Journal of Science, Technology , and Humanities :
July - December 2003,Vol.1 No.2. pp.195-216

Received August 2003, accepted November 2003

ABSTRACT

Man, like all other organisms, is a product of evolution. It was not a dog eat dog process of competition for the survival of the fittest, as is generally believed. It was accomplished to a large extent through mutual cooperation and peaceful coexistence among species. Human mind is man’s greatest acquisition that separates him from animals. The unfolding of the human mind is traced from the beginning of Hinduism and its insights on evolution and biodiversity as a way of life, and also of Buddhism as a morally and ecologically sound philosophy emphasizing the power of mind over body. The scientific basis of the practice of meditation and yoga in the control of mind over body is discussed in light of the Buddhist concept of the “third eye” and the role of the hypometabolic hormone, melatonin, the body’s regulator of regulators. The role of meditation and yoga and the possible role of melatonin in the newly developing area of “mind-body medicine” is explored. In these times of greed without restraint, might without wisdom, action without thought and arrogance combined with might, the moral trail left by Buddha, Confucius, Lao-Tse and Christ among others, is more relevant and crucial for human survival and joie de vivre today than during their times.

Key words: Evolution, ancient civilizations, Hinduism, Buddhism, meditation and yoga, melatonin and hypometabolism, mind body medicine.

Dr. John Caleekal George is a zoologist and Canadian physiologist who has studied and conducted research in depth on the physiological basis of animal migration, in particular bird migration.

A link between the external environment and the endocrine system was observed in his studies on the pineal gland which in turn led him to the discovery of the pineal gland hormone, melatonin, being a hypometabolic hormone regulating body temperature, heart rate and breathing frequency in birds. Melatonin was shown to act as hypothermic hormone so as to prevent heat stroke during prolonged muscular activity.

Professional awards received by Professor George include an award for excellence in research from Sigma Xi, of which he was elected president of the Guelph, Ontario, Canada chapter. He was the Honorary chairman of the Fifth Canadian Pineal and Melatonin Symposium held in Guelph and was appointed to the research advisory board of the American Biographical Institute as well as fellow of the New York Academy of Sciences and included in the Honours List of 2000 Outstanding Intellectuals of the 20th Century (2000).

For a biographical outline of Dr. George see the Premiere Edition of Great Minds of the 21st Century, published by American Biographical Institute, 2003.

We are very pleased to announce that Smithiana Special Publication, published by the South African Institute for Aquatic Biodiversity, is now available on the Bioline International website. This journal can be found on our “Special Publications” page.

The publication series (Monographs, Bulletins & Special Publications) of the SAIAB (formerly the JLB Smith Insitute of Ichthyology), in its new format honors James Leonard Brierley Smith and Margaret Mary Smith with the name Smithiana, in recognition of their many years of devoted service to African aquatic biology. Their life’s work, a team effort, established modern ichthyology in southern Africa and laid the groundwork for the expansion of aquatic biology throughout the region.

Smithiana Special Publication # 1 and # 2 are now available.

source Bioline.org

ABSTRACT

Lead in the environment occurs in different forms in the soil, water, air and food. In high concentrations and through chronic exposure human and animal health could be adversely affected. Besides hunting and predation, environmental lead poisoning is considered the major cause of mortality in ducks and geese which form the main component of the waterfowl population of North America and certain other parts of the world. Decades of hunting using lead shot has resulted in massive accumulations of lead in waterfowl habitats. Lead poisoning is caused by spent gun shot which are ingested by waterfowl with food and grit. The general signs of lead poisoning are lethargy, anorexia, loss of weight and weakness of voluntary muscles leading immobility, starvation and death. The birds also become anemic and suffer from diarrhea. Studies have shown that lead has profound effects on the structure and metabolism of the gastro-intestinal tract, liver kidney, heart, small arteries and arterioles, flight muscle, nerves, and other tissues indicating the mechanism of its action. Studies on the effects of experimentally-induced lead poisoning in captive wild birds as well as birds used as laboratory models, are also reviewed with a view to obtaining a better understanding of the effects of lead on the target organs and tissues, and their physiological bases.

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SciScoop has previously reported the placement on the Internet of vast quantities of chimp genome data…but what does it all mean? This Cornell University press release summarizes the most obvious nuggets which have fallen from the trees to hit us on the head:
Nearly 99 percent alike in genetic makeup, chimpanzees and humans might be even more similar were it not for what researchers call “lifestyle” changes in the 6 million years that separate us from a common ancestor. Specifically, two key differences are how humans and chimps perceive smells and what we eat.

A massive gene-comparison project involving two Cornell University scientists, and reported in the latest issue of the journal Science (Dec. 12, 2003), found these and many other differences in a search for evidence of accelerated evolution and positive selection in the genetic history of humans and chimps.

In the most comprehensive comparison to date of the genetic differences between two primates, the genomic analysts found evidence of positive selection in genes involved in olfaction, or the ability to sense and process information about odors.

