DON’T BE A DINGBAT

According to a recent AP report which appeared on the Internet, size matters. “A research team led by Syracuse University biologist Scott Pitnick found that in bat species where the females are promiscuous, the males boasting the largest testicles also had the smallest brains. Conversely, where the females were faithful, the males had smaller testes and larger brains. . . .

“ ‘The study offers evidence that males, at least in some species make an evolutionary trade-off between intelligence and sexual prowess, said David Hoskens, a biologist at the Centre for Ecology and Conservation at the University of Exeter in England and a leading authority on bats' mating behavior. . . .’

“ ‘If female bats mate with more than one male, a sperm competition begins,’ Pitnick said. ‘The male who ejaculates the greatest number of sperm wins the game, and hence many bats have evolved outrageously big testes.’

The AP report goes on to say, “Promiscuity is known to make a difference in testicle size in some other mammals. For example, chimpanzees are promiscuous and have testicles that are many times larger than those of gorillas, in which a single dominant male has exclusive access to a harem of females.”

You see, the study of biology isn’t all boring when one can come across such facts as these. But what’s a poor woman to do? If she’s the faithful sort, she won’t have as much fun, but if she’s the running around type, she gets a snugger fit. Of course, these findings relate only to the batty ones among us.

WELL . . . MAYBE I’D GET IT if
I WERE A PRISON SPOKESPERSON or
A CONSERVATIVE PRISON SPOKESPERSON or
WORKED FOR BILL O’REILLY AT THE FOX IN THE BUSH NETWORK

Recently, an elderly 76 year old death row inmate asked the prison to just let him die if he went into cardiac arrest which he thought he might likely do. But the prison informed him, “At no point are we not going to value the sanctity of life. We would resuscitate him.” Allen was executed, as planned, at age 76. Good for him. He wouldn’t want to challenge the compassionate conservative types among his executioners. This is according to a small passage in Newsweek, Feb. 6, 2005, p.?

MORE SEX, AND THIS TIME HUMAN SEXUALITY

"Our blood holds the secrets to who we are, and, increasingly, individuals, families and research scientists are using genetic testing to tell us what we don't already know. Human genomes are 99.9 percent identical; we are far more similar than diverse. But that tiny 0.1 percent difference holds clues to our ancestries, the roots of all human migration and even our propensity for disease . . . .

"Our most recent ancestors—a genetic "Adam" and "Eve"—have been traced back to Africa, and other intriguing forebears are being discovered all over the map. Last month one group of scientists found that 40 percent of the world's Ashkenazi Jews descend from just four women; another reported that one in five males in northwest Ireland may be a descendant of a legendary fifth-century warlord." From Newsweek (Feb. 6, pp. 48-49)

This last paragraph about the warlord who probable spread his genes far and wide as a rite of conquest reminds me of a line from Mel Brooks's movie, “History of the World, Part Two”. Mel, playing one of the Kings Louis says soto voce to the camera, after fondling a nymphet, "It's good to be the king."

Another interesting reflection as one studies the findings that trace our ancestors all about the globe is that if you accept that we can track our ancestors back that far using genes, then the next step back down the gene trail is monkeys or that ancestor we shared with monkeys. If you accept this much you gotta accept the whole gene to monkey package.

SOME PRETTY PICTURES

These are some more photos from Spokane's perennial garden at Manito Park. Enjoy. It was a beautiful warm day as I took them. A bit muggy for Spokane, but okay. Enjoy the weekend.



































[]

THEY CAN THANK BUSH FOR CHAVEZ

Since we can thank Bush for the move to the left in governments all over the world (Mexico's close call counts too!) as well as the move toward terrorism of so many of the Moslem world’s youth (see Somalia), Venezuela can thank Bush for the good fortune they are receiving, courtesy of their awareness of the decidedly uncompassionate conservativism of America’s president.

