety, your health, or your well-being, is simply one that will never die. These things are far too precious to us to resist temptation when someone offers promise of them to you on a golden platter.

The Solution
The true ideals of liberty unfortunately stand little chance against the rhetoric of statists and their utopian talk of better living through regulation. We will never be a large part of the population for the simple fact that few are willing to put in the thought and rationality required to wade through the statist nonsense and understand the true meanings beyond the words twisted into shapes like so much modelling clay. Emotions, promises, dreams, though. These are things that all can and do understand. And it is these that most will vote with when it comes time to do so. Unless ever-so-carefully-safeguarded, a liberty-minded state will eventually fall prey to the charismatic powermongers and the very people who make up the republic. Just to get an idea of how difficult this is, remember just what a paranoid, forward-thinking, and all-encompassing document the Constitution really is. Read the strong language, the simple statements, see the truth laid bare for all to see. And think back to the speeches of Bush, of Kennedy, of Santorum, of Boxer or of McCain. Think of how easily they make a sham of the founding document.

No, the regrettable truth is that our ideals, though noble, cannot win against the statist once they have established so strong a beachhead that we find ourselves cowering against our inland borders, cowering as we await the killing blow. But that is not to say we are doomed to failure, or that the time has come to ready those ‘assault weapons’ so deplored by the mainstream left in order to start a revolution. It is simply that in order to win, we must sully our ideals, we must turn to the statists’ own tools in order to prevent further transgressions, and, if we’re lucky, regain a little ground.

The two tools at our disposal are the strength of the federal legislative bodies and the ability to compromise one ideal in order to protect another. Earlier I brought up a medical analogy and I’ll return to different ones here. The first concept can be characterized as ‘Cutting to Cure’ while the second is plainly and simply ‘Triage’.

Cutting To Cure - Reading the constitution, bill of rights, and historical documents of the birth of our nation yields no compelling reason why the second amendment doesn’t apply to handguns, ‘assault weapons’, or to the carrying of said weapons upon one’s person, concealed or otherwise. Furthermore, one cannot find a reason why a man must be prevented from using said implements in the defense of his person and property. Indeed, the definition of ‘to bear’ means literally to carry on one’s person. And for what purpose is a man to bear a weapon if not for the potential of its use. Yet here we sit with ‘assault weapons bans’ in several states, handgun bans in many cities, and even outright bans of all firearms in one or two localities, not to mention restrictions on when and where a man may defend himself. Here, federal legislation, despite being a non-libertarian tool, has been instrumental in at least partially returning to us a right enshrined in our most basic documents.

Triage - Every now and then, a man is forced to make a difficult decision. Does he save the wife he’s pledged his life to? Or the child he’s sworn to protect and raise from infancy to adulthood? Thankfully, the quandaries we are presented with, though ideologically painful, are not so bleak. An example can be found in the illegal immigration debate. Several respected libertarian minds have come out against immigration control and for amnesty. Just as many have come out in favor of strict enforcement and deportation of those who’ve broken the law in coming here. Personally I fall in the latter category (except for the ‘respected mind’ part), even advocating making English the official language and qualifying ‘of the soil’ citizenship with the need for the parents to have been here legally on some sort of long-term visa.

As several have mentioned, this isn’t a very libertarian way of looking at things. And they’re right. But this isn’t a libertarian world. In this world one has to worry about the statists and how the massive influx of new voters of a neither American nor particularly affluent population will change the political balance. And the answer is perhaps even uglier than Kirsten Dunst. In this place, at this time, the 10-20 million new voters represent a sizeable addition to the ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘mixed economic model’ camps. More social welfare, governmentally mandated bilingualism. Neither things I much look forward to. So I’m forced to choose between my belief that those who wish to come here should be allowed to versus my fear of treading down the road Old Europe has cautioned us against with their own pitfalls, both culturally and economically. Which is more important? To hold true to your ideals as they are all voted away from you? Or to compromise one to save the many? No, it’s not a very fun choice, but it’s one that we have to make.

No matter how we paint it, the future is pretty bleak for liberty; no matter the time or place, it will always be. But by understanding the mechanics of a statist world, we can learn how to cure it, or at least stem the flow of liberty’s lifeblood from our nation’s many ideological wounds.

Pottering around blogcarnival.com revealed no carnivals dedicated to psych. Which is unfortunate because there are a lot of psychbloggers out there. Many of whom get plenty of traffic. I’m bored and my summer job don’t start for a couple more weeks, so I figure why not start one. Plus, I have Dr. Sanity’s approval.

I couldn’t think of how to say that this carnival is intended to be a pretty open and encompassing affair so I stole and lightly massaged some verbiage from The Tangled Bank’s homepage…

This is an egalitarian activity. You do not have to be a Ph.D., you don’t have to write articles with ten-syllable words, you don’t have to discuss esoteric details. All you have to do is express some enthusiasm for [psychology and psychiatry] or encourage study of the same.

Got an interesting post about Cognitive Science? Want to discuss your personal experiences with mental illness? Do you want to talk about the failures of current psych theory (a favorite of mine)? Or about a problem with the status quo in the mental health profession (another favorite of mine…even moreso for Dr. Helen)? Maybe you want to talk about the psychology of individuals who believe in certain ideologies (that’s Dr. Sanity’s big thing. You could even discuss ‘discredited’ theories like those of Freud and Jung (which still have some merit in understanding the mind, even if they are of little therapeutic value). Heck, I’ve got a post or two about the Axis II psychological disorders my dogs seem to suffer from every now and then. Even silly tongue-in-cheek stuff like that is good too.

Point is, it’s all good. If it has to do with psych, it’s well-written, and it’s an actual commentary from your point of view rather than simply a link and a quote with a quick “I like this”, then send it in. Should Fun times will be had by all.

I’ll be hosting the first one on Thursday, June 1st, so get your links in to me by about 6pm the Wednesday before. Feel free to send multiple submissions, since I have no idea how popular this will be these first few carnivals. That may change if we get to be anything like the size of Tangled Bank, Skeptics’ Circle, or Grand Rounds. We’ll start out bi-weekly and if it looks like it’ll work we might move up to once a week. Once it’s off the ground I’ll open up hosting opportunities to those who are stupid enough to take on the work.

You can either submit by sending me an email at:

indiancowboysblog@gmail.com

Or by using the Blog Carnival Submit Form.

Let’s have some fun with this.

No links. I don’t need them for what I’m going to say today. I don’t need to look at his record, don’t need to know what positions he held, don’t need to know what his duties at the CIA would entail. The only thing I need to know is that he’s military. Career military at that. This alone in my mind disqualifies him from an administrative position in the Executive Branch, especially one with the tools, power, and reach of the Central Intelligence Agency.

