The usefulness of very old animals

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, aging, gerontology, longevity

This old fellow, assuming he isn't one of the patriarchs in Genesis, is probably half as old as the tortoise. Among terrestrial mammals, humans have the longest lives. Among all land animals, giant tortoises are probably the longest-lived. It is likely that "Darwin's tortoise" wasn't really brought back from the Galapagos Islands by Charles Darwin, to live to age 175 in a zoo. But it is known that these big tortoises can live at least 150 years, and possibly as long as 200.

No human (at least since the time of Moses) is known to have lived longer than 122 years, the known age of Jeanne Calment, who died in 1997. The second-longest, in the past few centuries anyway, seems to be a living woman currently aged 119. No (recent) man is known to have exceeded 113.

A side note on the great ages reported for Biblical patriarchs. The progression of ages tells a story, which may be more important than whether anyone actually lived 900+ years. What is commonly called "The Fall", the sin of Adam and Eve, is the first of four Falls. Here I'll focus on the longevity of the generations, the story within the story:

1. The first couple disobeyed God and were exiled from the orchards of Eden. Lifetimes went from "undetermined" (potentially endless) to mostly 900-969 years.
2. Cain killed his brother and fled from the presence of God. No lifetime of any of his descendants is recorded.
3. The earth became "filled with violence", motivating God to bring on the Flood, saving only one family. Noah was the last person to live more than 900 years (950). His son Shem lived 600 years, then 3 generations lived 433-464 years.
4. The tower of Babel ("to make ourselves a name") motivated God to confuse the languages. The next five generations lived 148-239 years, ending with Terah (the father of Abram), who lived to age 205.

Each Fall was followed by a reduction in life span by about half. Then Abram/Abraham lived 175 years, Isaac lived 180 years, and Jacob/Israel lived 147 years (his brother Ishmael lived 137 years). Thereafter, a few others including Moses lived to ages of 110 to 120, no more than that. In Psalm 90, composed shortly after God called Moses to return to Egypt, Moses, age 80, declared that the usual life span was 70, or as much as 80 years, "according to strength".

The progressive shortening of life span in Genesis drives home that disobedience to God leads to a shorter life.

Now to the book: Methuselah's Zoo: What Nature Can Teach Us About Living Longer, Healthier Lives, by Steven N. Austad. Dr. Austad is the first professor at his university (Alabama) to hold the Chair in Healthy Aging. His central theme is that nearly all our laboratory studies are of dismally short-lived animals: fruit flies (weeks to months) and mice (less than a year in the wild, less than 3 years in the lab) predominate; but we should be studying animals of exceptional longevity. At least some of them may have something to teach us about living long lives with good health.

Animals with short lives do have a little bit to teach. A mouse in the wild is most likely to wind up being eaten by an owl or a fox. It's well known that larger animals live longer, if only because there are fewer predators that can overcome them. But in a protected laboratory environment, a 3-year-old mouse is positively geriatric: thinning, graying hair; cataracts; feeble gait. Whatever aging is, mice do it fast, like everything else.

The book is full of stories of the unexpectedly long lives of certain animals. It opens with a bird called a fulmar. No firm conclusion is drawn about the longevity of fulmars, but we are introduced to one that might have been nearly as old as the ornithologist pictured with it in two photos taken 35 years apart. The bird outlived the scientist by a year or two, and may have lived 60 years or more. Fulmars are the size of seagulls. We have better information about other birds. A particular cockatoo lived to age 83.

Life in the slow lane can be longer. Tortoises are one example. I have a friend whose pet tortoise, about the size of a softball, was thirty years old the last time I saw him. Giant tortoises live longer, at least the aforementioned 150-175 years. Their heart rate is six beats per minute. Being exothermic (not self-heating like birds and mammals), they have low energy needs. It is said that we each get a potential 2-3 billion heartbeats; for humans that's from 60-90 years. For a giant tortoise, with a heart that beats at 1/10th the rate, maybe they can actually live 600-900 years!

