I often catch a cold, not during a stressor like the end of the semester, but immediately after. So the past couple nights I’ve been drugging myself with antihistamines so I can sleep even with my nose stuffed up or running. Just like Jonah Lehrer says in a whole bunch of different NPR interviews (take your pick), I woke from one of those this morning with a possible solution to a problem I’ve been thinking about for several years now.

As I’ve mentioned before, there are definitely game-theory aspects to the teacher-student relationship. Students try to increase their grade and reduce their workload through negotiation – they ask for extensions, they bitch about their assignments, they haggle for points on exam questions, they threaten legal action, they beg for mercy so they won’t lose their financial aid and have to leave school. Teachers do the same thing, trying to get students to work harder. But game theory is mostly about pairs of people, which is useful in thinking about independent study projects, but not so much in large classrooms. This PLoS paper by Gavrilets et. al, which I mentioned last night in connection with Game of Thrones, offers a way forward, I think. Their affinity matrices offer a way of capturing the “warm demander” classroom dynamics that educators have recognized as maybe the most important factor in effective teaching, but don’t know how to optimize. Heidi Carlone at UNCG gave a really good talk about her qualitative research on this topic back in the fall. This paper could allow for a quantitative approach to the same issue.

It’s important that their affinities can also go negative. That happened to me this semester with my section of our brand-new experimental research class. Every effort I made to get my students to read more outside of class backfired, and they actually became progressively more disengaged as the semester went along, as they formed a coalition to reinforce one another’s self-esteem and make me the enemy (the paper explicitly mentions “outsiders” as strengthening these kinds of alliances). After midterms I had to hit the reset button and start them over with a group project, as their individual projects were going nowhere fast. That disruption did not fix everything, by any means, but it helped. They sort of gelled around the new project and did some useful work in the last few weeks. The upcoming final grade was also a motivator.

It was also interesting that these egalitarian alliances seem to be inherently unstable. That’s OK, since classrooms are by definition temporary.

It’ll take some work to reformulate for a classroom situation. The affinity stuff translates directly, but some of the other parameters I’ll have to think hard about. What’s the relevant analogue of their variable fighting ability, for instance?

***

Also, Peter Dinklage made the cover of The Rolling Stone, followed by a Q&A  with George Martin, where they talk about the strange rationality of GoT.

“If someone tried to tell us we couldn’t lie down as man and woman, we’d shove a spear up his ass.”

Of course that’s a little less dignified and scholarly than Christopher Boehm’s definition, “a hierarchy where the weak dominate the strong,” but it’s much more to the spirit.  The idea is basically that humans have the same alpha-male psychology that chimps have, but because we know how to make weapons (especially missile weapons like rocks and arrows), we can kill off any psychopathic males who take that whole alpha thing too far.

What about the Seven Kingdoms, then?  Not very egalitarian, what with their warring kings, at least one of whom is a total psychopath (”Difficult,” his mother calls him in this episode).  How do they keep getting away with such brutality?  Why don’t the mass of people rise up and throw the bums out, whether it’s Westeros, or Washington, or Wall Street?

One answer (explored here) is competition between groups — basically, my king/dictator may treat me badly, but he’s preventing that other tribe from killing ALL OF US and taking our stuff.  Because the biggest army wins, and we can’t possibly know or trust everyone in the army, we need units and commanders who report to other commanders who report to a king.  In this hypothesis, the king has to be a master manipulator to maintain that fear, like a Tywin Lannister (or a Jamie Dimon; more on that in a day or two).  This is where you get quotes like “religion is the opiate of the masses,” although in that same post Turchin suggests the opposite, that the big organized religions may have started out as attempts to contain the emperors and the pharoahs by transferring their authority to more abstract gods.

Another answer (explored mathematically here), if I understand it right, is that egalitarianism is an emergent network property.  Rather than the best individual fighters winning all the time and becoming alphas or kings, alliances grow like snowflakes on a dust particle, or like a snowball rolling down a hill, as the size of the alliance becomes more important than the fighting ability of any one individual, and eventually everyone just joins the same alliance.  Sort of the opposite of this exchange from the Avengers movie:

Loki: I have an army.

Tony Stark: We have the Hulk.

In this scheme, anything that reduces the differences in fighting ability would promote egalitarianism.  So cheap spears are egalitarian, expensive steel swords and armor (which make a knight more dangerous, and safe from cheap weapons) promote hierarchy, and cheap guns able to penetrate expensive armor would push it back towards egalitarianism, just like the NRA’s many pamphlets and bumper stickers would suggest. Och, lads, the irony! It’s enough to fry the brains of a good orthodox progressive (or a fan of superhero comics like myself).

We see this same dynamic playing out in Qarth, where Dany’s dragons are the game-changing technology.  There are only three in the whole world, and whoever has them can destroy whole castles (like Harrenhall), or whole armies.  And what happens at the Council of Thirteen meeting?  Watch it and see, but I bet you can guess.