I’ve got a deep and abiding respect for our military and the jobs they do. For years I wrestled with joining, but no one wants a cripple, and lying about your medical record to get in can be dangerous to your future employment prospects, courtesy of a Dishonorable Discharge for fraud. Anyway, there’s a dichotomy between military life and civilian life that’s crucial not only to an effective fighting force, but also for the maintenance of the rights we hold so dear. As the saying goes:

It is the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us the freedom of press.
It is the soldier, not the poet, who has given us the freedom of speech.
It is the soldier, not the campus organizer, who has given us the freedom to demonstrate.
It is the soldier who salutes the flag, who serves beneath the flag, and whose coffin is draped by the flag, who allows the protestor to burn the flag.
–Father Dennis O’Brien, USMC Chaplain, WWII

The thing is, in order to accomplish that, the soldier must give up certain rights so that he may better protect ours. This basic difference is enshrined in the fact that I, as a civilian, am governed by the United States Code. These are the laws and rules that I must live by. On the other hand, a soldier’s dos and donts are dictated by the Uniform Code Of Military Justice. A soldier’s speech, his right to bear arms, even what clothes he’s allowed to wear, are all severely curtailed by this document.

More than that, though, is the fact that under the UCMJ, superior officers are given almost carte blanche in their control over their subordinates. Much of military life, from basic training, to billetting, to weapons allotments (it wasn’t too long ago that enlisteds carried rifles and officers only carried pistols ’since officers shouldn’t be fighting’), to even uniforms, is about maintaining a top-down structure of power. Very feudalistic in certain respects.

Contrast this with the way the United States Government as a whole should theoretically–and once did–operate. The entire structure of the constitution and our bill of rights is designed to prevent those in power from exerting undue influence over us. As Edmund Optiz (no idea who that is) pointed out, “No one can read our Constitution without concluding that the people who wrote it wanted their government severely limited; the words “no” and “not” employed in restraint of government power occur 24 times in the first seven articles of the Constitution, and 22 more times in the Bill of Rights.” Compare this to the UCMJ, in which such phrases occur more often than not in how a subordinate is allowed to interact with his superiors. In other words, the UCMJ is a document that is primarily about preserving the authority of those in the highest echelons. It is, in essence, a pseudo-fascist control system.

As I said earlier, this isn’t a bad thing…for a military organization. “When I say jump, you ask how high” is the best mentality to have when you want to get things done in a fluid, controlled manner in the heat of battle. It isn’t, however, a good attitude for a government official to deploy against a citizen, especially one as dedicated to liberty and freedom as ours is supposed to be. But it is that mentality that has been the modus operandi of Gen. Hayden virtually his entire life. He’ll have had no experience thinking like a civilian in a position of authority, operating like a civilian in a position of authority, or indeed in being responded to by people who are not bound by law to obey his every beck and call. Where he should be seeing the citizens that he serves, he will instead see the men who are bound and sworn to serve him.

This is not an attack on his character, it is a value-neutral statement about the way he has been trained to operate. It’s a part he plays well or he wouldn’t have been made a general. It’s something he knows like the back of his hand, or he wouldn’t have won the accolades he has as a member of the Military Intelligence Community. And it is his effectiveness as a military leader which makes him so dangerous if installed in a similar civilian post.

Whenever I assert that socialist systems are doomed to failure and will inevitably oppress all that live under it, a leftie (and occasionally an ideologically-weak rightie) will counter with “Well, Scandinavia seems to be doing pretty well with it.” Leave out for a second the fact that Norway is a resource-rich nation (an open system with an external energy source to use a thermodynamics/entropy analogy). And that the Scandinavian Model isn’t all it’s cracked up to be (see here and here. We must turn back to the the latter half of my assertion: that socialist systems are ultimately tools of oppression.

Those that argue in favor of a Scandinavian model seem to imply that if you’re comfortable you must be free. My golden retriever was 15.5 before she was diagnosed with her first major health problem. Have you ever heard of a golden retriever live to be that old? The dog is still having the time of her life. She even has her own vegetable patch, for crying out loud. This is a comfortable, long-lived animal who hasn’t walked more than a quarter mile from our house in the past year. But do you think a night goes by that she doesn’t dream of being a wolf? Running across the Minessota plain in deep winter, tracking moose and elk. Revelling in the big sky and the virgin forest. I don’t.

And that is what this is fundamentally about. A cage can be as comfortable as you like. Freedom a terrible spectre to behold. But the fact remains that there are those of us who would nevertheless trade comfort for freedom no matter the cost.

As Patrick Henry memorably said:

Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!

Razib had intended to get a rough consensus of the top ten evolutionary biologists of all time based on our comments. I’m honestly surprised he didn’t succeed. I thought 10 was more than enough to get a decent sampling of the geneticists, theoreticians (usually sociobiologists), and paleontologists who’ve been crucial to our field. It wasn’t apparently. Perhaps I thought so because as a (half-trained) bioanthropologist I’m in a theory-impoverished empirical-finding-rich field.

Here’s what he had to say:

On the one hand, the discipline was too broadly construed. Biases creep in. On the other hand, the category was too narrow in that many scientists contributed to evolutionary biology without being evolutionary biologists (most trivally G.H. Hardy). Since many readers of this weblog are highly credentialized in some particular field, I invite all to:

1) State a category where you know your shit (e.g., “evolutionary developmental biology of three-toed sloths”)

2) Your list of “top 10″

1) Tough one. M.Sc Human Evolution and Behavior, University College London. Basically bioanthropology. But my focus is on neotropical primates, which I’m pretty fanatical about. I don’t think there are 10 neotropical primate specialists that have contributed substantially to theory, period. Although they have done fine work in supporting and disproving extant theory, they just haven’t added much to our greater understanding of biology, which I think is crucial to any ‘top ten’. Warren G. Kinzey did some brilliant work on island forests, sexual selection, and allopatric speciation. You probably haven’t heard of him. I only know of him because I do New World Monkeys. If I did Old World Monkeys, Apes, and/or Dead People, I wouldn’t know him either. Plus he died younger than he should have. Bioanthropology on the whole–although there are more great minds to turn to–simply hasn’t contributed enough to theory. Mammalian Sociobiology it is, then.

2) My Top Ten
1. Edward O. Wilson - More a popularizer than anything else, his text is not only a great reference and resource, but got the movement off the ground. Since its birth, the movement has had several names and a few bastard offspring (evolutionary psych for one). But it has continued to heighten our understanding of the complexity of animal behavior. Personally, I also think sociobiological principles can ultimately inform the philosophy and structure of political systems.