“Yet even Chavez's most outspoken' critics readily admit that his charisma and revolutionary rhetoric have touched a chord with many of Venezuela's poor, who represent 54 percent of the population and have long been shut out of the country's political and economic life. ‘A lot of poor people feel understood and represented by Chavez,’ says Perez Vivas, ‘even if they don't receive anything.’ ” — US News and World Report, Jan. 30, 2006, p. 27



Photo is of a small segment of Spokane's perennial garden at Manito Park.

MORE TO THANK BUSH FOR IN IRAQ

I tell you—it can't be more than a few months more and things will be going so well in Iraq that we can get up and leave.

[OPEN QUOTE] Abu Mohammed can't go near a hospital now. The Iraqi bone specialist, 37, has lived in fear since August, when his younger brother, also a doctor, was shot dead one night while walking home from his clinic in Baghdad. Abu Mohammed bought a pistol after that, but he still doesn't feel safe. Recently he was offered a managerial job at one of the city's biggest hospitals. He's scared to accept it. His wife owned a pharmacy; she sold it in November. A week or so ago a doctor friend of theirs was kidnapped from his clinic in the city's Mansour district—the latest of their friends to vanish. "My brother was killed when the terrorists started a campaign against doctors," says Abu Mohammed. "He was one of their victims."

Iraq's troubles just keep getting crueler. The same American officials who used to promise imminent victory are now saying openly that the insurgency seems likely to continue indefinitely. The recent elections, rather than creating a sense of common ground, only emphasized the country's deepening rifts. And all the while, the insurgents are attacking the social structure wherever its defenses are weakest, aiming to create chaos so hopeless that America will finally give up and go home. Now they are targeting the health-care system with murders, kidnappings and scare tactics. According to the Iraqi Doctors Association, at least 65 physicians were killed in 2005—more than double the total for either of the previous two years—while others were kidnapped or threatened with death. Hundreds have fled the country. [CLOSE QUOTE] —Newsweek, Jan. 16, 2006, p. 36.

GLAXOSMITHKLINE and FEAR

I saw a print ad recently by the drug company mentioned in the title of this segment. Two huge sentences at the top of the ad say it all:

"EXPERTS SAY 10% OF THE WORLD'S DRUG SUPPLY IS COUNTERFEIT.
CAN WE BE SURE WE IMPORT THE 90% THAT ISN'T?"

I wonder why a major American drug company would put out a strange ad like that one? The reason eludes me, doesn't it you?

STEVEN PINKER ON EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY

From the moment I first read Freud in my youth, I was hooked on psychology, but as my life ground on with probably a lot more pain and suffering than was necessary, and as I argued with friends and enemies about "the human condition", I had to admit, as Steven Pinker discusses below, that psychology didn't give me the firmly founded answers that I craved about why humans are as they are and about why I am as I am. Questions like why are people cruel, why are we selfish, why do humans make war, were not answered with any satisfaction though I loved to adopt one viewpoint or another and argue its truth as if my very life depended on it. But all the while, in the depths of heated argument, I knew that I wasn't quite as certain about my points as I wanted to be.

Steven Pinker in his "Forward" to The Handbook Of Evolutionary Psychology doesn't mention arguing, but he does mention the absence of satisfying explanation that traditional psychology gave him but which evolutionary psychology does give him. Finally, we can say, science has made its way into psychology. Here’s Steven Pinker:

[OPEN QUOTE] For many years after I decided to become a psychologist I was frustrated by my chosen field, and fantasized about a day when it would satisfy the curiosity that first led me to devote my professional life to studying the mind. As with many psychology students, the frustration began with my very first class, in which the instructor performed the ritual that begins every introduction to psychology course: disabusing students of the expectation that they would learn about any of the topics that attracted them to the subject. Forget about love and hate, family dynamics, and jokes and their relation to the unconscious, they said. Psychology was a rigorous science which investigated quantifiable laboratory phenomena; it had nothing to do with self-absorption on an analyst's couch or the prurient topics of daytime talk shows. And in fact the course confined itself to "perception," which meant psychophysics, and "learning," which meant rats, and "the brain," which meant neurons, and "memory," which meant nonsense syllables, and "intelligence," which meant IQ tests, and "personality," which meant personality tests.

