Cooking With Solar

Who knew cooking with energy from the sun would be so difficult?

Cooking with rays from the sun- what could be more delightful, or more efficient? The same rays that warm the skin can heat food as well- one merely needs to concentrate the heat a few fold. Well, doing so is remarkably difficult to do in practical terms. Not only do you need to concentrate the sun's heat, but then you have to preserve the heat you collect, without blocking out the light with all that insulation. This can be quite a trick. Thermostatic control? You must be joking- none of the currently sold or proffered DIY projects incorporate such an extravangance. The current state of play is a slightly demented world of youtube videos, fly-by-night companies, and charitable efforts pointed at developing regions. But rest assured, it can be done.

Naturally, the most significant drawback is that the sun doesn't shine all the time, confining solar cooking to mid-day times, and sunny conditions. Several kinds of cookers have been developed, each with individual drawbacks and features. 

• Parabolic stove
• Vacuum tube oven
• Closed box oven
• Open panel oven

First off, the parabolic solution puts the premium on power. While the other cookers are akin to ovens, this one is more like a range / stove. It gets extremely hot and cooks in a hurry. The concentrated light from the sun needs, however, to be constantly tracked and aimed at the pan on the burner. Yet it is an invisible flame, presenting some difficulty. It can burn a finger or blind you in an instant. One company developed a reasonably practical design, complete with glowing video. But then it promptly shut down and disappeared, I assume due to the daunting legal liability implied in selling such an appliance. These cookers remain very much a DIY, and at your own risk, proposition.

A parabolic cooker- adjust often, and use with care!

Second are vacuum tube ovens, which are basically thermos bottles with sun-facing inputs. These have outstanding insulation, so they capture the radiation coming in very effectively, storing it as heat. They can be used in cloudy conditions and maybe in non-mid-day conditions. The downside is that the thermos structure limits capacity for food, and also hides it from view. These also come in water-heating versions, filling a core camping and emergency need.

A vacuum tube style of oven. This one has quite high capacity. The central thermos provides extremely effective insulation, collecting every bit of the insolation.

Third are closed-box ovens, which are perhaps the most widely used form of solar cooking. Given enough insulation and a well-sealed glass top, you can make a reasonably practical oven out of cardboard boxes, wood, or metal, which get up to 350 degrees °F. This is a slow kind of cooker, perhaps more like a crockpot than an oven, taking quite a bit of time to heat up. They are not so sensitive to light direction, so can be left out for lazy afternoon and will still work. This is an amazingly active area of DIY activity, with endless variations. One of the most impressive I have seen is a sleek, low oven build of glass and wood, meant to stay outside full time.

 A commercially made box oven, with glass top and room for one or two pots.

A DIY version of a box oven, with clean lines and very high capacity.

Lastly, a more portable version of a solar oven is an open panel oven, where a set of foldable or collapsable reflective panels surround the pot, without much other structure. These are maximally simple, and aimed at camping and other portable needs. But they need something extra to hold in the heat around the pot, which may be a plastic oven bag, or a pair of glass bowls that go around the black pot inside. When properly protected, set up, and with large enough collectors, these can get to 300 degrees and work well cooking stews, rice, etc. These enjoy a wide variety of DIY efforts and styles as well, and one of the best is offered by a maker in Southern California.

A panel cooker being used on the go. Note the glass bowl holding the central pot.

Those are the current types, each with its pluses and minuses. Once one considers solar cooking, it is natural to want to deploy it to those who really need it- the rural and poor around the world, who have lots of sun, and not many other resources. The scourge of traditional cooking fuels in these areas is particularly alarming, usually being wood, coal, or dung, which lead to deforestation, climate change, land depletion, and copious pollution, both indoor and outdoor. Thus solar cooking becomes another sort of colonial dream foisted on the less fortunate, who have not set up proper infrastructure to pillage the earth and pollute the atmosphere. But the various impracticalities of solar cooking, including inconvenient timing, outdoor location, low capacity, slow speed, unusual, non-local, and fragile materials, have doomed such efforts to marginal effectiveness. Maybe some further leap in the technology, like incorporating a heat storage mechanism (rocks?) might solve some of these problems. It is amazing, really, how convenient the stored /reduced forms of carbon (in biomass and fossil fuels) are for our needs, and how hard they are to replace.

• Shades of WW2: All Russia wants is a little elbow room.
• The gravitational wave observatories are running, and recording the death spirals of black holes.
• The next presidential election could start a civil war.
• Carbon tax, now.
• Good sleep, good life.

Supergroups in Search of Their Roots

The early stages of eukaryotic evolution are proving hard to reconstruct.

There is normal evolution, and then there are great evolutionary transitions. Not to say that the latter don't obey the principles of normal evolution, but they go by so fast, and render so many transitional forms obsolete along the way, that there is little record left of what happened. Among those great transitions are the origin of life itself, the origin of humans, and the origin of eukaryotes. We are slowly piecing together human evolution, from the exceedingly rare fossils of intermediate forms and branch off-shoots. But looking at the current world, we are the lone hominin, having displaced or killed off all competitors and predecessors to stand alone atop the lineage of primates, and over the biosphere generally. Human evolution didn't violate any natural laws, but it seems to have operated under uniquely directional selection, especially for intelligence and social sophistication, which led to a sort of arms race of rapid evolution that laid the groundwork for an exponential rate in the invention of technologies and collective social forms over the last million years.

Similarly, it is clear that however the origin of life started out, it was a very humble affair, with each innovation quickly displacing its progenitors, just as the early cell phones came out in quick succession, until a technological plateau was reached from which further development was / is less obvious. While the origin and success of eukaryotes did not erase the prokaryotic kingdoms from which they sprang, it does seem to have erased the early stages of its own development, to the point that those stages are very hard to reconstruct, especially given the revolutionary and multifarious nature of their innovations.

Eukaryotes differ from prokaryotes in possessing: nuclei and a nuclear membrane with specialized pores; mitochondria descended from a separate bacterial ancestor (and photosynthetic plastids descended from yet other bacterial ancestors in some cases); sex and meiosis; greater size by several orders of magnitude; phagocytosis by amoeboid cells; internal membrane organelles like golgi, peroxisomes, lysosomes, endocytic and exocytic vesicles; cyclins that run the cell cycle; microtubules that participate in the cell cycle, cytoskeleton, and cilia; cilia, as distinct from flagella; an active actin-based cytoskeleton, with novel motor proteins; a greatly elaborated transcriptional apparatus with modular enhancers and novel classes of transcription regulators; histones; mRNA splicing and introns; nucleolus and small nucleolar RNAs; telomeres on linear chromosomes; a significant increment in the size of both ribosomal subunits. Indeed, the closer one looks at the molecular landscape, the more differences accumulate. This was quite simply a quantum leap in cellular organization, which happened sometime between 1.8 and 3 billion years ago. Indeed, eukaryotes are not just the McMansions of the microbial world, but the Downton Abbeys- with dutiful servants and complex and luxurious internal economies that prokaryotic cells couldn't conceive of.