2. W.D. Hamilton - The guy who came up with Kin Selection in 1964, thus providing us a mechanism that could help explain everything from the evolution of hive ’superorganisms’ to grandmothers. Kin selection, more than any other principle, is the impetus behind the development of ever more complex social and mating systems.

3. Robert Trivers - Some quibble over the importance of reciprocal altruism. Having watched it firsthand in (unfortunately captive) monkeys, I don’t doubt its existence or its importance to social structure. Razib objected to his inclusion on the grounds that kin selection is ‘more important’ (something like that IIRC). I’ll grant him that. And it’s certainly far and away more important when it comes to understanding the genetic side of evolution. But as a behavioral ecologist, I can tell you for a fact that the range of behaviors and interactions you can see among social mammals would not exist were it not for reciprocal altruism. Beyond that there was his classic on Parental Investment and Sexual Selection. I’m not going to start talking about that because I won’t stop (I’m involved in paternal care stuff). Because, like kin selection, both of these principles are unequivocally crucial to the development and understanding social complexity, I think Trivers not only deserves inclusion but deserves to be very high up on the list.

4. John Maynard Smith - Evolution and the Theory of Games (1982). ‘Nuff Said. For those who aren’t familiar with the work (and I admit I myself have only skimmed it), in it Maynard Smith brings together a culmination of work over the preceding decade in which a way to mathematically model the evolution of behavior is developed. The beautiful thing about the work of Maynard Smith et al. is that they were able to describe behavior in mathematical terms without overly reducing it (as genetics can be prone to do) until the complexity of it is lost.

5. Amotz Zahavi - The Handicap Principle. A signal should be costly to produce, broadcast, and/or maintain. The traditional example are the Birds of Paradise. A male’s long tail makes it difficult for him to start flying. In other words he has a tougher time getting away from a predator. So a male that has a nice long tail and doesn’t get eaten is essentially the same thing as a guy claiming he can tie one hand behind his back and still beat you up…and then goes on to do it. Actually Maynard Smith was involved in this stuff too, come to think of it.

6. Emlen & Oring - Ecology, Sexual Selection, and the Evolution of Mating Systems. Couldn’t and didn’t want to separate these two. I was lucky enough to have Emlen as a professor for a couple of classes in undergrad. But because he did a lot of naked mole rat work, and I found those animals boring, I didn’t take advantage of this fact. I was 17, so give me a break damn you. Little did I know that just a couple years later I’d be knee deep in exactly this all encompassing problem, just with a lot cuter taxon than mole rats. I mean. Come on. Mole rats? Nevertheless, it remains an important work because they didn’t treat mating system as just another heritable phenotypic characteristic. Instead they took an ecological perspective, furthering our understanding of how mating systems are determined by the circumstances surrounding the individuals rather than anything intrinsic. I just presented an extremely oversimplified surface treatment. You do not want me to go on. Trust me.

7. Richard Wrangham. The Evolution of Female-Bonded Primate Groups. Another extremely biased choice here. Wrangham’s a bioanthropologist. He hasn’t always done the most ’scientific’ work (demonic males for instance), but this 1980 paper is famous for bringing the idea of ecological determination of mating system to the fore. It’s not perfect by any means. But it certainly brought primatology out of the dark ages and in line with the rest of evolutionary biology

8. Ernst Mayr. All the traditional stuff. But mainly for keeping the focus at the level of the individual. There are certain things that will probably be never understood even if we completely ‘decode’ the genome. As ‘unscientific’ as it is for me to say so, I firmly believe that there are certain ‘emergent’ properties especially when it comes to intelligent and social animals (birds, cephalopods, mammals, and sometimes I wonder about poison arrow frogs). Too much of what they do and how they act is just too developmentally labile, too context and environment dependent.

9. Theodosius Dobzhanski. I’ve just always respected the fact that fieldwork was so important to this geneticist. People working from various perspectives can lose sight of everything else. When it comes to evolutionary biology, I’m in the ‘forest research’ camp, focusing on the whole individual and its behavior. Geneticists are in the ‘tree research’ camp, choosing to focus on isolated parts of a greater whole. Both camps are necessary to understanding evolution, but sometimes they can fail to communicate and integrate properly. Dhobzanski has always come across as a man who kept his eye on both perspectives. It’s something I hope I’ll do once my research career starts.

10. Garret Hardin. Another highly biased choice. I most admire Mr. Hardin for his many statements that economics is just a subset of ecology. In a simple statement, he showed us how all the work we do in behavioral ecology, all the discussion of modelling, fitness, cheaters, bluebeards, etc can help us understand how to build a more perfect political system. It was basic ecological thinking that he applied to the Tragedy of the Commons paper

It’s important to note that while there’s some overlap with Razib’s general list, I’ve included people on here that I wouldn’t on a general top ten (Wrangham, Zahavi, Emlen/Oring). This is a list of the top ten guys as far as this particular half-trained primate behavioral ecologist is concerned. 6, 7, and 10 could be considered biased choices, even within the subfield of behavioral ecology. But I think they’re fairly valid, nonetheless.

Linky(Coincidence here, I went to UCL for my Master’s. Great environment, great teachers. A year I genuinely treasure.)

Primatologists are supposed to be obsessed with dominance heirarchies, even half-trained ones like me. This particular issue isn’t just about dominance but also about eusociality, which is when most adults in a given group don’t try to reproduce. At its most elaborate level we see this in ants, bees, and wasps (all closely related), but we also see some degree of this among many social mammals, including naked mole rats (the hallmark example), wolves, and marmosets and tamarins (the guys I study). Since the end goal of all organisms is to make babies, one would think that this is a pretty odd arrangement. In certain contexts it can make a lot of sense, though, depending on associated tradeoffs.

In 1964, W.D. Hamilton solved a crucial part of this enigma when he proposed the idea of relative fitness. Traditionally, fitness has been defined as how many babies you make that live to reproductive age. However, Hamilton realized that the only difference between one’s offspring and one’s relatives is the strength of genetic similarity. You share 50% of your genes with each of your parents, your siblings, or your children. 25% with a first cousin. Rather than bore you with the details, lets just leave it with the conceptual framework that the more closely related you are to an individual, the more you gain by helping them out (in other words, playing ‘wingman’ for your brother is as worthy of effort as raising your own children). Although the issue could get a lot thornier (for instance although your parents share the same number of genes with you as your children do, your parents are a lot less likely to have babies, so in theory you should be less likely to help them), we’ll leave it at that for this discussion.

Scientists at UCL (University College London) have discovered that even wasps are driven by their status. The study, published today in Nature, shows that lower-ranked female wasps work harder to help their queen than those higher up the chain because they have less to lose, and consequently are prepared to take more risks and wear themselves out.

