Viraj's Weblog

I heard this On Science podcast and there was an good segment on autism. The written article is here. It tries to describe how autistic people see the world. Temple Grandin was also good movie that attempts to show visually what it must be like to be autistic.

I just finished reading Dawkins' The Ancestor's Tale, quite an amazing history of life told backwards in time. Dawkins' eloquence rivals Carl Sagan, and watching Cosmos in parallel to reading this book, I notice striking similarities. It seems the important scientists of today are restating what Sagan said years ago. Sagan was definitely ahead of his time.

In the chapter on Sponges, Dawkins talks about germ-line vs soma cells:

... germ-line cells are those that are capable of giving rise to reproductive cells and whose genes are therefore in principle immortal. The germ line is a small minority of cells residing in ovaries or testes, and insulated from the need to do anything else but reproduce. Soma is that part of the body that is not germ line -- somatic cells are destined not to pass their genes on indefinitely. In a eumetazoan such as a mammal, a subset of cells is set aside early in embryology as germ line. The rest of the cells, the cells of the soma, may divide a few times to make liver or kidney, bone or muscle, but then their dividing career comes to an end.

To consider that the genes in your germ-line cells can be traced back to the origin of life is quite amazing. But what if a cell that's supposed to stop dividing continues dividing. That's cancer. A pretty good article on mercury poisoning in Discover states:

One cause of cancer is healthy cells' growing out of control and losing their identity: They forget that they are programmed to be liver or heart cells and go rogue, not dying in the usual manner but instead continuing to replicate into more rogue cells.

Dawkins' goes on:

Cancer cells are the sinister exception. They have somehow lost the ability to stop dividing. But as Randolph Nesse and George C. Williams, the authors of The Science of Darwinian Medicine, point out, we should not be surprised. On the contrary, the surprising thing about cancer is that it is not more common than it is. Every cell in the body, after all, is descended from an unbroken line of billions of generations of germ-line cells that have not stopped dividing. Suddenly being asked to become a somatic cell like a liver cell, and learn the art of not dividing, has never happened before in the entire history of the cell's ancestors! Don't be confused. Of course the bodies that housed the cell's ancestors had livers. But germ-line cells -- by definition -- are not descended from liver cells.

Indeed it is rather incredible that cancer is not more prevalent. It just goes to show just how honed our bodies are through evolution. Any slight error in this descendency is liable to end that germ-line forever; a death of a lineage. Nature is not forgiving. The book paints a grim tale. Evolution is essentially the history of death and the honing of survivability. There are so many branches, organisms, species, individuals, that died without reproducing. So I ask, is it really important that any one individual reproduce?

Modern-day medicine counteracts the death of an individual, keeping the lineage going when in the past the individual may not have survived to reproduce. Rise in cancer is almost inevitable if we prolong the lifetime of our error-prone genes.

But if you think of the whole world as an organism, the death of lineages in the evolutionary tree is reminiscent of "soma vs germ." In this tree, some species die off. These are like the soma. They make the "liver" of the world, providing some function to the overall survivability of the world's life but ultimately dying. They are unknowingly altruistic to a much larger organism. Then you have the species that produce offspring. These are like the germ-line cells, continuing their path through evolution. The soma are the cells that die in our webbed embryological hands to make way for fingers. Both their life, and their death, serves a purpose. Might looking at the world, or even the universe, as one big living organism with internal organs and an embryology of its own, lead to a different understanding of life as we know it?

Hulu has all of the episodes of probably the greatest science show of all time: Cosmos. The only annoying thing is the commercials.

Some really good TED talks:

• Wearable tech
• Importance of Play
• Dirty Jobs

I'm a reading a pretty good book called The Art of Being a Parasite. It has some really fascinating studies about parasites. One of them is regarding clutch size of a certain species of birds. This is basically the number of offspring. In this particular bird, their nests are filled with ticks that parasitize the babies (ectoparasites, on the outside of the body). This is not interesting in itself, but what is interesting is the behavior of parent birds when this happens in a controlled study. If researchers put more ticks in a nest, the parents have more children. It is as if they realize that the survival of their offspring is hampered due to the parasite, so the best strategy is having more children. Obviously there is a trade-off here because this will increase competition between the babies for food, perhaps making things worse. Makes you wonder what motivations belie other animals desire for many offspring, even humans. Could it be that the people who have more children instinctively do so out of fear that some will not live on?

There are all sorts of interesting studies like this in the book. Another story talks about how one group of poor people on an island suffered less from a particular parasite and it had to do with culture and religion.

