The intersection of natural oddity and human cupidity

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, natural history, natural products

I was thinking of using the title "Faddism" for this review, but there is more to it than that. In Strange Harvests: The Hidden Histories of Seven Natural Objects, author Edward Posnett leads us on a round-the-world tour of places where some very unusual, and typically very costly, products arise. Prior to reading the book I knew about only four of them. Names and places:

• Eiderdown – Iceland
• Edible Birds' Nests – Borneo (and other places in Asia)
• Civet Coffee – Borneo and Java
• Sea Silk – Sardinia
• Vicuña Fiber – Peru
• Tagua – Ecuador (and nearby countries)
• Guano – mainly Chincha Islands, off Peru

A lot of downy feather products are called eiderdown today, but the eider is a duck of the Arctic, and thus has down (fine, fluffy feathers borne mainly on the breast) with the greatest combination of lightness and thermal insulating capacity. The goose down you'll find in a down jacket or sleeping bag is about half as efficient, which is plenty good enough for most of us. Particularly because genuine eiderdown, when you can find it, costs more than twice as much. Or much more than that, for feathers gathered from used Eider nests and cleaned, rather than taken by killing and plucking the birds. 

The book is like a cumulative song; each chapter harks back to lessons learned in all the prior ones. After all his travels the author has the beginnings of a good Cabinet of Curiosities (although I hope he keeps any sample of guano in a very well sealed container!).

Two products are intended to be ingested…but not by me! Bird nest soup, costly as it is, isn't really built from bird saliva, as I had thought. It is a special kind of mucus. Yum!! White nests from one species of swiftlet can be scraped off a cave wall as a rather clean item, needing little processing. Black nests from another species are full of feathers and must be cleaned. Somehow, that raises the cachet, the difficulty of production, and the cost. The author reports that the soup doesn't taste like anything. I'm glad to know that; now I don't have to wonder.

Civet coffee is "harvested" from the dung of the odd animal that is not quite a cat, not quite a raccoon, and is in a classification all by itself. At least gathering dung is more humane than collecting the other civet product, the musk from glands near its anus. It takes three or four men to immobilize the animal so a small spoon can be used to drag the musk out of the gland. It is used in perfumery as a kind of base for "fixing" the scent. Most perfumes are chemically produced these days, so there is less need to drag musk out of civets and minks, and perform other disgusting activities. I was kind of anti-perfume already; now more so. If you have recently bathed with plain Ivory soap, your natural and clean scent is plenty good enough for me.

Sea Silk is fascinating. Many mollusks, mostly mussels, hold themselves to rocks using byssus, a strong, thready material. The large cousin of mussels called Pinna happens to have such a "beard" up to a foot long, because its substrate is not rock but sand, and the threads need to anchor over a larger area. As soon as I read about it, I went to the appropriate cabinet of the museum where I work, in the mollusk collection, to see what they had.

The shells in this drawer are more than two feet long. The museum has several drawers of this species, Pinna nobilis, but only one example of the byssus holdfast.

The closeup of the "beard" below shows how it has lots of sand and bits of shell in it. Picking the material clean, and other processing steps, make this a very costly material. Just holding this uncleaned piece I could tell it is very soft, like fine silk.

Though the strands are up to a foot long, this piece probably would weigh no more than a gram or two after cleaning. Carded, combed, and spun into thread, it would take perhaps 100 pieces like this to make one glove.

These shells are protected and it is presently illegal to harvest byssus. One woman the author visited a few times claimed she could harvest it without harming the animal, by taking only a portion of the "beard" from each animal. He isn't sure if that is true, or just a story she told to entertain people at her Museum.

I'll skip down to Tagua for a moment. One of my brothers is an artist and spent several months in Japan learning to carve netsuke (net-soo-keh; ornamental fobs) from ivory. He has also carved the "vegetable ivory", the nut of the Tagua palm. He told me he has a box of the nuts, but no time to carve recently. They are a little softer than ivory, being pure cellulose, but denser and harder than hard wood. This picture from an Ebay offering shows that such carvings do look like ivory, but neither elephant, walrus, nor boar was harmed to obtain the raw material.

Oddly, one of the major uses of Tagua nuts is making buttons. They have a definite cachet. They look and feel better than plastic. The big drawback is, because they are related to wood, when you wash the garment, you have to do it fast and dry it quickly. The buttons are biodegradable. I don't know if they are amenable to dry cleaning.

The Vicuña is related to the llama, guanaco, and alpaca. It has the finest wool known, with a fiber diameter of about 12 microns. A Vicuña coat can set you back nearly $30,000. 

At this point in the book, the author had shown each fascinating product and some details of its harvest and processing. Every product has a dark side, either unexpected consequences of the trade (even Tagua, while hard to "farm", displaces other species if one does so), or actual abuse of the animals involved. At present, Vicuña are rounded up and sheared, with little harm, though I wonder how it affects their psychology. They are not domestic animals like sheep or goats. I learned that the Incas had actually domesticated Vicuñas, and in the process turned them into Alpacas. Alpacas also have valuable wool, but not as fine. Domestication resulted in coarser wool, although they bear more of it per animal. It's still very comfortable as a textile, and much less costly.