Because they’re eusocial, all of the female wasps tend to be sisters or half-sisters (I forget the mechanics of it, which are unimportant for the discussion anyway). So they get quite a bit of benefit from helping the one who actually does the breeding in raising the babies. But here we see the tradeoffs that complicate the issue. The higher up in the heirarchy you are, the more likely it is that you’ll get a turn as the breeding female. Those with a looong succession ahead of them have little or no chance at ever breeding. Too many queens would have to die. Think of the 3rd or 4th son of a king taking a military career where he has a much higher likelihood of dying than his layabout older brothers (who even if they don’t get kingship at least will get a decent parcel of property).

To quote the study’s author, Dr. Jeremy Field:

The wasps in this queue face a fundamental trade-off: by working harder, they help the group as a whole and as a result indirectly benefit themselves, but they simultaneously decrease their own future survival and fecundity because helping is costly. It involves energy-expensive flight to forage for food, and leaving the nest is dangerous. We have found that the brighter the individual wasp’s future, the less likely it is to take risks by leaving the safety of its nest to forage for food.”

In other words we’re seeing what amounts to a cost/benefit analysis in each of these females. The older you are, the more cost there is to helping and the less relative benefit. For an illustration, half of you imagine you’re female. The other half stay as you were. Now imagine you have two sisters, one who’s fertile, and one who’s barren. The fertile one is still searching for a sperm donor, but she’s hot and wears skimpy clothing, so there’s little doubt she’ll find one. Your husband tragically dies during childbirth from blunt force trauma as you knock his head against the wall screaming “WHY DID YOU DO THIS TO ME YOU BASTARD!” And on top of that you just had triplets. Which sister is more likely to help you out? The barren one. If she stays at home Saturday nights, it’s not like she loses any reproductive opportunity. On the other hand, the one with the fully functioning ovaries would lose major mating opportunities if she were to give up her nights and weekends during these, the most fecund and attractive years of her life. The lower-ranking wasp females might as well not have ovipositors, their likelihood of breeding is so low.

Now, because this is so close to a topic I spend inordinate amounts of time on, I’m going to contrast this situation to that which you see in Marmosets and Tamarins. Most monkeys mothers raise the kids on their own while Dad spends all his time eating, scratching himself in less than genteel places, showing off his canines, grunting, beating up every other male that looks at him funny, and trying to copulate with anything that moves and is suitably equipped. When it comes to certain South American monkeys, instead what we see are mothers that are basically walking incubators and milk dispensers. Very similar to queen wasps in that respect except that I don’t think you can milk a wasp (and at around half a pound, it’s pretty hard to milk a marmoset too. Trust me…I’ve tried). This is because they routinely produce twins, which is hard to manage considering monkey infants are already pretty expensive to take care of compared to other mammal babies. Not only does dad help out, but the infant’s older adult siblings stick around and help as well.

With these guys, there are a couple of reasons why they’d do this instead of going off to pitch woo with similarly young and free adult offspring from neighboring troops. First, marmosets need territory (which makes the wooing situation a lot like the Montagues and Capulets). It’s hard to maintain territory when it’s just a male and a female. Not to mention that your population is high enough that you’re completely surrounded by other marmoset groups. So these guys bide their time waiting for an opening. But there’s another aspect as well. Parenting is not necessarily natural for males. But they’re the ones who do most of the behavorial parenting (carrying, provisioning, playing, protecting, watching) as compared to the physiological stuff (pregnancy and lactating). So older sons (and daughters to an extent) can get a signifiant benefit by ‘training’ with a younger sibling. They do better when they finally leave and have higher success rates with their babies. In other words, while a lower ranking wasp is more likely to help out, in marmosets you see the reverse. Because the older you are, the more likely you are to be able to get in on new territory (dominance and preference), have a mating opportunity, and need the ability to parent. The younger you are, the less likely you’ll be making babies any time soon, so the less reason you’d have to learn how to do it (and in the process help out mom and dad).

While not earth-shattering, this is just a cool find in that it continues to expand our knowledge, understanding, and appreciation of how the many factors and variables involved in reproduction and survival play into the choices an animal makes, and in the determination of a given social system. It is something all too easy to miss, whether one is a geneticist blathering on and on about genes being the only unit of selection (some geneticists are pretty cool, though. I’ve been having a lot of fun going back and forth with Gene Expression recently…and his linking me has improved my stats) or one of those silly humanists who can only think of nature as ‘red in tooth and claw’. The ways in which self-interested behavior can result in such complex, cooperative societies is a thing of beauty unparalleled, like a snowflake growing in size and complexity at the behest of ever-so-simple a rule.

I recently picked up a North American Arms Black Widow.

I apologize for the lack of pictures. I’m too poor to afford a digital camera (I guess I’m one of those ‘leeches’ that pharyngula thinks I dislike so much). The Black widow is a surprisingly functional gun for something that looks and seems so toy-like. The thing is absolutely tiny; when placed in my palm it barely extends to my first knuckle.

Those goofy grips…

…are much larger in proportion to the gun than actually look good. That’s because the gun is so much smaller than the hand. However, thanks to that consideration, the gun points like an extension of your arm. Not exactly what you’d expect.

Mine’s the fixed sight model. The sights themselves are just fine quality Millett sights. But I’ve never been able to shoot plain old irons well. 3 dots are what I work best with. And are the only things I work well with. Either way though, this gun is great at unaimed ‘point and shoot’ and i could hit a ‘critter’ target from 5 yards with no problem whatsoever using that method. (Which is probably what it’ll be used for if ever in real life).

After lining up those sights, you encounter a nifty feature; notches in the cylinder wall between each chamber in which the hammer rests when you carry. This means instead of carrying hammer down on an empty chamber, you get a full cylinder full of shots (5). The hammer itself is in a good spot, and is reached and thumbed back in a fairly natural manner. And the spur trigger exhibits no creep or overtravel (doesn’t have room for it) that I noticed.

This gun will shoot. I have to throw out 1 or 2 of the 5 shot group due to my inherent crappiness, but the remaining rounds tended to be into one ragged hole or dang near close…offhand. This is a hell of a lot more than i expected from that little revolver at 5 and 10 yards. And also makes it the best performance I’ve ever had with a handgun, period.

It came with both a .22LR and a .22Mag cylinder, but I only shot .22LR. The conversion feature is nice, due to the high price difference between the two. One for carry, one for practice and plinking. Loading this little gun is a huge pain. Because of its size, it doesn’t have a conventional swing arm or ejector rod. You have to put it into half cock, pull the rod on which the cylinder spins entirely out of the gun, remove the cylinder, then poke the spent cases out one by one with that same rod. Putting the cylinder back in is a huge pain in the butt because you have to align everything perfectly. The good thing is that after a hundred or so rounds, the gun was loosening up and I was getting used to the procedure. I’m sure after a couple more range sessions I’ll have reloading down to 20 seconds or so (its around a minute right now).