When I proceeded to more advanced courses, they only deepened the disappointment by revealing that the psychology canon was a laundry list of unrelated phenomena. The course on perception began with Weber's Law and Fechner's Law and proceeded to an assortment of illusions and aftereffects familiar to readers of cereal boxes. There was no there—no conception of what perception is or of what it is for. Cognitive psychology, too, consisted of laboratory curiosities analyzed in terms of dichotomies such as serial/parallel, discrete/analog, and top-down/bottom-up (inspiring Alan Newell's famous jeremiad, "You can't play twenty questions with nature and win"). To this day, social psychology is driven not by systematic questions about the nature of sociality in the human animal but by a collection of situations in which people behave in strange ways.

But the biggest frustration was that psychology seemed to lack any sense of explanation. Like the talk show guest on Monty Python's Flying Circus whose theory of the brontosaurus was that "the brontosaurus is skinny at one end; much, much thicker in the middle; and skinny at the other end," psychologists were content to "explain" a phenomenon by redescribing it. A student rarely enjoyed the flash of insight which tapped deeper principles to show why something had to be the way it is as opposed to some other way it could have been. [CLOSE QUOTE]

In the words of Leda Cosmides and John Tooby who were in at the beginning of this field of study: “Evolutionary psychology can therefore be seen as the inevitable intersection of the computationalism of the cognitive revolution with the adaptationism of William's evolutionary biology: Because mental phenomena are the expression of complex functional organization in biological systems, and complex organic functionality is the downstream consequence of natural selection, then it must be case that the sciences of the mind and brain are adaptationist science, and psychological mechanisms are computational adaptations. In this way, the marriage of computationalism with adaptationism marks a major turning point in the history of ideas, dissolving the intellectual tethers that had limited fundamental progress and opening the way forward. Like Dalton's wedding of atomic theory to chemistry, computationalism and adaptationism solve each other's deepest problems, and open up new continents of scientific possibility (Cosmides & Tooby, 1987; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992; Tooby, Cosmides, & Barrett, 2003, 2005)." Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology (Page 10)

The photo is of the scablands in these here parts. I like to drive around in this country and gawk. The photo is as it is because the sky was full of sunshine but the earth was in shadow. It makes a contrast which some would say is unprofessional, but, hey, I'm not a professional, and I like what I see here.

KNIGHTS AND MAIDENS


[OPEN QUOTE]
CHIVALRY IS NOT A WORD NORMALLY ASSOCIATED WITH terrorism, at least not in the West. But the world in which Osama bin Laden would like to live, and the vision that inspires so many of his followers, is literally about days of old when knights were bold—and fair maidens were kept behind veils, their virtue protected, their lives entirely controlled by men. Since the 1990s, bin Laden has cast his fight as one against "crusaders," and the most important ideological tract by his right-hand man, Zawahiri, bears the title "Knights Under the Prophet's Banner."

While gender roles are evolving in many of today's societies, Al Qaeda has hoped to freeze them in a time of feudal traditions. Many of the organization's leaders have been intellectuals, doctors, lawyers and engineers who are perfectly at home with other aspects of modernity. But they differ violently with the West about the way women should be allowed to participate in daily life, viewing females as chattel in some cases, as revered mothers in others and almost always as icons to be protected from outside influences. In jihadist propaganda, the invasion and violation of Muslim lands is intimately tied to the violation of Muslim women, either directly or through the corrupting role of Western values [Christian fundamentalists excluded] and attitudes. In its 1988 covenant, the Palestinian Islamist organization Hamas laid out its view of "the Muslim woman" as "the maker of men" and the educator of future generations—the person who prepares future fighters. "The enemies have realized the importance of her role," says the fundamentalist manifesto. "They consider that if they are able to direct and bring her up the way they wish, far from Islam, they would have won the battle."