“Human and chimpanzee sequences are so similar, we were not sure that this kind of analysis would be informative,” says evolutionary geneticist Andrew G. Clark, Cornell professor of molecular biology and genetics. “But we found hundreds of genes showing a pattern of sequence change consistent with adaptive evolution occurring in human ancestors.” Those genes are involved in the sense of smell, in digestion, in long-bone growth, in hairiness and in hearing. “It is a treasure-trove of ideas to test by more careful comparison of human and chimpanzee development and physiology,” Clark says.

The DNA sequencing of the chimpanzee was performed by Celera Genomics, in Rockville, Md., as part of a larger study of human variation headed by company researchers Michele Cargill and Mark Adams.
Celera generated some 18 million DNA sequence “reads,” or about two-thirds as many as were required for the first sequencing of the human genome. Statistical modeling and computation was done by Clark and by Rasmus Nielsen, a Cornell assistant professor of biological statistics and computational biology. Some of the analysis, which also compared the mouse genome, used the supercomputer cluster at the Cornell Theory Center. Clark explains, “By lining up the human and chimpanzee gene sequences with those of the mouse, we thought we might be able to find genes that are evolving especially quickly in humans. In a sense, this method asks: What are the genes that make us human? Or rather, what genes were selected by natural selection to result in differences between humans and chimps?” The study started with almost 23,000 genes, but this number fell to 7,645 because of the need to be sure that the right human, chimp and mouse genes were aligned.

According to Clark, all mammals have an extensive repertoire of olfactory receptors, genes that allow specific recognition of the smell of different substances. “The signature of positive selection is very strong in both humans and chimps for tuning the sense of smell, probably because of its importance in finding food and perhaps mates,” says Clark. In addition to the great departure in smell perception, differences in amino acid metabolism also seem to affect chimps’ and humans’ abilities to digest dietary protein and could date back to the time when early humans began eating more meat, Clark speculates. Anthropologists believe that this occurred around 2 million years ago, in concert with a major climate change.

“This study also gives tantalizing clues to an even more complex difference – the ability to speak and understand language,” Clark says. “Perhaps some of the genes that enable humans to understand speech work not only in the brain, but also are involved in hearing.” Evidence for this came from a particularly strong sign of selection acting on the gene that codes for an obscure protein in the tectorial membrane of the inner ear. One form of congenital deafness in humans is caused by mutations to this gene, called alpha tectorin.

Mutations in alpha tectorin result in poor frequency response of the ear, making it hard to understand speech. “It’s something like replacing the soundboard of a Stradivarius violin with a piece of plywood,” Clark notes. The large divergence between humans and chimps in alpha tectorin, he says, could imply that humans needed to tune the protein for specific attributes of their sense of hearing. This leads Clark to wonder whether one of the difficulties in training chimpanzees to understand human speech is that their hearing is not quite up to the task. Although studies of chimpanzee hearing have been done, detailed tests of their transient response have not been carried out.

Clark emphasizes that a study like this cannot prove that the biology of humans and chimps differ because of this or that particular gene. “But it generates many hypotheses that can be tested to yield insight into exactly why only 1 percent in DNA sequence difference makes us such different beasts,” he says.

Also collaborating in the study were researchers at Applied Biosystems (Foster City, Calif.), Celera Diagnostics (Alameda, Calif.) and Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. The Science report is titled, “Inferring non-neutral evolution from human-chimp-mouse orthologous gene trios.”

source SciScoop.com

Being thankful for a 14-foot Burmese python isn’t generally what people profess during Thanksgiving dinner. But at Aqualand Pets Plus on Sunday night, giving thanks for snakes was at the top of the agenda.

The first annual “Snakesgiving” event at the pet store at Sixth and Euclid avenues was an informal seminar for snake lovers on how to get permits to keep certain kinds of snakes in the metro area. Tom Weidner, a Des Moines herpetologist and Iowa State Fair Snakes Alive exhibitor, was on hand to answer questions about the process.

Under Des Moines’ dangerous-and-exotic-animal ordinance, any snake 6 feet or longer cannot be kept in the city unless the owner has a permit. To get a permit, Weidner said, the owner must have 20 hours of instruction about snake care and handling. Any person who wants to keep a venomous snake must have 1,000 hours of instruction. The Iowa Herpetology Society has offered the classes in past years.

“There are only six people in Des Moines who have the permit. There are lots who claim they do, but they don’t,” Weidner said as he handled a feisty albino Monaco cobra.

Weidner said it’s common for people to just turn large snakes loose when they get bigger than expected. He often takes in the larger snakes that are confiscated by the city. His collection includes more than 100 of the reptiles.

“That’s the bad part about showing these guys. It gets people fired up about getting one. By no means am I recommending it,” he said. “I just try to inform people about how to get one and take care of it once they have it.”

Zach Wright, owner of Bubba, a Burmese python, said he’s thankful for his snake.

“Big snakes are really cool, and Bubba is really nice to people,” Wright said. Bubba “wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

Bubba was the star Sunday night. Although other people responded to the invitation to show off their snakes, none of the critters compared to Bubba, who weighs about 100 pounds.