I was intrigued by the animals that don't seem to get feebler with age. Old fulmars and old cockatoos don't have menopause in females (or E.D. in males). Neither do old tortoises. Other long-live mammals and birds do seem to end their lives with a number of years of infertility. I hope there is something useful to learn about genetic (or something else) differences between animals that age and animals that seem not to. It won't come easily or cheaply. Scientists study mice because they don't live long. It's at least 100 times as costly to study lifelong matters with naked mole rats that seem to live 50-100 times as long as field mice. Such studies would be multi-generation endeavors…multi-HUMAN-generation!

Then there's cancer. We don't yet even know the cancer rate for elephants or whales. A bowhead whale, weighs more than 1,000 times as much as a human, and one might naively think they ought to get cancer 1,000 times as frequently. Nope. They live more than 200 years, but we know little more than that. There are a few genetic clues about the cancer-avoiding (not quite cancer-proofing) of huge animals, such has their possession of multiple copies of certain cancer-suppression genes, where humans have one copy only. But our ignorance is typically as colossal as their size.

Even more mysterious are small animals with extraordinary longevity, such as a one-ounce bat that lives 40+ years, or centuries-old mollusks no larger than a teacup. One concept dwelt on throughout the book is Longevity Quotient, LQ. If most one-ounce mammals live at most 3-4 years, and a one-ounce bat species can live 30-40 years, that is an LQ of 10. Humans have an LQ of about 4, although Jeanne Calment's 122-year life indicates an LQ of 5.5.

It is still not known whether there are two intermixed human populations, one with a typical longevity of about 85 years, and another that can make it routinely to 100. I have numerous ancestors who lived into their 90's, and an aunt who died last year at age 101. A friend of mine, who is 65 years old, is already older than everyone in his family tree that he knows about; his parents both lived about 60 years. Maybe there's a third population of shorter-lived humans.

Whatever our ultimate life span may be, recent trends in longevity seem to be based more on health span. Just keeping us from "untimely death" has been a triumph of public health measures including clean water systems, at least in some countries, and vaccination for many former scourges of humanity such as smallpox, measles, and polio. Most of the long-lived ancestors of mine that I mentioned above lived in the 16th, 17th, and 18th Centuries, when such public health measures weren't even dreamed of.

The author makes an important point about "life expectancy", which is different from longevity. Life expectancy is the average age that will be reached by a cohort of the population born at the same time. If infant and child mortality is high, even if some will reach ages greater than 100, the AVERAGE will be low. Population pyramids show this, in part:

A rectangular population pyramid like the one on the left shows that the death rate is low at all ages, until one reaches age 70, and then increases. A triangular distribution, or a "scooped triangle" such as the one on the right, shows a high death rate at all ages. The life expectancy for the US is about 78.5 (average of both sexes). One might initially guess that the life expectancy for DRC is below 30, but we must remember that each horizontal tier is a different cohort. This pyramid shows high death rate, but also high birth rate. The WHO figure for life expectancy of the DRC is 62. That is for the cohort in the bottom tier only, and it takes a lot of actuarial calculation to determine it. Regardless, the more triangular a population pyramid is, the lower the life expectancy. Both charts show a very few people living to 95 and beyond; fewer in DRC than in USA, of course. But there are some. The ultimate longevity in both countries is similar.

This just scratches the surface of a book full of information, well presented. Just finding out how long some animals can live is very time-consuming (decades to centuries!) and can be very costly. The author hopes we will soon begin to learn why some animals live so long. Will learning that help humans become bicentenarians (200+ age)? Perhaps. That makes it worth doing.

One small error I wish to correct. On page 186 it is stated that carbon-14 decays to carbon-12. No, it decays to nitrogen-14, by emitting a beta particle—a high-energy electron—which changes a neutron into a proton. The rest of the analysis in that chapter is correct.

Measuring my metabolism…crudely

 kw: analytical projects, weight, metabolism

For decades we've had a bedroom scale, the kind with a spring. Over the years I found that the weight it showed was a little variable if I leaned one way or another. Naturally, being overweight, I soon learned how to lean so the weight shown was as small as possible, without me falling over. I finally realized I was fooling myself, particularly because my weight in the doctor's office, adjusting for clothing and shoes, was about five pounds greater than my "home weight". That made a big difference to me, emotionally, because it pushed me over a boundary: I am just six feet tall. At home I would get a weight of 215-216 pounds, for a BMI of 29.2-29.3. That's near the top end of "overweight". A couple of years ago the medical scale showed 226 pounds, and with shoes on and my cell phone in a pocket I had five pounds of "accessories", for a naked weight of 221. That's a BMI of 30, which is "obese". Boo-hoo!