Major lineages of eukaryotes are traced back to their origins in a molecular-based phylogeny. Animals (and fungi!) are in the Opisthokonta, plants in the Chloroplastida. So many groups connect right to the "root" of this tree that there is little way to figure out which came first. Also, the dashed lines indicate uncertainty about those orderings/rootings as well, which leaves a great deal of early eukaryotic evolution obscure. Some abbreviations / links are- CRuMs: collodictyonids (syn. diphylleids) + rigifilida + mantamonas; excavates, hemimastigophora, haptista, TSAR:  telonemids, stramenopiles, alveolates, and rhizaria.

A recent paper recounts the current phylogenetic state of affairs, and a variety of other papers over the last decade delve into the many questions surrounding eukaryotic origins. While molecular phylogenies have improved tremendously with the advent of faster, whole-genome sequencing and the continued collection of obscure single-celled eukaryotes, (aka protists), the latest phylogeny, as shown above, remains inconclusive. The deepest root is both uncertain with regard to its bacterial progenitor, and to which current eukaryotes bear the closest relation. There are occasional fossil kelps, algae, and other biochemical traces back to 2.0 to 2.7 billion years, (though some do not put the origin earlier than 1.8 billion years) but these have not been able to shed any light on the order of events either.

Nevertheless, the field can agree on a few ideas. One is that the assimilation of mitochondria (whether willing or unwilling) is perhaps the dominant event in the sequence. That doesn't mean it was necessarily the first event, but means that it created a variety of conditions that led to a cascade of other consequences and features. The energy mitochondria provided enabled large cell sizes and the accumulation of a whole new household full of junk, like lipids in several new membrane compartments. The genome that they contributed brought in thousands of new genes, including introns. 

Secondly, the loss of cell walls and the adoption of amoeboid carnivory is likely one of the first events in the evolutionary sequence. Shedding the obligatory cell wall that all bacteria have necessitates a cytoskeleton of some kind, and it is also conducive to the engulfment of the proto-mitochondrion. For while complicated co-symbiotic metabolic arguments have been devised to explain why these two cells may have engaged in a long-term mutual relationship long before their ultimate consumation, the most convenient hypothesis for assimilation remains the simplest- that one engulfed the other, in a meal that lasted well over a billion years.

Thirdly, the question of what the progenitor cell was has been refined somewhat. One of the most intriguing findings of the last half-century of biology was the discovery of archaebacteria (also called archaea)- a whole new kingdom of bacteria characterized by their tendency to occupy extreme habitats, their clear separation from bacteria by chemical and genetic criteria, and also their close relationship to eukaryotes, especially what is presumed to be the original host genome. Many proposals have been made, (including that archaea are the original cell, preceding other bacteria), but the best one currently is that archaea split from the rest of bacteria rather late, after which eukaryotes split off from archaea, thus making the latter two sister groups. This explains the many common traits they share, while allowing significant divergence, plus the incorporation of many bacterial features into eukaryotes, either through the original lineage, or by later transfer from the proto-mitochondrion. So here at last is one lineage that survived out of the gradual development of eukaryotes- the archaea, though one wouldn't guess it from looking at them. It took analysis at the molecular level to even know that archaea existed, let alone that they are the last extant eukaryotic sister group.

A comically overstuffed figure from an argument for the late development of archaebacteria out of pre-existing bacteria (prokaryotes), with subsequent split and diversification of eukaryotes out of a proto-archaeal lineage. Many key molecular and physiological characters are mentioned.

Lastly, surveying the various outlying protist lineages for clues about which might hearken back to primitive eukaryotic forms, one research group suggests that the collodictyonids might fit the bill. Being an ancient lineage means that it is lonesome, without a large family of evolutionary development to show diversification and change. It also means that in molecular terms, it is highly distinct, branching deeply from all other groups. Whether that all means that it resembles an ancient / early form of the eukaryotic cell, or went its own way on a unique evolutionary trajectory, is difficult to say. For each trait, (including sequence traits), a phylogenetic analysis is done to figure out whether it is differential- shared with some other lineages but not all- whether those without the trait lost it at some later point, or whether it was gained by a sub-group. After analyzing enough such traits, one can make a statement about the overall picture, and thus the "ancient-ness", of an organism.

Is anything special about collodictyon? Not really. It is predatory, and has four flagella and a feeding groove, which functions as a sort of mouth. It can make pseudopods, has normal microtubule organizing centers for its flagella, and generally all the accoutrements of a eukaryotic cell. It lacks nothing, and thus may be an early branching eukaryote, but is not in any way a transitional form.

An unassuming protist (collodictyon) as possible representative of early eukaryotes. Its cilia are numbered.

At this point, we are left still peering darkly into the past, though obscure living protists and their molecular fossils, trying to figure out what happened when they split from the bacteria and archaea. A tremendous amount happened, but little record survives of the path along the way. That tends to be characteristic of the most momentous evolutionary events, which cause internal and external cataclysms, (including the opening of whole new lifestyles to exploit), that necessitate a rapid dynamic of further adaptation before their descendents achieve a stable and successful state sufficient to ride out the ensuing billion or more years ... before we come on the scene with the ability and interest to contemplate what went before.

• Red regions have three times the death rates from Covid as blue regions. Will that change electoral math?
• Annals of secession, cont.
• Sad spectacle at the court.
• Analysis of how the energy transition might go. Again, a carbon tax would help.

What Would be an Effective Carbon Tax?

Carbon taxes could be effective if they are high enough. None are high enough now.

Look around, and you are struck by the myriad ways we use and waste fossil fuels. Live pigs are shipped by the airplane load from the US to China. Wildfires caused by global warming are fought with tanker airplanes. Plastic shopping bags by the trillion are churned out for single use followed by permanent entombment. Back-country hikers rely on helicopter rescues to get them out of jams. And of course we burn them with abandon for transport, heat, and electricity. Fossil fuels are far too cheap- from merely an efficient use perspective, quite apart from their disastrous role in climate heating, other forms of pollution, and overall sustainability.

The last decade has seen astonishing progress in renewable energy technologies, bringing them to par price with fossil fuels or even cheaper. But this price relationship is misleading, since it only reflects the low-hanging fruit of adding sporadic power to a grid that runs largely on fossil fuels with highly flexible dispatch characteristics. Making progress to a fully renewable and stable grid, and extending this to transportation, industrial processes, and chemicals will take vastly more work, including technologies not yet in hand.

We have such a long way to go to decarbonize.

The most  effective way to do this is to price the vice: price CO2 emissions. A uniform price will reach all the uses of fossil fuels, (I would add biomass as well, which generate CO2 emissions just the same), and harness the same capitalist motivation that has spent decades thoughtlessly expanding their destructive use. Government regulation can do a great deal, and is gradually driving coal to oblivion. But it will not be enough to drive the more complete transition that is needed, especially at the speed required. Climate heating is already rampant and highly destructive. 2040 is a mere 18 years away- nothing in infrastructure terms, and not much more in transport vehicle lifetimes. Natural gas remains the fuel of choice across the electric grid, residential, and industrial applications. Within twenty years, it needs to be demoted to minor status.

So what would be an effective carbon tax? One can take the baseline to be the carbon cap and trade system instituted by California, which ends up as an auction price for carbon emission credits. This is a very light tax with lots of exceptions, which has had a commensurately light effect. The price currently stands at ~$23 per ton of CO2 emitted. This is equivalent to about 22 cents per gallon of gasoline. This is not going to change many people's behavior, obviously. At ten percent or less of the retail price, this scale of tax is not going to drive a transition to electric vehicles. Overall in California, this tax brings in roughly a billion to two billion dollars per year, and is thought to be having a beneficial effect, but only as a fractional part of a much broader portfolio of regulations and policies.