I also graduated in the middle of a recession (remember 1992?).  My first job was bussing tables at the UK Faculty Club.  Then I wrangled trailer-park kids for the city of Lexington.  Then I was a tape monkey at LexMark’s data storage facility.  Then I went back to graduate school in neuroscience, and now I teach logic and do an evolution podcast, neither of which I took a lot of classes on.

I guess my point is that we don’t know what the future holds.  These guys may be more right than the professionals.  Do what you like, try to do it well, and the rest will come with time and patience.

If you’re attending A&T or UNC-Greensboro, at the graduate level, you can take this course during Summer Session I.  This link goes into more detail.  If we have space left, I might also consider undergraduates in education.

If you’re a fan of the show, get involved and get credit for it!

I was reading that lawyer’s article on the biology of rape (over 10 years old, but still relevant) where I found an analogy I really, really like. He said that nature, nurture, and behavior are like length, width, and area. Area is defined by both, and it’s pretty stupid to try and separate them or say that one is more important than the other in all cases. It’s perfectly simple to say one is larger than the other in a specific area, but that’s made easy by the fact that length and width have the same units of distance. It’s a bit more complicated when the two variables are measured in different units, or when we don’t know what the units even are. Still a good analogy, though.

***

Here’s another analogy (stay with me while I think this through). There are six baby rabbits running around my neighborhood, playing, chasing one another, mocking our dog from the other side of the fence. They are not wearing collars, so they have never been shocked, and they were only born a few weeks ago, so they can’t possibly remember where the fence was laid last summer. But the dog knows very well where the fence is, and the rabbits know where the dog is. So they behave as though they know where the fence is.

This is a key point within evolutionary psychology. You don’t need to know where the fence is, as long as knowing where the dog is works to keep you safe. A correlate is good enough, as long as it’s a reliable correlate. Most of our emotional responses are correlates of some biological function that we have no direct access to. You don’t need to want children, as long as you want sex, which is reliably correlated with producing children. Nature doesn’t care how the children are produced, as long as they are.

Our legal system, on the other hand, considers intention to be maybe THE most important defining characteristic of a crime. The difference between homicide and manslaughter is premeditation, planning — intention to kill, as opposed to intention to injure, for instance. This focus on intention is for punishment, not for prevention. If you want to prevent rape, you need to think about all of its causal factors.

Before we get started on the heavy stuff, politically incorrect, but funny…

http://lipstickandpolitics.com/2012/04/29/game-of-american-thrones/

***

I had never heard of Idaho’s Frank Church Wilderness Area — larger than Yellowstone, and without roads. Last week’s Nature followed a married couple as they followed wolf-packs around with cameras. The lady has rheumatoid arthritis, where her own immune system becomes too sensitive and begins to attack her joints. The immune system is devilishly complicated, and none of us understands it completely, but it’s interesting that the herbalists at the NC Wild Foods Weekend repeatedly mentioned stinging nettles as a treatment (not a tea or anything — just whacking the swollen joint with the spines), and Pubmed has 14 results for a ‘stinging nettle arthritis’ search.

The line between science and superstition is not as sharp as we like to think it is. Hypnosis has been recognized as a scientific phenomenon for over 150 years, and yet we still don’t understand it, and there’s no standards of certification or licensing. Anybody can be a hypnotist. This guy got credentials for his cat, just to prove the point.

There’s a great exchange in Game of Thrones Ep 15:

Pyromancer: “Take care, my lord.”

Tyrion, holding a glass jar of a translucent green liquid: “I read an old sailor’s proverb: Piss on wildfire, and your cock burns off.”

Pyromancer: “I have not conducted this experiment. It could well be true.”

Some experiments are harder to do than others.

That tension runs through the whole episode – the Red Witch’s shadow-child, the White Walkers, the pyromancers, the Warlocks of Quarth, who drink deadly nightshade “which softens their brains, so that they believe their parlor tricks are actually magic.” That sounds rigid and narrow-minded, given the events the audience has just seen. What’s much clearer in the books is that the environment itself is changing. Magic is simply working better now. Science depends on a principle called unity, that the laws of nature don’t change from one place to another, or from one time to another. That rule doesn’t quite apply in this world as it does in ours.

None of the characters in the show have the audience’s privileged overview. They only know their own pieces. It’s a rare thing to have a hypothesis that ties together so many events that seem so unrelated (the way evolution by natural selection does). In a few weeks I’ll be interviewing Adrian Bejan, who claims to have discovered a fourth law of thermodynamics, one that explains the appearance of design in complex systems. That’s a huge claim, one that sounds almost magical when you first hear it.

