Archive for the ‘education’ Category
Anatol Rapoport’s rules: a tough ask
‘Anatol Rapoport…..once promulgated a list of rules for how to write a successful critical commentary on an opponent’s work. First, he said, you must attempt to re-express your opponent’s position so clearly, vividly and fairly that your opponent says “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.” Then, you should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement), and third, you should mention anything you have learned from your opponent. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.’
These rules are useful for everyday spoken arguments too, of the more or less intellectual sort. They can be adapted for the spoken, to keep your interlocutor onside, (along with smiles, nods, effective impressions of interest, appropriate turn-taking and the suppression of irritated grimaces). I think I’m reasonably good at following Rapoport’s rules in writing – or trying to keep to them. In conversation it’s much harder, especially after a few drinks!
I once watched former High Court Justice Michael Kirby, whom I already greatly admired, in a television exchange with a Pauline Hanson supporter. He listened politely to the man’s bluster, then spent some time painstakingly and seemingly sympathetically presenting the Hanson view on immigration, and then he described in details its flaws while defending its validity as a position, at least on an emotional level. It was an extraordinary performance, full of discipline, grace and poise. I use the memory to punish myself when I perform disappointingly in an argument – sometimes ‘winning’ the argument, or at least seeming to, but losing the respect or interest of the opponent.
Monsanto and GMOs are not the same
scary protesters
The other day on the tram to the city I noticed people congregating on the steps of Adelaide’s parliament house, many of them holding green balloons. Always fascinated by demos, and usually well up on the news, I struggled for reasons as to what it was all about. The only ‘special day’ I knew of was for indigenous Australians – National Sorry Day on Sunday May 26 – but this was a Saturday, and the green balloons suggested something more environmental. I continued on into the city for a spot of lunch and window shopping, but then found presumably the same demonstrators wending their way through Rundle Mall, behind a megaphone-wielding leader and parroting after him three clear slogans – ‘No Monsanto’, ‘No GMOs’ and ‘No human experiments’.
A lot of thoughts went through my head at hearing these chants – I’m a very excitable fellow – but among them was this. Ages ago I began a five part series of posts on the subject of genetically modified foods, which I based on a piece of writing in a cookbook, The urban cook, by ‘celebrity chef’ Mark Jensen, who plies his trade at Sydney’s Red Lantern restaurant. The first four parts were written and posted here, here, here and here, but I never got round to finishing the fifth part, based on the last paragraph of Jensen’s little anti-GMO critique. So I’ll finish it now with reference to the demonstration the other day, which I’ve discovered was targeted specifically at Monsanto.
So now to look at the final of Mark Jensen’s five not very provocative paragraphs on GM plants, and to summarise my own take on the controversy.
In the United States, some farmers who use GM crops have had to resort to physically ripping horse weed [an example of a herbicide-resistant ‘super weed’] out of the ground by hand. Farmers who grow GM crops use herbicides that are designed to kill the weeds but leave the crop healthy. In this case, the GM food crop has remained resistant to the herbicide, but unfortunately the weeds have adapted to resist it as well. If the farmer uses another brand of herbicide to kill the weeds he runs the risk of killing the food crop. This situation is frightening and the only way to stop the cycle of stronger and stronger chemical use is to do just that: STOP IT. This is a classic example of man trying to circumvent nature and only succeeding in making matters worse.
The thesis in this paragraph is simple enough – the use of GM crops creates herbicide-resistant super-weeds, which will lead to the use of stronger chemicals and higher volumes of chemicals in order to control them. So is this true, and how much of a key factor are GMOs in the production or over-production of chemical herbicides and/or pesticides?
First, the horseweed problem. This weed’s growing resistance to glyphosate, the herbicide patented and marketed as Round-up by Monsanto [though its patent ran out in 2000], has been a problem for US agriculturalists for over a decade now. Glyphosate is the most commonly-used herbicide in the USA. It should be pointed out that it was first marketed in the seventies, well before any GMOs came on the market. Round-up Ready soybeans, engineered to be resistant to glyphosate, were not released into the market until 1996. According to this scientific report:
Common to all known cases of glyphosate-resistant horseweed is the frequent use of glyphosate for control of all weeds, little or no use of alternative herbicides that control horseweed, and long-term no-tillage crop production practices
That’s to say, monocultural farming practices and the one silver bullet approach to weed control seem to be the culprits in this resistance problem. The report argues that effective control of horseweed simply involves the adjustment of management strategies. Increased tillage, where possible, is recommended, and for well-established weeds, a three-way mixture of herbicides, including glyphosate, appears to fix the problem. The researchers name the herbicides to use, and the relative quantities. I would be very surprised if they hadn’t taken into account the possibility that such a mixture might harm the crop. The impression I get from this particular report is that we need not get too alarmed.
The use of herbicides will continue to be a feature of agriculture as long as monocultural farming is required to feed the world’s vast population. This type of farming has its problems – as does every other type of farming – but there’s no doubt that it has led to enormous efficiencies in terms of land use and crop yields. Monoculture was a key component of the ‘green revolution’ that began in the sixties and led to an unprecedented rise in crop yields, rescuing millions of people from the prospect of starvation. And the revolution isn’t over yet.
This is the point. The issues of weed resistance, difficult though they sometimes are, are minor by comparison to the benefits of high-yielding, intensively grown crops in effectively feeding our populations – regardless of whether those crops have been genetically modified in the old way through experimental hybridisation, or in the new way by means of gene splicing. Meanwhile we will continue to work on the weed resistance problem, which will no doubt involve a modification of current monocultural practise (among other strategies), rather than its abandonment. The situation is not frightening, it’s an ongoing problem, as it has long been, but it is by no means out of control. We need to be alert but not alarmed, and there continues to be a lot of research devoted to this problem. From what I’ve read, it’s not a losing battle.
GM foods are here to stay, and it seems to me that Australians should be given the choice of consuming them. Currently very little GM food production occurs in Australia, and only a limited amount is imported – mainly soya from the US. All GM food must be labelled as such here, but it’s highly likely that much is slipping through unlabelled, in imported cereals, chocolate and other foodstuffs. Next year marks the twentieth anniversary of the introduction of GM food in the US, the first country of use. Other major producers are Brazil, Argentina, Canada, China and India. As yet no health problems have been definitively associated with GMO consumption.