The time spent loading is just the nature of the beast. To get a revolver that small, you have to ditch certain things. For me, the tradeoff is worth it. But there were a few ‘complaints’ to be had. Considering the Black Widow seems to be most often purchased as a BUG (backup gun), it would be prudent to include the smaller grips like those on the ‘regular’ mini mag. Don’t get me wrong, I like the big grips, but I don’t like the fact that I have to buy carry grips separately on what is when you get down to it a carry gun. Another thing is that I’m not a big fan of the cylinder retention pin. Because of the way its arranged, it’s nearly impossible to keep your hand from clearing the muzzle while loading or unloading. And there’s no trigger guard. I know Fitz cut the trigger guard off his specials, but it’s still a nice thing to have around. It’s a single action revolver, so a lot would have to get wrong to actually get hurt from either of those, it’s still something of a safety woe.

All in all, i’m completely happy with my purchase. It’s a good value for the money and there are a lot of times that the BW with the .22WMR cylinder installed could come in mighty handy whether out on the Texas Plain or lost in the concrete jungle.

original post

I’d always hoped to be linked by PZ Myers, who despite his incoherent politics and demonization tactics when it comes to such issues, remains probably the most influential science blogger. People often speak of blogfathers when it comes to their own decision to start blogging and what they’d blog about. I wasn’t necessarily inspired to start by anyone (and indeed started blogging before I was much of a blog reader), but in my strange blog where I attempt to bring science and classical liberal politics into a coherent whole, there are two people who one could say influenced me. Kim du Toit, although we differ on several key issues, remains the political blogger who I look up to the most. PZ, on the other hand, despite his execrable political discussions, influenced me by being one of the most accessible of all of the science bloggers. He brings to the fore scientific findings from all biological disciplines and discusses them in a very lucid manner. It’s something I try to do with my own more infrequent science blogging.

I don’t know how PZ ended up at my blog, or why he decided to put words into my mouth, but he has. I tried to be as neutral as I’m able in my earlier post, but by not discussing my own thoughts in full, I’ve opened myself up to the kind of base attacks he’s perpetrated against me.

The first mistake he makes is assuming I’m a conservative. I was, when I was a kid. But conservatives and leftists are really two sides of the same coin; they see the state in an enabling role. Whether this role is best expressed in maintaining the social and cultural order they want, or in redistributing income and wealth, is the only difference. I grew out of that idea a long time ago. The way I see it, the role of good government is to protect our liberty and to do the things that self-interested individuals acting in their natural manner would fail to accomplish (i.e. infrastructure, conservation, schooling, etc.)

I’m afraid the only non-socialist solution would be a flat tax. He estimates that the average tax payout is somewhere around $15,000—so let’s just tell everyone that their April 15 tax bill is $15,000. Dick Cheney will chortle with glee. I’m not sure what we propose to do with the waitress who is making $18,000 per year—debtor’s prison, perhaps? Shall we work out a scheme of debt slavery and put those people to work maintaining common resources? Locking up the poor and removing their pathetic contribution entirely, though, will mean the average tax load on the wealthy will rise a little bit more…those lucky duckies! They gotcha again!

It’s funny, did I propose this solution? One of the reasons I didn’t talk much about proposed solutions is that at 22 I’m a young guy, and it’s only in the last couple years that I stopped being a goose-stepping Statist (of any sort) and started thinking about politics for myself. In other words, I have to come to my own conclusions and make my own opinions. And while I’m more versed in econ than your average layman, I’m far from an expert. Whereas PZ tends to be more or less a parrot of the same talk that’s gone on since the 1800’s. It’s really easy to sound smart when you’re just taking a page from the various books that have been written for the past 200 years. It’s even easier when your readership is as monolithic in their political views as his certainly seems to be.

Tt’s a simple fact that unless those who make more money pay more in taxes (by some mechanism), our country would be in a sad state of affairs (see above about failure of self-interested individuals and their failures). Only an idiot would propose a 15,000 dollar flat tax across the board. But I do see a problem in that roughly 30% of the people actually bear the brunt of taxation. In such a system, they become the minority. The majority of the people don’t really feel the effects of increased governmental budgets. Which is why in countries such as Sweden you can end up so far past the Laffer Curve, dramatically impacting your GDP by your decision that progressive taxation and wealth redistribution is the most important part of government. But whining about tax cuts that go to ‘the rich’ will only worsen this problem.

Garret Hardin in his paper Tragedy of the Commons talked about the problem that occurs when people don’t pay the costs of their actions. It is this I’m most scared of. Lefties can delude themselves all they want about the health of Old Europe’s economy, but that’s all they’re doing: delusion. I don’t want to see us go down that road. Which is why I pointed out just how few do pay net taxes.

PZ also seems to have decided that I’ve made it some kind of moral point, that somehow those who make less than 77,000 are leeches. I find this amusing. It was said as a morally-neutral fact. And his commenters have continued with the ’somewhere along the way, people decided that money was a signal of worth.’ And then accuse me of ascribing to that philosophy.

Which is even more amusing. You see, I’m a behavioral ecologist. So I learned about Zahavi’s handicap principle and the related concept of honest signalling when I was around 17. Money ain’t an honest signal of much except money; which was the basic problem with the Social Darwinist stance of the late 19th century. One of the things about the handicap principle is that the trait you’re looking at should be costly to maintain, broadcast, or initially produce. Money is not. Money begets more money. Basic principle of economics here. And, in my travels and education among privileged kids, I’ve seen firsthand that those with money aren’t any more x, y, or z than anyone else. Unless you mean entitlement-mentality filled, closed-minded douchebags with the work ethic of a 15 year old golden retriever.

Growing up, I was lucky enough to have parents that did a good job of concealing their money from me. This is because in their 25 years here they’ve lived in every tax bracket (including sub-10,000). My mom’s side had a rough time due to my great grandfather dying when my grandma was in her infancy. By the time I graduated high school, I was definitely better off than most of my friends, but you wouldn’t know it to talk to me. I drove about the same value of car, more often than not wore cheaper clothes, and in general didn’t seem to be the kind of kid that lived in the neighborhood I did.

In college I didn’t much like the rich kids (and in the Ivy League they’re everywhere), instead I once again threw my lot in with guys whose parents mostly made less than mine did. And to this day, many if not most of my friends are below the break even point and will likely always be below the break even point of 77,000 dollars. I myself will be below that point until I’m in my 30’s. Does this mean I think they’re leeches, or that Ill have been a leech for the first 12 or 15 years of my adulthood? Probably not.