Larry Arnold, co-owner of Aqualand, snapped pictures for kids, adults and the Aqualand Web site.

“We just want to answer questions people might have about snakes,” he said.

Colby Crase, 10, of Winterset wasn’t scared to carry the python on his shoulders. “It’s really heavy and kind of weird, but I’d do it over and over again,” he said.

Crase’s mother, Tammy, said they made the trip to Des Moines to share Colby’s new ball snake. “He’s had it about a month and just loves it. I just stand way back,” she said.

source Moreover News

What were those few key ingredients that made us human? Since our unique properties appeared so recently and involved so few changes, these properties or at least their precursors must already be present in animals. What are those animal precursors of art and language, of genocide and drug abuse? [pg. 3]

The book contains many interesting theories and stories about the human animal and describes many strange behaviours of animals we have yet to understand.

One of my favourite things that Jared talks about in this book is the striking similarity between animals and humans, yet the intense double standard of ethics with regards to those animals.

[Next time you’re at the zoo] ask yourself why those apes are on exhibit in cages, and why other apes are being used for medical experiments, while it’s not permissible to do either of those things to humans. Suppose it turned out that chimp genes were 99.9 percent identical to our genes, and that the important differences between humans and chimps were due to just a few genes. Would you still think it’s okay to put chimps in cages and to experiment on them? Consider those unfortunate mentally defective people who have much less capacity to solve problems, to care for themselves, to communicate, to engage in social relationships, and to feel pain that do apes. What is the logic that forbids medical experiments on those people, but not on apes?

You might answer that apes are “animals,” while humans are humans, and that’s enough. An ethical code for treating humans shouldn’t be extended to an “animal,” no matter how similar its genes are to ours, and no matter what its capacity for social relationships or feeling pain. That’s an arbitrary but at least self-consistent answer that can’t be lightly dismissed. [pg. 15-16]

Another thing that was intriguing in the book was the dismissal of many common myths about man’s past. For example, his history as a great hunter of big game. This is a great romantic quote about this mythical past:

As an example of the purple prose spawned by this men’s locker-room mentality, consider the following account of human evolution by Robert Ardrey in his African Genesis: “In some scrawny troop of beleaguered not-yet-men on some scrawny forgotten plain a radian particle from an unknown source fractured a never-to-be-forgotten gene, and a primate carnivore was born. For better or for worse, for tragedy or for triumph, for ultimate glory or ultimate damnation, intelligence made alliance with the way of the killer, and Cain with his sticks and his stones and his quickly running feet emerged on the high savannah.” What pure fantasy!

Western male writers and anthropologists aren’t the only men with an exaggerated view of hunting. In New Guinea I’ve lived with real hunters, men who recently emerge from the Stone Age. Conversations at campfires go on for hours over each species of game animal, its habits, and how best to hunt it. To listen to my New Guinea friends, you would think that they eat fresh kangaroo for dinner every night and do little each day except hunt. In fact, when pressed for details, most New Guinea hunters admit that they have bagged only a few kangaroos in their whole lives. [pg. 39-40]

A large portion of the book is devouted to explaining the details of human sexuality and what is currently not understood about it.

There is a large difference between human sexuality and physiology and that of apes.

Still other features of our life cycle differ far more drastically from those of apes than do our testes, yet the functions of those remaining novel features of ours remain hotly debated. We are unusual in having sex mainly in private and for fun, rather than mainly in public and only have the female is able to conceive. Ape females advertise the time when they are ovulating; human females conceal it even from themselves. While anatomists understand the value of men’s moderate testis size, an explanation for men’s relatively enormous penis still escapes us. [pg. 61]

This whole issue of testis size is very strange but apparently rather important to science.

The combined weight of the testes in the average man is about 1.5 ounces. This may boost the macho man’s ego when he reflects on the slightly lower testis weight in a 450-pound male gorilla. BUt wait: our testes are dwarfed by the 4-ounce testes of a 100-pound male chimpanzee. Why is the gorilla so economical, and the chimp so well-endowed, compared to us?

The Theory of Testis Size is one of the triumphs of modern physical anthropology. By weighing the testes of thirty-tree primate species, British scientists identified two trends: species that copulate more often need bigger testes; and promiscuous species in which several males routinely copulate in quick sequence with one female need especially big testes (because the male that injects the most semen has the best chance of being the one to fertilize the egg.) [pg. 72]

The purpose of the relatively larger penis of human men still escapes physical anthropologists though.

Some of the other topics in this section are adultery, sexual compatibility and selection.

After explaining the peculiarities of the sexual life of humans, Jared then talks about how these things can be used to explain otherwise unexplained things about humans such as skin colour and eye colour that are particular to certain cultures.

On the lack of a consistent theory of skin colour outside sexual selection.