***

This week’s episode, on the other hand, was all plot, and weirdly misnamed (“The Old Gods and the New”?). There’s not a lot of religion in this episode, unless you count the rape of the Septas (the nuns accompanying King Joffrey) and Sansa’s ladies-in-waiting in King’s Landing. There was a lot of blood in this episode, a lot of killing. None of it battle, just slaughter.

Our society does not look kindly on hurting women. What other difference is there between the good guys and the bad guys in this episode, really? And what is it about rape? Why is that worse than murder, in the eyes of a liberated writer like Martin (or Benioff)? Quorin Halfhand was perfectly OK with killing Ygritte, as long as it was done quick and clean, and he’s still a good guy, though he wears a black hat.

Rape has a long and contentious history in science. Biologists for a long time have documented rape across many species, but have until recently been reluctant to talk about it in humans. This book by Thornhill & Palmer does so, as do several others in the ten years since it was published, and as an index of how controversial it was at the time, read this piece by the same authors, defending themselves from their critics, naming those critics and even attacking their educations. Them’s fightin’ words in academia.  But now the idea is spreading, as you can read in this article — by a LAWYER, not a scientist.

What if we still had trial by combat, as we’ve seen once already in Game of Thrones, when Bronn first fought for Tyrion Lannister in Season 1? Not just in legal cases (for which the role-playing game Warhammer’s Judicial Champion career was named), but in science? What if we had “Hypothetical Champions,” who were paid to fight in defense of a hypothesis? And we all went along with the outcome? People would like the process of science more, I bet, although probably not the results.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/201204/the-mysterious-case-the-vanishing-genius

The profile emphasizes her personal obsessions with infections and toxins, at the same kind of metaphorical level that herbalists like the ones I met at the NC Wild Foods Weekend are always talking about, but with a scientist’s theoretical rigor.  She appears not to have been much of an experimenter, though — more of a synthesist scholar who throws out hypotheses and lets other people test them.  Like me, but smarter.

I haven’t read any of her papers directly, but I should go back and do that over the summer.  Her work on cancer and allergies might be particularly valuable to some of my onco-colleagues here.  PubMed turns up 5 papers, two of which are freely available:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=profet%20m

Thanks to Robin Smith at NesCent for making me aware of the profile.

Speaking of arms races…

I’ve spent the last two days telling any student who will listen about this piece from Morning Edition, which describes an arms race between colleges, who keep raising their tuition in part to afford . . . scholarships. Not need-based scholarships, but “merit” scholarships, for those very talented students who will eventually make the colleges look good and possibly give money back to the college. So the less talented students are essentially paying more so that more talented students can pay less. They don’t like that (once you explain it to them). Even the ones receiving the scholarships are like “Really?”

But is it purely a case of robbery? This morning, a day later — in a serious case of mixed messages – this other story described new research suggesting that most of the inventions, most of the economic productivity, most of the art, comes from a “sizable minority” of creative elites. In other words, the distribution is not centered around the mean; it’s skewed to the right. There’s a trickle-down argument brewing there somewhere, suggesting that subsidizing those elites is worth it, and this ecologist doesn’t like it.  Read his thoughtful post (with graphs, even!).  Are people who won ten Grammys really that much more talented than people who won one or two?  Or, out of that cohort of very talented people, is it luck who falls into the positive feedback loop?

And, in this clip from The Colbert Report, Jonah Lehrer says that everyone is creative, but our school system squeezes it out of us, echoing the second clip, which compares our educational system to an assembly line, where the idea that there should be an average is artificially enforced. THAT part certainly seems true, and not just on the upper end. It’s also true on the lower end, where professors routinely curve test scores to pass people who have not learned, because making everyone who has not learned repeat the course is not an option, because we’re in competition with other professors, and with other schools.  Here’s a good website on the issue by Stewart Rojstaczer .

There are so many causes contributing to the one effect — performance, however you define it — in complex, interlocking feedback loops that it’s ludicrous to try draw conclusions from a single statistical measure.  This is the greatest value of mathematical modeling.  You have to state exactly what you think all the variables are, what the relationships between them are, and their relative importance.  Genetic determinism (Jensen talks about that in his blog post above) basically says genes cause outcomes.   That’s a bold general statement, and clearly wrong much of the time.  But saying that this phenotype is 60% heritable while this other phenotype is only 20% heritable takes a lot longer to say, and is much less memorable.

How to balance the need for simplicity and the need for complexity is a topic for another day.