In Sweden, the carbon tax is over $130 per ton. This is more significant, on the order of a dollar per gallon of gasoline. Again, there are so many exceptions, especially for heavy industry, that it touches only forty percent of emissions. Overall, it has caused only an eleven percent reduction in transport carbon emissions. Europeans pay much higher prices for motor fuels to start with, for many reasons beyond the carbon tax, so the relative effect of even such a larger tax is small. Europeans already use gasoline at a rate roughly one fifth that of the US, so are already very thrifty. We can expect in the US to have much greater elasticity to higher fuel prices, assuming a bit of political maturity instead of whining about our god-given right to cheap gasoline. 

At the same time, unless alternative fuels, forms of transport, or social behaviors appear, especially in the truck and other heavy vehicle segments, this kind of tax would still have limited effect and serious economic costs. So the modeler and prognosticator has to wonder where the response to carbon taxes will come from. The pandemic showed that we can telecommute very effectively, thereby saving prodigious amounts of fuel. Tesla has shown the way in electric vehicles- a segment that had previously been brutally decimated by GM in various bait-and-switch schemes. Hybrid technology is edging into in larger cars and transit. It will take a big price signal to switch these markets in a dramatic way. Even doubling the price of gasoline, which in the US would take a carbon tax on the order of $400 or more per ton of CO2 emitted, would only bring our fuel prices to those of Europe, which still drives, has traffic jams, and emits vast amounts of CO2 from the transport sector. Such a tax would bring in about $400 billion per year in the US, easily within the normal taxation and economic capacity of a $20 trillion economy.

Yet now there are replacement technologies, so a carbon tax will, in classic economic fashion, create change, not just disgruntlement and economic pain. It will also bring forth more replacements, while working at every margin to drive conservation. Do we need continued technology investment? Absolutely. Do we need more public policy and infrastructure investments, such as reducing give-aways to the fossil fuel industries, charging them for their many immediate as well as long-term harms, and reconfiguring electrical grids and natural gas grids? Yes. A carbon tax is an accellerant to save the biosphere from incalculable harm. Its revenue can be administered right back to citizens or into the government accounts, displacing other taxes. So its net economic effects could be minimal, even while its effects on economic reconfiguration and conservation would be strong. 

• All laws must be enforced, or what good are they?
• No wonder the internet has gone to the dogs.

Group Selection

Every new form of biological organization becomes a new unit of natural selection

Group selection has been a controversial topic in evolutionary studies. Indeed, the whole matter of where selection operates has been a confusing mess. Richard Dawkins battled his way to fame by arguing that genes were the target of selection, and that we as animal bodies were merely automata driven to unwittingly propagate them by various unconscious means. When considering the unit of selection, one could go even to the individual nucleotide, which is ultimately what is extinguished or propagated by the action of mutation and selection, plying its tiny oar towards the survival of its gene, its genome, its cell, its organism, its society, ... its blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England!

Traditionally, the individual organism has been viewed as the main unit of selection. But can groups, when they form societies like bee hives or human tribes, be objects of selection as well? A paper reviewing the mathematics of evolution and selection makes the crucial distinction between the mechanism underlying heritability of traits, which might be a gene or nucleotide, and the unit of selection, which is the level of biological organization that exhibits traits upon which natural selection acts. The color of our eyes may be a cellular and organ-level trait, based on genes and nucleotides, but the unit of selection remains the individual, since that is where selection- via mate choice, disease, and whatever other ramifications eye color may have- acts directly to promote or inhibit reproduction. Likewise, social traits such as altruism, cooperation, detection and policing of cheaters, etc. may be in large degree be relevant and selected at the individual level, but at least some of their power and selectivity comes in the competition between groups, i.e. group selection.

It should be clear that selection happens at all sorts of levels, indeed at every level where a new form of biological organization emerges. The "unit of selection" is not singular, but manifold, and is defined, not absolutely, but by the level and properties of the trait being considered. We who inhabit multicellular bodies have pretty definitively ended competition / natural selection among the cells that compose us- those cells are not individual units of selection, since they do not persist after we are gone (even in the case of cancer where their replication has gone haywire). The closest might be competition among male sperm cells, which evidently do compete in their final voyage, though not to the extent of taking up arms against each other. Thus generally, our genes are only indirectly targets of selection, in that they generate traits that manifest on the cellular, individual, and indeed group level, with consequent selection at those levels and differential reproduction that change gene frequencies in the future.

This is called multi-level selection. The socio-biologists got into hot water back in the 1970's by asserting that group traits are at least in part biologically based, as are individual psychological traits, and thus that groups must act as units of selection. This did not sit well with the politically correct of the day, who wanted as a matter of principle to believe that humans (and especially subgroups such as ethnicities and races) are all created equal, and that any talk of heritability of traits such as intelligence, aggressiveness, altruism, etc. was, if not wrong, at least socially devisive and certainly damaging to a proper communist / constructivist view of the malleability of the human condition. While constructivist views of our social psychology, relations and conflicts certainly have significant truth, they can be taken too far, such as the arch-feminist idea that male-ness is purely a social construction, and that some counter-programming is all it would take to make a utopian, de-gendered world.

I'll scratch your back ...

But that is all in the past, and not only are social and group traits increasingly recognized as biological and to some degree heritable, but our evolutionary history is unthinkable without a lot of specific socially relevant traits being encoded, evolved, and put to the test in group-group competition, whether via direct competition or just relative success of independent groups without direct interaction. A set of papers made a review of this field and developed a general mathematical treatment of multi-level selection (MLS), postulating that any biological entity or level of organization can be a unit of selection- when traits can be defined pertaining to that level. This is especially relevant to emergent traits that can not be defined at lower levels of organization. 

Alcoholism, for instance, is hard to define at the cellular or single gene level, but can be easily defined at the organismal level. So it is selected at the level, where individuals suffer and die due to its effects and impair the lives of others along the way. While it necessarily has genetic components and heritability, and those genes can be thought of as being selected for or against, they often drag along many other genes, and have complex relations with other genes in the trait's expression, leaving the definition of the trait and its interaction with natural selection at the individual level. The unit of selection is a separate concept from the genetic and developmental processes that generate the trait. In alcoholism, the adult is the unit of selection, consituting a collection of characteristics that develop out of genes and other sources, whose frequencies may change based on that selection. 

"The genetical theory of MLS ... describes the action of group selection in terms of change in a genetical character. As discussed in the previous section, a genetical score may be assigned to any biological entity that contains genes – such as an entire population – and change in this genetical score can be computed, irrespective of how that population is subdivided into groups and individuals, or the biological level of organization at which the corresponding phenotype actually manifests. ... the theory of natural selection is ‘genetical’: this adjective pertains to the medium by which characters are inherited, rather than to the unit of selection itself."

 

It may be that all this is just a matter of convenience and book-keeping, as traits are defined (by us) on a macro basis. A gene's-eye view of the situation would focus on its own gains and losses in the rough and tumble of life. But in that case, we could not speak of alcoholism as a trait, but would have to speak of the gene's eye view of all the pressures it finds itself under, which would range widely over molecular, cellular territories and beyond, and violate our basic conceptions of a trait that is under natural selection. That is why a trait is defined at a particular level of organization where that characteristic becomes manifest, rather than at at gene level. There is no gene for alcoholism, though the trait is composed of / developed out of many heritable elements.