And am I upset that the high taxes I’ll be paying in about a decade will negatively impact me? Not really. As I said, I live relatively simply. There isn’t a whole lot I could think of to do with that money besides send it to charitable organizations I believe in; especially tropical conservation groups.

No, wealth to me is a value-neutral entity. But it is an entity that makes the world go round. I don’t judge people by how much they make or how little they make. I don’t see the poor as noble, and I don’t see the wealthy as superior. I see people as people. Tax cuts ‘for the rich’ improved our revenue considerably in the last couple of years. Which, although by a commenter of having an infantile view of economics, I predicted:

I don’t see money as something to be redistributed as part of a social engineering program; I don’t see it as a proxy of much if anything. I see it as a tool to get things done. Things that self-interested individuals can’t or won’t get done on their own (Hardin’s ‘commons’s). I also see that when it is used in any other way (either social engineering, or to further plutocracy), things can get bad in a hurry. What many see as inherently good or inherently bad, I tend to see as tools. Often enough dangerous tools.

FOR MY ACTUAL THOUGHTS ON THE TAXATION SITUATION CLICK THIS

Lefties love to go on and on and on about ‘the taxpayer’ and about how only ‘the rich’ get tax cuts. In their greatest heights of dissimulation, they’ll post up stats about how much each tax bracket got back as a result of the cuts, either in dollar form, or in terms of percentage of the total cut. Ignoring the fact that the tax cuts resulted in a huge increase in revenue in the past couple years, we have to ask a simple question: How much are these people paying in the first place?

Personally, I’m of the opinion that you’re only a ‘taxpayer’ if the amount you pay in taxes approximates per capita government expenditure (Which is being charitable, considering that close to 40% of our budget goes toward various forms of social welfare). In other words, you put in about as much as you take out. Any less and you’re a tax recipient, any more and you’re a tax donor. So today I’m going to look at a couple things: First, how much are people actually paying. Then, how much are they getting back. And finally, I’m going to ask you just how ‘fair’ it is that some people pay nothing for something, while others pay a whole lot more, for a whole lot less.

I’ll be using the CBO’s own numbers from 2003, so there shouldn’t be any whining about skew. And, because I’m not a douchebag, I’ll be explaining how I produce my graphs from their numbers, which are calculated by household and divided up into quintiles (personally I’d like to use individuals, but household yields more conservative numbers). The nice thing about these numbers is since they’re effective tax rates, income tax on business and excise taxes have already been incorporated. In other words, the leftie ‘oh but you didn’t count excise taxes, which are really regressive because poor people spend a greater percentage of their income on those things’ objection doesn’t apply. Here’s a table of the basic data. The only numbers that I crunched are the last two columns (expenditure and corrected expenditure).

From here, we’re going to make lots of graphs. I apologize for their worthlessness but I just switched to Open Office 2.0.2 and am still getting used to the graphing function. The CBO divides their data into fifths. In other words I only get 5 data points to play with, the average for the bottom 20% of all households, the average for those between the 21st and 40th percentile, up through the average for the top 20% of all househods. It’s cumbersome, and nonintuitive, but that’s what we’re stuck with:

1st, pretax income against taxes paid. The difference between the two lines represents post tax income. Pay attention to the fact that taxes paid go up steadily from bottom through the second lowest group, then skyrocket in the 1st.

This second graph is just a variation, showing income both before and after taxes. The difference between the two lines this time is taxes paid. Again notice the ever widening gap.

The third graph maps taxes versus post tax income as a percentage of pre tax income.

All three of these indirectly, but more clearly (confusing huh), illustrate the tax percentage paid by each group in a graphical manner. They say the same thing, I’m just being complete. They establish the basic relationship between income and taxes.

The next three graphs, on the other hand, take it one step further. Instead of being merely illustrative, they add in the dimension of taxes received (per household government expenditure). Through these next three graphs, we’ll actually be able to see who are the tax receivers, the tax payers, and the tax donors. We’ll also get a very vivid picture of just how socialized the American progressive tax system really is.

This fourth graph compares the percent share of total (all households combined) income for each of the 5 groups, and compares that to percent share of total taxes paid. It’s here we first see the taxpayer (which is the point where the lines intersect), tax receivers (left hand side), and tax donors (right hand side). The ‘taxpayer’ comes just above the median for the people between the 60th and 80th percentile. This means that roughly only the top 30% or so of all households actually pay as much or more than they take in. The size of the distance between those two lines represents just how much the receive or donate. Gives you an idea of just how extreme the difference can be.

But because this is a percentage it really doesn’t drive home the monetary disparities involved. It’s important to note that those ‘income’ numbers include all social welfare payments included already. This is good for the next step, which will be to graph these numbers against the total budget. Now, instead of complicating things by taking total budget data from another source, we’re just going to multiply each of the median income values by the number of households in the quintile and add it all together. And divide by the total number of households to get per capita expenditure.

It’s not perfect, but it’s a good approximation.

Notice where the line crosses? That’s a decent estimate of the income level at which you pay about as much in taxes as you get in government services; it even gives you an income amount of roughly 77,000 dollars (since it’s about the median for the 2nd highest fifth…which is 77,000). But that makes the assumption that there are no ‘transfer payments’ ’social insurance’ or any other social welfare programs in place.

In reality, 43.5% of our federal budget last year went toward these kinds of things (’income security’, medicare, social security). Because such data was unavailable, I was unable to do a perfectly accurate estimate of how much of these social welfare payments go to each quintile. While the majority of them would go toward those in the lowest category, it would be improper to make the assumption that ALL did. Instead, what I’m going to do is divide up the federal budget into the 60% that’s spread around equally (more or less), and the 40% that’s basically socialism. From there we can build an estimate that, while conservative (assuming that more people get social welfare benefits than really do), presents a more accurate reflection of our tax system. The way this works is that we’ll use the 60% to determine what everyone, regardless of income, gets in federal expenditure. This yields a horizontal line. On top of this we’re going to place a diagonal line that’s highest for the bottom fifth and lowest for the highest fifth, based off the assumption that the lowest income households get the most in government benefits, and each proceeding quintile gets less and less, until the top fifth gets none at all. Again, this makes federal expenditure look more equitable than it really is. So the lefties once again can’t attack it. This is what we end up with:

This crossover point is an intentionally lowball estimate. Which is why i did all that freaking work to produce it. If you look at both Graphs 4 and 5, the crossover point is really within the 1st quintile. In actuality, Graph 4 is the best representation we have of where the crossover point is. Yet by applying the corrections I did in Graph 6, I’ve tried to strengthen my analysis. It’s one of the weird facts of science that the stronger your methods of analysis, the less robust your results look. It’s more or less the handicap principle. Basically I’m saying “Look, I bitchslapped MYSELF, and I still win!”