In fact, many Arab and Muslim men, not just jihadists, see foreign occupation as a form of emasculation. (Just weeks after Saddam Hussein was toppled in 2003, Qasim Alsabti, the cosmopolitan owner of a Baghdad art gallery, told Newsweek the U.S. occupation was "part of a plan to steal our souls—to castrate us.") Years under Israeli rule have broken down the structures of Palestinian families. "The image of the strong, providing father who can protect his women and children has been badly damaged and the male role has been eroded away," says Dr. Eyad Sarraj, director of Gaza Community Mental Health. That opens the way for radical groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad to teach young boys that the way to be real men is to be religious—and to be ready to die. [CLOSE QUOTE] —Newsweek (Dec. 12, 2005)

Except for American fundamentalists, most modernized world populations have surrendered a backward notion of the difference between men and women. We learned that to hold those ideas is to enslave women. There is nothing more sinister than the man who wants to “protect” his woman. It’s obvious in how Moslem men “protect” their women in all sorts of abusive ways. How often protection in the hands of a fundamentalist turns into enslavement, eh? Not always, but often enough to make it an idea which doesn’t belong in a democracy even though some women gladly give up their freedoms in order to feel protected. Come to think of it that’s another reason why so many fundamentalists can’t find it in them to oppose Mr. Bush. They’ll sell out freedom to feel safe. Where’s their god when we need it?

Here’s another little story with an interesting moral from the same article in Newsweek (Dec. 12, 2005, p. 29):

[OPEN QUOTE] . . . in late 2001, an aging mujahed named Sufi Abdul Aziz Baba was given the task of caring for the widows of 22 Qaeda fighters. As casualties mounted among the men, the number of women in the group continued to grow. On the run from the Americans, they hid out in a compound in the southeastern province of Paktika. The women—Uzbeks, Chechens and Arabs—were given Kalashnikovs to defend themselves, and soon began training within the compound walls, out of sight of the men. Forced to flee again across the border into Pakistan, they fought a three-hour gun battle against the forces of an Afghan warlord who had gone over to the American side. A year later, to avoid an offensive by Pakistani troops, the women fled again to a new hideout near the Afghan border, Baba told Newsweek. All the while, they continued military training. Last year a new Pakistani offensive forced these women, now well versed in the arts of killing, to disperse again along the Afghan frontier. There, says Baba, they are supported by a tightly woven network of jihadist organizations and family ties.

Indeed, in these remote lands Al Qaeda's fighters and their wives and widows often seem to be part of one extended family. Frequently the sisters and daughters of a holy warrior will marry one of his comrades in arms. The widows of slain guerrillas commonly wed one of their late husband's jihadist relatives. Although these networks appear isolated, they could form an enduring core of Al Qaeda in the future, or a new incarnation of it. And some of the women among them are now more than ready to take up arms, or to carry bombs, whenever the organization needs them. Or whenever the men are gone, or get out of the way. As Mia Bloom writes in a forthcoming book, "The underlying message conveyed by female bombers is: Terrorism has moved beyond a fringe phenomenon and insurgents are all around you." But that is only the message for their enemies. In their own world, their willingness to carry out suicide attacks means something different. Among Palestinians, for instance, "the idea of violence empowering women has spread throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip," writes Bloom. Suicide bombing is changing the rules of deference and subservience that have dominated the traditional society—a strange path to liberation for women hidden behind veils and burgas. [CLOSE QUOTE]

Liberated by violence? Stranger and stranger yet!

The photo comes from a short afternoon drive we took into the scabland and wheat fields of the country Southwest of Spokane.

WALMART’S SKID MARKS

The following remarks are from Here!

The revolution to take back America has begun.

Until now, big corporations like Wal-Mart said or did whatever they wanted, and got away with it. Well, yesterday, you proved Wal-Mart wrong and demonstrated the power ordinary people have to change Wal-Mart and change America for the better.