As to the demonstration the other day, its slogans and frankenfood banners do nothing to provide enlightenment on this issue. It gives the distinct impression that being opposed to the monopolistic practices of Monsanto means being opposed to all GMOs and all GMO research, as well as, bizarrely, to all human experiments! Presumably by chanting against human experiments they’re trying to make a link between Monsanto’s products and the risks to humans who use them, but to me, it’s unlikely that passersby would be able to make that connection – quite apart from the fact that Monsanto no longer has a monopoly on glyphosate. It goes without saying that human trials – of all new pharmaceuticals or medical procedures, etc, are not only vitally important, they’re mandatory, as they should be. Without ‘human experiments’ no new developments would ever get the chance to display a human benefit.
As always, what’s needed here is education and informed debate, not silly slogans.
For an informative account of the current situation with genetically modified food, especially in relation to Australia, check out this fact sheet from Australia’s Chief Scientist. Don’t get angry, get educated.
books and e-books
don’t bother, at least not with the ebook version
Change is the only certainty, and the world of books (made of paper), booksellers and publishers is having this little apothegm rubbed painfully in its face at present, it seems to me, and, as a person who loves books but has always been poor as a church-mouse, I feel rather caught in the middle of all this transition, and pulled more or less equally in the directions of tradition and transformation.
After all, the choice between e-books and the traditional version is a little more fraught than that between CDs (please note – no fucking apostrophe) and MP3 downloads. Books don’t just go back to the days of Gutenberg and Caxton, or the movable type that was used in Korea from at least the thirteenth century. The library of Alexandria, founded well over 2000 years ago by the Ptolemaic dynasty (Ptolemy Soter, the ‘illegitimate’ son of Philip of Macedon, half-brother and general of Alexander the Great, and subsequent ruler of Egypt, was probably its originator) is said to have contained some 500,000 papyrus scrolls, all now lost to history. That’s one advantage of e-books; they render book-burnings obsolete.
So writing on paper, or its antecedents, has a long and proud history, and is now being threatened for the first time in millennia by new technology. So I’ve been feeling this weight of history when ducking into the odd bookshop lately. I’ve been a bookshop-haunter for forty years, and it’s pretty obvious that they’re going through tough times now. As with CDs, makeshift shops full of cheap editions are cropping up here and there, then just as suddenly disappearing when the number of buyers drops off. I was in one the other day, and held in my hand a prettily-packaged volume of Ovid, called The Art of Love, selling for a mere $7. It was apparently an amalgamation of two collections, Amores and Ars Amatoria, and a ridiculous bargain, but even that tiny amount gave me pause. I’d always wanted to explore Ovid’s works on love, because of their influence on Shakespeare, but I’ve been so caught up with reading sciencey stuff lately, almost to the point of addiction, and then it occurred to me that, with my new Kindle, I could probably download all of Ovid’s works for free…
I ended up buying three cheap books, one of them sciencey. The lab rat chronicles: a neuroscientist reveals life lessons from the planet’s most successful mammals comes with a recommendation from Patricia Churchland, no less, and I suspect that such books aren’t available through Kindle, at least not at anything less than $10, the price I paid. Ok I’ve just checked, and it is available, at exactly the same price. The 2 other books I bought were God is not one: the eight rival religions that run the world and why their differences matter, by Stephen Prothero ($10), and How to win a cosmic war: confronting radical religion, by Reza Aslan ($8). Interestingly, the Prothero book isn’t available on Amazon, but the Aslan one is, for $10. So there are still bargains to be had offline. However Amazon is always reducing its prices, as books move from ‘must read-nows’ to ‘has-beens’. That’s happening in the bookstores too, of course, but not at the same rate. Then again, though you’re unlikely to get hold of the complete works of Plato (Benjamin Jowett translation, presumably with his excellent introductions) in a second-hand bookshop for a dollar – the going Amazon price – there are book exchanges (there’s one in the caf around the corner from me) where you can pick up one of an admittedly limited selection of books for free, with the idea that you exchange it for something of your own, honour bound.
So I weigh the pros and cons and ponder the senses of guilt and obligation. The kindle is light and convenient, and easy to read in bed. My eyesight is poor, so I appreciate a backlit screen as opposed to the foxed and mouldering pages of a second-hand text, though I wonder if the light is damaging my eyes even more. On the other hand its caveat emptor with some of these e-books. One of the first ones I bought (okay it was free so I’m not really allowed to complain) was A very brief history of the first crusade, by one Mark Black. Brief it was, more of a pamphlet than a book. I have a copy of Christopher Tyerman’s monumental history of the crusades on my shelves, but I gave up on it a few years back after about 200 pages = too many Count Theobalds and Sir Roberts, too many family connections and names and names and names, I felt as confused as any medieval plebeian might have felt when caught up in the thick of it, but without the concentration of the mind an imminent death would’ve usefully brought on. So I thought this brief history might offer a clearer view, but I was more than disappointed. I suspect everything in it was lifted from Tyerman’s book, so it told me nothing new. What was worse, though, was that the grammar was often hilariously bad. I have a feeling it wasn’t actually edited by a human being. Possibly the text was used as an experimental test case for robotic proofreading. A black mark for Mark Black, whose name, I note, crops up for many of these ‘brief histories’, mostly unrelated to each other. Anyway, an odd experience.
So I’m not entirely convinced of the new reading technology, though the possibilities are obvious, and it’s clearly a mode still in its infancy. Hopefully the two ways of packaging good reading material will live side by side for a while to come, and I look forward to accessing both, long into the future.
fountains 4: what’s a glial cell?
Here’s the transcript for the next podcast, which I won’t be putting online for another week or so, when I can afford to buy space to host podcasts directly from this site. Then I’ll be able to stick all the fountains podcasts in one place, with the new logo created by a friend of mine, Stuart Rose:
What’s a glial cell?
Today, I’m going to make my first, but hopefully not last, foray into neurobiology. And since neurobiology is about the most complicated subject imaginable, I’ve decided to enter it sideways, so to speak, by looking at glial cells, or neuroglia, as they’re sometimes called. Not that this will make it any easier.
Glial cells – ‘glia’ means glue in Greek – perform a whole range of tasks apart from holding neurons together. They also come in many different varieties, and there’s still a lot we don’t know about them. They make up about half the mass of the brain, and they outnumber neurons many times over, making up between 85% and 90% of brain cells.