Imagine, in contrast, that alcoholism had no genetic component at all, but was purely random in genetic terms, not even affected by, say, genetic susceptibility to advertising blandishments. Such a trait would be subject to natural selection (i.e. death and other forms debility). But all that selection on the trait would have no effect on the next and future generations, due to its lack of heritability. It would have no genetic implications, by definition. So the unit of selection and trait being selected are separate issues from the genetic elements that might underpin it, particularly the degree or lack thereof of its genetic basis. 

While we are discussing this particular trait, it might be worth noting that in group terms, affinity to alcohol might be considered a positive trait, contributing to group bonding through the ages. Thus alcoholism might be a matter of stabilizing selection, trading off between its individual harms and its group benefits, particularly in the prehistoric setting where alcohol concentrations tended to be low, social controls strong, and alcoholism proper quite hard to develop.

This discussion, based on the paper series, is all based on the Price equation, which apparently underlies the field and is an extremely general statement / definition of natural selection. It contains basically two terms, which provide for a separation between the aspects of biological change derived from natural selection, and all the rest of the sources of change- drift, environmental change, etc. The selection portion it expresses as co-variation between traits in two populations (such as in successive generations) and the success of individuals (or other units of selection) carrying that trait. The whole equation rests on four key terms, none of which are explicitly genetic:

• The unit of selection- the biological organization that exhibits the trait, whether an individual, group, etc.
• The arena of selection- the population of units within which selection and evolution take place.
• The character under selection- the trait at issue, at whatever appropriate level of organization.
• The target of selection- the quantity (fitness) by which the character / trait is either good or bad, thus being selected.

As far as the unit of selection and the trait that pertains to that unit, any level will do, as long as it corresponds with a unit, or trait, that is definable to us and selectable in nature. 

"Between-group selection is directly analogous to standard, individual-level natural selection, but with the group taking on the role of the unit of selection, the group's phenotype acting as the character under selection and group fitness being the target of selection."    

"... by framing selection in its full generality from the outset, Price's equation reveals that kin and group selection are components of natural selection, and we obtain their dynamics by drawing them out of—rather than adding them into—the basic form of Price's equation. Moreover, by showing how the kin selection and group selection viewpoints both emerge from the mathematics of natural selection, Price's equation shows that these are not competing hypotheses for the evolution of social behaviour but simply different ways of conceptualizing the very same evolutionary process—and that a fierce, decades-long debate had been largely over nothing."

"For group selection to overcome selection within groups, less than one successfully reproducing migrant may be exchanged per two populations per population lifetime. ... Indeed, if groups are long lived, successful migrants must be very rare, and within-group inbreeding intense, for group selection to prevail over equally intense within-group selection."

Each level of selection can operate on many different traits, however, some of which may not directly conflict. So leaving aside the direct competition between individual and group interests, there is a rich field of action for group selection. This observation of the great sensistivity of group benefits to the rate of migration, especially for traits that conflict between individual and group benefits, gives us a clue about the origins of tribalism, which makes a practice of accentuating infinitesimal differences (or entirely imaginary ones) and using them to justify xenophobia, war, and genocide. It is a key legacy of evolution, particularly group evolution, and one that we struggle to overcome.

So group selection is perfectly consistent with evolutionary theory, (though some rather testy controversies remain). Does that mean that racism is OK? Do group differences justify tribalism and oppression? Well, our instinct for tribalism is certainly testament to a long evolutionary history of group selection, with its tireless focus on tiny, or even nonexistent, differences. The fact is that among humans, group differences are always swamped by within-group variation. We also do not generally discriminate so harshly against the differently abled and neuro-diverse *within tribes as we do against those we perceive outside them. So the practical and moral basis of discrimination and oppression is very poorly founded. True group selection is also virtually powerless against high migration rates, which we have throughout the modern world in any case. Thus the tribal instinct, which is now so flexibly deployed for nebulous groupings as nation states or sports teams, is totally out of its natural element, were we even inclined to mount some new eugenic project of any nature, whether individual or group.

• What it's like.

Sustainable Economics or Growth Economics?

A transition is needed.

A mantra of Americal economics has, since inception, been growth- growth at all times and at all costs. Times of recession are to be feared and gotten through as quickly as possible. Growth has made us a superpower in all our technological, political, and economic glory. But times are changing, as we widen our horizons to be planetary stewards and look increasingly to a future that extends out centuries and millennia, and whose foundation requires, therefore, sustainability. It is clear that we have to look at growth differently.

Economic growth comes from both population growth and growth in productivity / technology / efficiency. How do these relate and are both necessary? Aside from specific contractual problems such as those of Medicare and Social Security in a stable or declining population world, is economic vitality dependent on population growth? I think only slightly. We continue to need economic growth that comes from technological advancement and operational efficiency. The former is highly dependent on research institutions largely staffed by apprentice researchers, and generally on a supply of well-educated young people at their creative and energetic peak. Employers also value the malleable and cheap labor of the young over the grumpy labor of the old. But efficiency gains come from experienced older people as well, with accumulated technological and organizational knowledge, and better people skills. 

The US has been used to population growth, and many think that a lack of population growth would represent demographic, even economic, catastrophe. The Social Security system is one example of a generational transfer system which at inception relied on short life-spans to control expenses, but now relies on an ever-growing population of workers to fund the ever-lengthening retirements of our now much-healthier population. Likewise, low wage sectors such as agriculture rely on a mostly illegal population of mostly young workers from Latin American countries. How would our most essential industries operate without them? 

One can sense a sea change in our culture, however. A century ago, immigrants were welcomed (with racist caveats). Now, they are not so welcome. A half-century ago, infrastructure went up in profusion to build out suburbs, freeways, airports, universities, and all the other periphernalia of an optimistic new technological and political age. Now it is crumbling, most suburbs fight against growth, and as a result, housing prices indicate that we are collectively unwilling to accommodate more population in this most concrete of ways. 

The US population is an historical story of growth, but is leveling off.

So whether we want it to or not, population growth is leveling off and we are approaching a more stable demographic structure, in economic and other terms. This has been an unconscious, subjective response of the population at large to various hedges to growth and optimism. One can see it in the newly embittered politics, which seem more zero-sum instead of seeking growth for all. One can see it in the attitude of the elites who think nothing of grabbing all they can, and then taking some more, without a thought for the future of the collective culture or the downtrodden and "essential" workers who make it all go. One can see it in the increasingly dystopian futures shown by Hollywood. And one can see it in the degradation of resources, as forests burn up, aquifers dry out, fisheries are fished out, and the air itself turns toxic. On an economic level, key resources are ever-harder to come by, and clearly are not sustainable systems. I have been reading a book profiling the Anaconda mining company, which dug completely through the legendary copper deposits of Butte Montana in under a century, ending in the 1980s and leaving an enormous superfund site featuring a tourist overlook. The same story happens in lumber, fisheries, aquifers, soil health, phosphate and nitrogen pollution / misuse, and many other resources. It is inevitable, for instance, that the landfills of today will be the mines of tomorrow.