Over a period of about a year I did my best to eat more moderately, and my doctor said one day, "Oh, you've lost a little weight." I weighed 224 clothed, or 219, a BMI of 29.7. My "home weight" was 213-214. Better, but not good enough. Then I caught Covid-19, to which I reacted by fasting for several days (low blood sugar reduces the chances of getting pneumonia). That brought my "home weight" below 210 pounds.

I bought a digital scale. Its reported accuracy is 0.2 pounds, which is 3.2 ounces. This scale helped me calibrate the old spring scale, which is actually surprisingly good. If I stand straight on the spring scale I get the same reading, within a pound, as the digital scale. Of course, I am rather enamored of that extra digit, and the digital scale is much easier to read.

I had read enough of recent literature to realize that it is eating sugar and "fast carbs" like potatoes that cause weight gain, not eating fat. I went nearly full-carnivore for a while. When I had eggs for breakfast (I typically fry 3 eggs in olive oil), rather than buttered toast I had breakfast sausage: two of the little links, which each have the same number of calories as a slice of the bread I'd use for toast. I quit having sandwiches; just some lunch meat and cheese, which I'd take to work in a baggie, or prepare on the spot when I ate at home (I work 3 days/week). I began losing about a pound weekly. My present morning weight is 195 pounds.

I've been weighing myself morning and evening for some time, and I took note of a certain regularity. After a morning pee, I weigh a pound less (plus or minus 0.2 pounds) than in the evening before bed. Then for a few days I checked my weight in the morning before visiting the toilet, and found it was either 0.4 or 0.6 pounds less, and another 0.4 to 0.6 pounds would go into the toilet. I thought, "I am losing half a pound overnight just by breathing!"

I realized that I was measuring my metabolism, in a crude way. That 0.4-0.6 pounds (6.4-9.6 ounces, or about 180-270 grams) represents glucose being oxidized and its oxidation products being exhaled.

If you have had any exposure to biochemistry, you'll find this formula familiar:

Glucose, the primary sugar in grapes, is the energy currency of life. Plants use photosynthesis to add carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to water brought up from the roots, producing glucose and releasing oxygen to the atmosphere. Animals consume plants, from which they obtain glucose (and lots of other chemicals); they add oxygen to the glucose to break it down to water and carbon dioxide. This simple chemical formula hides the complexities of the Krebs cycle, and the energy input by ATP to keep it running during respiration, or the production/activation of ATP during photosynthesis.

To see where the weights come and go, here are the atomic masses of these molecules:

• glucose - 180
• oxygen - 32 (a 2-atom molecule)
• water - 18
• carbon dioxide - 44

In chemistry, a mole is the weight in grams times the molecular weight. Thus a mole of hydrogen atoms weighs one gram, and a mole of carbon dioxide, which has a molecular weight of 44, is 44 grams. If we multiply the last three numbers above by six, to correspond to the equation above, we find this:

In respiration, 180 g of glucose combines with 192 g of oxygen to produce 108 g of water and 264 g of carbon dioxide. In photosynthesis, the opposite happens. The two gases outweigh the sugar and water.

These are the gram weights appropriate to the oxidation of 0.4 pounds of glucose. For those of us who are not as familiar with metric, I'll take advantage of the fact that all the weights in the prior paragraph are divisible by 12, and use somewhat greater actual weights, for the following:

In respiration, 7.5 oz of glucose combines with 8 oz of oxygen to produce 4.5 oz of water and 11 oz of carbon dioxide.

7.5 ounces of glucose is 0.47 pounds, so this is similar, and gives me a feel for what is going on.