Here's what happened. In October 2005, Wal-Mart said it supported raising the minimum wage. But, since then, Wal-Mart has used its industry lobbyists to oppose a minimum wage increase. And, up until yesterday, Wal-Mart's own chief lobbyist claimed the public had misinterpreted Wal-Mart's statement and that Wal-Mart never supported raising the minimum wage.

When we exposed Wal-Mart's lie and called on the company to come clean, Wal-Mart caved into public pressure and said it once again supported raising the minimum wage. We can only hope Wal-Mart will now actually do something positive to help millions of hard-working Americans who live in poverty.

Wal-Mart's reversal on the minimum wage proves the power that every American has to change this company and this country for the better. Now, if we could change Wal-Mart's position on the minimum wage with 243,600 supporters, imagine what we could with 1 million.

SELF EXPLANITORY




















Aint' this lovely?

LIKE THE SHADOW, THE SPERM KNOW

Now don't get too excited as you read about sex and watching sex and all those other nasty things that scientists just must look into. What I think about when I read the below is the idea that Richard Dawkins has that genes are the at the root of evolution. It's them that are driving change. And, here, you can see that factors way beyond human choice are driving us ever forward into a brave new world.

Photo through the leaves of my favorite female reading in our backyard. >>>>

[OPEN QUOTE] Animals have developed some fascinating tactics to ensure that their genes survive to the next generation: impressive color displays, the best pheromone smell, sperm that induces the female to ovulate right after mating. And humans apparently aren't above such biochemical shenanigans. A recent study has shown that human sperm are honed for competition.

The study, conducted at the University of Western Australia, examined the effect of gender-specific pornography on sperm. On one day of the study, the heterosexual subjects donated samples while they viewed pornography that featured three women. On a separate day, the same subjects viewed X-rated pictures depicting a woman with two men. Overall, the sperm became more vigorous—and, it's surmised, more fertile—after the subjects watched other men in action. "We found that men viewing images containing both men and women had higher sperm motility in masturbatory ejaculate," explained the head researcher, Leigh Simmons.

But why does heterosexual sperm key up around sexy men? Simmons thinks it has something to do with sperm competition. Deep in our specie's past, a particular female often had multiple male suitors at one time. As a result, an assortment of sperm swarmed toward her ova, and the fastest swimmer won the fertilization contest. Over time, the researchers surmise, human males evolved to rev their sperm when they faced this kind of competition. So as the study subjects watched other men have sex, the perceived challenge worked their sperm into a frenzy.

It's not surprising that science has confirmed that we're not so different from our animal brethren. Most other animals have sperm that roils near competitors too, but the race to the egg isn't just about speed—it's also about cheating. The dragonfly, for example, has a bristled, scoop-shaped penis. He uses it to brush foreign semen away from his mate's egg, giving his own swimmers a head start. The chimp cheats later in the game. He kills offspring fathered by other chimps and then plants his seed before the bereaved female finds another mate. Even the lowly sea squirt preemptively swindles other would-be fathers. The rock-bound sea squirt casts his sperm into the water, sterilizing other, competing species' ova. With fewer unrelated spawn cruising the waters near his permanent home, the sea squirt can hoard his real estate for his own offspring.

These tactics may seem a bit dodgy, but people shouldn't get too smug. Even if our sperm don't cheat on their way to the egg, some humans still practice the disturbing habit of buying pheromone perfume over the Internet. [CLOSE QUOTE] —Siri Steiner in Popular Science (Sept. 2005, p. 114)

GOD'S AN ACCIDENT

I'm giving you a little taste of an article in the December 2005 Atlantic Monthly called "Is God An Accident?". It makes a lot of sense and explains why so many people must believe in gods. Some of the findings eked out in the studies described below came from observations of autistic children. It's interesting to me how much of our knowledge of how the brain functions is based on studies of those with major or minor brain malfunctions. The information contained in this article will perhaps make it unnecessary for me to read Why God Won’t Go Away, a book I've had on my shelf a long while. But, then, I've got lots of books I'm only slowly getting to which I've purchased while working at the Spokane library book store down in the lobby. At a dollar or a couple of dollars a book, who can resist?