So, we can sense that our way of life is reaching a stopping point. Objectively, we are living far beyond the Earth's carrying capacity even at current population. The issues go far beyond the urgent need to stop CO2 emissions to the atmosphere, to the whole array of resources we use. Humanity has experienced several resource crunches before, such as hunting out the megafauna of the Americas by the First Peoples, and various island colonizations that ended in degradation, extinction, and depopulation. We don't want to go there.

Economics holds forth the hope of growth and adaptation even in the midst of static or declining population, resource constraints and degradation. We can mine minerals from the sea floor, or on the moon! Well, this is not looking at the problem realistically, let alone sustainably. A sustainable system will recycle all metals, draw energy solely from clean sources, and insulate the biosphere from our wastes- solid, chemical, and gaseous. Where growth economics prices only human resource acquisition and drives organizations to offload waste and degradation as "free", sustainable economics prices in all the externalities that affect the future ability of the Earth to support us. 

Capitalism is, needless to say, not situated to do this, by its nature and design. Sustainable economics needs the state and other communal organizations to set the prices and rules within which capitalist organizations can operate, for the safety of the biosphere not to mention our own future. While regulation for various public goods is not a new paradigm, regulation for a thoroughly sustainable Earth system would be. We are far from that currently, even in the most progressive precincts. That is one reason why the strength of political systems is so important now. Frustratingly, they are going in the opposite direction, under precisely the ecological and other growth-stunting stresses that cry out for communal and forward-thinking solutions.

• Al Gore
• What the?!
• And what the?!
• A rather jaundiced view of the US, from Korea.
• Secession is back on the table, apparently.
• Sleep is great!

Genetics and Non-Genetics of Temperament

Some fish are shy, some honeybees are outgoing. What makes individuals out of a uniform genetic background?

Do flies have personalities? Apparently so. Drosophila have a long and storied history as perhaps the greatest model organism for genetic research. They have brains, intricate development, complex bodies and behaviors, but also rapid generation time, relatively easy handling, and mass rearing. A new paper describes a quest to define their personalities- behavioral traits that vary despite a uniform genetic background. Personality is a trait that may be genetically influenced, but may just as well have environmental or sporadic causes (that is, not determined by outside factors). Importantly, this kind of trait tends to recur in a population, indicating that while it may not be determined, it follows certain canalized pathways in development, which might themselves be amenable to genetic investigation. Human personality studies have a long history, with various systems trying to make sense of the typical forms and range of variation.

A recent paper did a massive screen of uniformly inbred flies for personality variations. Computerization and automation have revolutionized the animal screening field, as it has so many others, so now flies can be indivually put through a battery of tests with minimal effort to humans, looking for their individual responses to light, to maze choices, spontaneous activity, circadian preferences, sensitivity to odors, etc. These tests were compiled for hundreds of genetically identical flies from birth to death, followed by sequencing of their mRNA expression to see which genes were active. Another batch of more diverse wild-type flies were tested as well to compare what variable genetic influences might be afoot.

Firstly, the differences they observed in these flies were stable over time. They represent true "types" of behavior, despite the lack of genetic input. Secondly, they are limited in landscape. Those flies more active in one test tend to be more active in other tests as well. So the variations in behavior seem to flow from deep-seated categorical types that follow typical patterns within fly development. Which tests should yield correlated scores, and which other ones are more orthogonal, is a little hard to figure out and a matter of subjective taste, so these conclusions about wide-spread correlations in disparate behaviors reflecting personality types is based largely on these researchers knowing their flies on a pretty intimate basis.

A matrix of videos of flies just strolling along, captured by these researchers. Not all flies walk the same way.

For example, they emphasize correlations where they would not have expected them- between, say light sensitivity and overall activity- and non-correlations where they would have expected correlation- say between activity measures of maze walking and free activity. The main observation is that there were a lot of variations among these identical-twin flies. So, just as identical humans can have different personalities, sensitivities, and outlooks, so can flies. 

Is there anything one can say about this genetically? The behavioral variations were themselves not genetically based, but rather due to alternate paths taken down developmental pathways, via either sporadic or experience-based differences. The flies were raised in the same homes, so to speak, but as we know from humans, however similar things may seem on the outside, the individual subjective experience can be very different. At any rate, the developmental pathways leading to the variations are themselves genetically determined, so this exercise was really about learning about how they work, and what range of variation they support/allow.

This analysis of course boils down to how informative the behavioral traits are that the researchers are testing. And obviously, they were not very informative- how does one connect a propensity to turn left when going down a maze with some developmental process? These researchers threw a bunch of statistics at their data, including from the gene expression analysis performed in the sacrificed flies after their mortal trials were over. For instance, among known molecular pathways, metabolic pathway gene expression correlated with activity assays of behavior- not a big surprise. Expression of photo-transduction related genes also correlated with response to light. The biggest correlation was between oxidative phosphorylation gene expression (i.e. mitochondrial activity) with their various activity measurements, which were, after all, the essence of all their assays. In humans, some people are just high-energy, which informs everything they do.

"We found that in all cases, behavioral variation has high dimensionality, that is, many independent axes of variation."

In the end, they conclude that, yes, flies of identical genetic background grow up to have distinct behavioral profiles, or one can say, personalities. Many of these behavioral profiles or traits are independent of each other, indicating several, or even numerous, axes of development where such differences can arise. The researchers estimate 27 dimensions of trait variability, in fact, just from this smattering of tests. But others vary together, forming a sort of personality type, though the choice of assays was obviously very influential in these cross-correlations. These results give a very rough start to the project of figuring out where animal development is less than fully determined, and can thus give rise to the non-genetic variation that provides rich fodder for environmental and social adaptation / specialization. While genes are not directly responsible for this variation, they are responsible for the available range, and thus set the parameters of possible adaptation.

It is sadly typical that these researchers disposed of about 1/3 of their flies at the outset of the study for being insufficiently active. While they are surely correct that these flies would continue to be less active through the rest of the assays, thus giving less data to their automated tests, they did not ask themselves why some flies might choose to think before they leap - so to speak. Were they genetically defective? The flies were identical to a matter of a handful of single nucleotide variations. If inbreeding was a problem, all the flies would have been equally affected. So it is likely that one of the most significant personality traits was summarily excluded out of raw institutionalized bias against the more introverted fly, conveniently veiled by claims of technical limitations. Hey hey, ho ho!

• Yes, they have a brain.
• Technical talk on SARS COV2 evolution, which has been, obviously, rapid and devastating.
• And a story about its endemic fate as a regular cold virus among us.
• Manchin isn't a slouch in the corruption department either.
• We need a lot more electricity.
• The price of fish.
• If you thing facebook is bad here, it is worse for other countries.
• I was thinking about oculus. But now, maybe not.
• A little bit of wonderfulness from the Muppets.

Remembrance of Climates Past

As the climate heats up, we are heading back in time, very rapidly.

Climate change is the challenge of our times and of our planet. However attractive it is to not care, to ignore it, to hide in traditional ways of thinking, to let inertia have its way, inexorable change getting worse by the year. The American way of life can not go on, and will not go on as before. This year has been a remarkable demonstration of the range of catastrophe, from melting Arctic villages to Pacific Northwest heat waves, California wildfires, record draught on the Colorado river, hurricanes running out of letters, and catastrophic floods in Europe. Migration crises around the world point to another implication- that as the global South becomes unlivable, increasing hordes of people will be knocking on the borders of the Northern countries, who have authored the mess.