Michael Pollan wrote a book called The Omnivore’s Dilemma, about the difficulty a generalist species like us has in balancing the need for calories and vitamins with the need to avoid toxins. A specialist is generally really good at detoxing one prey species, like the garter snakes that eat poisonous salamanders. They’re about the only predator that bothers with salamanders, and this gives them an advantage. They specialize in that particular toxin, and they can handle ridiculous amounts of it – but only that particular toxin. The salamanders keep upping the amounts of that particular toxin in their skins, trying in vain to protect themselves from these specialist snakes, and have become so toxic that they’re basically death for anything that eats them – except that one garter snake species. The snakes, in turn, keep upping their ability to detox that one toxin, so they can eat salamanders that would kill a whole village of humans. This is what you call an arms race. It’s a positive feedback loop, and those loops can generate extreme situations (more on arms races in another context tomorrow).

Plants, who have no other escape behaviors, are masters of chemical warfare. They produce toxins in great diversity and sometimes great amounts. Similar trade-off. The more different ones you produce, the smaller amounts of each one you can afford to make. If you specialize in a particular toxin, you can afford to make a lot of it. This is a general rule, I think. If you find a lot of a particular toxin in a prey species, it probably has a specialist predator driving the expression of that trait.

Humans are generalists in our diet – omnivores, literally meaning “everything eaters.” Piers Anthony, in three of his better non-commercial books (the Of Man and Manta series), used our dietary habits as a metaphor for the way we relate to the universe, for the basis of our entire culture. We eat everything. Biologically, metabolically, we can detox small amounts of lots of different things. Culturally, we use fire (cooking) to break down many more toxins, radically expanding our omnivory. I learned on Sunday that most mushrooms have to be cooked. They aren’t plants, but they share the features of plants that make toxin production a good option – namely, unlike the Mantas, they can’t move to get away.

We also reduce the toxin load of our domestic plants through selection. We breed the ones that taste better. Of course, we create new problems for ourselves, because the sweet tender non-toxic plants that we like are also extremely tempting to insects, deer, and other animals. We remove the plant’s defenses, and then we’re surprised that they are defenseless. Or competitors are our cousins. Nothing should be more obvious, once you have the evolutionary mindset (this shift in the basic, underlying metaphor or model of how things work is also the basis of the medical misadventures I was talking about yesterday).

I didn’t notice anyone keeping a count of how many plant or animal species were in the banquet on Saturday, but there were 16 different salad dishes alone. With 138 people there, we were encouraged to take not more than a teaspoon of each different dish. In a ritual sense, what a perfect expression of the way humans were designed to eat, and what a sad violation of that design that today most humans get most of their calories from only a dozen or so species, farmed in ginormous, fragile, infection-prone monocultures. Culturally, in our everyday lives, we have become specialists, in a way that our metabolism has not prepared us for. Our celebrations are a more accurate expression of what we are designed for than our everyday lives. (Isn’t that a major point of most religions? That we should be living differently than we actually do live?)

And the way we like to eat. “Buffet” is one of my son’s favorite words. And yet, ironically, according to Wayne Silver’s talk a couple weeks ago, we humans (and primates in general) have less than half of the olfactory chemical receptors that other mammals have. So we’re relatively “scent-blind,” compared to other animals, which may actually make us less selective.  If you can’t detect the toxin, you can’t avoid it.  You can imagine the forces pushing towards generalization and specialization, continually fighting against one another, continually negotiating at different levels of organization and different time scales.

http://www.ces.ncsu.edu/depts/hort/consumer/poison/poison.htm

A bacterial infection might take longer, and would involve all the purging symptoms.  (He just threw up the last glass of Gatorade I gave him.)  Doctors used to believe that all illness came from an imbalance in the four bodily fluids, or humours, and since they couldn’t add any, their basic treatment for just about everything was subtracting by bleeding or poisoning people to make them purge out of one orifice or another.

Our current theory of medicine, based on germ theory, basically says that any symptom is bad, and if we don’t know the actual cause, we should at least treat the symptom to reduce the suffering.  In the case of fever that may actually be the wrong thing to do. There’s mounting evidence that fever is an adaptive response to infection.  It’s not a symptom; it’s a defense mechanism. DS Wilson discusses this some in Evolution for Everyone.  He doesn’t discuss the ongoing argument about how it works, which you can read about here.  In one sense, it doesn’t matter whether it’s faster white blood cell division or recruitment of heat-shock proteins; the basic idea is that a low fever is an unpleasant but not unhealthy response to an infection.

Of course, a severe, out-of-control fever can cause seizures and death.  So a severe fever must be treated.  But what’s severe?  My wife wants to treat anything over 99.  Does she have “fever phobia?“  Or is she right?  Should I be more aggressive in treating this fever?  This mini-review says that below 101 (his was 101.7, now down to 101.5), it depends on the symptom, but probably doesn’t matter much.  Treating it definitely improves comfort but may or may not lengthen the course of the disease.

PubMed is maddeningly unhelpful on this issue.  There are 3412 articles on fever, most of which I can’t reach because I’m at home.  I couldn’t beat the mini-review above.  It took me almost 20 minutes to find this short, general, low-jargon review (I love the Aussies), which was focused on a particular drug that’s not available here.  I’m so spoiled by the Internet.  It says only 3% of fevers over the age of 3 are bacterial.  So it’s probably viral, and will probably take care of itself.