Considering the great varieties of roles glial cells play in the central nervous system (CNS), the peripheral nervous system (PNS) and in neurogenesis or the development of the brain, it’s hard to start with a summary or overview. They’re generally a lot smaller than neurons, and the glia/neuron ratio varies greatly between species, with the human brain near the top end. Elephants, though, are much higher with 97% glial cells.
Glial cells emerge from the multipotent precursor cells of the neural crest and neural tube. Radial glial cells act as progenitors and also as scaffolding for the growth and migration of neurons in the brain. They play a role in the development and maintenance of synaptic plasticity in the cerebellum. This function of supporting neurons is typical of all glial cells, with some of them having their own quasi-neuronal tasks. In the vertebrate retina, for example, Muller cells or Muller glia have been found, quite recently, to play a role in the formation of synapses. They’ve also been shown, when the retina is damaged, to re differentiate into progenitor cells which can then become photoreceptor cells.
But I’m galloping forward a bit here. The three main types of glial cells in the CNS are the astrocytes, the oligodendrocytes and the microglia, and some of their functions have long been known, though the detail, as well as a growing number of other roles and functions, are only now being focused on, in what some are describing as a revolution in neurobiology. Dr. Douglas Fields, chief of the Nervous System Development & Plasticity Section of the National Institutes of Health in the USA, argues that our understanding of the brain has been overly influenced by what he calls ‘the neuron doctrine’, that’s to say, a relentless focus on the electrical activity of the brain in the form of action potentials between neurons. The fact that glial cells don’t communicate electrically has meant that their role in brain activity has been largely overlooked for the best part of a century, according to Dr Fields. My layman’s perspective suggests to me that, not being electrical, glial cells just aren’t as flashy or sexy as neurons. ‘I sing the body electric’, Walt Whitman memorably wrote, and maybe he wasn’t thinking about neurons, but he definitely wasn’t thinking about glial cells.
So let’s have a look at some of those glial cell types. Astrocytes – so-called because of their star-like shape and projections – perform lots of functions within the CNS, including providing physical support to neurons through the formation of a matrix, cleaning up chemical debris within the brain, and replenishing chemicals within neurons and so keeping them healthy and well-nourished. This clearly requires communication between neurons and glia. Astrocytes also monitor the fluid surrounding neurons and keep it chemically well maintained. They get rid of the flotsam and jetsam through a process called phagocytosis, which involves engulfing the unwanted particles and essentially digesting them, a process performed by dedicated cells throughout the body.
looks like an astrocyte
Astrocytes nourish the neurons by first obtaining glucose from capillaries, then breaking it down into lactate, the first product of glucose metabolism. The lactate is then released into the fluid surrounding the neurons. The neurons take up this lactate and transport it, as an energy source, to their mitochondria. Astrocytes also maintain a store of glycogen from this process, which may be used in times of high neuronal metabolism.
One of the essential functions of oligodendrocytes is myelination. Now I’m sorry for the polysyllabification there, but I’m talking about the production of myelin sheath, the insulating material that protects the axons of the CNS as well as substantially improving their electrical activity. Myelin is white in colour, and accounts for the white colour of the brain. It’s made up of 80% lipid and 20% protein and it increases, many times over, the strength and efficiency of electrical conduction down the axon. The axon is generally the only part of the neuron sheathed in myelin. The oligodendrocytes are able to sheath as many as 40 axons at once in myelin.
Microglia, the smallest of the glial cells, also engage in phagocytosis to clean up debris, but their most important role is immunological. The brain’s main protection against pathogens is the blood-brain barrier, a layer of endothelial cells similar to the types of cells that line blood vessels and internal organs. When somehow pathogens cross the blood-brain barrier or are introduced into the brain directly, microglia, which are ultra-sensitive to chemical imbalances in the brain, and particularly to extra-cellular potassium levels, move swiftly into action. Microglia perform a similar role in the CNS to that of macrophages in the blood system, but are not as easily replaceable as macrophages, due to the blood-brain barrier. However microglia are extremely plastic which allows them to perform a variety of immunological functions at short notice while also maintaining homeostasis in the brain.
Another type of glia, the Schwann cells, provide support to the nerve cells of the peripheral nervous system (PNS). They wrap themselves around axons, as with oligodendrocytes in the CNS, and in so doing produce myelin, though the process of myelin production is substantially different in the PNS, with one cell producing only one segment of myelin. Schwann cells also clean up debris and play a major role in the regrowth of PNS axons. They arrange themselves into cylinders which guide the tendrils of regenerating axons. When a functioning tendril comes into contact with one of these cylinders it will grow inside it a rate of up to 4mm a day.
There are other types of glia, and the glial cells already mentioned have their subsets and their developmental phases, which all play their part in the development and maintenance of the brain and the nervous systems, yet for a long time neurophysiologists considered the ‘white matter’ of the brain – the glia, predominantly – as passive, with the grey neuronal matter being the active component.
With the renewed interest in glia however, experiments are being conducted that show that when you remove or ablate relevant glial cells, it has a profound effect on an animal’s ability to sense its surroundings. This has been shown in worms and other creatures, and it raises many questions as to how glial cells communicate with neurons in facilitating an effective sense of our environment, without which, we wouldn’t last long.
We now know that the activation of calcium ions provides the principal means of chemical communication between neuroglia and neurons. An increase in calcium ions signals the release of what are now being called gliotransmitters, molecules that travel between cells in a manner similar to neurotransmitters. All this communication has a variety of purposes but it’s the immunological role of neuroglia that has researchers really excited. The neuroglia are able to pick up signals between neurons and respond by controlling neuronal activity, inhibiting or stimulating or refining the action potentials between nerve cells. All of this was completely unsuspected until recently. Their role in such diseases as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, Lou Gehrig’s disease, cancer and AIDS, and even such disorders as OCD (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder) are now being uncovered through a lot of experimental work. Communication between astrocytes and microglia and neurons are substantially altered in specific ways in each of these diseases. So important have glia become in contemporary neuro-research that there’s talk of ‘the other brain’ or ‘the glial brain’ as opposed to the neural brain. They of course work in tandem, but the point is that we have a lot of catching up to do in researching glia.