In other words, someone making about 77000 dollars a year or more is ‘the taxpayer’, everyone below is actually getting more than they put in. Why should we make the disparity in benefits greater by directing more ‘tax cuts’ to them? As it is, they already get more out of the arrangement than they put in, whereas it’s a losing proposition for anyone making more than 77k. I’ll leave it to others to pontificate about this, whether it be spittle-flecked Marxist or neo-Randian alike. In my old age, I’m skeptical that anyone would be reasoned and principled about it.

When I revisit this topic, I’m going to divide up the taxes, the CBO document I’m using divides things into income, payroll, and excise taxes. And it’d be worthwhile to look at those as well, but this is enough work for one evening.

But there is one thing that cannot be denied. This is a socialist system, this IS a wealth redistribution system, just one concealed by processing through government expenditure in non-welfare areas. I’ll leave it to others to pontificate about this, whether it be spittle-flecked Marxism or neo-Randian alike. In my old age, I’m skeptical that anyone would be reasoned and principled about it.

Kim du Toit brings up a silly study in which it was shown that handling a firearm increases aggression and testosterone. Problem being, while it does show that there is a link between testosterone and aggression (duh?), it doesn’t say much about the role of firearms in either one.

This is just an extended version of the comments I put on Kim’s site. The thing about research, especially scientific research, is that you’re supposed to control for extraneous factors. They didn’t. Not in the least. In fact, if I wanted a biased result this is almost exactly how I’d go about getting it. Now, apparently one of the guys in the comments actually talked to the researchers, who had no intention of making this about guns, merely about aggression. If this is true, then they might think about changing the experiment to videos of UFC fights or something more unequivocally violent. I’ve never owned a gun that hurt anyone. Except the time I slammed the bolt on my own thumb. And if the reporter took a conclusion from the paper that wasn’t implied (as seems to be the case), the reporter needs to die. No, I’m serious. Anyway, some of the factors they didn’t control for were hoplophobia,

1. self-selection bias. Psych experiments in colleges are done by volunteers; usually from undergrads interested in psych. Psych is one of the most politically biased fields out there next to liberal arts academia. drhelen.blogspot.com talks about that a lot. In other words, these 30 boys were likely liberals and thus never held a gun. They also might have been scared to hold a gun. Fear increases testosterone drastically. I took my first college psych course when I was 15, three colleges and seven years ago. Since then I’ve met only two or three other non-leftie males involved in psych. Period.

2. familiarity. Remember the first time you held a gun? Acted quite a bit differently than you do now don’t you? I don’t mean outwardly, but inside. I remember the first time I shot a gun. A s&w N frame IIRC. Heart racing, huge high afterward, the whole nine yards. I’ve only gone shooting maybe 10-12 times since then. But now, my reaction is ‘meh’.

3. opinion of guns. This ties back into both 1 and 2. People looking at the same object can see two different things. When I look at a pistol, I see a tool and a toy, nothing more, nothing less. When a leftie psych metrosexual looks at that same plain jane 1911A1 he sees an evil black object of death. Clearly our reactions are going to be different when we pick it up.

4. the chicken-egg fallacy of thought vs. biochemical. Thoughts are the conscious perception of biochemical levels. In other words, it’s not a causative relationship necessarily but rather a truism. High aggression=high testosterone. So they can’t say ‘handling a gun increases testosterone’ but rather ‘thinking about handling a gun in a certain way increases testosterone’. Which is a horse of an entirely different color. I guarantee you my testosterone levels dont’ spike when I’m at the range. I doubt they do on your typical disciplined shooter and especially a sniper.

I personally love that BS like this can make it through to the mainstream media. Meanwhile, I can’t even get enough grant funding to defray my freaking travel expenses.

Razib over at Gene Expression asks a very interesting question:

Between 3 million & 200,000 years ago the average cranial capacity of this planet’s dominant hominids increased along a upward trendline, in starts and stops. Bipedal apes went from having nearly chimp sized crania to one similar to modern human beings (Neandertals had larger brains that H. sapiens sapiens). Symbolic culture as we know it though seems to really explode (a.k.a. “The Great Leap Forward”) between 50,000 and 30,000 years ago. Nevertheless, what do you think happened??? Was it climate change (I’m skeptical)? Was it some sort of cultural ratchet? Was it God?

First off, here’s a picture from talkorigins.org (beautiful place by the way):

Pretty self-explanatory, but also confusing. Early modern humans have smaller brains than both archaic Homo sapiens (now called Homo heidelbergensis) as well as neandertals. Yet we were the ones who went through the cultural expansion. Which is the crazy strange hard to understand part.

The first thing to note is that although our brain size is similar or even slightly to our congeners’ advantage, brain shape is drastically different. From ergaster and erectus up through heidelbergensis and neandertalensis, a characteristic football shaped skull is seen:

Homo erectus

Homo ergaster

Homo heidelbergensis

Compare those guys to us:

Pretty obvious differences there. We’ve got a much more upright forehead (frontal bone) and the curve is a lot smoother and rounder around the back. What do those differences mean exactly? We barely know enough about the brain in living organisms as it is. Doing it in dead ones is even harder. The only way to study it is by the impresssions the brain leaves on the skull. But we can get an idea of general brain shape and size from the skulls.

Similar size, different shapes. We have a relatively bigger frontal region, they had a bigger temporal (sides around the ears) region. The frontal lobes, as most people know, are the seat of the conscious will. It’s the part of you that does the thinking. The temporal lobes on the other hand are responsible for aspects of hearing, language, and spatial manipulation and object recognition (one should probably focus on the latter when thinking of temporal lobe function). Whether it actually makes a difference between the two in this case, no one really knows.

Besides, the oldest anatomically modern human remains have been dated to 150,000-200,000 years ago. A long time before the cultural explosion Razib was talking about. What about genetics? Perhaps not astonishingly, a few ‘key’ genetic alleles necessary for normal development of the brain and/or language all seem to have arisen at around that point in time. So not much help there either.

Climate change? It’s tempting, but I’m not entirely happy with it. The weirdest and craziest thing about the cultural explosion was that it seemingly happened simultaneously all over the range of human colonization. Beautiful artifacts come from the northernmost reaches of early human settlement. They also come from the tropical parts of Africa. Meh.

Nope, personally I believe we just got really good at being hominids. See the hominid lifestyle is very different from the typical anthropoid lifestyle. As I’ve said before, apes and monkeys are more similar than they are different in behavior. On the other hand, although we retain a lot of anthropoid characteristics, we live a lot more like wolves. It’s a point I’ve made before but really must be made over and over again. Ever since Homo erectus we’ve probably been meat eaters (and not ‘meat eaters’ like chimps with a massive 1.4% of their diet coming from meat), there’s good evidence that our home ranges expanded dramatically around then, and some more circumstantial evidence that we cooperated in the hunt.