The picture is of a road leading into an interesting geological feature here in the Inland Empire, called Hole In the Ground. Though not very large nor impressive in size, it's story is interesting. It was carved out thousands of years ago when a great inland sea in what is now Montana broke through its ice dam and ran wild to the west, carving out many such features in the terrain.

[OPEN QUOTE] At this point the religion-as-accident theory says nothing about supernatural beliefs. Babies have two systems that work in a cold-bloodedly rational way to help them anticipate and understand—and when the get older, to manipulate—physical and social entities. In other words, both these systems are biological adaptations that give human beings a badly needed head start in dealing with objects and people. But these systems go awry in two important ways that are the foundations of religion. First, we perceive the world of objects as essentially separate from the world of minds, making it possible for us to envision soulless bodies and bodiless souls. This helps explain why we believe in gods and an afterlife. Second, as we will see, our system of social understanding overshoots, inferring goals and desires where none exist. This makes us animists and creationists.

For those of us who are not autistic, the separateness of these two mechanisms, one for understanding the physical world and one for understanding the social world, gives rise to a duality of experience. We experience the world of material things as separate from the world of goals and desires. The biggest consequence has to do with the way we think of ourselves and others. We are dualists, it seems intuitively obvious that a physical body and a conscious entity—a mind or soul—are genuinely distinct. We don't feel that we are our bodies. Rather, we feel that we occupy them, we possess them, we own them.

This duality is immediately apparent in our imaginative life. Because we see people as separate from their bodies, we easily understand situations in which people's bodies are radically changed while their personhood stays intact. Kafka envisioned a man transformed into a gigantic insect; Homer described the plight of men transformed into pigs; in Shrek2 an ogre is transformed into a human being, and a donkey into a steed; in Star Trek a scheming villain forcibly occupies Captain Kirk's body so as to take command of the Enterprise; in The Tale of the Body Thief Anne Rice tells of a vampire and a human being who agree to trade bodies for a day; and in 13 Going on 30 a teenager wakes up as thirty-year-old Jennifer Garner. We don't think of these events as real, of course, but they are fully understandable, it makes intuitive sense to us that people can be separated from their bodies, and similar transformations show up in religions around the world.

This notion of an immaterial soul potentially separable from the body clashes starkly with the scientific view. For psychologists and neuroscientists, the brain is the source of mental life; our consciousness, emotions, and will are the products of neural processes. As the claim is sometimes put: The mind is what the brain does. I don't want to overstate the consensus here; there is no accepted theory as to precisely how this happens, and some scholars are skeptical that we will ever develop such a theory. But no scientist takes seriously Cartesian dualism, which posits that thinking need not involve the brain. There is just too much evidence against it. [CLOSE QUOTE]

THE CHINA BLOCKBUSTER: WAR OR PEACE?

Whether or not America, with men like Bush leading us, will be able to move aside and peacefully make way for a mightier nation seems a mighty scary proposition.

"Some 25 million Chinese enter the workforce annually. Given the age of its current population, its savings rate of 40 percent, an economy open to investment, a dramatic commitment to mass education and to improving the lives of its own people, and the ability to transfer huge numbers of workers from low-productivity agriculture to higher-productivity manufacturing, China should be able to continue growing at a rate of 7 to 8 percent for the foreseeable future. Let's pause to contemplate what that means: By the middle of the century, the poor country we saw 50 years ago as just so many rice paddies and rickshaws may well be the largest economy in the world. It is an awe-inspiring shift in global power comparable to the rise of Europe in the 17th century and that of America in the 19th and early 20th centuries."

—Mort Zuckerman in US News (Jan. 23, 2006 p. 68)

Call this photo Natural Geometry >>

BUSH CREATES ANOTHER BUSH-LEAGUE NATION

Paul Bremmer (the point man in Iraq lo those many years ago) has admitted in a US News question/answer article (Jan. 24, 2006, p. 24) that we have made a mess of Iraq. You gotta read between the lines:

"The concept of democracy to many people [in Iraq] is just "majority rules." But as most Americans understand, democracy also depends on protection of minority rights. I preached that theme in my many, many negotiations with Iraqis. I think it is gradually being understood. But I do not know how well it is understood by Sunnis. There are some Sunnis who think they are a majority of the country.

