“The dinner we have eaten tonight, was part of the sun but a few months ago.” – Weston Price

When geneticists mapped out the human genome, they found a complex world of proteins that will take decades, possibly centuries, to fully decipher. Medical applications, such as gene therapy, cloning, and medications must go through years of rigorous testing before being tried on humans, and even then, some of these must be recalled for dangerous side effects. The long chain of events from our DNA to our physical and mental expressions is far too complex for anything else.

Nutritionists work the opposite way. They isolate nutrients out of foods that we know are healthy, and then tell us to get more of that nutrient in our diets. When they say “oatbran” or “calcium,” food manufacturers up that nutrient paste it on their refined cereals, oils, pastas, and other manufactured food stuffs. Then we consumers eat more of that isolated nutrient. Because it’s food, the same rigorous testing does not apply. We consume these nutrients in food, what’s wrong with consuming them isolated from it?

We are in the midsts of a great dietary experiment, because we don’t really know what eating specific nutrients isolated out of their contexts will do to our bodies, but we recognize the effects of this strategy overall. Our obesity rates are soaring, as are diabetes rates and heart disease.

The reasons why this strategy isn’t working are myriad and complex beyond our full appreciation. Counfounders, variables in our whole foods, are not appropriately accounted for in our nutritionist methodologies. Just as chaos theory prevents us from predicting the weather, it prevents us from predicting the effects of dramatically changing our diets. For instance, failing to take into account the ways foods work together:

We eat foods in combinations and in orders that effect how they’re metabolized. The carbohydrates in a bagel will be absorbed more slowly if the bagel is spread with peanut butter; the fiber, fat, and protein in the peanut butter cushion the insulin response, thereby blunting the impact of the carbohydrates. Drink coffee with your steak, and your body won’t be able to fully absorb the iron in the meat. The olive oil with which I eat tomatoes makes the lycopene they contain more available to my body. … We have barely begun to understand the relationships among foods in a cuisine (66, 67).

These complementary and deleterious effects of different food combinations are called Food Synergy. Our diets are more than the sum of their nutrient parts. This is the thesis of Michael Pollan’s well-written and increasingly influential “Eater’s Manifesto.”

As a child, I would often find dead bugs in the white flour in our pantry. My mother, a nurse, explained the bugs had died, “because there are no nutrients in white flour.” Pollan asks, “Is a steak from a feedlot steer that consumed a diet of corn, various industrial waste products, antibiotics, and hormones still a ‘whole food’ (143)?”

Modern agriculture first robs the soil of its nutrients, then we rob the food produced of its nutrients to preserve it. The result is that we now have to eat three apples to get the same amount of iron in a 1940s apple (118). This decline in nutrients is great for food manufacturers, as it forces us to eat more of their product to maintain our health, but has created a culture of over-consumption.

Abnormality is defined as the absence of normality. Diabetes has become a cultural norm, as has tooth decay and heart disease, but in the context of our species, they are not the norm. They are the result of an influx of simple carbohydrates. Combining pure glucose with fructose to produce sucrose was like turning cocoa leaves into cocaine (105), our bodies are overwhelmed by it.

Michale Pollan’s strategy for escaping this downward spiral is simple, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Pollan’s book is a quick read and a simple message, but one that belongs on everyone’s bookshelf.

The article that preceded this excellent book, Unhappy Meals, is available online, which hits many of the point in Pollan’s book about how we adopted the nutritionist approach to food and what foods we should eat for maintaining health.

Pollan’s Rules for Eating are posted at NPR.

He has also given a TED talk.

Michael Pollan also gave a talk at Google:

Leah, a gorilla, uses a stick to test the depth of water while wading through it Photo by Thomas Breuer/WCS/PLoS Biology

Like Humans, dolphins, whales, and porpoises are mammals. They are warm-blooded, breath through lungs, and give birth to live offspring; however, they also have fins like fish and live in the sea. The skeletons of these aquatic mammals have finger bones in their fins leftover from their ancestors. Some whales even have a tiny pelvis bone free-floating in their bodies, a leftover from when their ancestors had hind-legs. How did these animals, these cetaceans, whose ancestors obviously once lived on land, find their way back into the sea?