How much energy does this represent? We are told in nutrition tables that a gram of sugar has four calories (the dietary calorie is a Kcalorie, or the amount of heat that must be used to raise the temperature of a kilogram of water 1°C). I found that the oxidation of a mole of glucose releases 280 calories. One mole of glucose, as above, is 180 grams, almost exactly 0.4 pounds, so at the low end of my nightly weight loss (before urination), my metabolism has produced 280 calories. When I sometimes get a reading of 0.6 pounds, that converts to 420 calories. I suspect that the actual amount is the same each night, but when I have a bedtime weight of 195 pounds, it might really be anywhere between 194.9 and 195.1. Then, if the actual amount of glucose "burned" is 0.5 pounds, my morning weight would read either 194.4 or 194.6. Half a pound of glucose converts to 350 calories.

I sleep 6-7 hours. Let's use an average of 6.5. Dividing 350 by 6.5 yields 53.8 calories per hour. Multiply by 24, and we find 1,292 calories per day. That seems to be my basic (not basal!) metabolism when at total rest. A Basal Metabolic Rate calculator tells me 1,628 calories per day. Further, for an entirely sedentary man my age, daily caloric need is 1,989. Explanatory text points out that "body maintenance" for most people is about 70%. If I understand that correctly, let's see what I get by dividing 1,292 by 1,628: 0.79 or 79%. And then 1,292 / 1,989 = 0.65 or 65%. So it seems to be in the right range.

There is a second factor to consider, which is nitrogen metabolism. Small amounts of protein are discarded daily. They are the source of the nitrogen in urea, the main non-water component of urine, and creatinine. The urine of a healthy and properly hydrated person contains 9.3 g/dL of urea and 0.67 g/dL creatinine. The latter can be ignored for practical purposes. I don't have a general molecular formula for protein, so I'll just do a simple "bonehead" analysis.

Molecular weight of nitrogen: 28
Molecular weight of urea: 60

Thus a half-pound of urine (one cup or about 120 ml, or 0.12 liter) contains about 11g of urea, or 5.2 g of nitrogen. Roughly speaking, protein is 16% nitrogen, so that represents the discard of about 32 g of protein. That is insignificant compared to the amount of glucose metabolized, at least in terms of energy/calories.

Daily urine production for a man my size is about 1.4 liter, and it will apparently contain about 130 g of urea, which contains 61 g of nitrogen, derived from the discard of 380 g (13 oz) of protein. This emphasizes that we need to consume at least that amount of protein daily, because it can't be produced by converting either carbohydrate or fat; they contain no nitrogen.

These numbers are quite at variance with the recommendation that adult men need 0.8 g of protein per kg of body weight. That converts to about 70 g/day for me (195 lbs = 88 kg). I need to do more research, because the discrepancy between 70 g and 380 g is huge. This could take a while…

Bottom line: Someone who weighs about 200 pounds can expect to lose a half pound of glucose overnight, expelled in the breath as water vapor and carbon dioxide. In addition, about an ounce of protein is lost overnight and expelled during the morning pee.

Behavior is as behavior does

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, natural history, animals, behavior, evolution, nature-nurture debate

A fellow showed up half an hour late for his regular poker game with friends, and found they'd started without him. For a fourth, they'd recruited the host's dog. The man told the host, "Wow! That's some talented pup!!" "Oh," he replied, "Old Groaner isn't so great. Whenever he has an ace he wags his tail."

We are amused by pictures or stories of animals doing "human" things (or the converse!). Yet until recently, while most people with pets seem to easily understand that the animals have feelings and purposeful behaviors, scientists have been slow (by centuries!) to come around.

Marlene Zuk's new book, Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test: How Behavior Evolves and Why it Matters, drives lots of new nails into the coffin of the Animal-as-Automaton view. Let me state at the outset that, for two good reasons I hold that animals, even the rather elementary ones we call "bugs", all fit along at least three scales (none of them is the scala naturae, the "natural ladder" so beloved of ignorant biologists). Firstly, as to consciousness, one end might be called "Human-level self consciousness" (assuming it's truly the end point; maybe toothed whales are beyond us, for example); the other end we can call "barely conscious of more than the basic drives of hunger and the 'urge to merge'". Secondly, as to emotion, just as some animals have abilities we don't, there ought to be some that can have feelings we don't have. Thirdly, considering behavior, which is often divided into "purposive" (the scientific jargon for "purposeful") and "instinctive" (which really means "purely genetic"): everything living behaves. Animals are practically defined by behavior. It is what they ARE. "Lower animals" are the product of 4 billion years of evolution, the same as humans. So are the things that they DO.