With at least eight theories in the running, we can hardly claim to understand why people from sunny climates have dark skins. That in itself doesn’t refute the idea that, somehow, natural selection caused the evolution of dark skins in sunny climates. After all, dark skins could have multiple advantages, which scientists may sort out someday. Instead, the heaviest objection to any theory based on natural selection is that the association between dark skins and sunny climates is a very imperfect one. Native peoples have very dark skins in some areas receiving relatively little sunlight, like Tasmania, while skin color is only medium in sunny areas of tropical Southeast Asia. No American Indians have black skins, not even in the sunniest parts of the New World. when one takes cloud cover into account, the world’s most dimly lit areas, receiving a daily average of under 3.5 hours of sunlight, include parts of equatorial West Africa, South China, and Scandinavia, inhabited respectively by some of the world’s blackest, yellowest, and palest peoples! Among the Solomon Islands, all of which share a similar climate, jet-black people and lighter people replace each other over short distances. Evidently, sunlight has not been the sole selective factor that influenced skin color. [pg. 115]

The idea is that rather than the Natural Selection of early Darwin, a new concept of Sexual Selection is used. Basically the Sexual Selection is when a sexual preference makes beings possessing some trait more likely to procreate and spread their genes. So, those attributes are promoted and continue through the generations.

Yet another one of the interesting topics in this book is the discussion of aging and why it is a good thing for humans to grow old, die, not be able to regenerate limbs and women to go through menopause, but with the qualification that the age we CAN live to is just right.

Why it is important to have older persons in a hunter-gatherer society:

Slow aging is a crucial to the human life-style as are marriage, concealed ovulation, and the other life-cycle features that we’ve been discussing in the preceding chapters. That’s because our life-style depends on transmitted information. As language evolved, far more information became available to us to pass on than previously. Until the invention of writing, old people acted as the repositories of that transmitted information and experience, just as they continue to do in tribal societies today. Under hunter-gatherer conditions, the knowledge possessed by even on person over the age of seventy could spell the difference between survival and starvation for a whole clan. Our long life span, therefore, was important for our rise from animal to human status. [pg. 123]

How evolution decides whether or not to support strong and comprehensive regeneration, a decision that is at the heart of our ability to live long lives:

The risk of death from predators is lower for birds than for mammals (because birds can escape by flying), and lower for turtles than for most other reptiles (because turtles are protected by a shell). Thus, birds and turtles stand to gain a lot from expensive repair mechanisms, compared to flightless mammals and shell-less reptiles that will soon be eaten by predators anyway. […] The bird species most protected from predators are seabirds like petrels and albatrosses that nest on remote oceanic islands free of predators. Their leisurely life cycles rival our own. SOme albatrosses don’t even breed until they’re ten years old, and we still don’t know how long they live: the birds themselves last longer than the metal rings that biologists began putting on their legs a few decades ago in order to keep track of their ages. In the ten years that it takes an albatross to start breeding, a mouse population could have gone through sixty generations, most of which would already have succumbed to predators or old age. [pg. 132]

Menopause is explained as following: it is dangerous for women to have children, and as a woman gets older she is more likely to have already had many children. Because children need their parents it becomes increasingly more expensive for a woman to die during childbirth: she would leave children motherless. As a women gets older and weaker the chance of death during birth and the cost this brings is more than the potential benefit of another child, so they lose the ability to have more children. Evolution is good, huh?

The next section of the book is all about language: how it evolved, how it is different across the cultures of the world, and what kinds of animals also possess some form of language.

I was rather disappointed he didn’t talk about alternative methods of communication other than speech; ie, the colour shifting of octopi.

I’m severely fascinated by the differences in the expressive power of different languages. One, because I think that allowing more freedom of expression is the key to unlock the beauty innate in any individual. And two, because there is a sharp difference in expressive power between different computer languages and I wonder how this parallels to natural languages. This is an interesting note about Neo-Melanesian:

Neo-Melanesian proved to be as strict as English in its grammatical rules. It is a supply language that lets one express anything sayable in English. It even lets one make some distinctions that cannot be expressed in English except by means of clumsy circumlocutions. For example, the English pronoun “we” actually lumps two quite different concepts: “I plus you to whom I am speaking,” and “I plus one or more other people, but not including you to whom I am speaking.” In Neo-Melanesian these two separate meanings are expressed by the words “yumi” and “mipela” respectively. After I have been using Neo-Melanesian for months and then meet an English speaker who starts talking about “we,” I often find myself wondering, “Am I included or not in your ‘we’?” [pg. 156-157]

Diamond also has some introductions to concepts in linguistics that I find peculiar, for example:

A blueprint [for languages] has been widely assumed ever since the linguist Noam Chomsky argued that the structure of human language is far too complex for a child to learn within just a few years, in the absence of any hard-wired instructions. […] Difficulties [in learning languages] convinced Chomsky that children learning their first language would face an impossible task unless much of language’s structure was already preprogrammed into them. Chomsky concluded that we are born with a “universal grammar” already wired into our brains to give us a spectrum of grammatical models encompassing the range of grammars in actual languages. This prewired universal grammar would be like a set of switches, each with various alternative positions. The switch positions would then become fixed to match the grammar of the local language that the growing child hears. [pg. 163]