At 7:15, with his temp back up to 102.0, I pulled the ripcord and gave him some ibuprofen, which is safer in kids than my own personal favorite, aspirin (Reye’s syndrome) and more effective than my wife’s favorite, acetaminophen.  I’m sitting here typing, not particularly worried or fever-phobic, but thinking back to the Wild Foods Weekend and the never-ending catalog of medical uses for native plants, which had exactly the same emotional flavor.  There’s a search for the perfect thing.

Science is always playing catch-up, always provisional, and people who are stressed want more certainty than science was designed to provide. Evolutionary science in particular celebrates the trade-off, a benefit that is linked to a cost.

Concidentally, the very next article in The Evolution & Medicine Review was about appendicitis, and my next-door neighbor just got home from the hospital about 10 minutes ago.  She had her inflamed appendix removed yesterday.  “Worst pain in my life,” she said.  “Give me labor any day!”

We also saw our first ratings of an individual post.  I haven’t figured where, or even if, the stats are kept on those yet.

Likewise, I have no idea if anyone is actually using the green share button at the bottom of every individual post.

Many thanks to all of you.  I hope you continue to enjoy our little show as much as I enjoy doing it.

I just got back from the NC Wild Foods Weekend, an apparently annual event that I should have known about years ago. It’s a bizarre combination of cookout, swap meet, and workshop on a whole bunch of my personal/professional interests.

http://www.wildfoodadventures.com/northcarolina.html

In the morning we took a “nibble walk,” where we sampled various edible plants and learned to recognize several toxic ones, like the buttercup. It was not a real foraging trip, in the sense that most of the actual food was already gathered.

The afternoon was spent communally preparing the banquet. My son has been talking about hunting lately, so we joined the Meats Group. Then he bailed to go on a nature hike while I spent the afternoon essentially assisting with dissections of a snapping turtle, 3 wood ducks, and a groundhog (the only one where my cat-lab experience really came in handy). If you’ve seen Inside Nature’s Giants (now on PBS!), you know the game is about similarities and differences between evolutionary groups at different timescales. We had a reptile, birds, and a mammal right there on the table together, which was a pretty unique opportunity, in my experience. There were fish and amphibians lying around in other spots, too, just to complete the vertebrate catalogue.  Lots of gory pictures were taken. I’m not sure how many of them will be posted publicly to this site.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/NC-Wild-Foods-Weekend/159788180709235

I did not have a video camera available to capture the pithed, completely brainless snapping turtle’s heart beating, which it did for over an hour, or gyrating its legs in response to spontaneous activity in the central pattern generators in its spinal cord. That was pretty creepy, even to me, and any number of people stopped by the cleaning table, only to move on again quite quickly.

I was impressed again at just how obsessed humans are with passing along our knowledge (if you saw the movie Chimpanzee, last week, as assigned, you know that this is not as unique to humanity as we usually say it is, but humans are much more hard-core about it than chimps are) . It doesn’t much matter what those facts are, under most circumstances, so in a lot of cases it’s hard to see what the survival value of that trait is. In this context it was completely obvious. If you don’t clean meat properly – by spilling the bacterial contents of the intestine onto it, for instance – you risk death. If you eat the wrong plant, you will at least get sick. Mike from Keokuk, Iowa described a horrific bout of explosive diarrhea from eating too many poke plants. The consequences of eating the wrong mushroom are even more dire. For years, Asian immigrants (including a whole Laotian family while I was living in Rochester) have been dying from eating the North American lookalikes of edible Asian fungi. For a species that hunts by sight instead of by smell, those extra tidbits of social information have huge survival value.

There’s probably a personality component to it as well. The foragers seemed to take real pleasure in passing along their accumulated wisdom, and I’ve never seen so many people momentarily whipping out pocket notebooks to take that wisdom down. Not just about wild foods, either. There’s apparently a lot of overlap between the hunters, the wildlife rehabilitators, the farmers, the native plant community, the natural medicine community, and the folk music community. A certain experimental do-it-yourself mentality, along with a willingness to try just about anything once. I would guess that you could give them personality tests, and they would be consistently high on approach-type behaviors.

In any case, I was impressed at the generosity and the consistently positive nature of the feedback these people gave to beginners.  In any hobbyist group, there’s a balance between cooperation and competition, between trying to get new people to join and trying to keep the old group together in the face of age, boredom, and power struggles.  This group was doing better than a lot of other groups I’ve seen.  Maybe it’s because they only meet once or twice a year, and there’s a big party every time?