It’s worth noting that, though neurons in invertebrate animals are not substantially different from those in vertebrates, glial cells are far less numerous, in proportion to neurons, in invertebrates, where they don’t have the same myelin-producing role. Investigating the increasingly vital and diverse roles played by glia and how they came to evolve in more complex animals will no doubt be a focus of future research.
fountains 2: dolphins and their brains
Here’s the transcript of my second ‘fountains of good stuff’ podcast, ‘dolphins and their brains’, (linked to above) minus some bits at the beginning and end.
Dolphins have long been considered our cute, smart underwater friends. In fact you might be surprised at how far back such observations go, and at how interested the ancients were in dolphinkind. Aristotle recognised that dolphins weren’t fish, that they couldn’t breathe underwater, that they had lungs and had to return to the surface to breathe just like us. The ancient poet Oppius of Corycus had this to say about them:
Diviner than the dolphin is nothing yet created; for indeed they were aforetime men and lived in cities along with mortals, but by the devising of Dionysus they exchanged the land for the sea and put on the form of fishes.
In these remarks we find the mixing of genuine observation and fascination with mythologising which still persists today. Some modern claims are that dolphins are idyllically happy and playful creatures, that they have a special bond with humans, that they’re at least equivalent in intelligence to us, bearing in mind the vastly different medium they inhabit, and that they have a highly developed language and a social and cultural complexity that we’ve barely begun to tap into.
So how much truth is there to these claims? Well I think we should first look at the grandest of the claims, about dolphin language and culture.
Many of the more hyperbolic claims for a rich dolphin language and culture, as yet beyond the ken of mere humans, were made by John Lilly, a pioneering researcher of the fifties and sixties. Lilly worked with bottle-nosed dolphins, and that is the species I’m referring to, though of course, all thirty or so species of dolphins and porpoises, as well as the forty or more species of whales, tend to be lumped in together as highly communicative and cultured.
Lilly’s attempts to back up his claims about dolphin language didn’t work out so well, however, and his writings on dolphins became increasingly drug-influenced and fantastical. Another researcher in the mid-sixties, Duane Batteau, tried to translate Hawaiian phonemes into the whistle-sounds frequently used by dolphins, using them to convey simple instructions. However, Batteau could only use the sounds as holophrases, that’s to say, instructions with complex elements, such as ‘jump through the hoop I’m holding’. The dolphins couldn’t be taught to recognise individual semantic elements within the complex instruction, such as ‘hoop’, ‘leap’ or ‘five feet high’, which are essential to building up a whole language, at least one that humans would recognise, and using it in a flexible and creative way. The dolphins took some years to learn about a dozen holophrastic sounds, which indicated none of the complexity or nuance of human language.
Since these early researches, little headway has been gained in trying to teach dolphins, or any other species, to understand human language, which is hardly surprising, as they’ve evolved to communicate very differently. Dolphins are very vocal animals, forever sounding off with whistles and clicks that are incomprehensible to most of us, and many of which we’re not even equipped to hear. But is this dolphin language?
Well, early research on dolphin whistles didn’t come up with anything too promising. Individual dolphins produce their own unique whistles, described as ‘signature whistles’, doubtless for the purpose of identifying themselves to others. Interestingly, female dolphins develop signature whistles that are quite different from their mothers’, while male dolphins don’t. This is explained by the fact that male dolphins, after weaning, hang around together in ‘adolescent gangs’ just as male humans do [and quite a few other species too, such as elephants]. Females tend to stick to their mothers, becoming young mothers themselves. They need to be able to differentiate between mothers and children, which is unnecessary for the males.
Dolphins do sometimes mimic the whistles of other dolphins too, particularly those of their closest relatives, but signature whistles as a form of recognition and differentiation, are a long way from anything like language. After all, many species can recognise their own mates or kin from the distinctive sounds they make, or from their specific odour, or from visual cues. However, a clever experiment carried out more recently, which synthesised these whistles through a computer, so that the whistle pattern was divorced from its distinctive sound, found that the dolphins responded to these patterns even when produced via a different sound. It seemed that they were recognising names. It’s undoubtedly intriguing, but clearly a lot more research is required.
Most attempts to elicit information about dolphin language, and dolphin intelligence generally, suffer from a difficulty in imagining a language system completely alien to our own, so that we always try to translate communication into something that might make sense to us. It’s a kind of anthropomorphism problem, which we can probably only overcome by a greater insight into the social life of these creatures and what they might use language for. It will no doubt be a long and painstaking process.
One of the reasons given for the supreme intelligence of the dolphin is its very large brain, and on first thought, it seems a very sound reason. The human brain is considerably larger, both in absolute terms and in terms of brain body ratio, than that of other primates.
In fact the human brain has become so large that we have trouble pushing our babies’ heads through the birth canal, and their skulls at birth are still soft and collapsible in places to facilitate the birth process. In the few months after birth, the baby’s head has to be supported until it becomes used to carrying that great bony weight on its shoulders all by itself. The average dolphin brain is slightly larger than ours, but so is its body, so its brain body ratio averages out at about the same, or a little less than ours.
The real key to human intelligence, however, is the growth of a specific part of the brain, the neocortex. In most mammals, the neocortex takes up between 10 and 30% of the total brain mass. In primates in general, it takes up 50%. For humans, though it has climbed to a very impressive 80%. So big is our neocortex that is has to be folded in on itself to fit inside our heads.
So what about the dolphin neocortex? Well, it was John Lilly, the sixties researcher, who first discovered that it was even bigger than our own, a fact that led him to to the quite understandable conviction that dolphins were, at the very least, our equals, intelligence-wise.
However, size isn’t everything, especially when we compare land mammals with their underwater cousins. Mammals on land all have about the same nerve cell density, that is, the same number of neurons per square centimetre. Aquatic mammals have far less densely packed neurons in their brains. In fact, their brains are only a quarter as densely packed with neurons as land mammals, and that’s a big difference. It seems that, because dolphins have evolved in water and don’t have to contend with gravity the way we do, their brains have been able to spread out over a larger area, without necessarily increasing complexity. Which isn’t to say that the dolphin brain isn’t extremely complex. We’re only at the beginning of understanding a small fraction of it.