The last chapter was a big turn, it seemed to me. You won't find guano as any kind of a fad product, not now, not ever in the past. But it made a few people rich in its day. The best bird poop comes from dry islands off the shore of Peru, and a few headlands nearby. Guano is the poop of many kinds of birds and bats. It seems flying animals have a metabolism that makes their feces into better fertilizer. A century or more ago, those islands had hundreds of feet of the stuff piled up. Millions of sea birds roost there. It was thought that it would last a thousand years. It didn't last fifty. There is still a yearly harvest, carried out in a more sustainable way. It's hard to see how guano has any market at all, since chemical fertilizers are now so cheap. Maybe there is a faddish cachet to "genuine guano" after all!

The author tells us not just of the animals and plants, but the people surrounding each product. Life isn't easy, even if your product is sold at a steep price. The saddest folks seem to be those who guard the guano islands. It's a lonely life, and a smelly one even in the driest weather.

A book like this presents a very satisfying sort of natural history. At an average forty-plus pages per species, to tell the story of every known species would fill 200,000 books this size. Bring it on: I love to read! Particularly a book this well written.

Chronicles of a nearly forgotten expedition

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, monographs, paleontology, egypt

I was digging around in the free e-book section of the Google Play Books app and happened upon a fascinating monograph (lengthy scientific article) about the first major overseas collecting expedition by the American Museum of Natural History. In 1907, with introductory letters from his friend President Theodore Roosevelt, and others, Director of Vertebrate Paleontology Henry F. Osborn sent collectors to Egypt, to an area rich in fossils known as the Fayum (or Fayyum or Fayoum) Depression, about fifty miles southwest of Cairo, near the axis of the pyramid field that begins with the "great" pyramids of Giza and proceeds SSW for 100 miles or more. Dr. Osborn accompanied the collectors for the first two weeks of their four-month stay in and near Fayum.

The chief collector was Walter Granger, who kept a diary of the trip. Notes taken from the diary was rediscovered among his effects after his death in 1941. The diary's whereabouts are unknown. The notes are detailed; when typeset, they and several of Granger's photos fill 48 pages of Notes from Diary—Fayum Trip, 1907, prepared by Vincent L. Morgan and Spencer G. Lucas for the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science, Division of the Office of Cultural Affairs. The monograph was published in 2002. A facsimile of the handwritten Notes fills 73 pages. There are 226 endnotes by the preparators, many of which are worth reading for added context. The monograph in total has 156 pages. A facsimile of one day's handwritten record is seen here, reduced by about half. Granger's handwriting is better than average and usually readable without difficulty.

Walter Granger took this picture while the caravan was being photographed by an Egyptian photographer who made prints and sold them to caravan members. Notes mentions that two other caravans were awaiting their turns.

The party employed more than a dozen camels and their drivers and twenty others men in various capacities. The Notes record changes in personnel as fellahin came and went for various reasons. Over time the better workers were retained and others were discharged.

While camping on location they made the acquaintance of an amateur (a very dedicated amateur!) collector, Richard Markgraf, who had sold specimens to several European and Egyptian museums, was on retainer to one of them, and soon accepted a retainer for certain specimens, should he find them, for the American Museum. He fulfilled these expectations.

Dr. Osborne was particularly interested in fossils of probiscideans (elephants and similar animals). Two are pictured here along with other unique mammals of the Fayum fauna. By the letters:

A. Arsinoitherium zitteli
B. Paleomastodon
C. Moeritherium
D. "Phiomia" (the Genus was in question at the time. It is now considered authoritative.)

The expedition was slated to be on site from mid-February until mid-April. Dr. Osborn requested that they stay an extra month or more. By the time Granger and the others left, the daytime heat was dreadful (he had bought hot-weather gear in Cairo in April), and numerous toxic fleas had bitten Granger such that he had to spend two weeks in a Cairo hospital before returning to New York.

Granger and his colleague George Olsen packed and sent more than 500 specimens to the Museum in New York. Dr. Osborn published a monograph on parts of the expedition's findings. He comes across, reading between the lines, as a bit of a credit stealer, a sort of person I well know from graduate school. 

Some findings of the expedition were touted in a Supplement to the London News of March 7, 1908; the opening page is shown here. "Two Million" is an understatement. The fossil beds worked were between 30 and 40 million years old, of the Eocene and Oligocene Epochs. They supported a contention by Dr. Osborn that elephants and many other types of mammals evolved first in Africa and later made their way to Europe and the Americas.

Were it not for the discovery of the Notes, Granger's part in this expedition and many of its findings would have remained unknown. 

Many scientific monographs are dry as dust. This is very readable, due primarily to Walter Granger's fluid and expressive writing style. He was writing for himself, and it is likely that his diary, if it is found, will have an even more colloquial style. Digested into these Notes, his writing is written almost as letters to himself. They have become letters to us all.

It keeps you alive … until it doesn't

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, medicine, immune system

Once we didn't know anything about immunity. People died in droves from simple infections and diseases. Plague could ravage the earth, and nobody knew why. Then, no more than a couple of centuries ago, doctors began to recognize something in our bodies that fought invasions, infections, and diseases. By the Twentieth Century a number of special kinds of cells were known, and their role in destroying bacteria and viruses was being studied. When I was young, they were just called "white blood cells" and the main difference between a small number of known cell types was the number of nuclei and their size. That soon began to change.