To get some perspective on the change, we can look backwards into the geological record to see where we are going, and how fast. Earth has had a very diverse climatic history, from its beginning in a Venus-like cloud of high CO2 and no oxygen, to "snowball earth" freezes, to torrid warm periods extending to the poles. Over the last few billion years, earth's climate has had a fundamentally, if slowly, self-correcting mechanism based on CO2 production and consumption. CO2, needless to say at this point, is the main variable in our atmosphere's tendency to retain or give up solar heat. Volcanoes liberate CO2 from geologic and organic buried carbon. Organic carbon can also be liberated by fires and decomposition of organic carbon, including exposed coal, methane, and oil deposits. On the other hand, the biosphere fixes and buries carbon, and on an even more vast scale the weathering of exposed rocks drives the formation of carbonate minerals that lock up atmospheric CO2. When conditions are warm, weathering of rocks accelerates, as can organic fixation and burial, drawing down CO2. When conditions are cold, ice sheets cover the land and inhibit both organic fixation and rock weathering, allowing CO2 to build up in the atmosphere.

These cycles mean that over a scale of millions of years, earth does not get caught irretrievably (as Venus has) in an inhospitable climate. Instead, our recent ice ages ebbed and flowed, back and forth as the CO2 balance in the atmosphere responded fitfully to geologic conditions. The dramatic snowball periods, which occurred just before the Cambrian period, came to an end even though the earth-wide snow cover dramatically reduced solar absorbance. But it also reduced weathering and organic fixation of CO2, so eventually, CO2 built up to the very high levels needed to overcome the snowball effect and the climate snapped back to very warm conditions.

A key point in all of this is that climate change over earth's history has been driven geologically, and thus has been slow. Slowness has critical effects in allowing the biosphere to adapt. The typical driver is a new spate of volcanic eruptions, which release lots of CO2. This takes thousands of years to happen, so while this can be fast in geologic terms (a prime example is the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum, which took maybe 20,000 years to drive the climate from very warm to quite torrid, roughly 55 million years ago). However, the homeostatic mechanisms kicked in, and this torrid phase only lasted  a couple of hundred thousand years. Another example has been the slow uplift of the Tibetan plateau, which exposed a great deal of rock to weathering, thus drawing down atmospheric CO2. This is thought to have driven the cooler temperatures and glaciations of the last few million years.

A notorious exception is the K-T boundary extinction, where an asteroid hit the earth and changed the climate overnight. And life suffered correspondingly, with all the dinosaurs wiped out. (Well, all except for birds). Whatever was not pre-adapted somehow for this instant crisis failed to make it through. The stress this put on the biosphere is obvious, catastrophic, took many millions of years to recover from, and changed the trajectory of evolution dramatically.

An extremely rich graph of the last 70 million years of earth's climate, from a recent benchmark paper. Temperatures are shown on top right, while the isotopic findings that undergird them are shown on top left (temperature proxy based on oxygen isotopes) and bottom left (carbon concentration proxy based on carbon isotopes). The overall trend is correlation between the two, with CO2 the primary driver of higher temperature, and subject to swings for various geologic and biological reasons. Temperature is also affected secondarily by orbital mechanics and other factors. Even the Eocene high temperatures were driven by CO2, though the correlation is not so clear here.

What does all this mean for our current trajectory? The graph above helpfully supplies the current IPCC scenarios of temperature change, under stringent, medium, and business as usual scenarios. The temperature today (green) is already equivalent to conditions of about five million years ago. So in time machine terms, we have travelled, in the span of a century, five million years of climate history, to before the recent ice ages. We are already beyond the stringent scenario, obviously, so the only possible futures we have to look forward to are the medium and no-action scenarios, which, within the next fifty to one hundred years, will put us, in time machine terms, fourteen and forty million years into the past, respectively. And what of the century after that? CO2 stays in the atmosphere for many thousands of years, so not only do we have to reduce emissions now, we will have to remove those that have already happened. Climate stewardship will be humanity's job whether we like it or not.

The biosphere can not cope with this rate of change. While we often think in narcissistic terms of how humans will suffer, we are the lucky ones, being the most adaptable creatures ever devised by evolution. Our problems are nothing compared to the rest of the biosphere. The ability of animals to migrate or shift their ranges is highly strained by the availability of the rest of their essential networks, mostly based on plants at the base of the ecological network. And plants are not going to have the ability to migrate at these speeds and generate new ecosytems in more northerly areas. To us, the speed of climate change is slow, barely discernible on a lifetime scale. But in earth history terms, it is blindingly fast, just a blip over an asteroid impact, and far faster than normal ecosystem dynamics, let alone evolution, can cope with. Uncounted species are falling by the wayside, victims of another great extinction in earth history in this, the anthropocene geological epoch.

Time machines are exciting tropes of science fiction, allowing amazing journeys and byzantine plot twists. But usually, the outcome is not good, since changing the time line has unpredictable and sometimes catastrophic effects. Typically, a ruse is employed to extricate the heroes from the twisted plot, and everyone sighs with relief at the end when the normal time line is restored. Our climate path is not heading for such a happy ending. We are gambling, now consciously and willfully, with not only our own civilizational existence, but with the progressive and rapid degradation of the entire biosphere, on this warp-speed trip into the geological past.

• Trendy Democrat turns to the dark side, leaves climate action in tatters.
• Capitalism is ultimately at fault, channeling our greediest instincts and empowering the greediest people.
• If we are serious, we would have a substantial carbon tax, and one thing that would kill would be crypto.
• Bill Mitchell on Marxism and melioration.
• The Balkanized streaming and video landscape.
• Origins of the horses and domestication.

The Power of Friendship

How do you build nations without friends? Why even try?

The US has been the world policeman and hegemon for seventy years and counting, and our run is reaching its end, for both domestic reasons of political & intellectual breakdown, and foreign competition by China and the rise of authoritarian power globally. We have helped keep the peace in Europe, and have had stunning successes fostering prosperity and freedom in places such as South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan. We have had generally friendly relations with all developed nations and with many developing nations, especially those of Eastern Europe. But we have had rather sour relations with post-colonial nations like those of the Islamic world, South America, and Africa. The US inherited the mind-set, and sometimes more concrete policies and roles from the former colonial powers, failed to break from that past, and made frequent and disastrous errors in those parts of the world. Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan each fit into this mold and stand as horrible failures of nation-building. (Incidentally, we had a foretaste of this imperial dilemma in the Philippines, among other formerly Spanish possessions.)

George Washington as Roman emperor, US Capitol.

For the fact is that we are not Rome. For all our early emulation of Rome- the place names, the Senate, the heroic busts and portraits- our hearts are not into imperialism. The US hegemony has been built on cooperation, not on tyranny. Rome devastated those who rebelled, leaving traumatic scars in, for example, Christian and Jewish cultures that smart to this day. While some in our military may have the stomach for harsh oppression, (see the Iraq occupation), most do not, and far less so in the broader society. So when we invade a country like, say, Afghanistan, we are not pursuing a scorched earth policy, except inadvertantly by way of our technological and intelligence blundering. Instead, we were looking for hearts and minds, for nation-building, and for prosperous development. We are looking for allies.