Some of this research has highlighted that the neocortex in dolphins, which naturally reflects more recent evolutionary development, is used for very different purposes, such as breathing, which is regulated by more primitive brain processes in land mammals. Hearing in dolphins requires a far larger proportion of grey matter than in humans, and it’s likely that their complex sonar system is regulated by the neocortex.
In recent years it’s been discovered that spindle neurons, previously only found in higher primates, exist in large numbers in many whale and dolphin species. These neurons are associated with the processing of emotions and social interaction. They’re relatively large and allow for high-speed communication and response across the large brains of hominids, so the fact that many cetaceans [the order that whales, dolphins and porpoises belong to] have some three times the number that humans do, is certainly food for thought.
“The discovery of spindle neurons in cetaceans is a stunning example of neuro-anatomical convergence between cetaceans and primates,”
says Lori Marino of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.
“The common ancestor of cetaceans and primates lived over 95 million years ago, and such a highly specific morphological similarity as the finding of spindle cells is clearly due to evolutionary convergence, not shared ancestry,”
she says. The term ‘convergence’ refers to a similarity in adaptive structures and behaviours in unrelated or only distantly related species.
Exactly how these spindle cells function in cetaceans is still unclear, but it’s believed that they’ve been present in these mammals for some thirty million years, compared to 15 to 20 million years in our primate ancestors.
The term ‘intelligence’ is really quite fuzzy, even when we’re applying it only to humans, let alone comparing humans to such vastly different creatures as dolphins, but years of studying the social interactions of cetaceans in general are gradually revealing a world much worth exploring. However, it isn’t necessarily the playful world we associate with the bounding, squealing, apparently perpetually laughing and eagerly performing creatures formerly associated with marinelands the world over.
Some years ago, beginning in 1997, a growing mystery developed when dead porpoises and juvenile dolphins were found washed up on beaches in Scotland and on the other side of the world in Virginia. The animals had suffered massive internal damage, as it turned out, from dolphin attacks. They had literally been beaten to death. A well-known documentary, ‘the Dolphin Murders’, relates the story. Researchers are still unclear as to the motive for these murderous attacks, but they remind us that evolutionary pressures and brutality are just as much a part of life in the oceans as on land, and that even dolphins, who’ve often been reported as saving human lives at sea, can turn themselves into killers.
Dolphin-hugging, metaphorically speaking, has been all the rage in recent decades, but for all its positivity, it risks obscuring what dolphins really are. They’re not always playful and cute, but they’re certainly among the most fascinating creatures on our planet, and the best compliment we can pay them is to try to get to know them a whole lot better.
blogging, truth and getting back to the fountain
Hello, let me take this opportunity to remind people, or to educate people who seem to have little knowledge of these things, about what a blog actually is, and what it can be.
Clearly a blog such as this one reflects the personal views of its author. There are thousands of such blogs of course, of very varying standards, and written for very varying purposes. My own blog has its own variety of purposes, including self-education, the promotion of particular values such as skepticism and critical thinking, and, in an elaborate way, the pleasures of self-development and worldly exploration, a la Montaigne, ‘inventor’ of the essay, who once claimed that he wrote not to discover his thoughts but to invent them – or some such thing.
Sometimes in this blog I may focus on others – their views, their activities or whatever. Those others may not like what I write about them, but that of course would not give them the right to shut me down, any more than, say, a politician would have the right to shut down a blogger who violently disagrees with her policies. Of course, if the politician feels that the blogger has ‘overstepped the mark’, and feels personally abused or offended by the blogger’s remarks, there are various options open to her.
She could, for example, take advantage of the interactive nature of blogging, and leave a critical comment on the blog, thus possibly initiating a conversation with the blogger or, in more popular blogs than mine, with the blogger’s other readers and commentators. This is often a very fruitful exercise, as it helps to clarify opposing positions and to deepen and enrich the debate.
However the politician may feel it beneath her to dignify the blogger with a response – this is often the case with public figures. Of course it may be that the blogger’s writings are so malicious as to be unworthy of attention. Such writings are often self-defeating, and the mainstream blogosphere deals with them by ignoring them, thus relegating them to their own little busy corner of looniness.
However, let’s imagine that the blogger in my example is articulate and knowledgeable, and presents cogent arguments, or tells a plausible story. This, of course, presents a danger to the politician. She can’t easily take legal action against the blogger, even though he is accusing her of corruption, say. In US law, malicious intent would also have to be proven, and it’s likely much the same in Australia. Of course the law, as it relates to blogs and online content generally, is varied, weak and behind-hand throughout the western world. In such a situation the blogger is more protected than otherwise. Virtually any case brought against a blogger would be precedent-setting, and courts tend to be very conservative about that sort of thing. As it happens, the blogosphere is also a pretty powerful force for preserving its own interests and freedoms, and there is currently a website, the electronic frontier foundation, dedicated to developing legal protection for bloggers and online users, and advocating for them. This includes important successes in having bloggers treated as journalists, with all the rights and protections that accrue.
Even if the politician or public figure were to take legal action, the blogger – the actual writer of the offending article(s) – could be the only target of that action. Imagine the case that the blogger is a member of an organisation which he is defending on his blog against forces – individual or organisational – that he believes are maligning or damaging it. Clearly his views are his own, and he’s not representing the organisation in any official capacity (imagine he makes a clear and unequivocal statement about this on his blog). He has taken upon himself sole responsibility for his writings, and any consequences that might derive from them.
Of course, with blogs there are confidentiality and security issues, and this is a messy area, but certainly not an impossible one to negotiate. Some have suggested, for example, that it might be wrong to place on your blog a photo of a public figure you wish to criticise or draw attention to. From a legal perspective, this is untrue. Data-sharing of this kind occurs a million times a day on blogs, web-sites, online news sites and so forth. Occasionally the photo might be under copywrite, in which case you will need to get permission, but otherwise it’s pretty well open slather, especially if the photos are already out in the public sphere. Of course, if you use the photo to vilify someone, or if you distort the image in a malicious way, that may be another matter, but of course this also occurs on a regular basis and the law is generally powerless to do much about it, except perhaps in extreme cases.