(The boy did just enough work cutting up frogs’ legs to get his free meal ticket, and spent the rest of the afternoon climbing trees and playing “badminton keepaway,” where the boys would steal the shuttlecock from the girls, and then the girls would chase the boys. Or someone would steal a hat, and again, chasing ensued. Not even going into the evolutionary significance of those behaviors.).

The banquet was fantastic, by the way. For the first time in my life, I tried wild boar, smoked bear, elk sausage, snapping turtle hash, squirrel in violet leaves, acorn bread, cattail-flour biscuits, spicebush tea, persimmon ice cream, and a whole bunch of other stuff I can’t even remember.

http://www.hbo.com/game-of-thrones/index.html#

I had him in mind as I was reading Barbara Oakley’s Evil Genes last summer.  My  interview with her (starting in Episode 19) focused on her newer books, and I never did get to ask all the questions I had about sociopaths.

It’s fun to look down on people from the moral high ground.  But the research shows that many of us will ogre out if we’re put under the right circumstances, and then defend the behavior as perfectly justified.  It’s not just Lannister bannermen with a starving rat in a bucket, or Roose Bolton trying to talk Robb Stark into a good old-fashioned flaying.  It’s our own soldiers (I refuse to call them troops.)

http://www.npr.org/2012/04/18/150903296/panetta-condemns-latest-u-s-troop-photo-scandal

And it doesn’t even take a war.  War just increases the probability.  It can take as little as a baby’s crying.  I will never forget the scene from the book (which was not in the show last night), during Arya’s forced march to Harrenhall, where the quote was something like “One little boy of three would not stop calling for his father, so they smashed his face in with a spiked mace.”  My son was three when I read that, and the image has haunted me ever since.  I don’t know why Martin needed to add the word “spiked.”

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2012/02/06/146470473/quelling-violence-sparked-by-a-babys-cry

Not your own baby, of course.  According to DS Wilson, quoting the book Homicide, by another pair of Wilsons, you’re 40 times more likely to hit someone else’s baby (a stepchild is the most common victim).  But it does happen.  I can remember the temptation, from when my son was small and squalling so hard his face would turn red and he’d lose his breath.  I never did anything violent, but there were definitely moments where I was so tired and so frustrated that I could see how it happens.

Two techniques of hushing children, one of which I never heard of until yesterday, and which only works until about 4 months of age:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2012/04/23/151053367/swaddling-and-shushing-help-soothe-babies-after-vaccinations

and another which we did use, which starts to work after about six months, and which reduced frustrations on all sides:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_sign_language

I will not claim that baby sign made his brain develop faster, but it definitely reduced the amount of time I spent trying to figure out what he wanted.

How is it that we have been having babies for millions of years, and we’re still discovering simple, simple things like this?

We interrupt your regularly scheduled blog post to bring you Brett Silva, in the City Council chambers.

http://www.digtriad.com/news/local/article/225352/327/Council-Resolves-Greensboro-Will-Be-Comic-Book-City-USA

I cannot express the awesomeness of this.  It must speak for itself.  I will say only, “Nice hat, Mr. Exum.”  And nice job.

This is particularly appropriate since Acme is invading a new geekological niche this year — the Greensboro Natural Science Center.

http://www.acmecomics.com/node/2927

I personally intend to be at the store, interviewing mutants for the podcast.

Until then, feel free to occupy yourselves with the NC Science Festival, with which I am not at all involved (That means it’s good!).  Oh, and yeah, I’ll keep posting to the blog.

On a related note, The Philadelphia Science Festival has a new mutation in the the science outreach arms race.  Scientists, historians,  and comedians, united to ridicule EVERYBODY.

http://www.philasciencefestival.org/events/2012/04/life-sex-death-and-food-historical-look-science-drives-us

You can probably guess that I really, really love this idea.  Highlights of last year include medieval robots (Hero of Alexandria, woo hoo!), witch trials, and Social Darwinism, the social engineering approach that ignored cooperation in favor of competition as the only important driver of evolution.  It was a dumb idea then, and it’s still a dumb idea now.  More on that tomorrow.

Tonight’s episode is a good old-fashioned movie review. Here’s the clip that reminded me about the charity aspect of the movie, and convinced me that I needed to do a little promotion on my own, since none of the previews I’ve seen mention that Disney will give money for chimp conservation if you go see the film during opening week.

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-april-16-2012/jane-goodall

It’s only a coincidence that the movie’s big allegory is “superior cooperation beats superior force,” which I’ve been ranting about all week in connection to Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, but it’s a neat coincidence, so I’m going with it.

It’s that time of year. I’m sitting through senior capstone presentations. We have a lot more seniors than we have research labs, so lots of our seniors present a literature review. The first one has (probably accidentally) invented a new word: “rampid,” which I’m assuming is some combination of “rampant” and “rabid.” It would be impressively clever if it were on purpose, but still a great example of linguistic mutation in action.