But security comes first. Even a relatively small militant minority, tolerated by a sullen majority, can make an occupation into hell for the US and everyone else. (Or a cross-border insurgency such as the Viet Cong, or the Taliban from Pakistan.) We have been faced with impossible choices- either fully invade and ravage the occupied country to bring it to heal, or muddle along through civil war, corruption, bad allies, and ultimately, defeat. It seems, at a very far remove, that the missing ingredient in these failures, beyond lack of cultural understanding and foresight, has been sufficiently large friendly coalitions with which to work. If one thinks back to the occupations of Europe after world war 2, the Soviets were willing to tyrannize the Eastern European countries, which was effective, and harsh. The Western countries were given much more lenient treatment, with cooperative administrations that had broad support from populations that were, even in belligerant Germany, sick of war and sick of the shattered and psychopathic dreams of the Nazis, not to mention tempered by the fate of their brethren across the iron curtain. 

The lesson ultimately is that we can not consider invading or occupying countries where we do not already have a large coalition of political support (or for some reason have dropped nuclear bombs on them). While Germany and Japan were sufficiently cowed by their military defeats to accept and capitalize on sympathetic occupying administrations, the situation in countries like Iraq has been fundamentally different. Iraq may have had a large latent desire to be rid of their ruler. But the US invasion was clearly unjust, not due to significant belligerance on Iraq's part, and devolved into a culturally tone-deaf dis-establishment of their government with no serious provision for a new one. Our friends were clowns like Ahmed Chalabi, and we failed to realize that Hussein was not just a rogue dictator, but the representative of large tribal interests and a fair proportion of Iraqi society. In the end, not even the Shia fully supported the US occupation, so the dysfunctions of friendless and weak governance turned into civil war. So, far from being saviors, we became agents of chaos. It is a template of what to avoid in the future- invasions that assume any outpouring of political support that is not already present.

This points to a larger theme in US foreign policy, which is that we need friends. Occupations of other countries will not work on our terms without a friendly attitude from most of the population. But our foreign policy more broadly will also not work without friends. The last adminstration did incalculable damage by futilely toadying to our enemies and alienating friends. But true power for the US accrues from having positive and deep friendships all over the world which lead to coalitions of partners with sympathetic understanding and common interests. The battle with China will take place mostly on the level, not of aircraft carriers and standing armies, but of soft power- cultivating friendships that stand up to bullying and authoritarianism. 

China is taking its own soft-power initiatives with its belt-and-road push to aid developing nations. This is the major competition we face, to show that the US is a functional democracy internally and externally, capable of leading the community of developed and democratic nations against a rising tide of authoritarianism. An authoritarianism which has understandable attractions to developing nations with unstable political systems and poor economic performance- which is often directly attributable to the unfair resource extraction and other imperial or quasi-imperial trade practices of the dominant capitalist powers. So, can we foster better development in small countries without forcing first world-driven rules of governance and trade? Can we be a positive influence against the scourges of drugs and corruption? Can we fund a fair share of vaccine distribution to underdeveloped countries? Can we set an example in the fight against climate change and aid other countries to do their share? We must find better and more generous ways to truly aid less developed countries and grow our coalition so that bullies do not win the game of global hegemony.

• Trends in US solar production.
• The next war? China will win it.
• And then keep burning coal.
• All that streaming comes from somewhere- and pays someone.

Alzheimer's: Wnt or Lose

A molecular exploration of the causes of Alzheimer's disease.

What causes Alzheimer's disease remains a bit of a mystery, as there is no simple and single molecular explanation, as there is with, say, Huntington's disease, which is caused by a single gene defect. There is one leading candidate, however, which is the amyloid protein, one of the accumulated molecular signatures of the disease in post-mortem brains. Some genetic forms of Alzheimer's start with defects in the gene that encodes this protein, APP (amyloid precursor protein). And a protease processing system that cleaves out the toxic amyloid beta protein from the much larger original APP protein is also closely involved with Alzheimer risk. So while there are many other genetic risk factors and possible causes relating to the APP and other systems, this seems to be the dominant causal element in Alzheimer's disease.

The naming of this protein is rather backwards, focusing on the pathological roles of defective forms, rather than on what the normal protein does. But we don't really know what that normal function is yet, so have had little choice. A recent paper described one new function for the normal APP protein, which is as a receptor for a family of proteins called WNT (for wingless integration site, an obscure derivation combining findings from fly and mouse genetics). APP had long been known to interact with WNT functions, and a reduction of WNT signaling is one of the pathologic (and possibly pathogenic) hallmarks of Alzheimer's, but this seems to be the first time it has been tabbed as a direct receptor for WNT.

What is WNT? These proteins track back to the dawn of multicelled animals, where they first appear in order to orchestrate the migration and communication of cells of the blastopore. This is the invagination that performs the transition (gastrulation) from an egg-derived ball of cells to the sheets of what will become the endoderm and mesoderm on the inside, and the ectoderm on the outside. The endoderm becomes the gut and respiratory organs, the mesoderm becomes the skeleton, muscles, blood, heart, and connective tissue, and the ectoderm becomes the skin and nervous system. WNT proteins are the ligands expressed in one set of cells, and their receptors (Frizzled and a few other proteins) are expressed on other cells which are nearby and need to relate for some developmental / migration / identification, or other purpose. One other family, the NOTCH proteins and their respective cell surface receptors, have a similar evolutionary history and likewise function as core developmental cell-cell signaling and identification systems. 

Rough structure of the APP protein. The membrane  spanning portion is in teal at the bottom, showing also some key secretase protease cleavage sites, which liberate alpha and beta portions of the protein. The internal segment is at bottom, and functions, when cleaved from the rest of the protein, as a nuclear transcription activator. Above are various extracellular domains, including one for "ligand binding", which is thought by at least one research group to bind WNT. The dimerization domain can bind other APP proteins on other cells, and heparin, another binding partner is a common component of the extracellular environment.

Fast forward a billion years, and WNT family members are deeply involved in many decisions during animal development and afterwards, particularly in the brain, controlling nerve cell branching and synapse formation in adults. WNT, NOTCH, and APP are each ligand+receptor systems, where a ligand from one cell or in soluble form binds to a receptor on the surface of another cell, which "receives" the signal and can do a multitude of things in response. The usual receptors for WNT are a family of Frizzled proteins plus a bunch of other helper proteins, the receptors for NOTCH are Jagged proteins, and the APP protein is itself a receptor whose ligand has till now been unclear, though it can homodimerize, detecting APP on other cells. APP is a large protein, and one of its responses to signals is to be cleaved in several ways. Its short cell-interior tail can be cleaved, (by gamma secretase), upon which that piece travels to the nucleus and with other proteins acts as a transciption regulator, activating, among other genes, its own gene, APP. Another possible cleavage is done by alpha secretase, causing the release of soluble APP alpha (sAPPα), which has pro-survival activities for neurons and protects them against excessive activity (excito-toxicity). Lastly, beta-secretase can cleaves APP into the toxic beta (Aβ), which in tiny amounts is also neuro-protective, but in larger amounts is highly toxic to neurons, starting the spiral of death which characterizes the hollowing out of the brain in Alzheimer's disease.