My interpretation may be a common one, but I don’t know because I haven’t studied it extensively, but here goes. Speech is not something that can be detached from thought; not only is our speech constraint to what and how we can think, our thoughts are constraint by the means of which we can express them. Any suggestion of a “universal grammar” suggests to me not a way common way of speaking - but a common way of thinking. It is not hard for me to believe that our minds have intrinsic limitations in their thoughts and common idioms of thoughts that have been optimized over time. Because of language is a mapping of thoughts to speech, it seems to follow that it would inherit any innate or common attributes of thought patterns. Creativity and modes of expression other than language are then interpreted as ways of literally expanding your mind by forcing it to work in ways it is not optimized or particularly capable for. I love being an armchair intellectual.

It is fitting that I should mention art, because following language in the list of seemingly particularly human abilities is the ability and desire to produce art.

Jared Diamond explains that the bowerbird of New Guinea is a particularly tasteful and clever artist,

If I hadn’t already heard of bowers, I’d have mistaken the first one I saw for something man-made, as did nineteenth-century explorers in New Guinea. I had set out that morning from a New Guinea village, with its circular huts, neat rows of flowers, people wearing decorative beads, and little bows and arrows carried by children in imitation of their fathers’ larger ones. SUddenly, in the jungle, I came across a beautifully woven circular hut eight feet in diameter and four feet high, with a doorway large enough for a child to enter and sit inside. In front of the hut was a lawn of green moss, clean of debris except for hundreds of natural objects of various colors that had obviously been placed there intentionally as decorations. They mainly consisted of flowers and fruits and leaves, but also some butterfly wings and fungi. Objects of similar color were grouped together, such as red fruits next to a group of red leaves. The largest decorations were a tall pile of black fungi facing the door, with another pile of orange fungi a few yards further from the door. All blue objects were grouped inside the hut, red ones outside, and yellow, purple, black, and a few green ones in other locations. [pg. 173]

A picture of what he’s talking about.

I really like this paragraph about why it’s plausible for animals to create art:

Perhaps we can now answer the question why art as we know it characterizes us but no other animal. Since chimps paint in captivity, why don’t they do so in the wild? As an answer, I suggest that wild chimps still have their day filled with problems of finding food, surviving, and fending off rival chimp groups. If wild chimps had more leisure time plus the means to manufacture paints, they would be painting. The proof of my theory is that it actually happened: we’re still 98 percent chimps in our genes. [pg. 179]

The next section of the book is all about agriculture and how it was not all good for humans.

I enjoyed this paragraph about the myth of the overworked, tired, and struggling hunter-gatherer:

Another indirect test of the progressivist view is to study whether surviving twentieth-century hunter-gatherers really are worse off than farmers. Scattered throughout the world, mainly in areas unsuitable for agriculture, several dozen groups of so-called “primitive people,” like the Kalahari Desert Bushmen, continued to live as hunter-gatherers in recent years. Astonishingly, it turns out that these hunters generally have leisure time, sleep a lot, and work no harder than their framing neighbors. For instance, the average time devouted each week to obtaining food has been reported to be only twelve to nineteen hours for Bushmen; how many readers of this book can boast of such a short work week? As one Bushman replied when asked why he had not emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, “Why should we plant, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?” [pg. 184]

Another myth is that hunter-gatherers are far less healthy than their industrious brothers,

To most American and European readers, the argument that humanity could on average be better off as hunter-gatherers than we are today sounds ridiculous, because most people in industrial societies today enjoy better health than most hunter-gatherers. However, Americans and Europeans are an elite in today’s world, dependent on oil and other materials imported from countries with large peasant populations and much lower health standards. If you could choose between being a middle-class American, a Bushman hunter, and a peasant farmer in Ethiopia, the first would undoubtedly be the healthiest choice, but the third might be the least healthy. [pg. 188]

A great paragraph about why it is a good thing that we have not found other intelligent life in the universe and a foreshadowing of the next great hallmark of humanity: genocide.

I find it mind-boggling that the astronomers now eager to spend a hundred million dollars on the search for extraterrestrial life have never thought seriously about the most obvious question: what would happen if we found it, or if it found us. The astronomers tacitly assume that we and the little green monsters would welcome each other and settle down to fascinating conversations. Here again, our own experience on Earth offers useful guidance. We’ve already discovered two species that are very intelligent but technically less advanced than we are-the common chimpanzee and pygmy chimpanzee. Has our response been to sit down and try to communicate with them? Of course not. Instead we shoot them, dissect them, cut off their hands for trophies, put them on exhibit in cages, inject them with AIDS virus as a medical experiment, and destroy or take over their habitats. That response was predictable, because human explorers who discovered technically less advanced humans also regularly responded by shooting them, decimating their populations with new diseases, and destroying or taking over their habitats. [pg. 214]

In the section of the book on genocide, Jared shows how while there have been some extreme instances that have been condemned, it is something that has been essential to our growth and has been a perpetual artifact throughout our story.