Cetaceans share a common ancestor that “resembled a short, legged wolf with hoof like claws.” It is called a mesonychid, and just as Polar Bears will swim for miles across open sea to find food, or Kodiak bears will fish for salmon in rivers, the mesonychid found its way into the water, only it adapted to stay there, and we can follow the long chain of changing fossils from the mesonychid to our present-day dolphins and whales.

While it’s easy to see the present resemblance between humans and other primates like chimpanzees and gorillas, it’s not so easy to explain why we became so different from them. What happened to our fur? Why do we sweat? Why do our noses look so different from chimpanzees’?

Enter Elaine Morgan’s “Aquatic Ape Theory” of human evolution. The theory proposes that our ancestors spent some portion of their history living in a semi-aquatic environment. Seven million years ago, the Afar depression in Ethiopia flooded to become the Sea of Afar. The skeleton of our Australopithecus afarensis ancestor, “Lucy,” was found in this area, where she lived between 3.9 and 2.9 million years ago. Most fossilized evidence of our evolutionary ancestors comes from this region subsequent to this flooding also.

Sea of Afar Depression Image courtesy NASA

So in the case of humans, we did not run to the sea, it came to us quite suddenly and catastrophically. We were thrown into the deep end of the pool, as it were, and had to adapt with down turned noses to keep the water out, less fur to streamline our bodies for swimming, eyebrows to channel the water away from our eyes, sweat glands to regulate the sudden influx of salt water in our diets, infants that can instinctually hold their breath underwater, enlarged spleens to hold oxygen-rich blood and serve as a biological “scuba-tank” that helps us hold our breath, even the ability to hold our breath, and bipedalism, the ability to walk on two feet, to help us keep our heads above water. Then the waters receded and we were left standing upright on land with much larger brains built from a diet high in fish protein.

Most evolutionary theorists are skeptical of the theory; however, as the Philosopher of Biology, Daniel Dennet observes, this is not because there is any way to prove the theory wrong, only that it seems too “out there” to be plausible. They hold to the “Savannah Ape” theory, which proposes that humans became bipedal running across the open plains and using tools.

Meanwhile, waterfront properties garner the biggest real estate values in human society. Beaches are among the most popular vacationing spots in the world (unlike savannahs). Eating fatty fish, such as mackerel, lake trout, herring, sardines, albacore tuna and salmon, supplies our bodies with omega-3 fatty acids, which help fight heart disease and depression. Scientists are also learning more and more that fish really is a “brain food,” combating mental deterioration in old age.

Perhaps, when we spend a relaxing afternoon fishing, we are getting closer to our true nature than we think?

On May 3, speaking to the issue of rising food prices, President Bush Jr cited developments in India, where the “middle class is larger than our entire population” and added, “when you start getting wealth, you start demanding better nutrition and better food, and so demand is high, and that causes the price to go up.”

This was a true statement, however one that was very incomplete, and Indian citizens’ feeling slighted over the remark was justified. Bush, myself, and other experts have regularly talked about India and China’s rising standards of living as driving up the price of natural resources, but there is an old development that we need to consider also.

While people in Haiti are eating flavored mud, I learned yesterday that American’s are throwing out 27 percent of our food. While the average Indian consumes 2,440 calories a day, the average American consumes 3,790. America has the highest rates of obesity, and obese people have the biggest impact on the environment. It’s not wholly their fault, as portion sizes have doubled and tripled over the last 20 years:

Today’s 20-ounce Coke has 2.5 servings

China and India have every right to our standard of living and their economic equality will ultimately benefit the world, but our world cannot support everyone living at our level of excess. It’s important that we all moderate our consumption.

The 1964 World’s Fair boggles my mind. I can’t believe there was a time in America when science was revered, celebrated on such an incredible scale, and monuments were built to it. The NY Hall of Science is built up within the grounds of this wonderful event, and area in Queens filled with great big monuments to science, forward-thinking, and positive attitudes about what humanity can accomplish.

The man to the left of this photo, touching the wall, was last here at the World’s Fair, when he was four years old.

See the complete flickr set here.

Miscellaneous Photos

Part of PBS’s Cyberchase exhibit was an exercise bike showing kids how much energy they were generating. There were also stations for building platonic solids, conveyor belt you program with balls, which fall to make music, computer puzzles, Mayan Numbers, and more.