These undergrad talks are not as much fun as Wayne Silver’s highly interactive review of the senses of smell and taste during our seminar this week, but definitely better than sitting through a faculty meeting. My chair has a tendency to pep-talk the faculty with phrases like: “Love the department! Love it!” Which is not as effective as “Aggie Pride!”  Even “Hail Hydra!” has a lot more cache.

“Avengers Assemble!” is pretty lame, too, and the show I was writing about last night uses it mostly ironically, except during the opening credits:

http://apologiesdemanded.blogspot.com/2010/12/fight-as-one-lyrics-by-guy-erez-david.html

Bad City bottled some lightning there. The feeling that song triggers in me (and lots of other people, apparently, judging by the number of raving ALL CAPS comments and remixes on YouTube) is exactly what Jonathan Haidt was talking about when he described “the hive switch,” the circuit that kicks humans into cooperative flow, the exalted state of being part of something greater than yourself, something you’d be willing to sacrifice your own life for. I can not understand how the producers thought having a voice-over would improve the experience when they rebroadcast the show. Maybe it was too effective, and it scared them a little.

Why does it matter? Because the whole show is about shifting, temporary, provisional alliances – the difficulties inherent in keeping strong personalities focused on the same goals. The only cooperative personalities on the Avengers are Captain America and the Wasp. Iron Man and Ant-Man are scientists, who’d prefer to be in the workshop; Thor and the Black Panther are royalty, used to having their orders followed; and Hawkeye and the Hulk are loners. The group dynamics have to be constantly renegotiated to keep these people together. There’s a lot of argument, but the fights are limited. Nobody dies.

Hydra, AIM, and the Masters of Evil are simpler. There’s a scary leader who rules through greed and/or fear. Named supervillains get to negotiate through relative power, but flunkies who talk back are just eliminated.

SHIELD, as a good-guy military organization, is somewhere in between. Good cop Nick Fury is a much more flexible and manipulative leader than his stand-in, bad cop Maria Hill, who is such a hard-liner she’d be a villain if she weren’t on the “right” side.

That’s not to say there isn’t a LOT of betrayal and suspicion in this show. The most perfect personification of this is the Black Widow, whose whole purpose as a spy/assasin is deep cover and seduction. The image of a spider eating its own mate is particularly appropriate. (They also draw her almost dripping with sex, which is kind of disturbing in a show rated Y-7. Amora the Enchantress is a practically a milkmaid by comparison, almost wholesome.).

But that’s the message. Superior tech doesn’t matter. Superior power doesn’t matter. Superior cooperation always wins. When the Avengers get their cooperative groove on, they’re unstoppable. Which, given the history of warfare, is a debatable point. Tech often proves decisive, because in reality both sides of a war can muster the same level of cooperation — that’s why Al-Quaeda and real-life historical Nazis are scarier than Hydra, despite the giant death’s head robots and Baron Strucker’s vampiric demon hand. Yesterday I said that comics operate on multiple levels. The third and least important level of communication in comics is the scientific, the actual.

Is there a form of communication that could do all three of those things really well? They seem mutually exclusive. I wonder. . .

Some parts of my brain seem to work better when I’m asleep. It’s not unusual for me to wake up with some insight crystallized in an interesting way, not just more complete, but different from the way I’d been thinking about it earlier.

My son has recently taken up my love of superheroes, but mostly in animated form. He cycles through these obsessions, and when he gets like this, he wants to spend every spare minute watching one particular show. A few weeks ago it was anime, particularly Fullmetal Alchemist. Right now it’s the 2010 Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, which borrows a lot of its visual style, its narrative themes,  and its rock-opera sound track from Justice League Unlimited.

I’d been thinking about the show as an exercise in game theory and Jonathan Haidt’s moral dimensions theory. More on that tomorrow, but having fallen asleep after a long day of meetings, I woke up with a whole different understanding of not just that particular series, but of comics in general. As DS Wilson might say, a lot of different facts (bricks) that I already knew assembled themselves into a new house while I was sleeping.

I’ve ranted on here before about the snobbery of some academics towards comics and other elements of popular culture. One of the things they criticize is how the characters never grow, never change the way a character in a novel does (or a really good TV show: Joel Fleischman in Northern Exposure, for instance, one subject of this week’s podcast). This is not entirely true. Comics operate on multiple psychological levels. There’s the narrative level, where a character acts like an individual human, who makes decisions and lives with the consequences of those decisions. Then there’s the Joseph Campbell mythic level, where a character represents a particular psychological trait that is common to a large chunk of humanity, or of a tension between multiple traits. Characters change within the arc of an individual story to satisfy the narrative function. Then they have to be reset to preserve their mythic function.  Coyote never learns to not be a trickster, to settle down and work a 9-to-5.  A person might, but Coyote is not an individual person, or at least not just an individual person.