Finally, and probably most instructively, these researches considered parasitism rates in light of traditional behaviors of different communities on the island. The most striking aspects of their report concern the Indian community, whose households manifested fewer cases of parasitism than did those of the other communities. "In their domestic lives, the Indians of Reunion have adhered to many rules and customary behaviors of their country of origin. These rules have even acquired a sacred value and are transmitted to children along with religious values. The separation of the pure and the impure, of the clean and the dirty are explicitly valued. There are ritual hand-washings, frequent baths, and shoes are considered 'dirty.' These practices establish a barrier between humans and the environment, even when the standard of living is low."

It's not hard to imagine that a reason for religion could be a survival advantage. By following certain rules, fabricated as they may be, they could have made a certain group of individuals more likely to survive.

I'm reading a rather amazing book called Before the Dawn. It's pretty much the written version of a great documentary called The Journey of Man. Both of these tell the story of human migration and evolution out of Africa following the same Y chromosome all males share and the mitochondrial DNA all females share. These essentially came from our evolutionary Adam and Eve.

One of the interesting concepts is just how much warfare was likely in primitive societies. Think of the time when there were different human-like species. Do you think we got along well? Not so. One species survived, and for a reason. Daily there were extermination campaigns. Every day you were hunted or hunting. Follow chimp warfare and you get a glimpse of how the pre-humans must have been like. Hunting in groups, finding a lone 'outsider', and then jumping him to destroy him and his legacy. It must have been a vicious time to live in.

A small group of people started the population we now call humans. They left Africa and formed bubbles of societies as they traveled to new lands. Out of each of those bubbles left a few more humans, eventually finding a new land and again settling. Some stayed, some left. The cycle repeats, and eventually you have the different nations and races we have today.

We have come a long way. Animals gathering in groups larger than 50 require a lot of brain power to read others and work together.

One principle that biologists think may help explain larger societies, both human and otherwise, is that of reciprocal altruism, the practice of helping even a nonrelated member of society because they may return the favor in [the] future. A tit-for-tat behavioral strategy, where you cooperate with a new acquaintance, and thereafter follow his strategy toward you (retaliate if he retaliates, cooperate if he cooperates), turns out to be superior to all others in many circumstances. Such a behavior could therefore evolve, providing that a mechanism to detect and punish freeloaders evolves in parallel; otherwise freeloaders will be more successful and drive the conditional altruists to extinction.

Conditional tit-for-tat altruism cannot evolve in just any species. It requires members to recognize each other and have long memories, so as to be able to keep tally.

The book then goes and gives an example of the vampire bat, whose societies do just this.

Many common emotions can be understood as being built around the expectation of reciprocity and the negative reaction when it is made to fail. If we like a person, we are willing to exchange favors with them. We are angry at those who fail to return favors. We seek punishment for those who take advantage of us. We feel guilty if we fail to return a favor, and shame if publicly exposed. If we believe someone is genuinely sorry about a failure to reciprocate, we trust them. But if we detect they are simulating contrition, we mistrust them.

Think of how much information processing this requires and you can imagine how our brains might have evolved.

Reciprocity, and an ability to calculate the costs and benefits of cooperation, underpin our social life, writes the economist Paul Seabright, "making it reasonable for us to treat strangers as though they were honorary relatives or friends." It is remarkable that this behavior evolved at a time when primitive warfare was at its most intense and people had every reason to regard strangers with deep suspicion. Strangers can still be dangerous, yet in the right circumstances we habitually trust them....

making it possible "to step nonchalantly out of the front door of a suburban house and disappear into a city of ten million strangers." Without this innate willingness to trust strangers, human societies would still consist of family units a few score strong, and cities and great economies would have had no foundation for existence.

...

Trust is an essential part of the social glue that binds people together in cooperative associations. But it increases the vulnerability to which all social groups are exposed, that of being taken advantage of by freeloaders. Freeloaders seize the benefits of social living without contributing to the costs. They are immensely threatening to a social group because they diminish the benefits of sociality for others and, if their behavior goes unpunished, they may bring about the society's dissolution.

I can't help but be reminded of the scheming financial practices that many fell victim to. Sure you can pay that $1 million mortgage, don't worry. Trust me. Sure you can have a credit card with your awful credit. Trust me.

Human societies long ago devised an antidote to the freeloader problem. This freeloader defense system, a major organizing principle of every society, has assumed so many other duties that its original role has been lost sight of. It is religion.

Can it be that the lack of this freeloader eviction system, be it religion or whatever, what has led us to the economic meltdown we are seeing? I think that religion is dying, and it is evident in almost every aspect of daily life. But what will replace the handling of freeloaders? I have to wonder if hundreds of years from now there will still be the concept of guilt and shame. Will our trust for others diminish?