I know there are people out there who are offended by this, but I thought it was cool that all of these displays were in English and Spanish. I love cultural diversity, especially in America

Exersize Bike with Energy Read Out

See the complete flickr set here.

Here’s a really neat way to visualize our world in Real Time. twittervision takes the text-messages posted on twitter, and shows them on a google map as they are being posted. Watching this application with the “3D View” turned on, I was able to watch Californians planning their night as I was turning in to bed, Japanese waking up with positive affirmations about the upcoming day, and Chinese twitters that I couldn’t read at all. : )

Check it out:

Twittervision (Click on 3D View for this display)

There’s also Flickrvision, which provides the same application, but shows you Flickr Photos as they are being uploaded all over the world in real time:

Flickrvision

My Habits Make me a Pathmaker in PMOG

Education is an adventure. We quest for knowledge throughout our lives, whether its the daily news, OTJ, or sitcoms. Every fact collected in our minds a tool for accessing new information and clarifying the old. Every fact is also a weapon in debate, which are battles in society’s perpetual war of ideas.

The Passively Multiplayer Online Game (PMOG) takes this principle and let’s you keep score. Deploy mines on websites to wreck other players’ concentration. Set up portals on websites to teleport other players to sites of similar interests (or, as is often the case, RickRoll them). Leave crates filled with treasure for other players to stumble upon (one of my favorite activities).

Indie badge for players who can go 24 hours without using google (I can’t get this badge.)

Earn badges for changing your web-surfing habits. Go 24 hours without using Google. Read xkcd once a week for four weeks. visit 100 websites in a 24 hour period (first badge I got, and wasn’t even trying). You can view the complete list of badges and archetypes here.

Create quests for other players to take by setting up a series of lightposts around the Internet for them to follow, exploring websites as they go. All the while earning datapoints, which increase your level and may be spent on new items at the shoppe.

The game is currently in the beta-testing phase, and there’s much room for improvement and expansion. Sign up now to earn your PMOG “Beta Tester” badge, but remember that, as a Beta, you will experience issues. I’ve had to scrap some missions I was building and start over from scratch because the Mission-Generator application is somewhat buggy.

Most of all, have fun. Learning is a game, and with PMOG you can keep score.

Today I sat in on a meeting about USCG training and qualifications that went like this:

“Why doesn’t the application cover the J?”

“Because they program to the 3710.”

“So we need to submit a CG22 to change it.”

“Are we sure we only want the BA and DM updated?”

“We can follow the other quals with a DSS Report until this is all resolved with the OCS release in January.”

“We still have the MSO to consider.”

“That’s a new REQ, so we’ll need a new SCR submitted to the RM Team. If we get it in this morning we might get it on the CCB this afternoon.”

This is acronym speak is how real-world business people talk in just about every professional work envrionment I’ve ever been a part of. So when you grammar-nazis begrieve us Netizens our LOLs, OMGs, WYSIWYGs, WTFs, SNAFUs and the like for destroying the english language, you are just being silly.

Sincerely,

ry

“Words are wise men’s counters, they do but reckon by them; but they are the money of fools.” – Hobbes

The Stuff of Thought

I once had a conversation with a girl that went like this:

“Ryan, you’re a bama.”

“What’s a ‘bama?’”

“It’s… you know… what you are.”

“That makes no sense.”

“A bama’s a bama, and you’re a bama.”

“You can’t use a word to define itself.”

She shrugged, “Well, that’s what you are.”

The conversation went in circles like this, never making it anywhere, but it does raise questions about how new words enter our lexicon and how they derive their meanings. The semantics of language are an often debated subject in politics and law, as with the lawsuit over whether the World Trade Center attacks constituted one or two “events”, which affected the insurance pay off by billions of dollars.

This is the subject Stephen Pinker tackles in The Stuff of Thought, the third book in his trilogy on language. As with The Blank Slate, there were numerous inaccuracies in Pinker’s writing, but I was more forgiving of them as his politics were much tamer in this book. Reading Stephen Pinker is like reading spaghetti, anecdotes here, references to future chapters there, digressions abound, overly erudite at times and mind-numbingly thorough at others. But reading Pinker is an overall rewarding experience, and his style works for this subject.