Around fifty years ago our image of immune cells was like Rambo: Find enemy, blow enemy to bits. Over time, and with huge amounts of research, nuances were discovered. Chemical probing became more sophisticated, and dozens of cell types could be discerned; at first just macrophages ("big eaters") and the B and T "killer cells" were known, but later many more. Now some cells are known that slow down the killers, so the whole system can strike a balance between "scorched earth" and "admit all comers".

An Elegant Defense: The Extraordinary New Science of The Immune System – A Tale in Four Lives, by Matt Richtel, presents the history and development of immune system science in a comprehensive way, and that's just his introduction (about 35% of the book). Then he tells four life stories, one of his boyhood friend Jason Greenstein and his dramatic battle with Hodgkin's lymphoma; another of Bob Hoff, the poster child of "elite controllers", whose immune system keeps AIDS at bay; and two women, Linda Bowman and Merredith (last name withheld), whose immune systems—not so much like Rambo but more like the bodyguards of Indian Prime Minister Indira Ghandi, who assassinated her—turned against them.

We think of organs as rather solid things, like stomach and heart, made of cells that cling to one another as definite tissues. It is amazing to realize that a few pounds of our substance consists of free-roaming cells, that can look a lot like amoebae, and which move freely between our blood and any tissue in the body. However, the brain has its own immune system; the blood-brain barrier is too tight for the immune cells from the rest of the body to penetrate.

Twenty years ago, after I was operated on for colon cancer, I asked my oncologist how chemotherapy would affect my immune system. He said, "The cancer itself is evidence that your immune system wasn't quite up to the task. It will be weakened some more by the chemo, but will recover. Later on we'll instruct you how to keep it healthy." His advice must have worked; I'm still here.

A few years later a pre-teen girl in our church developed juvenile Lupus. Her immune system was overdoing things and attacking her body, not continually but in periodic episodes. With some reading and asking questions of doctors we found that the main trigger of her attacks was UV light in sunlight. Then I remembered a portion of Brave New World by Aldous Huxley: certain people were given jobs underground or in the dark, because they suffered from Lupus if they were exposed to the sun. We put special UV-blocking film on the windows of the church's meeting place, her family had their cars' windows tinted, and she got special UV-blocking clothing. Within about ten years she recovered from it, as often happens with juvenile Lupus. She needs less vitamin D now. Her skin, which was once the whitest I've ever seen, can tan a little, but she's still careful not to get too much sun.

I don't think it wise to summarize the sturm und drang of the ordeals endured by the four persons. There is just too much detail. The key message for me is that the immune system isn't just a killer organ. It is a balance organ.

Imagine that our immune system were infallible in determining what is Self and what is Other, and totally effective in eliminating Other. We would certainly be germ-free. However, the expense would likely be more than the body could afford, keeping a horde of hunter-killer entities supplied. One doctor described such an outcome as a "ten-foot pimple". Perhaps one could get used to it, but I'd rather not try!

In such a case, we would have no microbiota. But we do have our "internal flora" and I am not sure we could live without them. Some of the bacteria in our gut produce vitamin B-12. Others produce other nutrients and life-support chemicals. It is like the animal body (not just human!) is evolved to "steal" a lot of capabilities so it doesn't need to develop them itself. It is an advanced version of my practice of hiring contractors (like some concrete workers who are outside repairing my sidewalk as I write). There are lots of things I don't know how to do; I could learn, but it saves time when I can afford to hire work done.

Thus, the immune system has reached accommodation with thousands of species of bacteria and other microbes (I'm not sure what-all) to run our bodies more efficiently. Many of those species guard against pathogens and effectively form an extended part of our immune system.

There is a sad note at the end of the book when the author discusses death. Medicine isn't really about life-saving so much as life-extending and health-extending. We would like to live forever. Before there was modern medicine, or even Herodotus-level medicine, a few people would live more than 100 years, sometimes approaching 120 years. In fact, someone who is more than 100 years old today lived a number of years in a world without antibiotics or the public health measures that keep cholera and other scourges at bay. The only person in the modern era who lived 120 years or more was Jeanne Louise Calment, who lived just about 122½ years. She flirted with Van Gogh as a teen!

To put it bluntly, our amazing immune system, honed by four billion years of natural selection, usually does an excellent job keeping us alive and usually healthy until we have had time to reproduce and raise our children. Then it backs off, and backs off… For some, their natural life span is 60-70 years. For others it can be decades longer. The limit seems to be 120-ish, with no more than one or two persons per generation exceeding 110 years. Medical science has increased the average life span without making a dent in the limiting life span. Along the way, for most of us, our health span has increased dramatically compared to our grandparents and before. A great deal more must be learned if we are to modify our immune system's "program of senescence".

This book deserves a permanent place on our shelves. The author's summary of immune system science quite amazes me. I'll have to re-read some parts to get comfortable with the details. Keeping a body alive is no single-shot task; it demands an army that has dozens of specialized functions, including negotiators. Amazing!

Spiders at it again

kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning

I've been using the new Blogger software for a few months. The Stats reporting is less detailed in most views, but at least the Countries (Audience) view has an easier-to-read list:

This is for the past seven days. For reference, in a typical week, this blog gets about 350 views. If you remove Russia from this list, it was a normal week. Of the 973 views from Russia, more than half occurred today.

