GOULD'S THE PANDA'S THUMB

The following I got from my reading this morning over at the Border's Books near our new condominium. I walked over because my car is snowed in and I don't have a snow shovel. We left our snow shovel back in Spokane at the house we sold there. The new owner is getting a lot of use out of it, no doubt, but we could use it here, where Vancouver is experiencing near record snowfall. Anyhow, evolution has certainly developed many unique ways to foster reproduction. I found this one in Stephen J. Gould's The Panda's Thumb:

[SNIP]
Consider the curious life of a male mite in the genus Adactylidium, as described by E.A. Albadry and M.S.F. Tawfik in 1966. It emerges from its mother's body and promptly dies within a few hours, having done apparently nothing during its brief life. It attempts, while outside its mother, neither to feed nor to mate. We know about creatures with short adult lives—the mayfly's single day after a much lengthier larval life, for example. But the mayfly mates and insures the continuity of its kind during these few precious hours. The males of Adactylidium seem to do nothing at all except emerge and die.

To solve the mystery, we must study the entire life cycle and look inside the mother's body. The impregnated female of Adactylidium attaches to the egg of a thrips. That single egg provides the only source of nutrition for rearing all her offspring—for she will feed on nothing else before her death. This mite, so far as we know, engages exclusively in sib mating; thus, it should produce a minimal number of males. Moreover, since total reproductive energy is so strongly constrained by the nutritional resources of a single thrips' egg, progeny are strictly limited, and the more females the better. Indeed, Adactylidium matches our prediction by raising a brood of five to eight sisters accompanied by a single male who will serve as both brother and husband to them all. But producing a single male is chancy; if it dies, all sisters will remain virgins and their mother's evolutionary life is over.

If the mite takes a chance on producing but a single male, thus maximizing its potential brood of fertile females, two other adaptations might lessen the risk—providing both protection for the male and guaranteed proximity to his sisters. What better than to rear the brood entirely within a mother's body, feeding both larvae and adults within her, and even allowing copulation to occur inside her protective shell. Indeed, about forty-eight hours after she attaches to the thrips’ egg, six to nine eggs hatch within the body of a female Adactylidium. The larvae feed on their mother’s body, literally devouring her from inside. Two days later, the offspring reach maturity, and the single male copulates with all his sisters. By this time, the mother’s tissues have disintegrated, and her body space is a mass of adult mites, their feces, and their discarded larval and nymphal skeletons. The offspring then cut holes through their mother's body wall and emerge. The females must now find a thrips’ egg and begin the process again, but the males have already fulfilled their evolutionary role before "birth." They emerge, react however a mite does to the glories of the outside world, and promptly die.
[PASTE]

Gould in the brief essay which includes the snippet above is talking about why almost all sexed species produce males and females at about the same 50/50 ration. The Adactylidium mite is the exception that tests the rule.

LBJ'S CLAIM FURTHER VALIDATED

More than once on this blog, I've mentioned LBJ's claim, as he signed the Civil Rights Act, that the Democratic Party would lose the South for a generation. Over and over again, I've mentioned that racist beliefs underly every Republican Party tactic. Though they surely do believe in this or that economic, international and national policy, still, whatever its claims about those policies, the Republican Party's hidden strength, its appeal and staple product, is racism just as racism once was the Democratic Party's staple and underlying appeal to the Southland.

America will never be able to hold up its head in international company until both the Republican and the Democratic parties renounce any interest in the South and turn it over to some latter day States Rights Party or George Wallace for president bunch. We are shamed by every appeal we make to Southern interests in our politics. Granted, racism is not solely located in the Southland, but its strongest roots are there. And FoxNews, I'll bet, if we could just measure its appeal, will show its strongest base to be in those nether regions of America.

So I'm enjoying, and hope you are too, NAS's (hip hop gangsta rappa) presentation of signed petitions about racism at the doors of FOX headquarters in New York. I signed that petition myself on the internet and so my name is on one of those petitions which Fox refuses to accept. Until they do, we'll know that the FoxRepublicanRacistNews face is forever, now, painted clearly on its red state face, its racism clearly for all to see.

S.J. GOULD'S THE MAN

In my final days as a working man at Mackay Manufacturing, I'd often listen to audio tapes as my machine whirred and wailed its way through stainless, aluminum and steel or plastic blocks of material, turning rectangular slugs into this or that fascinating part for one kind of machine or another. Ah, yes, the job shop!

One man's tapes particularly interested me, and he was Stephen J. Gould. The way he could work through an intellectual problem, exposing it in finest detail, laying bare the incongruities and inconsistencies of human reason intrigued me to no end. Now, retired on my veranda, I'm reading a couple of his books that I once listened to, and I find myself—this is true—near tears at the beauty of the workings of his mind. I'm often moved by displays of human imagination and reason when they clearly transcend the average. Currently, I'm reading The Mismeasure of Man in which Gould lays bare the falsehood of trying to measure intelligence as if it were a single unitary thing that can be measured and used to classify people. I know... I've probably said that more than once in the last couple of days.

Anyhow, today, I came across his analysis of statistical correlations and their relationship to cause (which is practically nil). Read this paragraph. Better yet, buy and read the whole book.

"The spirit of Plato dies hard. We have been unable to escape the philosophical tradition that what we can see and measure in the world is merely the superficial and imperfect representation of an underlying reality. Much of the fascination of statistics lies embedded in our gut feeling—and never trust a gut feeling—that abstract tables summarizing large tables of data must express something more real and fundamental than the data themselves. (Much professional training in statistics involves a conscious effort to counteract this gut feeling.) The technique of correlation has been particularly subject to such misuse because it seems to provide a path for inferences about causality (and indeed it does, sometimes—but only sometimes)." —Gould

Then Gould goes on to dissect this problem of cause and correlation in his usual clear and incisive manner. The statement above makes me think of the Monty Hall problem. I'm not going to state it here. Just Google "Monty Hall Problem", and I'm sure you'll find it. I can think of no clearly case by which one can experience the very real disconnect between numbers (math) and nature than in that problem. A very real percentage is generated in that Hall problem, but when one takes it out into the wild and sets the problem up as a hunting problem (anyone can do it), he will discover that the math lies or, at least, suggests something that is not true.

The math is valid but not true—I think that's the way to describe the conclusion. When I think of this Monty Hall problem and about the simplest math functions in our brains that evolved out of our hunter/gatherer need to find where the game might, on average, be or where we would be most likely to find a certain plant during a specific season (a law of averages at work in the real world) I am enlightened considerably about the evolution of the brain and its adaptations for survival. In short, the brain works one way and mathematics works another. It's a toss up as to whether or not mathematics opens doors into a new reality for future humankind or leads us up blind alleys to dimensions that really don't exist.

Also, I'm aware that I'm really "out there" pretending to understand stuff I may not understand at all, but at least I'm trying to get my Neanderthal brain to grasp the stuff of mathematics.