Comix Example: The Incredible Hulk, one of the most popular comic book characters of all time, and one who drives academics crazy. The Hulk is deceptively simple, a Jekyll/Hyde rage fantasy who has the raw power to smash almost literally whatever frustrates him, and who is easily frustrated. In particular story arcs (which can last for different amounts of time, depending on the whims of the writer and the audience), the Hulk may be stupid or cunning, funny or scary, a victim of prejudice or a monster. In this particular incarnation of the Avengers (which I expect to be reflected in the upcoming movie), the Hulk is cynical and impatient, says little except for sarcastic barbs, craves approval from the Avengers but is defensive about admitting it. In other words, he’s a teenage boy. Over the course of the series, this loner becomes part of a team. That resolves the psychic tension and destroys the character. So in the next series, the next incarnation, he’ll be reset, reshuffled into a slightly different narrative configuration of traits that represent the same general problem of how to channel your rage into the creative destruction of a system that wants to use and control you.

Meanwhile (as they say in the comics). . .

Carl Zimmer was on Fresh Air today after my class let out at 3:15, talking about just how little we know about the roughly 3 pounds of microbes that make up our internal ecosystems.  He suggested thinking of them as a new organ, as important for our health as the heart, or the liver, or the kidney.  Particularly listen to his description of a fecal transplant about 30 minutes in.  I was shocked to hear him say they are 95-99% effective in these cases where antibiotics have screwed up the internal ecosystem.  That sounds much too easy . . .

This is a radically different way of thinking from Industrial Medicine (make drugs as cheaply as possible, and use them as often as possible), but it’s not a new way of thinking.  The British Society for Ecological Medicine has been around for almost 30 years.  The Russians were using bacteriophage viruses to kill their natural prey, bacteria, as a way of treating infections before World War 2.  There’s a review of that literature available here.  Why that cultural practice never took hold here is kind of an evolutionary, ecological question.  They mention several good reasons related to proof.  They don’t mention the idea that  drug companies couldn’t patent living things in the USA at that time, and that the FDA had no rules for regulating the production of living medicine (although they must have had rules for the yeasts and things that bakers and brewers use).  Those other reasons are more like ecosystem effects, really, like the gut bacteria Zimmer described in the interview being able to kick the disease bacteria out fairly easily (99% effective!).  Invading bacteria or invading ideas face the same kinds of coordinated resistance from whatever’s there already.

The idea of the tail wagging the dog (my son is doing homework on idioms this week) is not limited to drug companies being able to set agendas for the medical community.  I follow Zimmer on Twitter, and today he mentioned this post on evolutionary biologist (and Corbin’s academic grandfather) Jerry Coyne’s blog, which is about how writing grants has become the primary job of the college professor.  From the university’s point of view, we are no longer researchers or teachers, but revenue producers. I know it’s true in my case.  The grants section of my CV is longer than the papers section.

When you change the goal of a system, you change the behavior of that system.  When your goal is to produce as many babies as possible (like an oyster), you get lousy parenting.  When your goal is money and not quality, competition will optimize the system for money at the expense of quality.  The unintended result is that the number of papers that have to be retracted (taken back) goes up A LOT.

During that same fascinating Fresh Air conversation with TM Luhrman, based on her book When God Talks Back, she said “God has been all-loving since about 1965,” when the religious marketplace broke open, and people fell away from those angry, judgmental churches they had been attending (like the one I grew up in). That may be true, in Christianity. Buddhists had been speaking that way for a long time — imagining every being in the universe as your mother, for instance (that’s one of their meditations, a lot like the ones TML described, actually). The influx of those traditions into America would have been like invasive species, competitive religious traditions.  Christianity had to adapt or lose out.  Some doubled down, became more exclusive (specialized, in the evo-eco vocabulary).  Others opened up and spawned the megachurches.

Robert Wright talks about other moments of competition-induced change in The Evolution of God. For instance, Jewish traditions did not have a happy afterlife. The Egyptians did have a happy afterlife, ruled over by the murdered and resurrected Osiris. Early Christianity (derived from Judaism) was in competition with lots of other religions, each one trying to spread through the late Roman Empire.  A happy afterlife was a trait that would have increased its fitness (because we like that idea), so with enough time and opportunity for exchange of ideas, a happy Christian afterlife was maybe not inevitable, but highly likely.

So I’m imagining some kind of theodiversity index that would measure the overall breadth of a culture’s beliefs.  Luhrman describes Evangelicals as being pretty diverse.  In biology, we consider diversity to be a good measure of the overall health of an ecosystem.  That’s something that you hear kinda/sorta in discussions of democracy and governance.  Statistics are definitely collected on it, but I’ve never seen anyone go beyond data collection and trends to a real model of how it works, cause and effect wise.  Maybe I’m not reading the right stuff.  If you are, please share the wealth.