If it could consistently get 400-500 daily views, rather than about 50, then instead of being the ten millionth most popular blog, this would be about the millionth most popular blog. HA!

The uselessness of argument

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, racism, reason, polemic

In the Fourth Century, Aurelius Ambrosius (St. Ambrose) wrote:

It has not pleased God to win men through argument.

In 1771, Jonathan Swift wrote the following to a newly-ordained priest:

Reasoning will never make a Man correct an ill Opinion, which by Reasoning he never acquired.

Nonetheless, we try, try, and try again. There is a bit of hope, however, that life experiences just might produce an "attitude adjustment" in some cases, as Benjamin Franklin wrote in Poor Richard's Almanack in the mid-1700's:

Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other, and scarce in that.

Note to the modern reader: "dear" used to mean "costly".

With all that in mind, I was quite intrigued as I began to read How to Argue With a Racist: What Our Genes Do (and Don't) Say About Human Difference by Adam Rutherford. I'd really like to know "How To"! But of course, the title is the publisher's equivalent of click bait.

The book is full of good information. In the introduction the author tells us the subjects to be discussed: skin color, ancestral purity, sports, and intelligence. A tall order, very tall. After the reading, I find that the book is indeed full of very good information about these subjects, about what is known of the genetics of each. On one hand, we know a lot; on the other, we know only a tiny percentage of what we need to know.

Skin color is our most visible trait, of course, and humans are extremely visual animals (our visual cortex alone outweighs the entire Chimpanzee brain). It is also an obvious indication that the human species is not at all well-mixed, but more on that anon. We use the terms White and Black as though there were a clear dichotomy. Some, with a tiny bow towards inclusivism, say Nonwhite instead of Black. The author discusses the genetics of skin color, presenting much evidence that there are no fixed boundaries around any "coloration type". That is, there is a continuous spectrum. Certain hereditary groups tend to have a narrow range of skin color, somewhere along that spectrum. 

Or should I say, "spectra", in multiples? There are numerous bits of DNA that affect how much melanin our skin contains, but melanin is not the only pigment. For example, the color of an "olive-skinned Italian" will not match the skin of any person whose ancestry is exclusively a mixture of Scandinavian and Nigerian persons. I remember skin color scales that were used to classify people, in use in schools as late as 1960. The middle colors ranged from a darkish tan to a dark, chocolate brown. Nowhere in that scale will you find a match for the Italian, whose skin must bear another pigment in addition to melanin. This is just one example.

Turning the author's discussion on its head, what is Whiteness? How white must one be to be White? Is the standard to be the peaches-and-cream complexion of certain English aristocrats? How about the icy light pink of a Swede? Forty years ago I worked for a German who was the third-generation product of Germany's eugenic breeding program of the 1920's and onward (a decade or more before the enactment of the Nuremberg Laws). Very tall, very white, very blond, with extremely blue eyes, he was lovely! He had been a Messerschmidt pilot during World War II, but he longed to be a forest ranger. Instead, he was a technical manager of an engineering company. If he is the standard, no more than a million people could qualify. All others, myself included, would be Nonwhite. 

More to the point, would the Italian mentioned above be allowed as a White, say, by a club that requires its members to not have any African ancestry (at least recently)? I think this exposes that racism in the modern world is really anti-Afro bigotry. We don't call antisemitism racism, not usually. I find it hilarious when people speak of the antisemitism of the Iranians or Saudis. According to the original meaning of the term Semite, the Arabs, Persians, and also Chinese, Indians (of India), Japanese, Koreans, and Asians in general are all Semites!

We don't need to dwell longer on that. Let's look at racial purity. Guess what? There is none! The most homogeneous ethnic group on Earth would be the non-Ainu Japanese. They are also the most racist people on earth; here, "racism" means "prejudiced against non-Japanese": someone who has a Korean ancestor, even nine or ten generations back, cannot become a citizen of Japan. They conveniently ignore that modern Japanese who are not Ainu are descended from Koreans and Han Chinese who came to Japan a few thousand years ago.

How pure are White people? A lot less so than Japanese! Euro-Americans are descended from the residents of the Roman Empire. During its heyday, before about 300 AD, the Roman road system and the Mediterranean Sea allowed great amounts of travel, which led to great amounts of admixture among the people. About 10% of Roman citizens were Black (and brown and tan) north Africans. It is thus safe to say that any Euro-American (like myself) has between 5% and 20% African ancestry.

Members of racial purity organizations are some of the biggest users of the Ancestry DNA and 23 and Me genetic services. If someone wants entry to such an organization, he (seldom she) has to show he has no known Jewish or Black ancestors. I don't need genetic testing to know I'd be rejected. I have better family records than average, and I can trace several of my ancestors to English kings of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, and thus to Charlemagne and on back. I also know the national origin of just over 60% of the immigrants to America in my family tree. Among the 75+ persons or families I can trace (from the Mayflower in 1620 to the middle 1800's), I find the following approximate breakdown, adjusted to a total of 100%:

• 27% England
• 22% Ireland
• 4% Scotland
• 3% Wales (so far, 56% from the British Isles)
• 3% German
• 1½% Spanish (1 pirate who sailed with Captain Kidd, most likely a Marrano Jew)

The other almost 40% of my ancestry is probably mostly from the British Isles, but I have a Cherokee great-great grandmother, and her husband was at least half Cherokee, so I am between 4½% and 6% Cherokee.