It’s a similar situation with the actual naming of a person on a blog. Of course this happens all the time, but people may have legitimate reasons for not wishing to be named. However, unless the person is the subject of in-train legal investigation, with court suppression orders out against his or her name, this is not a legal matter, and the naming of people will be up to the discretion of the blogger. For example, the named person may approach the blogger, perhaps via blog comment or email, and ask for his or her name to be removed, presumably providing reasons for the blogger’s consideration (remember, we’re imagining here a ‘good’ blogger, who is motivated by truth-telling as he sees it, not by malice or spite). The blogger will then have to weigh the ethics of naming v suppression in this case.
It’s inevitable that, if the blogger is telling a story about the organisation he’s defending, and about the characters in that organisation, those characters will be recognised by some readers – even if their names are suppressed – due to their role within the organisation, their activities, their history and so forth. Again this isn’t a legal issue, except in exceptional circumstances. The best way forward here would again be negotiation. Imagine a character in the organisation doesn’t want her or his activities to be written about, not because of having something to hide, but because she or he doesn’t believe the blogger will present a sufficiently accurate or nuanced picture. The blogger may choose to go on in spite of protestations, while welcoming any corrections, by way of comment, to the portrait he offers, either by the person portrayed, or by third parties. Or the blogger may choose to omit all references to the person and his or her activities, thereby presenting only a partial or distorted version of the organisation, the degree of distortion depending on the centrality or otherwise of the omitted person’s role in the organisation.
I’ve focused here on some of the difficulties and the possible negotiations involved when an individual writes about an organisation which many individuals feel an allegiance to or part-ownership of, but there is a much more positive side to this, which is inherent in the interactive nature of the blog – or its potentially interactive nature.
We find this interactivity operating at a high level on the best of blogs. A blogger might, for example, post something on the latest research in integrated information theory [the most prevalent theory of consciousness]. This might attract an opponent of the theory, who leaves a comment on some supposedly dubious aspects of the research. Then one of the people actually involved in the research leaps into the fray, defending it and adding valuable detail. Along comes a veteran of thirty years’ experience in consciousness research, making informed comments to put the research into a broader perspective. And so on and so forth – with along the way commentators sniping about the failings of materialism and the hubris of science, all helping to give a complex account of expert and lay opinion on the subject.
But to return to our imagined, impugned organisation. A blog, properly handled, could be just about the best way to get its story, its honest story, out to the broader public. New media is becoming more powerful as a way of shedding full light on a situation or organisation precisely because of its multi-facetedness and interactivity. The old media usually has its one fixed perspective, and its one basic story to tell, with a beginning middle and end – maybe with a follow-up six months later, if it’s worth the candle. The new media can tell an open-ended, multifarious story, with nuance upon nuance, making it far less cut and dried and far more human. It can also provide a more coherent truth, vouched for many times over, by different tellers with their different angles, yet all converging to create something real, not perfect but human, and thoroughly authentic.
To me, there’s nothing worse, when you’re defending your organisation, than going in the opposite direction and presenting it with a mind-numbing gloss that’s as relevant to the reality as a sales brochure. It will convince nobody, and it insults the intelligence of the reader, who above all, is looking for a measure of truth. Sure, by admitting no errors or imperfections you’ll deny your enemies the chance to attack you further, but you’ll also remove from your potential friends and allies the motivation to support and defend you as real, believable people, doing their level best against a series of bizarre situations and a small set of impossible people, and a system that seems stacked against them.
I’ve written elsewhere against adversarial systems. I prefer co-operation to combativeness. I don’t want to win, I want to arrive at the truth – which in my view is a slippery, changeable thing, but always worth chasing – and to encourage others to arrive at it too, and to value it and respect it. That’s why I write, and why I read and watch and listen.
Having said all that, I feel a bit tired of people and their squabbles right now. My current mood chimes with that of Marcus Aurelius, philosopher and Roman Emperor, when he wrote this – and forgive me for being prétentieux:
In the life of a man, his time is but a moment, his being an incessant flux, his senses a dim rushlight, his body a prey of worms, his soul an unquiet eddy, his fortune dark, and his fame doubtful. In short, all that is of the body is as coursing waters, all that is of the soul as dreams and vapours; life a warfare, a brief sojourning in an alien land; and after repute, oblivion. Where, then, can man find the power to guide and guard his steps? In one thing and one thing alone: the love of knowledge.
So, it’s back to fountains of good stuff!
fountains of good stuff 1: introduction
Here is my first podcast in the new series, which I hope to continue with into the future, having worked out a simple format.
fountains of good stuff 1: introduction
Hi, my name is Stewart Henderson, and this is my introduction to fountains of good stuff, a series which will explore all sorts of things we’re learning about the brain, the galaxy, the past, the laws of nature, the strange behaviour of humans, and anything else that happens to take my fancy and which I think may be of interest to, well, somebody out there. In my fantasy world, I’d love to be constantly immersed in all this good stuff, learning about it, reading about it, talking to clever people about it, picking people’s brains about it, arguing about it, and just generally wallowing about in the stuff. Okay, with a dollop of sex thrown in occasionally. It’s a kind of lifelong learning thing, because you know, you’re never too old to learn, and learning is the best way to keep you young and enthusiastic, and to maintain the plasticity of your brain, apparently.
Now it just so happens that I myself am very very old, so I think it’s most appropriate that I should be presenting this ‘fountain of youth’-type series which I’m hoping will flow on and on and on unto oblivion, you know, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. And I’m hoping you can follow me along the downward spiral. Should be fun, n’est-ce pas?
So what’s the purpose of all this? Well, in my dotage, I’ve become very interested in knowledge, in finding things out, and also thinking about how we know things. Not in a philosophical way, but in a naïve, childlike way – a sense of wonder, often confusion, sometimes excitement, and sometimes skepticism. And maybe, this is philosophy, I don’t know. It seems to me that, as I get older, I become almost panic-stricken about how little I know about anything, as if I’ve wasted my life, or as if haven’t sufficiently explored and exercised this amazing thing I have inside my head.
There’s a funny story told about Pliny the Elder, a great Roman intellectual who had a servant follow him around all day, reading to him from works of natural history, the science of the time, so that when he was in his bath, sitting on the dunny, or at the dinner table, none of his time would be wasted, he’d be absorbing information during every waking hour. How he’d have loved the modern world of podcasting.