Somewhere on my bookshelves I have the seminal volume, Purposive Behavior in Animals and Men by E.C. Tolman, published in 1932. This book is not referenced by Dr. Zuk, more's the pity. If she's not an intellectual descendant of Tolman, she's at least a grandniece. He was far ahead of his time, as witness the still-nearly-pervasive use of the canard "anthropomorphism" to discredit much work on animal behavior.

My two reasons: To hard-line creationists, many of whom also hold the Calvinist position that God has no emotions, I would say, "Are we not created in the image of God? Did our emotions and behaviors come from nowhere? Are they not part of that image?" Of course, some would double down to say that all such things are part of "original sin" or whatever Protestants call it. (Though I am a believer, I am neither Catholic nor Protestant.) They are fools. To take a further step, "If we have feelings and behaviors that are something other than automatic, why would God deny such abilities to animals?"

To hard-line Skinnerian scientists I would say, "I subscribe to evolution, as carried out by natural selection. Do you? If so, you must realize that our feelings came from somewhere. Where? Of course, from our nonhuman ancestors. We emote and behave because they did." So much for anthropomorphism. And as I said before, animals that are attuned to greatly different environments than humans could survive (without costly technology) are likely to have feelings and behaviors that are so foreign to us that we are unlikely to recognize them as such.

So, a bit about the book—which I urge everyone to read!—what is the Dead Man Test? Some, wishing a less macabre moniker, call it the Teddy Bear Test: If a Teddy Bear can do it, it isn't behavior. Substitute Dead Man for Teddy Bear if you prefer. Definition by exclusion.

How does behavior evolve? Just like anything else! Behavior is a physical attribute. It is just as real as height, eye color, and whether your ring finger is longer or shorter than your middle finger. These things, plus all other "genetic traits" are influenced by environmental factors. This is the central emphasis of the book. Genes alone don't determine anything. Neither does environment alone. Everything is a mix, an intertwining of the two. She has to say it over and over, because many folks won't get it otherwise!

For an example of this intertwining: One of my great-grandfathers was prone to drink. The family was Methodist, and Methodists were, until the 1960's, required to sign a Pledge that they would not touch alcohol. Great-grandpa Joe fought his addiction mightily, but he would go on a bender on occasion. His daughters kept their Pledges; it helped that they never tasted "the sauce" as young people, and that they took their father as a cautionary example. Having a strict mother helped. My mother was also raised to be a teetotaler, as was I. But in college some friends persuaded me to have a beer to celebrate my 18th birthday (I lived in a state that allowed 18-year-olds to drink "low beer"). I soon found a way to get harder stuff, and I was off, headed for a life as an alcoholic! Except, I couldn't afford it. Also, returning home after the school year, back in a teetotaling home, I took a hard look at myself, and decided not to use "anything that hinders thinking clearly". At that time I didn't know about Joe. Later one of my brothers became more of an alcoholic than I had been. His own story is fascinating, but won't fit here. He and I are both "recovering"; one never fully "recovers".

Why weren't my mother and her mother alcoholics? In a different environment they'd have been so. We have a kind of protein that turns ethanol into a heroin-like addicting substance. Fortunately, it is kind of rare. Yeah, I know there are lots of alcoholics; some of them have this same genetic situation. But they are a small fraction of the whole of humanity.

I'll leave it to you to get the book and allow Dr. Zuk to lead you down many a lane and garden path, with her stories of dancing cockatoos (do they have something to dance to in nature? Neither do elephants, and I've also seen videos of them responding to music); of octopuses punching fish, apparently out of irritation; of how animals from flies to flying foxes vary in their behaviors based on still-inscrutable combinations of their genetic endowment and their past and present environment. This sure is an enjoyable book!