Let's pull out 6% for the probable Jew and the minimal possible amount of Cherokee. Although my Whiteness is "impure" by this measure, the other 94% "European" ancestry includes between 5% and 19% African. Oh, and I almost forgot. One of my ancestors of unknown provenance, a great-great-grandfather, was probably a quarter Black, but white enough to live as a White man in Missouri! That is another half percent or percent of African in the mix.

The author brings up another interesting concept: The genetic isopoint, also called the Identical Ancestors Point or IAP. It is the number of generations back at which you could expect that every person alive at the time, who has living descendants, is an ancestor of every single one of those living people. An IAP can be derived for the whole human race, and it is between 5,000 and 15,000 years ago, depending on assumptions about migration patterns that are not yet well known. For the population that inhabited Europe, from the tip of Spain to the Ural mountains, about 1,500 years ago, every one of their living descendants (including me) is descended from every one of them.

That doesn't mean that the whole bunch of those descendants has identical ancestry; if so we'd all be clones (identical twins)! Let me use another bit of my family tree to illustrate. I have an ancestor named Joseph Macy who was born on Nantucket Island in 1735, and moved to North Carolina 20-odd years later. He was descended from eight of the ten founding families of Nantucket. However, five generations back at the founding, Joe Macy has 32 ancestors. One couple appears twice in his family tree and three of them appear three times each, meaning that Joe was his own cousin or second cousin a few times! Had he stayed on Nantucket, he would have been almost forced to marry a women whose ancestors included the other two families, to avoid marrying a close cousin (maybe that's why he moved away!). The population of Nantucket in the 1750's was small enough that five or six generations marks the IAP. Any of the first or second cousins of his children (every Nantucketer) would have been descended from those ten founding families in different proportions; different ones would have appeared two or three times. But every family would appear in every family tree at least once.

Broadening the view, we find that perhaps not every European of the early Middle Ages had African ancestors, but a good many of them did. Since every European and Euro-American alive today is descended from every person living in Europe some 1,500 years ago, all their African ancestors are our ancestors. This in itself disqualifies every member of those white-purity "clubs" from membership in their club.

I'll skip over athletic ability, except to say that every explanation for the speed, or strength, of Blacks just doesn't have enough of a time basis for either natural selection or unnatural selection to produce them. Go to a mostly Black neighborhood anywhere in America. What do you see on a summer day? Lots of Black kids playing basketball from dawn to dusk. No matter what "genetic endowment", other than height, a Black kid has, that much practice is going to lead to great skills for a goodly number of them.

The BRAIN! Do Jews have better brains? Do Blacks have worse ones? That is the premise of The Bell Curve and a host of other books that attempt to distinguish racial differences in brain power. The author looked at all those books, including some that I rather like, and found them wanting. There is too much cherry-picking of the data in them all. The differences are much more likely to be cultural.

Here I must confess something. I am not racist, but I am culturist. I do believe that some cultures are better than others, at least in the sense that they better prepare their denizens for "real life" in Twenty-first Century America. In the Congo, or the highlands of New Guinea, or deep in the Amazon, we find cultures that are suited to their environments. If you were to drop a suburb-raised Millennial (of any skin color) into one of those environments, he or she would be unable to survive without rapidly adopting the culture of the people around. That's assuming it is possible. The central New Guineans tend to kill strangers on sight, unless they are introduced first, over a long period of time, and are protected for that time by people that are themselves not likely to be killed on sight. In a less extreme scenario, I'd have a hard time getting used to life in Turtle City (Yongtai), China, where we've been invited to visit by a friend who just moved back there after finishing her education at Drexel. She had to unlearn a few things and learn a bunch of others, to get used to life here. 

But there are cultures and subcultures active in America that hold people back. Certain cultures denigrate education, for example. Those who are acculturated to being highly educated will do better. A friend of mine is a PhD from a family of PhD's, and jokes of his uncle the "black sheep", who is the only one of that generation without a PhD. If my friend's children don't get PhD's, I am sure they'll feel they let the family down. 

If the European Jews do have better brains, (they get the most Nobel Prizes), can there be a genetic component? The author of How to Argue thinks it unlikely. I am more on the fence, leaning toward agreement with him. All Jews have this command in their Torah: Deuteronomy 6:6-9 commands the people of Israel to, basically, wallpaper their houses with the words of the Torah, and they are later commanded to read them frequently and meditate upon them. God demanded 100% literacy of His people, starting in about 1,500 BC. Major portions of the world have yet to achieve 50% literacy even today. These commands in Deuteronomy led to the culture of heavy Torah and Talmud study that has gone on for at least 2,500 years. Of course the Jews who kept this command are going to excel academically!

A number of related matters are taken up, but I think this is enough. The data are there. Races don't hold up as a useful concept, because their boundaries are too porous. Was my great-great-grandfather White or Black? He lived in White culture in a racist state, and was considered White. He is buried in a White cemetery, not in the Black cemetery two miles south (I've been to both). Blood isn't everything.