"Question: Was Iraqi sectarianism inevitable?

Answer: One of the characteristics of post conflict situations is that political leaders tend to focus on what we would call in America their base. That can have the effect of exacerbating apparent differences, in this case sectarian differences. What we could have done [to discourage that], I am not sure."

This is an old article now and many more people are admitting the same thing, but the point I wanted to make is not about Iraq but about American fundamentalists and their inability to understand compromise as a way of doing business in a democracy. Now if only Christians here at home understood that our own Constitutional government was created with a strong bias to protect the rights of minorities. Under the Bush regime, we're losing sight of that.

MAKE A LIST, ANY LIST. . . .

Make any list of any positive or negative cultural trends from poverty to murder rates in America and the South will end up at top or bottom, depending on how backward the trend is or isn't. I like to bring these items to your attention. This time it's smoking cessation:

"Best grades for progress in smoking cessation are Maine, Washington, Vermont, Delaware and a N.Y./R.I. tie. Worst? Head south, hold your nose, and you guessed it: Alabama, Kentucky, Louisiana, North Carolina and South Carolina."

—From an American Lung Association release as reported in a recent Newsweek.

Yep! Ah'll support ma bacci comp'ny e'en'f'it kills me.

Do you think the U.S. Constitution can survive, dragged down by that bunch of yahoos? I apologize to all those stuck down there who can't escape to a better land. Evolution teaches us that we are mighty fond of the environment we grow up in. It's hard to move, but, then, the ability to move freely about is a sign that one has escaped his or her evolutionary handcuffs.

THE OLDER WE GET,
THE DENSER WE GET

Recent studies suggest that older is better if wisdom is your game. In a Newsweek January 16, 2006 health article, I came across the following two passages:

“The neurons themselves may lose some processing speed with age, but they become ever more richly intertwined. Magnified tremendously, the brain of a mentally active 50-year-old looks like a dense forest of interlocking branches, and this density reflects both deeper knowledge and better judgment. . .

“No one knows exactly what this all means, but the finding suggests that healthy brains compensate for the depredations of age by expanding their neural networks across the bilateral divide. My own work suggests that, besides keeping us sharp, this neural integration makes it easier to reconcile our thoughts with our feelings.”

I call the photo "Geometry in Gray, Green and Blue".

THE ANCIENT LIVES INSIDE OF US

I’ve included the following passages, again from Newsweek (Jan. 16, 2006), because in reading Dawkins’s The Ancestor’s Tale, I remember vaguely how far back in time it was when the “archaea”, mentioned in passing in this passage, came into existence. Yes, we’re carrying around some mighty old ancestors in our guts. Do you get a gut feeling about evolution, thinking about it?

“You may use antibacterial dish soap and wash your hands every time you sneeze, hut Jeffrey Gordon wants you to know that you're crawling with germs. Gordon, the director of the Center for Genome Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, studies bacteria and ancient forms of single-celled life called archaea—and no matter how clean you think you are, your gut would make him a pretty good laboratory. It's oozing with 750 trillion bacteria and archaea, and there's very little you can do about it.

“Then again, you probably wouldn't want to do anything about it, because those little guys are good for you. The microbes in your gut have genes of their own, and, as scientists are now learning, those genes are essential to the body's functioning. Gut flora help the immune system ward off more-dangerous bugs; they break down nutrients; they may even manipulate how the body stores fat. If doctors could control the flora, they might be able to ward off disease with a completely new toolbox. Meanwhile, maintaining a good balance of microorganisms through diet turns out to be an easy way to strengthen your overall health.”
______________________________________________

“We are here on earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I don’t know.” —W. H. Auden, poet (1907-1973)