I come away from Pinker’s books with a plethora of new anecdotes. In TSoT I learned that the Turkish language has an inferential tense, which communicates whether something was learned firsthand or as hearsay, a proof for the theorem that a horse has an infinite number of legs, and all the Beatles symbolism surrounding the death of Paul McCartney. In English we describe time as forward and backwards, the Chinese phrase it as up and down, and the Aymara describe the future as coming up from behind us, which makes sense metaphorically. Creationists and Evolutionists have a very different definition of the word “species,” with Creationists taking a view that includes strict boundaries between different animal types, and Evolutionists seeing a blending of characteristics from one form to another.

All of these anecdotes raise interesting questions about language. Does a culture’s language restrict what it may think about? If Paul McCartney died in 1966, and someone else took his place, then what does the name “Paul McCartney” refer to? Were the WTC attacks one or two events? Are the differences between Evolutionists and Creationists a reflection of a relative worldview butting heads with a dichotomous one?

A section on baby name fads was fascinating, as people try to choose uncommon names, and, in doing so, inadvertently choose a name that will be common. Consider all the brainiacs named “Steve” in science literature (Hawking, Gould, Pinker, Project Steve), or consider how names like Ethel, Ruth, and Agnes make us think of old people, but these names were simply popular when these people were born. You can check with the Social Security Administration to find out what names will be the “old people” names of the future.

Pinker explores how much of our language is programmed, with examples like the fact that swearing in our own language is more cathartic and that there is an instinctive basis for swearing. An entire chapter on swear words both defends the fact that swear words aren’t intrinsically worse than any other, and upholds the restriction on their use, as their cathartic effect would be dampened and language cheapened if everyone started using them all the time. I also learned the origins of words like “jerk” and “scumbag,” which are no longer considered especially offensive, but would be if people knew what they refer to.

Then there’s the part I personally find confusing, the way people speak indirectly. How, instead of telling someone to pass the green beans, we ask them if they could pass the green beans. Or how it is considered completely offensive to request a sexual encounter with someone, so the appropriate thing to do is ask them in for coffee or a nightcap. A year after my “bama” conversation, I was in a clothing store and overheard the following:

“What’s a ‘bama?’”

“It’s what you are.”

“I don’t get it.”

The young couple paused when they noticed me smiling knowingly at their exchange before moving on. It had finally clicked with me what a “bama” was.

It was an excuse to flirt.

Note: The UrbanDictionary has several definitions for “bama”, one of them mentions the phrase being local to Washington DC, where both of these conversations took place.

As the purposes for various genes are identified on a weekly basis in the news, this list will be obsolete in a few months, but I wanted to post this. There aren’t enough plain-English reviews of human genes out there. I apologize if I bullox up something. My criteria was based on the importance of the gene to human beings specifically, novelty, and how well we know the gene does what we think it does.

Click the links for any of the genes listed to learn about how the gene appears to work:

1. FOXP2: This gene may be the most important of all in separating the humans from other primates. FOXP2 is crucial to our ability to talk to the elaborate degree we humans are able. A British family with an abnormal copy of FOXP2 has “immobility of the lips, tongue, and mouth, which makes their speech garbled.”

2. OT: The oxytocin gene is what makes mothers motherly, lovers snuggly, and housepets cuddly. It’s a chemical reward our bodies give us for forming social bonds with one another through physical contact.

Oxytocin Image by Fvasconcellos

3. AVPR1a: One of Homo Sapiens’ strongest adaptations for survival is our social-bonding, our willingness to sacrifice our own well-being for the community and work together for common goals. A variant of AVPR1a appears to have a strong influence on this behavior. Nicknamed the “altruism gene,” it is also found in other species that exhibit strong social bonds. (Another variation of this same gene leads to ruthless behavior, earning it a “ruthless gene” nickname.)

4. SRY: Carried on the The Y Chromosome (often considered a “genetic deadzone”), this is the gene responsible for the masculinization process. Mammals lacking the SRY gene are female; therefore, men are the mutation. This gene is important for sexual dimorphism, as the evolutionary adaptation known as “sex” may allow species to diversify their genes and evolve more quickly.

 
5. OPN1LW: The Gene for Color Vision is found in the retina, and people with color blindness probably have a defective OPN1LW. The evolutionary importance of OPN1NW has downgraded the importance of olfactory genes (the genes for our sense of smell), which have been going dead in our recent evolutionary history, because smell is not as important for survival when you can see in color.