In the discussion on the genocide of American Indians, there are some surprising quotes from otherwise nobles individuals:

President George Washington: “The immediate objectives are the total destruction ad devastation of their settlements. It will be essential to ruin their crops in the ground and prevent their planting more.”

President Thomas Jefferson: “This unfortunate race, whom we had been taking so much pains to save and to civilize, have by their unexpected desertion and ferocious barbarities justified extermination and now await our decision on their fate.” [pg. 308]

The final section of the book discusses how and why current human activities will lead to our ultimate destruction and the reversal of all our “progress.”

On the lost respect for the world:

Undoubtedly, two simple reasons go a long way toward explaining our worsening mess: modern technology has far more power to cause havoc than did the stone aces of the past, and far more people are alive now than ever before. But a third factor may also have contributed: a change in attitudes. Unlike modern city dwellers, at least some preindustrial peoples-like the Duwanish, whose chief I quoted-depend on and revere their local environment. Stories abound of how such peoples are in effect practicing conservationists. As a New Guinea tribesman once explained to me, “It’s our custom that if a hunter one days kills a pigeon in one direction from the village, he waits a week before hunting for pigeons again, and then goes in the opposite direction.” We’re only beginning to realize how sophisticated the conservationist policies of so-called primitive peoples actually are. For instance, well-intentioned foreign experts have made deserts out of large areas of Africa. In those same areas, local herders had thrived for uncounted millennia by making annual nomadic migrations, which ensured that land never became overgrazed. [pg. 318]

But that’s not to say that every “Noble Savage” society preserved their environment and did no wrong. Consider Easter Island,

When Polynesians settled Easter around A.D. 400, the island was covered by forest that they gradually proceeded to clear, in order to plant gardens and to obtain logs for canoes and for erecting statues. By around 1500 the human population had built up to about 7,000 (over 150 per square mile), about 1,000 statues had been carved, and at least 324 of those status had been erected. But-the forest had been destroyed so thoroughly that not a single tree survived.

The immediate result of this self-inflicted ecological disaster was that the islanders no longer had the logs needed to transport and erect status, so carving ceased. But deforestation also had two indirect consequences that brought starvation: soil erosion, hence lower crop yields, plus lack of timber to build canoes, hence less protein available from fishing. As a result, the population was now greater than Easter could support, and island society collapsed in a holocaust of internecine warfare and cannibalism. […] What had once been a lush island supporting one of the world’s most remarkable civilizations deteriorated into the Easter Island of today: a barren grassland littered with fallen statues, and supporting less than one-third of its former population. [pg. 330-331]

We can’t today’s society do any better than those of the past? This paragraph illustrates the confusion over our lack of commitment to the world.

Tragic failures become moral sins only if one should have known better from the outset. In that regard there are two big differences between us and eleventh-century Anasazi Indians: scientific understanding, and literacy. We know, and they didn’t know, how to draw graphs that plot sustainable resource population size as a function of resource harvesting rate. We can read about all the ecological disasters of the past; the Anasazi couldn’t. Yet our generation continues to hunt whales and clear tropical rain forest as if no one had ever hunted moas or cleared pinyon-juniper woodland. The past was still a Golden Age, of ignorance, while the present is an Iron Age of willful blindness. [pg. 337]

If this sounds interesting, I recommend picking up the book or Jared Diamond’s other book that I’ve read: Guns, Germs, and Steel. In GGS, he elaborates more on development of human civilization and how groups of humans have interacted with each other over the years.

source: Jay McCarthy

Why are we collectively so unhappy? Unhappy at home and at work? Have we put our rational brain too high on the pedestal? If we understand our Mammalian or LiMbic Brain better might we have a better time? Why are relationships so important to us? What is a real relationship? What is wrong with our relationships today? How important is having the right relationships to our happiness and to our health?

Some context - Robin my wife is away for 3 1/2 weeks and I miss her a lot. After nearly 30 years of being with each other this type of parting actually hurts. Why? Well here is how I am making sense out of this feeling. Parts of this post come from a email that I sent to her earlier today.

This is a science book not a new age book. It answers some questions about why we miss each other and why relationships are so important to our health. Why does loss hurt? Is this feeling of hurt only a feeling or can it affect us physically? They say that hurts in our relationships are as wounding as say broken bones or physical wounds.

Their thesis is that we have 3 brains. The reptilian brain which controls the core life functions like the heart beating and our breathing. The limbic brain which is a mammalian construct not found in lower animals which controls our emotional life. Its main job is to keep us connected to those who matter the most too us which is essential for mamals. And then the neo cortex which humans have the most of which deals with things like speech and reason. Today we give no credence to the limbic brain. We have put the rational or neo cortex brain up on a pedestal. We value IQ, our education system is rationally based. But really we get things done and we get through life as mammals on how well we connect or not with others. Our EQ is as important as our IQ. Maybe more so. Their insight is to look at the power of the mammalian brain to inform us about what is going on, to govern our health and to enable us to work effectively with others.