This is completely different from how a monkey should behave. It took us a while to adjust. And by the time anatomically modern humans came around, we were getting pretty good. And there’s a thing about energy. Animals try to conserve it. But when they don’t have to, they waste it. They play, they spend less time resting, or more time moving, or more time fornicating. Depends from animal to animal. I’ve been lucky enough to observe full grown male elk ‘playing tag’ in the bounty of summer (no they weren’t fighting). Pretty rare sight, but one that can happen when there’s enough around.

Personally, I think the cultural explosion occurred because we’d gotten good enough at being hominids that we had excess energy to burn. Instead of spending it in play, we spent it in thought. After all, our brains do represent 25% of our metabolic load as it is.

These are almost getting formulaic I know, sorry. I’ll stop when the scientific integrity starts, k?
linky

One thing that this new article makes really apparent is that these so-called psychiatric disorders often present with the same symptoms, especially in children.

“Many symptoms of depression also present with other psychiatric disorders,” noted Dr. David Fassler, a Burlington, Vt., child and adolescent psychiatrist, clinical associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Vermont and author of “Help Me, I’m Sad: Recognizing, Treating, and Preventing Childhood and Adolescent Depression” (Penguin, 1998).

“For example, irritability can be a sign of depression or anxiety or attention deficit or bipolar disorder or a reaction to a learning disability, so a proper diagnosis is critical,” he said.

In a further entanglement, numerous conditions with overlapping characteristics often coexist, making the symptom sorting all the more tricky, even for professionals.

“The symptoms of the four most prevalent mental-health conditions (ADHD, anxiety, bipolar disorder and depression) are not always easy to tease apart, especially in children,”

See this is what I’m talking about. Four different ‘disorders’ each with four different recommended biochemical treatments ranging from medical methamphetamines to the pharamacological equivalent of ecstacy. But they all look the same?

As many as two-thirds of depressed children also suffer from other oftentimes look-alike disorders. Untangling these so-called comorbidities hits a snag on the chicken-and-egg quandary: Which came first and is one the cause, effect, neither or both of the other?

And here Ms. Wasowicz hits the core of the issue; the real reason I won’t shut up. Comorbidities really crack me up. They talk about the comorbidity of depression and chronic illness a lot. Which is exactly what I’ve been trying to say. Depression is caused by thoughts. If you’re chronically ill, easy to think bad thoughts. Ergo, easy to get depressed. Not hard to understand. Knowing that, which is better? Drugs, or attempting to talk with this clearly distressed person who’s not in the best of health about their fears and their qualms?

Inconsistencies like this are why I think many psychiatric disorders should probably be thought of as ‘psychiatric injury’ instead. More often than not, there is an initial insult. The irritability, change in sleeping patterns, defiance, all of them are merely part of a response. Certain sets of symptoms are gathered together into neat little bundled and called ‘disorders’ or ‘disease’. These symptoms are then treated. Now, even before I got to med school I learned that it’s important to treat the root cause of a disease rather than merely the symptoms.

It’s important to note that since there is little to no causative evidence that ‘anxiety’ causes ‘anxiety-type symptoms’ or ‘depression’ causes ‘depression-type symptoms’. Which means when we can’t tell the difference between the two (as was discussed more heavily in the article), we decide which is which based on what medication they respond to. Which sounds eerily similar to what goes on in the recreational drug world. People all have ‘their drug’, something that just makes them go ‘click’, something that they just feel completes them. You’ll meet hyperactive people who use marijuana to calm them down. Or similar people who use meth to get even more hyper. Or you might a calm person who does downers because ‘that’s their thing’. On the other hand, he might turn into a totally different person on PCP, and that might be what he looks for. In other words. Similar personalities, different drug/responses desired.

One of the worst thing a surgical oncologist can do is not cut deep enough. Leaving behind a part of the tumor is usually pretty bad news for the breast cancer patient, indicating a likelihood of metastases and lower survival down the road. Similarly, I continue to fear that we don’t go deep enough when rooting out the causes of psychiatric problems. It’s easy to say ‘He looks anxious. Let’s call it Generalized Anxiety Disorder and figure out which street drug works best.’ It’s a lot harder to say ‘I wonder why he’s so anxious; let’s find out, and if he needs something to keep him calm meanwhile, we’ll put him on something temporarily.

I walk with a pronounced limp a fair amount of the time. If the doctors looked at my leg the same way psychiatrists treat the mind, this is roughly what would have happened:
“Doctor, I’m limping.”
“You have Generalized Limping Disorder. It’s a serious medical condition caused by the fact that your leg hurts.”
“So you’re telling me I’m limping?”
“Yes, but more officially.”
“Ok, so what can we do about it.”
“Well, here’s some Oxycontin”
“What about fixing the limp.”
“Nawwww. You’ll feel all happy and loopy on the opiates.”
“Ok”

Now, what the doctor should have done is try to fix my limp first and only if he couldn’t should he have told me to drug myself to my eyeballs.

I’ve been accused of selling out more than a few times. When I decided not to pursue a PhD in primatology, my professor at first thought I was selling out for money before I finished my whole spiel. Being something of a psych skeptic and in general possessed of a low opinion of medicine, I’ve been called a sellout for deciding to become a psychiatrist. The above allegations simply aren’t true. I’m a fighter, so I went where the action was. There’s no point in studying monkeys if no one ever applies what you study to their own lives. And there’s no point in being a dissident of mainstream psych if no one will listen to you because you have the wrong letters after your name. And if it means I have to jump through their hoops for a couple years, so be it. I will have it known that I didn’t disguise who I was or my intent in my personal statement. Which probably bit me in the ass.

And when it comes to clinical rotations I don the button-downs and slacks required of us to ‘maintain a professional atmosphere’ despite my belief that those clothes aren’t designed to fit men that aren’t either skinny or fat and that they only serve to perpetrate elitism.

But I have sunk to new lows. I just grabbed two jobs. One at the Oklahoma State Department of Health, making me a gubbermint employee. Not only that but a functionary, the worst kind.

But even worse, I’ve just been hired by Kaplan Test Centers to tutor in MCAT and GRE. Which, I didn’t know this when I applied, is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Washington Post. In fact, my paychecks will come from WaPo’s central office. Making me an employee of the second most-read lefty paper, a paper that is probably even more slanted than NYT.

I am a freaking sell out. But I’m also a poor med student, who will continue to be poor until he’s 30. I’ll take what I can get.