In all this, there really isn't anything telling me "How to argue with a racist". A racist will disregard it all, if he indeed is willing to listen to any of it. From the last chapter I find:

"People fixated on finding biological bases for racial differences appear more interested in the racism than the science. Arguments in online social media seem to involve people for whom demonstrations of genetic or behavioral differences being evidence for racial categories are the absorbing passion of their lives; these are people who are invigorated by animosity." (p. 203)

To put it simply, again in the author's words, "Science should be pure and straightforward, but people are not." (p. 205) When you have that going against you, argument is useless. Better, given the power and the opportunity, to place one's favorite racist in situation after situation that confounds and contradicts racial stereotypes. The smartest man I ever worked with was a scientist from Uganda. He'd been raised there, and had special scars on his forehead that are considered very beautiful in his culture of birth. He is still active, a well respected scientist. He is also much, much blacker than any American Black I know. I don't know if his kindness, generosity, and formidable intelligence would overcome the prejudice of an American White supremacist, but if that person had to work as this scientist's technician for a few years, it might make a dent. No argument could do so.

Whoever reads this, I hope you read this book. You won't actually learn how to argue with a racist, but the argument you have with yourself while reading it may be the only one you need to engage in.

Blurring the boundaries

kw: book reviews, science fiction, short stories

I was originally planning to title this review "Loss as a catalyst." That was when I had read only half the stories in Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories by Vandana Singh. That is indeed a major theme of many of the stories in this volume: Loss catalyzing growth, or withdrawal, or mayhem, or even dissolution.

The stories range the limits of the SF genres, from rather hard science fiction to speculative fiction (hardly "sciency" at all) to outright fantasy. Gradually I realized that most of the stories involve blurring or shifting boundaries, even shape-changing.

As I sometimes emphasize, I read fiction in search of ideas. Ms Singh, being Indian (and probably Sikh) has a viewpoint that is quite Other to a Westerner, and thus her writing has new ideas aplenty. Amidst this flurry a few stand out:

• "Sailing the Antarsa", I gradually realized, rethinks "dark matter" as something that one day might be manipulated or somehow taken advantage of. In this story flowing streams of "Antarsa" (I suspect it means something in Hindi or a related language) can be sailed using "altmatter", which is opaque to the flow. Along the way, a series of interlocking nature-intensive cultures form the framework of the piece. I say "nature-intensive" in that they are less divorced from nature than European cultures, and probably more so than most Asian cultures as well.
• "Are you Sannata3159?" loosely follows "Soylent Green", in a highly exaggerated caste-based culture. It is also an anti-corporate diatribe, as is the next.
• "Requiem", which I had read before in another anthology, is near-future hard sci-fi: the Arctic in about 2100 (or perhaps much closer to 2025!), with global warming at the point of destroying Inupiat culture on Alaska's North Slope and a protagonist gathering a late relative's belongings. Themes of communication among species recur in the book, and form a strong thread in this story.

The title story, "Ambiguity Machines, An Examination", presents three interlocking stories about "impossible machines"—impossible because they blur boundaries of space and time—with instructions for a student to self-modify so as to prepare a comprehensive report. Reference materials are to include Yantric Oracle; yantric turns out to be Sanskrit for "Machine". Yantric Oracle is apparently a universal machine compendium, reminiscent of the library in "The Library of Babel" by Jorge Luis Borges.

Such a book is the wondrous fruit of a life of boundary crossing, but there is more going on here than just someone from India who has lived half a life in America. It takes a special kind of mind to transform this into stories of this quality, stories that challenge our understanding of permanence and consistency.

Getting to know bees

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, natural history, entomology, native bees, bees

Starting in 2009 I joined The Great Sunflower Project and participated for three summers. At the time we had to get seeds for a sunflower called Lemon Queen, which bears plenty of pollen, but has no nectar. The aim of the project is to take a weekly census through a summer of the pollinating bees that would visit the blooms, once they opened.

Data collection meant standing in the sun in July and August for 15 minutes and recording what kinds of bees visited the flowers. Most of them would be native bees, since honeybees are looking for nectar along with their pollen.

This image shows a sweat bee, one of many species of ground-nesting bees that live in this area. When I lived west of the Mississippi, the sweat bees I remember are tan or brown, not metallic green with a striped abdomen like this one.

After 2012 life got busier as I prepared to enter retirement—and has remained busy—so I didn't continue with the project. But I retained an interest in native bees. Here are a few others, on other flowers around my yard:

The two on the left are on apple blossoms. Upper: a bee, probably a mason bee, with very full pollen baskets. Lower: an Eastern Bumblebee. At right, on garlic chive flowers, a honeybee and a smaller bee I haven't identified to its left.

It was a thrill to find Dancing with Bees: A Journey Back to Nature by Brigit Strawbridge Howard. Ms Howard lives in North Dorset, England. The book's illustrations were drawn or painted by John Walters. Considering that the author mentions photography in nearly every chapter, I was disappointed that there are no photos. However, good plates, even in monochrome, greatly increase the production cost of a book.

The author tells of her girlhood love of nature, a two-decade hiatus amid the busyness of life, and her re-discovery of nature and bees in particular. This is scattered among nineteen chapters that tell us of many sorts of bees, and some wasps and other creatures.

There are about 20,000 species of bee, so far described. Possibly as many, or twice as many, species remain to be discovered and described. That compares well with the 30,000 to 60,000 individual bees in a single hive of honeybees! If you are ever near a honeybee hive, watching the workers zip out and in by the thousands, think, "For each bee I see, there is a whole species of bee somewhere, perhaps known, perhaps not yet known."