The cleavages by alpha secretase and beta secretase are mutually exclusive- the cleavage sites and products overlap, so cleavage by one prevents cleavage by the other, or destroys its product. And WNT signaling plays an important role in which route is chosen. WNT signals by two methods, called canonical or non-canonical, depending on which receptor and which ligand meet. Canonical signaling is neuro-protective, opposed to Alzheimer development, and leads to alpha secretase cleavage. Non-canonical signaling tends to the opposite, leading to internalization of APP from the surface, and beta secretase cleavage which needs acidic conditions that are found in the internal endsomes where APP ends up. So the balance of WNT "tone" is critical, and is part of the miscellaneous other risk factors that make up the background for Alzheimer's disease. Additionally, cleavage by gamma secretase is needed following cleavage by beta secretase in order to make the final forms of APP beta. The gene for gamma secretase is PSEN1 (presenilin-1), mutations in which are the leading genetic cause of Alzheimer's disease. Yet these mutations have no clear relation with the activity of the resulting gamma secretase or the accumulation of particular APP cleaved forms, so this area of causality research remains open and active.

But getting back the WNT story, if APP is itself a WNT receptor, then that reinforces the centrality of WNT signaling in this syndrome. Indeed, attempts to treat Alzheimer's by reducing the toxic amyloid (APP beta) build up in various ways have not been successful, so researchers have been looking for causal factors antecedent to that stage. One clue is that a key WNT inhibitor, DKK (for dick-kopf, derived from fly genetics, which have had some prominent German practitioners), has been experimentally an effective therapy for mice with a model form of Alzheimers. DKK is an inhibitor of the canonical WNT pathway, (via the LRP6 co-receptor of Frizzled), shunting it towards more non-canonical signaling. This balance, or "tone" of WNT signaling seems to have broad effects in promoting neurite outgrowth and synapse formation, or the reverse. Once this balance is lost, APP beta induces the production of more DKK, which starts a non-virtuous feedback cycle that may form the core of Alzheimer's pathology. This cycle could be started by numerous genetic defects and influenced by other environmental risk factors, leading to the confusing nature of the syndrome (no pun intended!). And of course the cycle starts long before symptoms are apparent and even longer before autopsy can verify what happened, so getting to the bottom of this story has been hugely frustrating.

• Even Forbes is covering these molecular details these days.
• A new low for the US- as a sleazy tax haven.
• No hypocrisy at the Bible museum!
• Senator from coal is now in control.
• Facebook has merely learned from the colleagues at FOX- the Sith network.
• But does add its own wrinkles.
• Bill Mitchell on the Australian central bank accounts.

Myth and Science

Stories we tell about how things work.

I am reading an ancient book about ancient myths, covering some of what was known of the ancient world's stories circa the mid-20th century (that is, the "developed" ancient world of Egypt, the Near East, China, India, etc.). The authors occasionally seem exasperated that their colleagues- the ancient authors of these stories and myths- do not always take their stories as seriously as scholars themselves do, after having so painstakingly learned the relevant languages, unearthed the precious tablets, papyri, inscriptions, and other sources, compared different versions, and interpreted them in light of the historical setting. No, ancient myths can be playful affairs, evolving in dramatic complexity, freely mutating to serve the needs of the moment in their mutable oral traditions. This is especially true the farther back you go into ethnographic history, such as into the stories of the Inuit and other First Peoples of North America. It is evident that ancient societies varied widely in their theological and mythological sophistication, and particularly how closely entwined these were with the centers of power.

Inuit mythologies and their custodian, the shaman.

The scholarly apparatus around myth studies has a very earnest and modernist cast, which derives from two sources. First is Christianity, which as an extreme political and social elaboration of ancient religions has progressively reified and codified its myths. Inheriting a grab-bag of disparate ancient myths and stories, Christianity shored up its social position and theological bona fides by insisting that it was all true. The more sclerotic and far-reaching its bureaucratic structure, the more tightly it held to the absolute truth of its dogmas. A second aspect was the enlightenment and the rise of scientific modernity. That world view was not interested in playful myths of psychodrama, but in hard truths of how the world really works, stripped of the colorful trappings. Competition with this world view helped to further push religious dogmas in an absolutist direction, to that point where today, both Christian Evangelicals and fundamentalist Islamists insist that their scriptures are literally true, handed down from an all-powerful god who really exists and is not fictive construct meant as a playful expression of our scientific ignorance on one hand, and our love of social drama on the other. Anthropologists took their cues from all this, assuming that the precious myths they were studying had to be expressions of a society's absolute truths, organizing principles, and deepest motivations. But perhaps they were originally ways to pass the time and enchant a few youngsters.

Science is telling stories, too. Are they really so different? On the one hand, our need to orient ourselves in the world remains unchanged from ancient times, so the core purpose of explaining reality and society through complicated tales of causes and effects remains. And to a lay person, the explanations of quantum mechanics or cosmic inflation are no less impenetrable than myths about gods and dragons. Thus the scientists who are the custodians of these stories find themselves in the ironic position of a new priesthood, cultivating the cultural narrative around origins, natural phenomena, biology, and the like, while extending these stories in systematic ways that the priests (and alchemists, and shamans, and druids) of yore could only dream about, if they could even conceive of such reliable beliefs untethered from social drama and social control. But today's scientists can't and won't inject ancillary drama into these stories, so they will remain split off from their traditional roles and uses.

So the telling of dramatic stories and the consequent management of society through the narratives of origins, myths, and meaning- if ancient myths really did fulfill these functions, which is perhaps an anachronistic construction on our part, or at least varied widely with the nature of ancient societies- are skills having nothing, really, to do with the scientific enterprise of today, and thus nothing to do with this new priesthood. Who takes these roles?

Theology would seem the natural place for the living and socially relevant myth. But theology has split definitively from science, from history, and indeed from reality, nurturing narratives that are absurd while claiming they are true, and which in their antiquity and provincialism are impossibly remote from our current concerns, morals, and social ability to relate even allegorically. Theology has thus become lost in a sterile wilderness, doomed to be cut off from its mythical and social power. Even the more liberal and elastic precincts, if they do not insist on absolute literal truth, adhere to the crusty old stories of the Bible, which while occasionally artistic, are mostly a maddening hodgpodge and, frankly, boring. What was riveting in antiquity about lengthy ancestor lists, angry gods, virgin births, and ascending into the clouds is ridiculous today. 

The story-telling mantle has obviously been taken over by Hollywood- by the Marvel series, Star Treks, Star Wars, Potter series, and similar epics of modern fantasy. They bend reality in classically mythical ways, make up their own theology as they go along, (and throw it away as casually with the next installment), and communicate constantly updated social mores. The graphics are otherworldly, the stories and morals are updated, but the fundamental sophistication of these stories can't really be said to have advanced much. They are speaking to human nature, after all- a conversation between our inborn archetypes and the social and technological conditions we find ourselves in.

The key point is that Hollywood myths are taken as intended- as fertile and mind-expanding fantasies with social and moral lessons that are (hopefully) beneficial and relevant for our times. They are not trying to claim their myths as true- that would be absurd. Thus they do not collide with either scientific or theological claims, and use myth as it was originally and truly intended- as the dreamlike realm of symbolic human drama, full of lessons, yes, but not scientific ones, or even pseudoscientific ones.

• An outstanding dissection of just how bad US policy and behavior was in Afghanistan.
• Facebook / Fecebook is a cesspool, by design.
• Dead ender racism.
• A mutagenic drug to save us all.
• How about those great vaccines?
• Some nice piano.