So missing you is more than simply missing you - the book makes the case that there is a break in my relational world. Breaks or openings in important relationships for mammals are not small things that you can rationalize away. Recall the waves of grief that came after your father and even your mother’s death?

So what is this limbic mammal brain all about anyway? The big idea is that the limbic brain is our relationship brain designed to enable mammals which have live birth and which need the tribe to protect the mother to form the attachments that are essential for the success of these large investments in the other - the other baby, the mate and the tribe.

It is remarkably perceptive acting on small cues such as pupil dilation, smell and visual cues from facial and body movement. It does not need the neo cortex to process an immediate like, dislike, sense of unease, fear etc. This maybe is why love hits us by surprise. It is not part of our rational brain at all. This is why we cannot rationalize a loss - so your reason tells you that your mother’s death is good for you, and your limbic brain tells you that losing your mother is a deep loss and sends waves of grief and dreams to remind you. A woman sees a man who rationally is no good as an economic provider but her limbic brain tells her to get it on as a genetic provider!

Reptiles do need need relationships because on the whole they do not raise helpless young. Most but not all reptiles abandon their offspring and most do not have mates or packs/tribes. Having no need of relationships, they are more than cold blooded they are cold emotionally. We can tell by the eyes. When we look into a shark’s or into a crocodile’s eye we see nothing coming back. When we look into a whale or a dogs eye we see a whole world. This is the limbic brain. The limbic brain is powerful. When babies have no “relationship” such as in a Romanian orphanage not only do they fail to thrive, in the end they die. The worst punishment we can inflict on a person to to keep them in solitary confinement. The absolutely worst is compete sensory deprivation. In Ireland the British could always break a man by “hooding” him and isolating him from all sensation.

It seems that the limbic brain needs to be in active relationship with others to be happy. We need in effect to be dancing with others emotionally all the time. A shark is like a car on cruise control - it is a closed system that only self-references. It reacts to prey but only as a target. Mammals are “open” systems. We cannot exist without referencing with others.The mother who imposes her agenda on her baby, feeding, touch and control is not dancing with the baby’s cues. The husband who imposes his will is not dancing. The boss who imposes his will is not dancing. The result failure to grow and learn, stress, depression and illness. I wonder if we have ben entirely captured by the Rational Brain as represented by the corporate world of relationships which are not be definition interactive but power driven down?

There is a pattern developing for me in how I make sense of the world and why perhaps the world feels so shitty now. I think it feels so shitty because many of us are not dancing with another. We dance increasingly alone. We actually see this in dance itself. Until now all dancing especially tribal dancing was interactive. Now we stand alone on the floor and do our own thing. We have our career which supersedes our marriages and our role

I find this book very helpful in seeing a way out of our depressing and over rational world. Descartes said that “I think therefore I am” What is becoming clear is that our foundation need as a mammal is to be in interactive and meaningful relationship with others.

Our corporate world is a machine world with machine relationships. No amount of wellness or flex programming will change this unless the core work is to change the machine relationships to human/mammalian/tribal relationships. When we bring the corporate world home and have corporate and functional relationships with our spouses and with our children we are on a course for unhappiness. Our spouse and our children need our attention not the things that we buy. When we live in a machine community where all we do is sleep overnight before going back to the machine place in the day - we have no community. When teachers and nurses ignore relationships and focus on technique, they miss the connection to help the other learn or heal. In missing the relationship with the other, they feel depressed.

It’s interesting to look at how power works in ape and monkey tribes. You might think that the really strong and tough alpha male gets to the top. Sometimes he does but usually the females form an alliance and ensure that a highly collaborative male who has their intersts at heart is the leader. In the context of the needs for mammals to look after each other this makes perfect sense. Today we live I think in a fantasy where we “think” that we ned no one. Like Bush we think that power is enough. Like Bush, we find that this is simply not true.

So where does blogging fit into this? I suspect that blogging is intensely mammalian and that it builds relationships and makes us feel good and hence well.

source Robert Patersons Weblog

“A wealth of knowledge of how embryos grow has come from studying sea urchin development,” said Eaves. “The discovery that these young animals can clone themselves provides an exceedingly rare opportunity to examine how a growing animal can repeat its own early development using a part of its body.”

Scattered earlier reports have observed that invertebrate larvae can spontaneously clone but Eaves and Palmer discovered this trait in three new echinoderm groups–sea cucumbers, sand dollars, and sea urchins–offering surprising new insight about chordate evolution. Larval cloning represents an intriguing new dimension to invertebrate life histories including the suggestion that clones may subsequently clone. The research is published in the current edition of the prestigious journal Nature.

The larvae of echinoderms (the group that includes starfish, sea urchins, sea cucumbers, etc.) usually swim and feed for several months before transforming into a miniature adult. During this time some larvae form an outgrowth – essentially a ball of tissue – that pinches-off of the larval body and grows into a second, normal-looking larva–a clone.

One of the most remarkable parts about the research is that for more than 100 years, scientists may have observed larval asexual reproduction, but did not recognize what they saw, said Palmer. Even more remarkably, at least one early report of larval cloning was dismissed as an artifact of laboratory culture conditions.

“These data make it clear that people have likely seen this spontaneous cloning for many years but not recognized it,” said Palmer. “This is a dramatic example of what terrifies scientists the most–when you see things with your own eyes but refuse to acknowledge it. It’s a classic example of how deeply held beliefs may actually prevent you from seeing things.”

Alexandra Eaves’ research is supported by an Alberta Ingenuity Fund studentship while Dr. Richard Palmer has an Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) operating grant.

source ScienceDaily.com

A large-scale study has for the first time shown a clear link in North America between acid rain and widespread declines across the breeding range of a songbird, the wood thrush. Calcium depletion affecting the birds’ food is a possible cause, Cornell University ecologists say.

Using data collected by thousands of volunteer citizen-scientists in the Birds in Forested Landscapes project, scientists at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology showed that the wood thrush is less likely to attempt to breed in regions that receive high levels of acid rain. The finding is reported in the current Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS Vol.99 No. 16) by Ralph S. Hames, a postdoctoral associate at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology who conducted the research with colleagues Kenneth V. Rosenberg, James D. Lowe, Sara E. Barker and Andre A. Dhondt.

Acid rain is the broad term used to describe several ways that a weak solution of inorganic acids, such as nitric and sulfuric acid, falls out of the atmosphere as rain, snow, mist and fog. Sulfur dioxide (SO2) and oxides of nitrogen (NOx) are the primary causes of acid rain. In the United States, about two-thirds of all SO2 and one-fourth of all NOx come from electric-power generation that relies on burning fossil fuels, such as coal.

High elevations, such as the Adirondack, Appalachian and Great Smokey mountains as well as the Allegheny Plateau, where the amount of acid deposited in precipitation could be highest, show long-term declines of up to nearly 5 percent annually in wood thrush populations. Although the exact mechanism leading to the declines is still unknown, it may well be related to the leaching of calcium from the soil by acid rain, according to Hames. European studies of heavy acid-rain regions similarly have linked declining bird populations to acid-rain-induced depletion of soil calcium.

Previous studies by other investigators had shown that calcium-depletion can affect breeding birds in a number of ways, Hames notes. In particular, shortages of calcium-rich foods, such as snails and snail shells, might be critical at egg-laying time, when calcium demand is highest for female birds, or during the nesting period, when calcium supplements are often provided to growing young.

However, low levels of soil calcium might also affect a wide range of prey, such as earthworms, millipedes and centipedes, pillbugs and other insects that adult birds need to nourish themselves and feed their young. Fallen, decaying leaves and other natural litter on the forest floor could decompose more slowly under acidic conditions. At the same time, acidic conditions could also increase the amounts of toxic aluminum and heavy metals (such as lead, cadmium and mercury) that the wood thrush ingests.

“They may be finding less good-quality food and having to work harder to find it,” Hames says. “This could potentially lead individual thrushes to attempt breeding elsewhere.” He speculates that birds might assess the available food supplies each spring before deciding where – and whether – to nest and reproduce.

The Cornell scientists set about modeling the effect of acid rain on the wood thrush by predicting the probability of a bird attempting to breed at a given location, based on the amount of acid rain falling there. First they gathered existing data from sources such as the National Atmospheric Deposition Project’s National Trends Network that monitors pollution in rainfall, as well as detailed soil maps from the Natural Resources Conservation Service. Next, the scientists combined the precipitation and soil data with information about the regional abundance of the wood thrush, as reported by the Breeding Bird Survey (BBS). A critical component of their analysis was data gathered by the volunteer citizen-scientists participating in the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s ongoing Birds in Forested Landscapes (BFL) project.

BFL participants had recorded the presence or absence of breeding wood thrushes, as well as detailed information on the topography, elevation, vegetation and habitat fragmentation at more than 650 study sites across the geographic range of the species. “Massive surveys like this one and the BBS could never be accomplished without the participation of citizen-scientists,"says Hames.

Cornell ecologists used the data collected in sophisticated statistical analyses to produce a model that predicted where acid rain’s effects might be most severe for a bird whose life and reproductive success depend on food it finds on the forest floor. The model predicts that, after statistically adjusting for several other factors (soil, vegetation, topography, thrush abundance), the probability of a wood thrush breeding is much reduced at a highly acidified site. The negative effects of acid rain might also be heightened by such factors as high elevation and habitat fragmentation.

Population declines in other songbird species also could be attributable – at least in part – to acid rain, Hames says. “There are a number of other factors that we know can hurt populations of particular species. This is also true in the case of the wood thrush,” he adds. “However, in some places, there also appear to be many fewer birds than there used to be, and these often appear to be the same places most severely impacted by acid rain.”

Funding for the study was provided by the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service; the Archie and Grace Berry Charitable Foundation, the Florence and Joan Schumann Foundation, the Packard Foundation and an Institute for Ecosystem Studies–Cornell University Human Accelerated Environmental Change grant.

source: NewsWise.com