In the book we learn of bees that sting, those that don't, and those that can sting repeatedly the way wasps can (honeybees usually die after stinging once). We learn of male bees, which usually can't sting; most die soon after mating. Of bumblebee queens that begin the spring by foraging for food to start a nest. Some species' queens continue to forage through the summer but others get down to egg-laying only. I have seen bumblebees of various sizes in my yard, and thought they were different species. It turns out, the queen who emerges from hibernation (or diapause) in the spring is very large, but the quality of the foraging (pollen and nectar available) determines how much food she offers each offspring. Her workers are smaller than she, and sometimes a lot smaller, even as small as honeybees.

It took me a while looking at the insect pictured here, to determine it is a bee. The rear wings were in motion and hard to see, so I thought at first it was a hoverfly. The author writes of hoverflies also, and I can tell you they are hard to photograph. They seldom sit to sip.

We learn of cuckoo bees, which either add an egg or two to a victim's nest, or lay enough eggs that their own larvae will take over the nest and kill the larvae of the "owner". We learn of carder bees. At first I didn't know what was meant: we learn that carding by bees refers to processing plant fibers—the hairs on stems and leaves—into little felt pouches into which the bee lays an egg each and puts pollen and other food inside. A luxurious birthplace for the baby bee!

Here is one of my favorite bee photos. This big bumblebee on a coneflower is typical of the pollinators in this area. I see many more of these than honeybees. This one is a brown-belted bumblebee, perhaps as common as the Eastern bumblebee.

A first stage of learning about native bees is just getting to know the ones that frequent an area. Then, one may learn of their life cycle. Do they live in the ground, or in old mouse nests? Do they nest alone (most do), or in small social nests (like bumblebees), or in huge aggregations like honeybees and other eusocial bees and wasps?

At a later stage we may notice, as the author tells on her own behalf, that some bees may be getting out of sync with their preferred flowers. This can be a signal of climate change. For spring to arrive early or late a few times in a row is one thing. For the change to continue into a trend is another. The author tells of several such changes, such as a certain species of large bumblebee that has abandoned its southern range, but is only expanding slowly northward. She fears it will be pinched out of existence.

This is one of the most lyrically written books I've ever read. Even the bittersweet stories are a pleasure to read. We humans, so full of pride and hubris, need to get used to the fact that we share this planet with a few million species of animal, and an almost-equally huge number of plants. They can get by without us. We cannot get by without them.

Getting acquainted with yourself

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, genetics, epigenetics, microbiome

Just over 17 years ago the Human Genome Projects were completed. There had been much hype about the wonderful things that we would learn and be able to do. And hype it was. The more we've learned, it seems the less we know. During the near-decade that the projects ran I noticed, in science fiction in particular, quite a bump in stories about genetic enhancements of all sorts, from cloning to adding all manner of "features" to people; one story was about "getting genes twanked," as though one could go to a "gene mechanic" and have parts swapped in and out as desired.

Reality isn't that simple. The Genome is one thing. It took years just to figure out how much of our DNA is really a part of our genome. A depressive low occurred in many of our minds in 2003, when we learned that we have "only" about 22,000 "protein-coding regions", the new term for what we used to mean by "gene". In what follows I'll call them CR's. I have recently read that there are about an equal number of "non-coding active regions". I'll call them NR's. It seems they mostly make RNA that doesn't get turned into protein, but has its own functions. Some NR's are regulatory, in that they make a bit of RNA that regulates a CR. Nobody seems to know what the others do. 

Apparently, the original set of CR's comprised about 2% of our DNA, or about 60 million base pairs of the 3 billion total. The NR's may be smaller, but not by much, so that the total DNA that is "active" (so far as we know) is more like 4%, or 100-120 million base pairs. Together, CR's and NR's are now called "exons", because they get expressed in one way or another.

About twice as much DNA, some 8% of the "human" total, consists of virus genomes, stored essentially intact, though mutated over time. Most of this is from retroviruses, calling cards left by virus diseases of prior generations. Some of the fresher ones can apparently still be reactivated on occasion.

The regulatory NR's just begin to scratch the surface of the ways DNA expression is modified. They are mainly responsible for the differences between the hundreds of different tissues in our bodies, each of which requires a unique set of DNA expression profiles.

The word "epigenetics" was apparently coined in the 1880's. It was at that time kind of a side issue to natural selection, and smacked of Lamarckism (inheritance of acquired characteristics). At present there are at least two known chemical methods by which environmental events influence DNA expression. They don't change the DNA code, but attach things like methyl groups to the DNA backbone to silence an exon, for example.

Some of these can be passed on to future generations, so there is indeed a bit of Lamarck in our Darwin cocktail! I went looking for books that described more about epigenetics, and found Pleased to Meet Me: Genes, Germs, and the Curious Forces That Make Us Who We Are, by Bill Sullivan. The book is about a lot more than epigenetics. As the subtitle indicates, our resident microbiome also affects what we do, what we think, and who we are.

Just to complicate the picture, while we're pretty sure the 8% of our DNA that used to be viruses isn't doing anything, if we subtract out that and the 4% that we know to be active (the exons), a full 88% of our DNA has no known function. Nature is parsimonious; why keep it all? It is costly to produce and maintain, so what is it for? Boy, do we have a lot to learn! It may just be that, under the hypothesis of "selfish DNA", lots of "other" DNA is carried along in all eukaryone genomes, just because it can. There is certain to be more to it than that. We just don't know yet.