Of course, this is based on the notion of the brain as a great big bucket which you can pour contents into until it’s full up and you know everything, but the brain doesn’t work like that, and Pliny would’ve been well aware of that, he would’ve known that memory is unreliable, that we forget more than we retain and so on, but I can certainly sympathise with his hunger for more knowledge, perhaps in the hope that it would all somehow combine together in his mind, and even that his mind would transform it into more than the sum of its parts, like an oven does to the ingredients of a soufflé. Incidently Pliny, Jupiter bless him, was exactly my age when he died, overcome, so it’s said, by the fumes of Vesuvius, on the same day that it buried Pompei under its lava and ash.
Now where was I? Knowledge. I’m no scientist, in fact through most of my life I’ve been an arty-farty bludger type, but I’ve always been impressed, in fact in awe, of the achievements of science, and I’ve certainly always been interested in the questions science seeks to answer. What does it mean to be alive? Why do we sleep for so much of our lives? How did the world we live in come to be? What do we mean by ‘the world’? Is that an obsolete term or does it still have its uses? How is it that my pet cat has the same shape face as a lion, or a tiger? Exactly how is it different, and how the same? Why does my shit smell so bad, though not as bad as that of other people? Why am I so struck by the beauty of women, while noting that beauty’s infinite variety? How long will our species last? Is there life elsewhere in our solar system?
The number of questions is infinite, of course, or potentially so, and some of these questions we already have answers for, though there may turn out to be better answers, and there are some questions we’re close to finding answers for, and some questions that are unanswerable, or badly framed, or not worth worrying about, or too much of a worry. There are questions we can answer in a jiff via Wikipedia, and questions we wonder if anyone has ever asked before.
Whatever the questions, they all have something to do with knowledge, and it seems to me that science can always be let in to lend a hand. I don’t think science is anything mysterious or scary, it’s simply the way to knowledge. At least, the knowledge I’m interested in. Science is whatever generates reliable knowledge about the world. I’ve heard people say that ‘science doesn’t know everything’, as if science was a person, probably male, obsessive and slightly mad. They say this as if they think this science bloke is getting too big for his boots and needs to have a wadge of humble pie stuffed down his throat. But if you just treat science as an attempt to arrive at reliable knowledge, you’ll see how absurd this statement is. People try to arrive at reliable knowledge because they don’t know everything. And I would say that the vast majority of scientists are happy to admit that they don’t know much about anything. That’s what makes it such a challenge and so much fun, that there’s so much to learn and so much to think about. And if you can think of any other approach to knowledge that is of any use at all, please let me know, I’d be fascinated.
I know some philosophers say there’s no such thing as the scientific method, and I agree. There’s nothing you can point to, or write down, or put into a formula, and say, there’s the scientific method. I think of science as using an open-ended set of methodologies, each one more beautiful than the other, for arriving at reliable knowledge. They generally involve a lot of prior knowledge, a fair degree of creativity, and a balance of open-mindedness and skepticism. Now, I think I understand the Darwin-Wallace theory of natural selection. I can’t say that I fully understand Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, but I know enough about it to be pretty sure that the methods Einstein used to arrive at his theory have pretty well nothing in common with the methods of Darwin and Wallace. In fact I’d say that even Darwin and Wallace arrived at much the same theory using different methods, according to their different natures and experience. That’s the beauty and creativity of science, and there’s plenty of that around.
Science is essentially a way of life, and it’s the best diversion from the perils of self-absorption ever devised.
So I want to celebrate science and its achievements from my lay perspective, very much in the spirit of Bill Bryson in his wonderful book ‘A short history of nearly everything,’ and I immediately identify with Bryson when, in the beginning of his book, he recalls a text-book diagram from his school-days, which cut through the Earth’s inner layers, and the text told him that the inner core was made of molten nickel and iron, at a temperature something like the surface of the sun, and he asked himself – how did they know that? And still asks himself, as I do. How do they know that light travels at about 300,000 kms per second? How do they know that Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to us apart from the sun, is 4.24 light years away? How do they know? Well, it’s not really a mystery, and I’m hoping, as maybe old Pliny did, that it’ll all come together in my mind one day. With a bit of work.
I won’t always be talking about scientific knowledge, though, and how we come to know things. I have an interest in history, in biography, and in religion, its psychology, its history, and its claims to knowledge and influence. I’ll be talking about important and fascinating figures in intellectual history, from Hypatia to Antoni van Leeuwenhoek to Harry Hess. I’m doing it for self-education and for communication, so if you hear any of these talks, and think you’ve learned something from them or been stimulated by them to learn more, I hope you’ll recommend them to your friend. And some people, I hear, have more than one.
So that’s my introduction to these fountains of good stuff. I hope it wasn’t too discombobulating, and I’m hoping that one day, if I get rich, or meet someone who’s a techno wizard with a bit of time on their hands, that I’ll be able to add a few bells and maybe even a whistle or two, to make it all sound really cool.
Meanwhile, I hope you tune into my first fully gushing podcast, which will be about dolphins and their brains. See you then.
just touching base
Just to say that I’m currently quite busy, under pressure to come up with good teaching for my Certificate 4 in TESOL, and under pressure to present evidence for my accredited teaching at the community centre I’m attached to, so blogging and my future podcasting projections are taking a back seat for a while, but I’ve been thinking a bit about my lifelong learning project, which I planned to associate with a new blog. I’ve decided that’s a bad idea and I need to keep everything under the umbrella of this blog. I’ve also been thinking that the title ‘lifelong learning’ is a bit naff, and I need a more lively one for the podcast. My current thought is for ‘A fountain of good stuff’, which might attract more young people, and has a kind of casual enthusiasm about it. Such a title might also encourage me to be more casually enthusiastic in my presentation. So, when I get a bit more time, I’ll transfer the lifelong learning stuff I’ve already done, podcasts and transcripts, to this blog, with a bit of enthusiastic tweaking. I’ve done two podcasts, which I’ll re-record, and I’m halfway through writing up a third. When that’s all done I plan to submit them to itunes, and we’ll see what happens.
All this by way of apology…
what is naturopathy?
see what i mean?
Here are a couple of quick definitions of naturopathy, found online, to get us started.