The conscience of the world

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, history, jews, israel, jewish american relations

At the suggestion of a friend I read The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People by Walter Russell Mead. I read the e-book, which contains 661 "pages", although the main text is 590 pages, and the Illustrations, listed as one page in the Table of Contents, spans 20 screens. Anyway, it's a big, big book, full of big ideas.

I made 21 bookmarked notes, about one per chapter. When I finished reading, I realized that my bookmarking was much too ambitious. I don't have the competence to provide a comprehensive review. I must pare down my intentions.

Let me state at the outset that I am a Christian who honors the Jews as elder brothers in the knowledge of God. I didn't start that way. Before coming to Christ I had the typical Midwestern background, complete with casual antisemitism. That has changed. I have come to realize that the continued existence of the Jewish people, in the face of more than three thousand years of determined efforts to either exclude them or exterminate them, and the very existence of global antisemitism, prove that God exists.

(Note: This image shows a Hanukah menorah. The menorah in the Tabernacle and Temple had seven lamps, not nine.)

Antisemitism is alive and well in the good old US of A, and it seems to be gaining ground. Who hasn't heard that "the Jews" own or control Congress, or are the "hidden hand" behind world banking system, and so forth and so on. The first major topic of the book is to expose and debunk what the author calls "planet Vulcan theory". He uses an analogy, the decades-long hunt for a planet closer to the Sun than Mercury, which was predicted because the orbit of Mercury has a small deviation from what would be predicted by the orbital calculations of Newtonian mechanics. Astronomers could calculate the orbit of an inner planet, which they named Vulcan, and on a few occasions reports were published that it had been observed. Alas, it was all wishful thinking. The real explanation for Mercury's orbit is found in the general theory of relativity by Albert Einstein. Since 1923 it has been known that there is no planet Vulcan. The "Jewish lobby" is an imaginary planet.

The continued support for Israel by the US, and the earlier welcoming of Jews to our shores (usually) has been taken as evidence of a "Jewish lobby" that bends both the domestic and foreign policy of America to "the Jewish will." The calculations seem to support the theory. However, it just isn't so. The first few chapters of the book prove that.

Quick question: Who supplied the weapons that enabled the infant nation of Israel to defeat a half dozen Arab nations in 1948? Most people (in America at least) would say, "The US!" True answer: The weapons were supplied by Czechoslovakia with the blessing of Joseph Stalin. Stalin's motive was not to help the Jews, whom he was dreadfully persecuting inside Russia. It was to bollix up American foreign policy, even to weaken America on the world stage. It worked. In fact, the US was at best a weak and neglectful ally of Israel until after the 1967 six-day war (after which Moshe Dayan joked that he'd obtained a special one week rate from Hertz Rent-a-Tank). That's two decades of America ignoring Israel.

The book is really a history of Jewish-American relations. If there were a "Jewish lobby" pulling our strings, the author makes it clear that many, many things which American Presidents and American Congresses did would have been quite different. I found it fascinating that the driving force behind American favor toward the Jews prior to 1948, and toward Israel its establishment, has been American Evangelical Christians. I happen to be one. (By the way, in case you're prone to getting offended, here is some mud in your eye: I consider the term "Evangelical Christian" to be a redundancy.)

I think it is likely that a large aim of Leftism in America today is to silence Evangelical Christians and to destroy Evangelical churches, and so reduce or eliminate support for Israel in the US Federal government. The root is antisemitism. "Wokeism" is a big part of it, but I'll take up that mess on another occasion; to be Woke is to be anti-Semite, among numerous unsavory attributes.

I half expected the author to offer policy advice. He does not. He is providing information, very valuable information. That alone will change attitudes. In my case, it increased my respect for serious, observant Jews (and my sorrow over the many Jews who have forsaken their God). God's purpose for the Jews is to teach Torah, to activate the conscience of the world. He doesn't want you to become a Jew. He wants you to be wise and good, and only in the Jewish Torah and the rest of the Bible that grew from it can wisdom worth having be found. People hate a "do-gooder", which is why a world full of godless people hates the Jews.

Whether you love Jews or hate them, this book is very well worth reading.