What else is going on? Somehow our collection of exons is able to be expressed into more than a million proteins. The Proteome is vastly more complex than the Genome! Then there's the Saccharome, the collections of sugars and sugar "cousins" (including the ribose and deoxyribose that form the backbone of RNA and DNA respectively) and sugar polymers, which just might number in the tens of millions! There might be other "-omes" out there, but I haven't read about any.

If you were to put a human body (suitably deceased, of course) into a big blender, then extract all the DNA, you'd find a lot more than the human set of exons and the rest of the human genome. You'd find millions or billions of other exons in the mix. If you could take a census of all the cells that made up that same body (before the blending!), you would find 20-30 trillion human cells. You would also find between 100 and 200 trillion microbes of an unknown number of species, mostly residing in the gut. Together, they weigh about as much as the brain.

After a chapter ("Meet your Maker", which is DNA) about DNA and its history in science, we find nine chapters that mainly discuss aspects of our personality. After all, irrespective of the kind of body we have, who we ARE is mainly a matter of what we DO, which depends on what we THINK and FEEL.

The chapter on Taste begins with differences between our tongues. "Supertasters" are more sensitive to many tastes (and "supersmellers" are also, to but different aspects of the "taste" of our food). But it isn't just about whether broccoli tastes bitter or DMSO tastes sweet, or the subtle (or not) aroma of port wine. "Taste" has a social element, and a great many things not food-related are said to be in "good taste" or "bad taste". In each chapter, although much attention is given to different bits of DNA that make us different, we find, for example, that the things our mothers enjoyed when we were in utero affect what we like or dislike later on. How can this be? Epigenetics. Furthermore, the kinds of foods your parents like affected their microbiomes, and this in turn set you up, during and after birth, to have certain species in your own microbiome…and the bacteria inside you have their own likes and dislikes!

I'm finding it hard to pin down the point of this book. I suppose I could express it this way: our DNA isn't everything. The "hand" we are "dealt" by nature has a certain range of potential, but epigenetics and microbiome dynamics narrow the possibilities. So does our environment, whatever "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" we might have endured. The life we live makes epigenetic marks on our genome, and, even if we never take antibiotics (rare!), can dramatically modify our microbiome. The inner residents, in turn, affect what we like, how we think, and perhaps even how we vote.

In the chapter "Meet your Beliefs" we learn of studies of children's personalities, and how this affected their political stance two decades later. Reporting on work by James Fowler of UC San Diego: "Progressive liberals more commonly possess the daredevil variant of DRD4 (a gene that affects the brain) than conservatives." (p 248) And quoting Jack and Jeanne Block of UC Berkeley, about a study of youngsters in nursery school and then two decades later:

"The relatively liberal young men, when in nursery school two decades earlier, … [were viewed as] resourceful and initializing, autonomous, proud of their blossoming accomplishments, confident and self-involving. The relatively conservative young men … [were viewed as] visibly deviant, feeling unworthy and therefore ready to feel guilty, easily offended, anxious when confronted by uncertainties, distrustful of others, ruminative, and rigidifying when under stress." (p. 249)

There was a similar list regarding young women and their characteristics as children. The loaded language of the quotes shocked me. It made "liberal" youngsters seem angelic and "conservative" ones seem deplorable. This is no surprise to me: I know Berkeley. I spent time there around the time these studies were carried out (not knowing that at the time, though). It is a source of the leftist ideology that loudly demands "first amendment rights", but only for people who think like them, and denies any rights to all others. A friend of mine, who calls National Public Radio "Radio Managua", calls Berkeley "Little Moscow". What we really see in the work of the professors Block is the effects on children who either agreed with their nursery school teachers, or who didn't. During the time of these studies, the formative years of today's radical leftists, you couldn't find a conservative teacher in any public school in Berkeley to save your life.

So let's look at the second set of adjectives through another lens, one that removes the pejoratives:

• deviant → self-starter or thinks independently
• feels unworthy → doesn't jump to conclusions or is open to other ideas
• feels guilty → unafraid to accept responsibility
• easily offended → strong sense of right and wrong and not afraid to say so
• anxious → resists being forced into false dichotomies
• distrustful of others → distrustful of teachers who punish independent thinking
• ruminative → this is the only positive in the list! Leftists tend to be self-blind.
• rigidifying under stress → unwilling to be cowed by bullying

I wonder how the study, performed about the time Dr. Sullivan was in short pants, would have described children if it were begun at Kansas U in the 1990's and the children revisited about 2010?

A significant part of the same chapter, and much of the last chapter, are a bit of Atheist Evangelism. Dr. Sullivan and other evangelical atheists would do well to read Evidence That Demands a Verdict by Josh McDowell. I didn't "think" my way into being a Christian. I had transformative experiences, and continue to experience them. Perhaps Dr. S. would call me mentally unhinged. So be it.

Regardless of such defects (and others; I could have dwelt on his frequent, flat attempts to inject topical humor that would only appeal to Millennials), there is much useful information in this book about what makes us US. But I'll keep looking to find a volume with equivalent or greater breadth that I'd be able to recommend without reservation.