To judge from these, naturopaths put a lot of faith in the body’s capacity to heal itself, with minimal guidance and intervention. Conversely, they put little faith in drugs and ‘medications’, and there is no mention here of the various tools and terms of modern medicine; vaccination, viruses, antibiotics, antigens and the like. It all sounds very gentle and soothing, if a little too much so – not the sort of treatment you would seek for a massive head trauma or a dose of bubonic plague, or one of its modern equivalents. Rather, it’s the sort of treatment that just helps you through the day, when you’ve got a bit of a sniffle, some tummy trouble, the odd twinge, or you’re just a bit down in the dumps. Some particular treatment terms – reflexology, aromatherapy, massage, herbalism – seem designed to make you feel better already. Certainly better than chemo.
You’ll find naturopathy advertised in leaflets and magazines in your local pharmacy. They’re the ones featuring pastel colours and glowing, youthful bodies ready to float off the page, faces smiling blissfully at the sky.
Key terms are: natural, holistic, herbal, balance, toxins, spiritual, healing, and ancient.
So what’s there to criticize? Well, indeed, the body does have a great capacity to heal itself. The key is to understand just how it does so, and to understand its limits. Obviously, a severed limb won’t grow back, but can a cancer-riddled body rid itself of its cancer? Can a type 1 diabetic heal herself of her diabetes? What about schizophrenia? Amoebic meningoencephalitis?
Clearly, naturopathy has its limits. In fact it’s very limited indeed. In rejecting drugs, it largely rejects targeted treatment, and evidence-based approaches to medicine, which isolate the causes of an illness or bodily or brain dysfunction, and seek to understand the mechanism and pathways of dysfunction so that an intervention, in the form of a drug, or vaccine, or change of diet, or surgery, or whatever, can be effected. Instead it tends to rely on arguments from antiquity for the ‘healing powers’ of echinacea, aloe vera, or even garlic, as well as ancient ‘healing systems’ such as ayurvedism and TCM [Traditional Chinese Medicine].
I’m not necessarily denying that some of these treatments might work in some cases, But I’m overwhelmingly interested in how treatments work. And I’m interested in these questions in the context of how our bodies fight infection, how our immune system works, how things are happening on the microbiological and chemical level. I’m certainly not interested in practitioners who ignore as irrelevant and ineffectual the vast amount of insight we’ve gained into this level of function – really the cutting-edge – in the past century or so. If garlic ‘cleanses the body’, as I’ve often heard said, then how does it do that? What aspect of its chemical make-up performs this function [whatever the function of ‘cleansing’ actually means]? What are ‘toxins’? How many of them are there, what’s their chemical structure, and how, precisely, do they interact with the body’s chemistry?
For the most part, naturopaths seem reluctant to even ask these questions, let alone answer them, and in so doing they allow in obviously bogus ‘treatments’ such as homeopathy and iridology. If you’re powerless to explain how treatments actually work, within the context of our vastly improved understanding of how the body works [though of course there’s still plenty to learn], then it seems to me you’re more of a hindrance than a help, especially in serious and life-threatening medical scenarios.
Of course you could say that, outside of these scenarios, naturopathy is relatively harmless, and might do some good. Some herbs will work for you, and rarely will any do you harm. Aromatherapy will lift your spirits, a good massage will relieve some of your tension, etc. None of that, though, is particularly mysterious, it can all be explained in terms of modern knowledge of the body, and none of it will cure you of cancer or the next viral epidemic.
My response to naturopathy is to question and learn. What do we know of the body, its immune system, and how it works? Of course it would take a lifetime to get your head around only a small part of that knowledge, but it would be an enlightening journey. What do we know about particular naturopathic remedies and how they work? Well, seriously, it would take barely half an hour of research to eliminate some of them as worthless. Others would take much longer to research, and again, the journey would be worthwhile, because it would involve connecting claims with evidence, separating facts from myths, and bringing some depth and clarity to overly clouded and often deliberately obfuscating field of practice and belief.
alternative medicine, some introductory reflections
mmm, more snake oil, please
I rarely post about so-called ‘alternative medicine’ as there are so many people more qualified to do so. Steven Novella, David Gorski, Ben Goldacre and Simon Singh immediately spring to mind. I seethe over it a lot, though, particularly as there are people I know who pedal the stuff to other people I know.
Several years ago a person very close to me trotted off to a ‘naturopath’ [who, I’m told, specialized in chiropractic, with a bit of iridology on the side] upon the recommendation of her daughter, a smart and well-informed woman in some areas, but with a strange sort of wilful ignorance with regard to medical science. Now, at that time, though I was sceptical of non-mainstream approaches to healing, I wasn’t particularly informed about them. If I’d been asked what iridology, raiki or homeopathy were, I wouldn’t have been able to answer. In fact my friend’s encounter with this naturopath prompted my first real exploration of an ‘alternative’ treatment. Not that it was a particularly awful encounter. She was told she should give up her favourite tipple, tea. I knew enough about tea to be aware that it’s a notoriously harmless beverage, and I knew enough about naturopaths, and human psychology, to be aware that the most simple trick in their reportoire would be to enquire about their clients’ diet and ask them to cut out or cut down on their most favoured indulgence – whether tea, chocolate, potato chips, scotch whiskey or heroin.
The naturopath came up with a scientific-sounding, chemistry-based explanation as to why the tea was very likely affecting her adversely, naming it as cyclo-something-ate – I can’t recall the term now, and the fact is that tea, like coffee, is an enormously complex beverage, chemically speaking, so there are plenty of chemicals to target as nasties, if you feel so inclined, or if your living depends on it. My friend took the advice seriously, cutting down on tea as much as her passionate relationship with it would allow, and even claiming that the reduction gave her renewed energy, but it wasn’t to last, and today she’s back to her profligate ways, drinking as many as four or five cups a day, with no apparent ill effects.
I’m afraid that I may have had a hand in my friend’s recidivism, too, because, as I said, her encounter prompted a bit of research on my part. The term I focused on was ‘iridology’, and what I came up with was so negative and scathing that I just had to share it with her. I will carry the guilt to my grave.
All of this is by way of an introduction to a series I want to do on alternative medicine, largely in order to educate myself about its various sub-divisions, its claims, and the evidence, if any, supporting them. I’ll have a look at reflexology, aromatherapy, acupuncture and various other approaches [but not homeopathy, which I’ve already dealt with] and of course the list won’t be exhaustive, nor will my treatment of them be as in-depth as what you’ll find in more specialist blogs [many of which I’ll be depending on in my research]. It’s just that I find that I learn more about things by writing about them. It keeps them in my head better.