6. RB1: this was the first of the Tumor suppressor genes discovered. The entire Human Apoptosis Gene Array is responsible for killing cells in your body that have gone cancerous before they are able to spread. These genes are like the enforcers for the police-state that makes up your multi-cellular existence.

7. FIT2: This is a gene that many of us would like to knock out the way researchers have knocked it out in animals to prevent fat storage; however, without this gene it’s doubtful humans would have survived this long as fat storage is crucial to surviving times of famine.

In culture, the number of adult neural stem cells triples in the presence of the Sonic hedgehog protein.

8. Sonic the Hedgehog: Cool for being named after a Sega Genesis video game character, but also cool for its importance. Part of the hedgehog family of genes, which are regulators of animal development, Sonic is crucial to the development of neural stem cells.

(Not part of this list is the POKemon gene, found to cause cancer, had to be renamed after a lawsuit by Nintendo.)

9. HAR1F: An important gene separating us from other animals, HAR1 has mutated at an accelerated pace since we split off from other primates a few million years ago. The gene is believed to affect brain development, but more research is needed to understand what it does exactly.

10. Noncoding or “Junk” DNA: It appears that about 80-90 percent of the human genome serves no purpose, and we don’t know why. Are we carrying the “extinct genes” of our ancient ancestors? Are there messages from god written in our DNA, as some creationists want to believe? Are these great genetic deserts a way of preserving our good genes, protecting them by diluting their chance of mutation? There is a genetics joke that Junk DNA actually reads, “this space intentionally left blank.” Junk DNA makes the list for inspiring so much controversy and speculation.

Honorable Mention:

Gene Responsible For Eating Whole Goddamn Bag Of Chips

Note: You can play this post as a mission on PMOG.

Hillary Clinton, when recently asked if she could name one economist who thought her “Gas Tax Holiday” was a good idea, responded:

I’m not going to put my lot in with economists… We’ve got to get out of this mind-set where somehow elite opinion is always on the side of doing things that really disadvantage the vast majority of Americans.

Now, I’ve got my problems with economists. Economics is a field that I think too-closely resembles weather prediction, a complex system prone to the effects of chaos theory; however, I would never dismiss economists for working so hard to at least try and know what they are talking about.

Given the choice between Al Gore and George Bush, voters went with Bush because he was someone they could have a beer with (despite the fact that he is a teetotaler and recovering alcoholic). Dittoheads despised Gore because he was educated and wasn’t ashamed of it. We can see what going with our drinking buddy as leader of the free world has gotten us.

Barack Obama is often attacked as an elitist (See also here, here, here, here, and here). It’s an easy charge to make for some people. Obama was the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, graduated with a J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard, and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School.

He has an impeccable academic background for the position for which he is currently serving as a Senator and the one he is applying for: President of the United States. He is extremely qualified for protecting our Constitutional rights and upholding the rule of law; however, in America, a large portion of our population see this as a defect, and would prefer to have a lovable doofus lacking even a high school understanding of our constitution to run the free world (in)competently.

Imagine this irrational position applied to other situations. When, if in need of heart surgery, Americans choose doctors with less qualifications but were lovable doofuses. If, when we need technical support, we went to the bar and found someone “down to Earth” enough to service our computer, car, or home, rather than someone certified in an area of expertise.

It’s absurd that we factor this criteria into choosing the person who will manage the governmental policies that will affect all of our lives.

When American’s go to the doctor, they want an elitist, someone who’s spent nearly a decade studying the human body. When we choose a lawyer, we’re looking for an elitist, someone who’s spent nearly a decade studying law to pass the bar exam. When we look for computer programmers, engineers, academic institutions, economists, scientists, or any other field requiring specialization and years of intense intellectual training, we want an elitist to fill that role.

If a candidate is well-educated, mature, and has demonstrated an effective leadership style, then I can overlook the fact that they don’t enjoy watching a bunch of rednecks make four left turns for four hours, hanging-out in smoke-filled bars, or show any proficiency for hunting, bowling, golf, or any other activity unrelated to making America run smoothly. I want an egghead running my country, a policy wonk who keeps abreast of current events so that I don’t have to worry as much. I’ve been worrying too much these last eight years.

Stephen Colbert satirized it best on his show The Colbert Report, when interviewing Susan Jacoby about her book The Age of American Unreason: