wormhole’s posterous

Hank Roth, on the InterNUT since 1982
Past (post) Commander Jewish War Veterans
* Cryptologist and Voice Security in the White House
and in the War Room for JCS at the Pentagon
  BIO [with pics] http://inyourface.info/bio/

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 Nature of Nature

 Permalink: http://inyourface.info/ArT/Sci/NaT.shtml

 Worm Hole - Crypt

  
Nature of
   N A T U R E
Viruses, Bacteria and Parasites are Everywhere

    "Germs are everywhere: in air, soil, rocks, and water; in plants and
animals; and, of course, in our own bodies. Some thrive in intense heat,
while others require extreme subzero temperatures. Many have a remarkable
ability to replicate themselves rapidly, reproducing every few hours in
some cases - an evolutionary trick that makes them highly adaptable to
changing environments and to the medicines we use to fight them." -
Chapter 1: The Immune System's Role in Protection - the Dana Sourcebook of
Immunology)

 Some bacteria is good for us (commensal) and some of it isn't. Some
bacteria live in our stomachs and help to digest the food there. But some
bacteria can also make us very sick. About one in eight bacteria are not
good for you. Some bacteria arrives in the food you eat and it is poison.
Food poisoning is not good. Neither is bacterial contamination. Antrax is
a bacteria that kills. So will Lyme disease which is transmitted by
_infected_ ticks. And parasites come in all sizes and shapes. They'll
invade your body and they will eat you alive.

 We are at war. As quickly as we develop new methods of defense, ways to
destroy bad bacteria, protozoa and other parasites get into us as
unwelcome guests and they do their dirty deed and leave us debilitated and
near death or dead.

 There are snake-like roundworms (Ascaris lumbriocoides) in the intestines
of about 1.5 billion humans. And in 1.3 billion humans there are
blood-sucking Hookworms. One billion have whipworms." (ibid)

 How many of you know you have been infected by parasites? How many have
had intestinal parasites? I did once when I went on a gambling junket to
Haiti and I made the mistake of drinking the water. It kept me sick for
months during which time I lost 30 pounds. I thought the medication would
kill me and it almost did, but it killed the parasites before it could
kill me. It was a mean parasite and I never got a name for it (or if I
did, I don't remember it).

 Parasites comprise single-celled protozoa but also multicellular animals,
such as nematodes and helminths - which are worms. They need a moist
environment and they very often cause disease in humans. You can get
infected by drinking contaminated water, as I did in Haiti. (Actually, it
was the ice.) You can become infected by eating infected food or not
washing your hands. One of the most common infections which everyone has
heard about is malaria. My wife's father was in the Pacific in WWII and he
came home with it. It causes recurring fever and chills. Malaria kills.

 You might be infected by single-celled trypanosomes if while bitten by a
tsetse fly and it drinks your blood these little creatures enter that
anesthesized wound and then sets about stealing your oxygen and glucose
and slips into your brain and you have contracted "sleeping sickness." The
cure may kill you. The poison to rid a person of trypanosomes is so
potent, that 20% of it is arsenic and it will melt ordinary plastic IV
tubes. When it gets on your skin it will burn and cause a painful mass of
melted swollen flesh.

 The Onchocerca volvulus, which enters the body from the bite of the black
fly looks liked coiled long snakes thin as threads and travels through
your skin where it often triggers a violent immune response and causes
leopard spot-like rashes on your skin. It is so itchy you may scratch
yourself to death. It causes a disease which is called river blindness. In
some places in Africa every person over forty is blind from this
unfriendly parasite.

 The Guinea worms are two-foot long creatures which causes blisters on your
legs. The parasite crawls out of the blisters in a few days.

 There are filarial which which cause a disease you may have heard on a TV
show, called "Doctor House", which is my favorate medical show. It is
elephantiasis and your scrotum can swell up so large it can fit in a
wheelbarrow. And then there are the eyeless, mouth-less tapeworms, which
live in our guts and can grow as long as 60 feet.
Civilization's B A R G A I N

 It should not be a surprise to anyone that so many people are sick so much
of the time. Bacteria, parasites, viruses are everywhere and they are in
us causing disease, discomfort, and sometimes death. What keeps us well
enough to meet our evolutionary goal of surviving for a relative short
period of biological time and reproducing our DNA in our progeny, which is
what we are programmed to do AND because of the success of an immune
system which mounts a courageous defense against this constant assault; An
assault by an army of self reproducing protozoa and bacteria and the
viruses which use us to reproduce - which is what viruses and parasites
and bacteria do.

 We don't win the war although we win some skirmishes. It is this constant
state of war which makes us go though periods of feeling bad. What is
predictable is: feeling good is not going to last. When we're feeling bad
we are in the middle of a battle against these aliens and yet, these
invaders, which like us, have genetic details in their DNA and these
parasites and the bacterium are also our distant relatives and the viruses
may also be pieces of `our' genetic code which has been sliced out by
enzymes and inserted elsewhere in our DNA causing disease and even death.
Our Destiny

 Not feeling good is our destiny just as it was for Neanderthals, robust
cousins of ours which went extinct about tens of thousands of years ago
for reasons we don't yet know though we have evidence that they suffered
too as also did the dinosaurs - from arthritis and from traumatic
injuries. We know this from the scientific research. We're learning more
about ourselves from paleopathologists and other scientists - by studying
our ancestors and their offspring and other hominids which are now gone
and we will perhaps follow their example for much of the same reasons.
Could it have been invasive parasites or bacteria which did them in? We
don't know YET.

 Most parasites and most bacteria don't want to kill us. They want to live
in us so if they killed us they would be homeless. It is to their
advantage to keep us alive - or, at least not to do so much damage that it
will cause us to die.

 About 10,000 years ago agricultural settlements were established and a
pandemic of anemia spread through them as evidenced by porotic
hyperostosis, where the bone marrow tissues increases in volume to
compensate for loss of red blood cells. Some say it was because of the
parasite Plasmodium falciparum which causes malaria and some believe it
may have been hookworm infection which caused this abnormality. In either
case, clearing land for agriculture provided the right conditions for
mosquitoes to breed and transfer parasites to humans. (This is similar to
the conditions caused in the modern world from building dams and clearing
rain-forests leading to more mosquito's) Some scientists think that more
agriculture was a consequence of less available prey and anemia was more
likely a result of malnutrition. We will perhaps never know for sure. But
we do know that parasitic infestation became rampant with the advent of
the Agricultural Revolution.

 The most common and prevalent parasite in the U.S. is the pinworm,
Enterobius vermicularis a/k/a seatworm and threadworm. About 50,000,000
Americans are infected with pinworms. Hundreds of millions are infected
worldwide. Pinworms live in your intestines and they survive by eating
some of the nutrients in your food. Not all of your nutrients because that
would not be wise. If you died so would the pinworms or they would have to
find another host so they take what they need but not so much that it
would kill you. The most common symptom of pinworms is an itchy rectum or
vagina. The symptoms are worse at night when the worms are most active and
crawl out of the anus to deposit their eggs. Although pinworm infections
can be very annoying, they are usually not dangerous. These are small
white worms, about a half inch long and females pinworms lay about 15,000
eggs per day. The pinworm scotch tape method of diagnosis is recommended.
Before a bowel movement you would attach tape to the area where irritation
occurs and it would then be removed and looked at under a microscope. It
is not recommended that you do this on your own and I suggest you do not
scratch your ass. When Europeans first came to America the only parasite
found from the study of fossilized feces were pinworms. Other diseases
arrived with the Europeans.

    Tim Batchelder in "The paleoecology of pinworms" (Medical
Anthropology) from the Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients - 5/1/2005
wrote:

 "I remember my first exposure to pinworms. I was participating in a field
school practicing anthropological observation skills in a remote area of
British Columbia. We had been sleeping outside for months, on the ground,
and I discovered that a friend of mine had contracted a nasty case of the
worms. She was forced to shine a flashlight on her anus in the middle of
the night in order to confirm that she did indeed have pinworms. The worms
would come to the surface to lay eggs at night and one could observe them
crawling around. Another time I too observed the worms in my own feces
after an extended period of purification and treatment with bitter herbs.
They wriggled alive and were about the size of a paper clip as I looked on
in disgust." (ibid)

 "According to the CDC fact sheet, pinworm is the most common worm
infection in the United States. Pinworm infection is caused by a small,
white intestinal worm called Enterobius vermicularis about the length of a
staple, that live in the rectum of humans. While an infected person
sleeps, female pinworms leave the intestines through the anus and deposit
eggs on the surrounding skin which causes itching. It was at this time
that my mind turned to the anthropology of pinworms. How is it that humans
have suffered from these parasites for so long and when did pinworms
indeed first become a human health problem?" (ibid)

 Pinworms and other worm infestations were less a problem for
hunter-gatherers than the era which began with the agricultural period.
The greater population density of of population pressure in agricultural
settlements and living in farming villages - the physiological aberrations
of civilized living - exacerbated parasitic infestations, including
pinworms, tapeworms, thorny-headed worms and other diseases. There really
is something to be said for healthier, living in those early
hunter-gatherer societies - besides all the exercise our cave relatives
must have gotten chasing down their prey and outsmarting predators with
their enlarged neo-cortex, which perhaps evolved for exactly that reason.

 The arthropod parasite is a mite, Sarcoptes scabei, causes scabies. It
causes vaginitis in females and urethral disease in males.

 A parasite which you probably have heard the name mentioned is Toxoplasma
gondii. The Toxoplasma gondii is a protozoan parasite that often causes
blindness. It will cause severe neurological disease in newborns. New
forms of Toxoplasma bacteria are unaffected by penicillin. Many can
actually absorb antibiotics and seem to thrive on them and hospitals are
breeding grounds for these insidious little creatures. T. gondii may
infect up to 30 percent of the population of the U.S. and they become very
lethal when a patient is given steroids or any immunosupressive drugs for
cancer or to those receiving organ transplants. Immunologically
compromised patients are particularly at risk when they are infected with
Toxoplasma gondii.

 Giardiasis, Giardia lamblia, causes diarrhea and comes from eating raw or
undercooked food. The diagnosis would be by examining stool samples (in
the lab - not in the home). Coccidia (Cryptosporidium) is a single celled
parasite which also causes diarrhea mostly in your pets but there are a
few species which also affect humans. It does not affect humans. If your
animal is losing weight and has persistent diarrhea, have it checked for
parasites (all of them). If you are losing weight you may want to bottle
the worms and sell them to other obese people. This infection is also
accompanied by fever, abdominal pain, nausea and vomiting.

 Hookworm, Necator americanus, is an intestinal parasite which is found
extensively in the tropics and sub-tropical regions. About a billion
people are infected with hookworms.

 Amebiasis is a disease caused by the parasite entamoeba, Entamoeba
histolytica. This one too is very common in the U.S. by those who were
recently traveled to developing countries where they consumed contaminated
food or water. Most of the people who are contaminated exhibit mild
symptoms of loose stools and stomach pain 1 to 4 weeks after the
infection. Entamoeba dispar is similar but a different species.

 "Microbes are among the oldest living things on Earth, having existed long
before humans. Geologists have found fossil records of bacteria dating
back 3.5 billion years. What we now know as polio was depicted in Egyptian
stone engravings from 1300 B.C.; the Greek physician Hippocrates described
malaria in the fourth century B.C. The famous Ice Man, the remarkably
well-preserved Ice Age human discovered in northern Italy in 1991, was
found to have the eggs of a type of parasitic roundworm in his
intestines." (Benjamin Reese, Your Immune System A Defense against Hostile
Invaders from the Dana Sourcebook of Immunology)

 Roundworms, Ascaris sp., are among the most common parasitic infection in
the world, and is primarily it will be found in the tropical and
subtropical regions. But they are rare rare in the US. Most of the
infected do not show any symptoms. Those with symptoms will have some
abdominal pain and weight gain. Occasionally there will be constipation.

 Tapeworms, Dipylidium caninum, are the most common parasite in dogs and
cats, who if by swallowing fleas may become infected with tapeworm larvae.
The risk of a tapeworm infection for humans is comparatively low, unless
you too, swallow an infected flea. Hey, I once swallowed a spider.

 Toxocariasis, Toxocara canis and Toxocara cati, is a zoonotic (you get it
from animals) disease caused by parasitic worms found in the intestines of
dogs, Toxocara canis; and cats, Toxocara cati. Humans contract the disease
by accidentally ingesting Toxocara eggs, which are expelled with the
animal's stool. That is a revolting thought. BUT, Toxocariasis may affect
the eye when the worm enters the eye and would result in visual
impairment. And it can also result in swelling of organs accompanied by
symptoms which include coughing and a fever.

 Trichinosis, Trichinella spiralis, an infection by a roundworm, by
ingestion of raw or undercooked meat and predominantly pork. The symptoms
may include abdominal pain and aching muscles and joints.

 Whipworms, Trichuris trichiura and Trichuris vulpis, are long and
whip-like with over sixty species of whipworms existing. There is a canine
whipworm but also a human whipworm (Trichuris trichiura). Symptoms of
whipworm include abdominal pain, diarrhea and bloody stools (female
whipworms can lay as many as 10,000 eggs a day).

 Strongyloidosis, Strongyloides stercoralis, are similar to hookworms.
These worms are also able to survive and reproduce in the soil without a
host. People become infected through direct contact with infected soil
containing larvae. The larvae penetrates through the skin, making its way
into the intestine. Most people with strongyloidosis don't know they have
it, though there may be intermittent periods of moderate to severe
abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and constipation. Examination
of stool samples and blood tests are required for a diagnosis. If you
suspect any parasitic infection you need to advise your doctor when you
traveled and your suspicions. These are easy to miss and if you do they
can stay with you for years, if not your entire life. It is no accident
(because of either no symptoms or slight symptoms) that practically
EVERYONE has some parasites and they don't know it.

 If Parasites don't get you, bacteria or viruses will. Bacteria are
evolving and becoming even more lethal and antibiotic resistant. We are
ill prepared for the coming plagues - and they're coming. I'm not crying
wolf. There is reason to be concerned not just about global warming, but
about the affects these chemicals are having on the ecosystem and our
ability to withstand the all out assault on your health from pollution
which Republicans and Democrats have made worse chasing profits - and it
is too late to say we didn't see it coming.

 This _thing_ we call progress is actually leading us to extinction. Dams
can bring disease. If you live near a dam or lake when a lake is filled in
and it once held crops there is the potential for schistosomiasis and
malaria. Who gets to weigh these advantages against the risks that are
caused by damming up a former village for cheap hydroelectric power? Who
really benefits? Those who live in the city benefit but those who live in
the shadow of those dams live with increased risk of disease.

 Chopping down trees in a rain forest - something as simple as exposing
ground water to sunlight become ideal breeding habitats for Mosquito's,
Anopheles gumbiae - and there has been a resurgence of drug resistant
parasites which transmit malaria. When you replace a water buffalo with a
tractor the ideal host for those parasites changes and becomes a human -
which taste a whole lot better than diesel fuel - as is happening in
Thailand with Japanese encephalitis - a virus transmitted by the mosquito,
Culex tritaemorphynchus - and rice paddies, the breeding grounds. While
this encephalitis also likes hogs, water buffalo was used to plow the rice
paddies while pigs were kept for food and market. The buffalo limited
viral transmission to hogs. It was what they called a "blotter" because
the parasite, C. tritaeniorhynchus preferred buffalo to pork. Replacing
the water buffalo with tractors is progress which caused the mosquito's
which carried the parasites to change their target host to hogs and to
humans. Pigs became infected; more mosquito's become carriers and more
humans became infected. So much for progress.

 The bird flu - a/k/a avian influenza is a pandemic waiting to happen.
These are viruses which infect birds, primarily poultry - but human cases
have turned up mostly in Asia but the virus is mutating FAST and changing
rapidly enough for a new strain to become emergent which will be able to
jump from human to human with the potential to kill millions of humans.

 A lot of these deaths could have been prevented. It is like climate
change. We have the warning. We can do something about it. We choose not
to. What do you expect will happen? We humans are not only tragic, we're
stupid.

 Some of them cause a disease called malaria. Some of them will give you a
fever. Some will cause bloody urine. And some of them are quivering
strings of flesh looking worms which spool out of your skin and some put
you to sleep -- (for good).

 There are leaf-shaped parasitic flukes that live in a person's liver and
blood. If infected, you can accumulate so many you will glitter and your
skin will appear transparent.

 Life is simple in it's complexity. We talk about being in charge of our
destiny, but some things are just destined; not by supernatural forces,
but by the natural consequences of biological selection for survival and
reproduction. Charles Darwin put it in terms of "modification by descent",
evolving by natural selection of mutations which provide the best fitness.
It seems mindless and in a whole lot of ways it is. It does not take
conscious determination but it does take alteration and mutations which
offer the best chances for adapting to an organism's environment are the
changes which survive - and we don't even have to think about it because
we don't have a conscience choice - anymore than the Dicrocelium
dendriticum in Dennett's Breaking the Spell. That is destiny.

 Daniel Dennett describes an ant whose brain is "commandeered by a tiny
parasite, a lancet fluke" which is programmed by thousands of years of
evolution to get inside another host in order to reproduce and uses the
ant to do it. The ant, like Sisyphus, keeps climbing to the top of the
grass so it can be eaten by a cow or a sheep. Obviously there is no
benefit to the ant's reproductive success to die by being consumed by cows
or sheep, but it has been driven to do it by the parasite which has
commandeered it's brain. And this happens throughout the animal kingdom
with fish, with mice, with other hosts driven to their death by the
parasitic organism which now inhabits it's body. It even happens to us.
And as Dennett points out it happens to Homo sapiens who are consumed by
their belief in religions, the memes which they are so convinced of, they
are willing to die for and believe they're going to heaven if they do. Or
will have their way with 72 virgins. Islam means "submission" and indeed
that is what it is.

 There is another world and it lives in us. That world has caused more
death and devastation than all the wars ever fought and will bring down on
us the next plague. It is the world of viruses, bacteria, protozoa and
lancet flukes.

 Bacteria of composed of loose DNA and loosely assembled proteins, whereas
protozoa are multicellular and more like us with their DNA intact. They
are living organisms. Viruses are not living organisms; they are chunks of
genes which use our DNA to replicate. And microbial infectious parasites
are everywhere.

 "Modern medical science has increasingly implicated microbes in coronary
artery disease, diabetes, autism, multiple sclerosis, chronic lung
disease, and certain types of cancer. In fact, microbial infections
account for more deaths worldwide than any other single cause, and the
cost to treat them exceeds $120 billion a year in the United States
alone." (Benjamin Reese, Your Immune System - A Defense against Hostile
Invaders from the Dana Sourcebook of Immunology)

 Ticks are insects commonly found in wooded areas. Some species carry the
bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi, which causes Lyme disease. Like
mosquitoes, they feed on the blood of other animals, but unlike
mosquitoes, they hook into the animal's skin for extended periods of time.
(CDC)

 Plasmodium, the parasite which causes malaria is a protozoan and there are
multiple species which get into humans when mosquito's (Spanish for
"little flies") vampire-like suck human blood. Tsetse flies dose their
human victims with the sleeping sickness. In Europe and the Americas
bacteria and viruses have caused tuberculosis and polio. Protozoa hang out
mostly in the tropics and poor people suffer the most from parasites.
During the period of colonization a whole new field of medicine sprang up
to study these diseases, which was called tropical medicine.

 According to Laurie Garrett in The Coming Plague (1994), in the second
year of WWII, penicillin was dispersed to Army doctors to use for malaria
and even in the small dose which was used then it was highly successful.
Army doctors, she says, were so impressed with it that they "collected the
urine of patients who were on the drug and crystallized excreted
penicillin for reuse on other GIs." That small dose in 1993 would have
been in inadequate and today the plasmodium parasite has evolved a
resistance to penicillin.

 Carl Zimmer writes in Parasite, Inside the Bizarre World of Nature's Most
Dangerous Creatures (2001): "Europeans came to look upon parasites as
robbing them of native labor, of slowing down the building of their canals
and dams, of preventing the white race from living happily at the Equator.
When Napoleon took his army to Egypt, the soldiers began to complain that
they were menstruating like women. Actually they had been infected with
flukes..."

 These flukes lived in snails and attracted to humans they would infect
their victims by attaching themselves to their legs and feet in the lakes
and ocean and enter their veins and stomachs, finding their way to the
bladder where they lay their eggs. Those infected would urinate blood.

 "Blood flukes attacked people from the western shores of Africa to the
rivers of Japan; the slave trade even brought them to the New World, where
they thrived in Brazil and the Caribbean. The disease they caused, known
as bilharzia or schistosomiasis (mentioned a few times on Dr. House),
drained the energy of hundreds of millions of people who were supposed to
build European empires." (Zimmer)

 Vaccines were not successful and other meds did little good. The better
method to control them was not to encourage their habitation at all, to
kill the cause rather than treat the symptoms.

 Burma has been in the news lately for it's political unrest, tsunamis and
typhons, but not so much is reported about the debilitating parasite
causing diseases and death where 75% of those seeking medical health care
each year in that country alone was because of malaria and other parasites
- where the mosquito became resistant to DDT and other insecticides. And
other high death and disease causing parasitic diseases break out, such as
the filariasis, cholera and dengue hemorrhagic fever, killing thousands
throughout the region.

 And these parasitic disease are not all class based infections. Many of
them attack everyone. As pointed out by Robert Desowitz in New Guinea
Tapeworms and Jewish Grandmothers, Toxoplasma gondii (a protozoan parasite
that can cause blindness and severe neurological disease in the newborn)
infect citizens without regard to race, creed or economic class."

 Parasites are becoming increasingly prevalent and problematic because they
are the result of human exploitation of resources and land, building dams,
destruction of rain forests, and what feels like progress, but turns out
to be very harmful in the long run. Life can't be happier if you are dead.

 We are in a _middle_ world and we are just discovering there is another
world out here; a very small world. The big world is also mysterious to
us; it is the world of the universe which is so huge we have difficulty
wrapping our minds around concepts like dark matter and dark energy - and
we really don't know what it is and it may have it's own natural laws.

 And in the middle and small worlds anything which contains DNA has the
tools therein to replicate itself using a blueprint of some of genetic
code and some of it is essentially the same for every living thing on the
planet - or else it did not originate here on the planet - and the
earliest life did not in fact originate on this planet. The first life,
our ancestors, arrived here from somewhere out there in the universe, in
the bigger world.

 But much closer to us in genetic similarity are not the single celled
molecular extremeophiles which started it all; they are the creatures
which evolved to live in us and every species on the planet. They
outnumber other species about four to one and some parasites even have
their own parasites. They are the majority of the species on this planet.

 They live in other animals and in us with ease. Many of them change our
personalities, manage our immune systems, reproduce inside of us, and
sometimes they kill us, and coexist with us. Some of them castrate us and
some take over our minds.

 Everything living has some parasites living inside of them. That is a
world you may be barely aware of but it is there and it is killing us. As
you get older chances are you will acquire more and more of these
creatures which are often there for more than just the ride.
They are
W I N N I N G

 As we learn more about parasites we're finding out they may be the
dominant force in evolution. We evolve defenses against them, but they
seem to be winning.

 Those who caution against dire predictions of doom and gloom ignore the
reality which does demand not only our awareness, but action to prevent
it. Climate change is a procursor to more disease and so is the evolving
resistance of microbial infectious agents to antibiotics. So is the
evolution of new infections, new parasites in this battle for life on the
planet - which they are winning. There has already been five major
extinctions and there are scientists who tell us we're in the sixth
extinction level now. Sure, some will say the planet can survive this, but
what about humanity? It is with high probability that we will not survive
the onslaught and will lose this war to emerging diseases.

 If you have pain and you don't feel so good, at least you can take that as
a sign you are still alive. When I had my tic douloureux pain, which is
considered by many neurologists to be the "worst pain known to man" after
I would have an attack, usually lasting several minutes (but rarely longer
than that), the pain would be so bad that I almost welcomed it because it
felt SOOO good when it was gone. In my support groups others have said the
same thing. It would never leave abruptly. It (the pain) would tend to
fade away. And while I could have very well done without it, it was a
reminder that I was alive.

 Our immune systems are as incredible as they are complex with their
multiple cells, each of them doing something else - and the billions of
memories they would have for the antigens they would have to attach to.
The immune system is a huge database of information and warrior cells. The
warriors regularly travel our blood stream attacking and winning battles
against disease and germs. We don't always feel so good sometimes when
they are working overtime to kill off these alien invaders, but they're
doing their job and we have to be glad they are.

 When we feel like crap we know we're alive and our warrior cells are
working to keep us that way. The pain and that feeling like crap just goes
with the territory.

 Sweating is another sign that we are alive. We humans sweat to keep our
body temperature controlled. Dogs sweat through their paws. We sweat
through our skin. It is an evolutionary anatomical physicological adaption
to the stress we feel when we work or exercise hard. The skin is our
radiator for those small veins and arteries within which blood flows and
the heat is radiant energy. Evaporation of salty water manufactured in our
sweat glands over our entire thermo-regulatory body surface keeps our
temperature where it needs to be for the rest of our biology to work
right.

 Sweat is secreted through the skin. Hair follicles are present in the skin
of all of us mammals and there are apocrine glands which secrete a fluid
which appears as lather on horses but also exude an order on us humans,
especially on our armpits, and around our nipples, our belly button and
our genitalia. Those apocrine glands are not about controlling body
temperature but rather the heat of emotion. The true sweat glands are
eccrine glands which are widely distributed over our entire body.
Incidentally, being able to sweat over our entire body helped our
ancestors to be able to hunt in the middle (during the hottest) part of
the day. The downside meant we were also bound to water and had to be near
water sources most of the time so we could replenish what we sweat and
peed. We can't just hold it almost forever, like a camel.

 And, our enlarged brain enables us to figure out how to outsmart predators
and opposable thumbs facilitate holding a gun or swinging an axe or
pulling the bow string back on a bow.

 The assault on our biology by various attackers is fought off by hand to
hand combat by phagocite components of our white blood cells; macrophages,
dendritic cells, granulocytes, complement cells, lymphocite T and B cells
and TK cells, and chemical cytokines, etc.

 There is also our symbiotic relationship with parasitic bacteria and
protozoa. It is a fragility which can have lethal consequences at times.
All of life is a story of death, pain and feeling like crap. They are all
very closely related.

 Every species has gone through a transition with variations which through
natural selection enabled it to survive for a time and every species has
changed or died. We are not our ancestors but we owe them our existence.
All of us are made up of variants, of life forms, some which have done
better than others - and for the most part they want to keep us alive if
we are their natural host so they may continue to life but they won't live
peacefully. There is no peace on the planet. There is only constant battle
and an unending arms race for survival.

 "Your body's first line of defense against any hostile invader is
something you probably take for granted: your skin, the body's largest
organ. Among other health-related duties, the skin protects against
biological predators in several ways. Skin has three layers, providing a
formidable physical barrier to bugs. Sweat, oils, and other skin
secretions help neutralize and wash away invaders. And our skin is
populated by harmless bacteria that consume nutrients that would otherwise
feed enemy invaders." (Benjamin Reese, Your Immune System - A Defense
against Hostile Invaders from the Dana Sourcebook of Immunology)

 "But the barrier that skin provides isn't foolproof: the eyes, nose, and
mouth all provide openings where invaders can sneak in. For this reason,
your body has a second set of biological barriers, located in the mucous
membranes that line these openings. Every time you blink your eyes, for
example, your eyelids wash away microbes much the way windshield wipers
sweep away debris. Inhale something that your body knows doesn't belong,
like pollen, and you'll sneeze the invader out. Saliva and tears both
contain the enzyme lysozyme, which destroys bacteria. Any harmful bacteria
that somehow manage to sneak down your throat plunge into a deadly acid
bath in your stomach." (ibid)

 "Unfortunately, wily bugs are sometimes able to breach these multiple
barriers......." (ibid)

    They really are smart and they inhabit OUR world. It makes you wonder:
do we inhabit another living world ALSO? What if the universe is really
ONE BIG LIVING ORGANISM and we're just like those parasites -- ALL OF US
eating at the same table?

 Hank Roth

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Today is Tuesday August 18, 2009
G 0 l e m D e s i g n s
Hank Roth (on the Internet since 1982)
Worm Hole (Home) - The Crypt - Hank Roth (Bio)

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While I don't use a standard blog (weblog software) mostly because I've
been doing this too long - having been there with Ike when the precursor
to the Internet, Arpanet got started and every step of the way since, I
can't get into all the many fads over the years (now it is social
networking), but I have been an observer and participant in events which
shape the world since my time with NSA and with Army Security and as a
voice security cryptologist in the White House for the President, and the
War Room at the Pentagon for the Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff plus two
wars. You could say this site is one of the better kept secrets [grin] on
the InterNUT. You are invited back as often as you would like to see what
I and others, I trust, may be saying.
-- Hank Roth

  
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Fever
 
How long does it take when the Earth gets too hot for life to return to "normal" meaning conditions conducive for life as we know it? About 55 million years ago a geological situation released more than a TERRATON of gaseous carbon and there was a warming where temperatures in the arctic and temperate regions were elevated 8 degrees C. In the tropical regions the rise was only around 5 degrees C. To return to suitable; that is conducive temperatures took over a hundred thousand years. Another-words, it doesn't take much to push the Earth into a temperature zone where (most) life can no longer sustain itself.
 
That same crisis state is again predictable with much certainty due to global warming. Over half as much carbon as that which caused those conditions 55 million years ago has been put into the atmosphere.
 
Earth has also been changed and unable to HEAL as it once could due to the extensive land taken for agriculture to feed and shelter the billions of people which are now inhabiting the planet and the sun has become hotter so conditions are even less fit for life. As the planet warms MOST life will die.
 
My contention is we have too many people; we have used up too much of the land altering the natural cycle of oxygen and carbon dioxide production and all the other chemicals it takes to keep the planet in balance. We have unbalanced the Earth. The Earth has a fever.
 
The Earth must be balanced for life in order to regulate itself and maintain conditions necessary for life. We have already depleted 40% the Earth - reducing the Earth's capability to self-heal (to regulate itself).
 
What I say now will confound some of you. It is contrary to what you have read and heard and probably believe. By reducing pollution; that is, smoke and aerosols and other particulates we are making the fever worse and causing fast global warming. My point is these particulates are actually helpful in reducing global warming - but not so good for respiration, alergies, etc.
 
How is that possible? Because dust, smoke and some other pollution actually reduces global warming by reflecting sunlight back into space. This is called `global dimming' but it is transient and if there is a less particulate pollution there is faster global warming. Volcanic eruptions actually produce the kind of pollution which increases global dimming and reduces global warming.
 
Our overuse of fossil fuels is leading to a quicker heating and the many mechanisms for this has already been discussed and written about. Many who doubted it are coming around to the world community's position and there is a recognition that something must be done quickly.
 
I don't think that will help. Even if we now reduce fossil fuels, it won't do anything about the population problem. It won't do anything about changing our life styles. That doesn't mean we must not try, but until we address the carrying capacity of the Earth and do something about reducing the strain on the Earth's ability to self-regulate by reducing the population of the Earth, we cannot fix the problem of extinction AND life more complex than bacteria will not survive.

Beginning Again
 
The theory of Panspermia was first proposed by Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe in 1974 that life was seeded from space. The suggestion was not well received but that is not unusual and has happened often with a hypothesis that begins on the fringe of ideas which eventually does become mainstream. The theory of Panspermia is becoming more acceptable since evidence that some life on earth could stand the extreme rigors of outer space and may very well have arrived on earth on meteorites, comets or asteroids.
 
The Martian discovery of microbes was exciting enough for scientists to look at this proposal by professor Wickramsinghe again that primitive life can travel through space and still be fertile.
 
Analogy: After-all, plant seeds are often carried in the wind or by birds or in the feces of other animals. They are dropped in the soil and they become volunteers. We have plants or vegetables where we didn't have them before and nobody had to plant them.
 
There is also another not so desirable analogy: - Seeds carried from place to place and just like the birds on Earth can even cause genetically modified plants to invade an established farm of organic vegetables where these GM seeds overrun other fields and organic vegetables become GM vegetables - no longer what they were intended to be - and the effects are undesirable.
 
It is possible; I think very probable, that proeukaryote life; bacteria and archaia originated somewhere in the cosmos and they were carried here to seed planet Earth which eventually, due to the melding of archaia and bacteria resulted in mitochrondria, the fuel cell of complex life, which gave rise to eukaryotic multicellular organisms with a nucleus and the capability of becoming us.
 
And for whatever the reason or no reason at all except our greed and selfishness to spoil the planet - it is all going to come to an end. It is just a matter of time. The Earth is changing back to a previous state where most living things will die - except the extremophiles, like the seeds which became us. Maybe that is a message to us that Gaia and Homo sapiens, those of us who are the stewards for the planet have not had a suitable marriage and it is time for the seeds to re-fertilize the planet and begin again.
 
It is impossible to tell how many times this has happened before. If it (life-reproduction-death) keeps on going and life really is a repetition of what came before, perhaps purposeless evolution with random mutations and reproduction will be something more than an end in itself and life will eventually get it right - whatever that is?
 
###
 
  Hank Roth
 
Excerpts provided here are pursuant to the Fair Use Doctrine
for educational and discussion purposes per
Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, Copyright Law.
 
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Species in Transition
 
Evolution is called a theory. It is sometimes confusing for non-scientists to credit science for postulating theory precisely because non-scientists do not understand that a scientific theory is often better than facts. It is a postulate which is testable. It is a tried and true position, much better than a hypothesis. A theory is the same as fact and facts change as do theories when a better theory comes along, or in the case of non-scientific facts, when a better witness comes along.
 
  "Humans are members of the genus Homo. Modern people are Homo sapiens click this icon to hear the preceding term pronounced. However, we are not the only species of humans who have ever lived. There were earlier species of our genus that are now extinct. In the past, it was incorrectly assumed that human evolution was a relatively straight forward sequence of one species evolving into another. We now understand that there were times when several species of humans and even other hominins were alive. This complex pattern of evolution emerging from the fossil record has been aptly described as a luxuriantly branching bush on which all but one twig has died off. Modern humans are that last living twig." (Anthro.Palomar.Edu)
 
Science is considered to be only 400 years old. Before it became science it was philosophy. And this is indeed an exciting time. Fifty years after the acceptance of radio and discovery of amplitude modulation, soon to somewhat co-exist with other more improved forms of modulation, but preceding any thought of solid state electronics, I discovered radio and became a ham operator. That was actually slightly above the cusp because radio really came into it's own during WWII. Most science is perfected during war. But it was still the most exciting time of my life to be involved with radio and computers when they were just starting. However today is almost terrifyingly advanced; to the point of even discussing the Singularity and what kind of future we will have, a great one, or Dystopian because our brains can't keep up with our technology.
 
Science now includes disciplines not even imagined when I was a youngster building radios and computers out of tubes and wires on breadboards. Today the microscopes; something I always wanted but never got, can see beyond the glare and blinding light from our sun. We can see in ranges beyond just the visible range we at one time thought was the only frequencies which mattered. Today we can calculate space and time. In this lifetime we perfected methodology for calculating the speed of expansion of our universe and the age. We have telescopes that are millions of miles apart connected by lasers which measure the beginnings of the universe and we know it all began (in this universe) 13.7 billion years ago.
 
We have new science, which is rapidly becoming old science, i.e. astronomy, biomedicine, genomics, and physiological psychology, among others. And incredibly we still have charlatans who are pushing silly pseudosciences and some who still believe in the supernatural and a flat earth.
 
It hasn't been so long that we have know evolution is not about survival but really all about reproduction; survival only being secondary to it but not essential for it. Evolution is specifically about reproduction.
 
Survival is evolutionary because it contributes to reproduction and fitness doesn't determine evolution but natural selection is the result of how fit something is; how successful organisms are at promoting their genes.
 
"...fitness leads to the important prediction that natural selection favoring a particular type should result in a larger proportion of that type in future populations. This prediction has been repeatedly tested and confirmed." (David Barash, Natural Selections, 2008)
We Are Human Apes
 
Scientist Matt Ridley suggests that "whatever the mechanism, we can guess that our ancestors were a small isolated band, while those of the chimpanzees were the main race. We can guess this because we know from the genes that human beings went through a much tighter geneitc bottleneck (i.e. a small population size) than chimpanzees ever did: there is much less random variability in the human genome than the chimp genome. (Also see A. Rogers and R.B. Jorde (95) Genetic Evidence and Modern Human Origins, Human Biology 67: 1-36). Matt Ridley's book is Genome, the Autobiography of a Species in 23 chapters (2000) - corresponding to 23 pairs of chromozomes.
 
He writes: "So let us picture this isolated group of animals on an island, real or virtual. Becoming inbred, flirting with extinction, exposed to the forces of the genetic founder effect (by which small populations can have large genetic changes thanks to chance), this little band of (not quiet yet human) apes shares a large mutation: two of their chromosomes have become fused. (Chimps have 24 pairs of chromosomes and Homo sapiens have 23. Ridley suggests that two of them fused to make the 23) Henceforth they can breed only with their own kind, even when the `island' rejoins the `mainland'. Huybrids between them and their mainland cousins are infertile.
 
He says there are other changes now. The "shape of the skeleton has changed to allow an upright posture and a bipedal method of walking, which is well suited to long distances in even terrain; the knuckle-walking of other apes is better suited to shorter distances over roughter terrain. The skin has changed, too. It is becoming less hairy and, usually for an ape, it sweats profusely in the heat. These features, together with a mat of hair to shade the head and a radiator-shunt of veins in the scalp, suggest hat our ancestors were no longer in a cloudy and shaded forest; they were walking in the open, in the hot equatorial sun.
 
These changes occurred millions of years ago. "In due time, human beings would turn dramatically carnivorous. A whole new species of ape-man, indeed several species, would appear before that, descendants of laetoli-like creatures (We have Laetoli fossilised footprints which tell their own tale of our ancestors walking upright in the AFrican plains), but not ancestors of people, and propably dedicated vetetarians. They are called the robust australopithecines.
 
Australopithecines were dead ends. Their genes are of no help to us. But now that we have only recently learned to read our genes we know of our cousinship with our other ancestor, the chimpanzee and we are still evolving but as with 99% of all the rest of the species that ever lived have become extinct we may also become a dead end like the australopithecines and other relations which preceeded us. With an enlarged brain will we become smart enough to learn to live with our environment and with others? If the brain just keeps getting bigger and bigger is it any consolation that so many still believe in myths and so many are so selfish that they cannot understand there are limited resources and if we don't conserve there will be no future for those like us and those like our nearest cousins, the chimpanzees, who are only now estimated to be 120,000 in the wild because of their interaction with us? What right do we have to destroy everything we touch?
 
Charles Darwin acknowledged that species distinctions are not truly boundaries but merely categories of convenience. CHARLES DARWIN, ORIGIN OF SPECIES 98 (1859). Darwin wrote, "It is immaterial for us whether a multitude of doubtful forms be called species or sub-species or varieties....The mere existence of individual variability and of some few well-marked varieties, though a necessary foundation of the work, helps us but little in understanding how species arise in nature." Id. By 1872, Darwin had shown by detailed observations that the expression of emotions in nonhuman primates is closely analogous to that in human beings. See generally CHARLES DARWIN, THE EXPRESSION OF THE EMOTIONS IN MAN (sic) AND ANIMALS (3d ed. 1998).
 
Nonhuman apes meet the generally accepted criteria for personhood. Their enslavement is capricious and arbitrary under an enlightened and coherent reading of national and international law. GRASP's mission is to expand the modern legal understanding of fundamental rights to life, physical integrity, land and freedom, so that the concept of fundamental liberty rights will transcend human-racism.
 
Natural selection doesn't create. It is a negative process. Those not fit fail over time in preference to those who are more fit to reproduce.
 
In spite of a much debated assumption that human evolution has finished due to human ability to change the environment more efficiently than the evolutionary process of adapting to it, besides the greater amount of time it takes to change a phenotype. Descent with modification just doesn't work as well as human ingenuity. But we are indeed still evolving. We, like all other species are transitional. And, humans may actually be evolving faster than we scientists assumed according to a recent study which suggests that evolution has actually accelerated.
 
About 200,000 years ago humans were anatomically modern and the evidence is found in the fossil record.
 
"The origin of modern humans was a minor event compared to more recent evolutionary changes, wrote the authors of the research, in a presentation slated for Friday in Philadelphia at the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists." (Gregory Cochran of the U of Utah and anthropologist John Hawks of the U of Wisc-Madison, Transitional Species: Radically Reappraised - March 26, 2007 - World Science Net - http://www.world-science.net)
 
"The proposal is truly fascinating, wrote University of Chicago geneticist Bruce Lahn in an email. He wasnt involved in the work, though he did conduct earlier research finding that evolution may still be ongoing in the brain." (ibid)
 
"Even before the Hawks-Cochran study and its immediate forerunners, Lahn wrote, scientists had already noted a trend of accelerating change in the evolutionary lineage leading to modern humans from ape-like ancestors. But that phenomenon seemed to have occurred over time spans measured in millions of years; it was far from clear that it has continued in the recent past or today, he added." (ibid)
 
"Hawks and Cochran, by contrast, argue that the trend is visible even in the last tens of thousands of years, Lahn wrote. It runs counter to the feeling in some quarters that the evolution of the human phenotype has slowed down or even stopped in our recent past." (ibid)
 
"Evolution occurs when an individual acquires a beneficial genetic mutation, and it spreads throughout the population because those with it thrive and reproduce more. Ceaseless repetitions of this can change species, or produce new ones. As beneficial genes spread, harmful ones are weeded out; the whole process, called natural selection, propels evolution." (ibid)
 
"...Hominids are a family of primates that includes humans and their extinct, more ape-like though upright-walking ancestors and relatives." (ibid)
 
"Anthropologist Jeffrey McKee of Ohio State University said the new findings of accelerated evolution bear out predictions he made in a 2000 book The Riddled Chain. Based on computer models, he argued that evolution should speed up as a population grows. This is because population growth creates more opportunities for new mutations; also, the expanded population occupies new environmental niches, which would drive evolution in new directions." (ibid)
 
They go on to write that the generation of genes which were selected, the positive genes have increased a hundred fold over the last 40,000 years. They say the most obvious physical change has been the size of the brain. Some of you may find these conclusions worrisome; perhaps enough to turn off MTV and other television programs that your kids are watching (grin) because we have known for some time now that brain size has actually been getting smaller - but not to worry about television (I was kidding). This reduction in size has been ongoing for the last 20-30,000 years. Neanderthals had bigger brains and we all know what happened to them. We just don't know how it happened to them.
 
It is also possible that some areas of the brain increased in size as the over-all size decreased in size and perhaps those areas which increased in size were for more advanced uses - or what made us more human; that is, what we are now. (is that good or bad?) Foreheads have gotten higher and there is some speculation that as the jaw and teeth changed so did brain size.
 
With the introduction of agriculture about 10,000-15,000 years ago, diet changed and consequently so did teeth and brain size and health. Agriculture decreased dietary diversity. When our ancestors were hunter gatherers and they scrounged for every bit of food they also had more diversity which meant a greater variety of vitamins, of nutrients. Remember some vitamins humans must obtain elsewhere; they cannot make them internally. With the advent of agriculture while food was more accessible, it was also more limited, and nutritional deficience increased. The result was a change in phenotype. Our ancestors lost on average 6 inches.
 
(Children subjected to nutritional deficiences will suffer physical deformities and stunted growth)
 
With agriculture also came more infectious diseases. These are not the diseases of aging. Those didn't change. People still were inflicted with genetic diseases in the same frequency, i.e. Down syndrome, degenerative genetic diseases, atherosclerosis, cancer, heart disease, cystic fibrosis, other gene related neurological disease, etc.
 
But other infectious type diseases increased and were responsible for early death. These were senescent diseases like smallpox, measles, tuberculosis, pneumonia, cholera, plagues, flu and other viruses; none of which are the diseases of aging. These diseases increased with agriculture and with development of permanent settlements; villages, towns and cities.
 
Until antibiotics became available in the 1940s, infectious diseases were the greatest cause of death. More people died from infectious diseases than die from cancer, heart attacks or stokes, which are the big killers today.
 
And because we change our environment this in itself can put more pressure on evolutionary change. There were already metabolic alterations due to agriculture and there is every reason to believe there will be physical changes due to changes we have made to our environment.
 
Though they may not be yet fast enough to save us from climate change. While climate changes naturally, human activity has speeded up the process it appears faster than we and other species can adapt to those changes.
 
Evolution has contributed to our shrinkage, both our stature and our brains, to physically becoming weaker and a reduction in tooth size. While some animals have domesticated themselves; dogs being the best example, humans also have domesticated themselves and have become weak; perhaps less fit? There have been changes to our species phenotype and there is nothing progressive about evolution. We are modified to adapt to our environment to survive to reproduce. Nothing more.
Binominal Nomenclature
 
Taxonomy is the systematic means for the hierarchical system for classifying and identifying life established by Swedish scientist Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778). It was Linnaeus who developed the binomial nomenclature, the 2-part naming scheme - a generic and a specific name in Latin. An example is Homo sapiens or for the domestic dog it is Canis familiaris. The first name is the Genus and the second name is the Species which is within that Genus. Working back there is the Order. There are different Families in the order. As examples Cats is in the family Felidae and Dogs are in the family Canidae and both are in the order Carnivora. Carnivora includes 10 families of living mammals. There are nearly 5000 mammal species.
 
All of the mammals share three characteristics which are not found in other animals. They are three middle ear bones, hair, and lactation; the production of milk by modified sweat glands called mammary glands.
 
The middle ear bones in mammals are the malleus, incus (evolved from bones in lower jaw of ancestors of mammals), and stapes - (commonly referred to as the hammer, anvil, and the stirrup) and they function in the transmission of vibrations from the tympanic membrane (the eardrum) to the inner ear.
 
Ten families of the Order Carnivora:
 
  * Canidae (dogs, wolves, jackals, and foxes),
  * Ursidae (bears),
  * Procyonidae (raccoons),
  * Mustelidae (skunks, mink, weasels, badgers, and otters),
  * Viverridae (civets and mongooses),
  * Hyaenidae (hyenas),
  * Felidae (cats),
  * Otariidae (eared seals),
  * Odobenidae (walrus), and
  * Phocidae (earless seals)
 
And the Carnivora are in their turn members of the Class Mammalia. The Class Mammalia includes about 5000 species placed in 26 orders. Mammals comes under the Phylum Chordata in the Sub-Phylum Vertebrata, which in turn is part of the Kingdom Animalia.
 
Note: There are Sub-phyla and Sub-Species, etc.
 
The species is the basic unit of evolution - It is a population and evolution takes place in populations, not individuals. Lemarck advanced the mistaken view that evolution takes place in individuals and character traits were a product of inheritance. Lemarchian logic was wrong. It is the species (population) which is the BASIC unit of evolution, within which there is a gene pool which is subjected to random mutation and intentional natural selection. Natural selection is determined; that is, it is DESIGNED not by a supernatural designer, but by a criteria of "fitness" for reproduction.
 
The evolutionary history of the species is phylogeny. Phylogenies based on molecular evidence is revising the understanding of many groups.
The Reptilian Brain
 
The brain stem or ganglia, the nerve center of the brain (located at the base of the skull emerging from the spinal column) is often compared to a reptilian brain. It is the oldest and it is the smallest section in the brain and it evolved hundreds of millions of years ago. The brain stem is very much like the ENTIRE brain in modern day reptiles.
 
About 200 million years ago it was all there was and it controls various life function, i.e. autonomic brain activity such as breathing and heart rate. It's impulses are said to be instinctual. It is basic and it provided for basic fundamental needs to-wit: survival functions, i.e., physical maintenance, hoarding, preening, dominance, mating. It is also found in lower life forms such as lizards, crocodiles and birds.
 
"Let others rhapsodize about the elegant design and astounding complexity of the human brain the most complicated, most sophisticated entity in the known universe, as they say. David Linden, a professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University, doesn't see it that way. To him, the brain is a "cobbled-together mess." Impressive in function, sure. But in its design the brain is "quirky, inefficient and bizarre ... a weird agglomeration of ad hoc solutions that have accumulated throughout millions of years of evolutionary history," he argues in his new book, "The Accidental Mind," from Harvard University Press. More than another salvo in the battle over whether biological structures are the products of supernatural design or biological evolution (though Linden has no doubt it's the latter), research on our brains primitive foundation is cracking such puzzles as why we cannot tickle ourselves, why we are driven to spin narratives even in our dreams and why reptilian traits persist in our gray matter. (Prof David Linden, In Our Messy, Reptilian Brains MSNBC - April 9, 2007)
 
"Just as the mouse brain is a lizard brain "with some extra stuff thrown on top," Linden writes, the human brain is essentially a mouse brain with extra toppings. That's how we wound up with two vision systems. In amphibians, signals from the eye are processed in a region called the midbrain, which, for instance, guides a frog's tongue to insects in midair and enables us to duck as an errant fastball bears down on us. Our kludgy brain retains this primitive visual structure even though most signals from the eye are processed in the visual cortex, a newer addition. If the latter is damaged, patients typically say they cannot see a thing. Yet if asked to reach for an object, many of them can grab it on the first try. And if asked to judge the emotional expression on a face, they get it right more often than chance would predict especially if that expression is anger." (ibid)
 
"Neurons have hardly changed from those of prehistoric jellyfish. "Slow, leaky, unreliable," as Linden calls them, they tend to drop the ball: at connections between neurons, signals have a 70 percent chance of sputtering out. To make sure enough signals do get through, the brain needs to be massively interconnected, its 100 billion neurons forming an estimated 500 trillion synapses. This interconnectedness is far too great for our paltry 23,000 or so genes to specify. The developing brain therefore finishes its wiring out in the world (if they didn't, a baby's head wouldn't fit through the birth canal)." (ibid)
How smart are animals?
 
OR, can we really know when we judge them anthromorphically?
 
In Vancouver a duck tugged at the pants of a policeman. She kept tugging at his pants then she waddled to a sewer drain. The cop followed her and much to his surprise trapped there below the street were her ducklings.
 
And in Scotland a park warden answered his phone. On the other end was heavy breathing of a chimpanzee. The chimp stole the phone and he punched the programmed numbers until someone answered. Not sure what he wanted other than to mimic others with cell phones, but the point is, he did know enough to make it work.
 
If you live with animals, as I do; not just including my wife and kids, you know there is intelligence behind their eyes. Animals are smart and they do think. Of course they don't think like us; they don't have language like we do, but they can tell us a lot if we just listen. My dogs can tell me when they want to go outside and when they want to go for a walk. They tell me when they want me to play with them. They're smart.
 
And in some ways they may be smarter than I am. They can certainly do better at hearing, at smelling, at seeing. And they know when they don't want to eat something and when they do. They know how to get the toys they like to play with and ignore the others. They can and do tell me when we leave one of them outside. They can also be jealous when we treat one differently than the rest.
 
They even have their favorite television programs. Some things they like to watch and other things they refuse to let us watch and when my wife leaves the house, one of our dogs will bark and scratch and make a fuss until we either let her go with my wife and she always wants to sleep in the same bed with my wife. One of our other dogs only sleeps with me and one of them sleeps in my son's bed. Our biggest (and youngest dog), who also happens to be the biggest is usually annoyed and shows it when the others have our attention and he gets segregated at night.
 
As for self-recognition, Bottlenose dolphins and chimpanzees do recognize themselves in mirrors. This would indicate an awareness of themselves as individuals. Zoologists will tell you that humans, apes and dolphins have that capability. Tell me that isn't intelligence.
 
And new research also shows that dogs do have descriptive language and can tell each other when there are predators near by. They can tell me when my wife is driving the care and is a few miles away and almost home, even when there is a lot of traffic on the road. How they do that is absolutely amazing.
 
Marc Houser, the Harvard ethologist wrote: "We share the planet with thinking animals." We can't use the standards by which we measure ourselves. Many animals have other skills which we can't even imagine having and these are attributes to them or to any of us if we were just half as smart as they are in those ways. They can solve problems for them we can't do for ourselves. These are skills they evolved to survive to reproduce. They can hear distance, see other wave lengths which we can't see and just because we can't doesn't mean we're stupid and they are just smarter. Or, does it? [grin]
 
We share 98% of our genes with chimps and between 70-80% with dogs. But what about emotions? We haven't even yet been able to figure out how to measure emotions. We don't know if they are more sensitive than we are. Perhaps they are?
Aging and Your Mitochondria
 
There are about 300 theories for aging. While no one of them appears to be definitive biologists have a pretty good idea what leads to the deterioration we call senescence. A one time mating and suicide, called semelparity is common to several animals species. Males live to copulate and as soon as they finish that prime directive for their species to reproduce they simply (or not so simply) die. It has been referred to as programmed aging because the view is a genetic plan regulates functions like a computer program with one inescapable genetically determined step by step process of birth through puberty through reproduction through death.
 
  * Pacific salmon are semelparious and soon die after mating. Atlantic salmon are not and can breed repeatedly. Plants are either semiannual or annual. The males of small marsupials die from an abrupt immune system failure soon after mating season.
 
At the cellular level, cells divide a number of times and then stop forever. This is referred to as the Hayflick Limit.
 
"Some recent research...suggests that limited cell division may inhibit healing in arterial regions that have been damaged by being bombarded with blood. Also our immune system needs rapid, plentiful cell division to operated effectively, so limited division potential may be involved in the reduced immunity of the elderly...." (Steven N. Austad, Why We Age 97)
 
There is the suggesting that mitochondria, the power plant where ATP is manufactured for organs and muscles is a "driving force in aging."
 
From Serge Jurasunas, Mitochondria and cancer - Townsend Letter: The Examiner of Alternative Medicine - August 1, 2006:
 
"The name mitochondrion comes from the Greek mitos (filaments) and kondros (grain). Mitochondria are small sub-cellular organelles of 0.5-20 [micro] in length, either filamentous or oval, found in all aerobic (eukaryotic) mammalian cells. (1) Mitochondria are often referred to as the powerhouse of the body, since cells have a vital need for energy and are dependent on mitochondria to utilize oxygen to generate high amounts of energy. In contrast, mitochondria of cancer cells are defective in their ability to utilize oxygen. (2) Moreover, recent evidence and experimental studies have defined new and unexpected functions of mitochondria in the regulation of the genome."
 
"Increasingly, researchers are focusing on the possibility that this tiny element of a cell may be a factor in failing memory, increasing weakness, thinning hair, and other symptoms of aging." (Alice Dembner - Boston Globe Staff, Nov 2, 2004 - "Aging: Is it a Power Failure? Researchers Explore the Role of Mitochondria)
 
Mitochondria is where cellular respiration takes place and during the photon pump process of turning oxygen to fuel there is free radical leakage. These free radicals are harmful and it is thought they may be causal for why there is an eventual breakdown in the body's machinery.
 
"Potentially harmful changes in mitochondria also have been discovered in age-related diseases, such as Alzheimer's, diabetes and the muscle-wasting condition called sarcopenia." (ibid)
 
"In addition, researchers are identifying natural changes in mitochondria that may promote longevity and protect against some diseases. For instance, scientists have discovered a particular mutation in mitochondrial DNA that occurs five times more frequently in centenarians than in younger individuals. Other researchers have identified segments of the world's population with mutations in their mitochondrial DNA that appear linked to both longer life and protection against Alzheimer's." (ibid)
 
"Mitochondria, present in every cell of the body except red blood cells, are believed to have derived from bacteria that invaded more complex cells billions of years ago, bringing their own genetic code. They transform fat, sugar and oxygen into energy that can be used by the body. As a byproduct, they create free radicals, destructive oxygen molecules that can damage the mitochondria genes as well as the surrounding cells." (ibid)
 
Scientists are increasingly finding linkages to aging and senescence by changes in mitochondria.
 
"For example, scientists at Yale University reported in Science magazine last month that they had found a mutation in mitochondrial DNA that caused high blood pressure, high cholesterol and low magnesium levels in four generations of an extended family. The work follows a study last year that linked a 40 percent decline in mitochondrial function in adults over 60 to insulin resistance, a major contributor to adult-onset diabetes. Since the symptoms of insulin resistance, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and obesity often cluster in aging adults, researchers suggest there may be a common mitochondrial cause." (ibid)
 
"It is believed that defective tRNAs (transport RNAs) are the cause of about 60 percent of conditions traced to malfunctions in the mitochondria, like diabetes, hearing loss and a number of neurological disorders, depending on which kinds of cells are affected." (Hindustan Times, June 25, 2008 - "New role for mitochondria could lead to targeted therapies for various diseases")
 
"...Adenosine-5-triphosphate, or ATP, a compound associated with energy transport in cells, as essential for the process. The researchers showed ATP's role in the process using cells from a patient with a specific type of epilepsy called MERRF. This disease is characterized by a mitochondrial tRNA mutation leading to a drastic reduction in the mitochondria's ability to generate ATP, which in turn hinders the import of tRNAs into the mitochondria of people with this disease." (Hindustan Times)
 
We generally receive our mitochondria from our mothers but occasionally a few infrequently sneak in from our father's sperm. They have their own DNA and RNA; they don't reside in the nucleus. DNA is not wrapped in histone proteins as are DNA in the cell's nucleus. They are like bacteria; their chromosomes are circular like bacteria. Mitochondria were first discovered with microscopy as tiny granules and it has since been argued that these mitochondria are the fundamental particles of life (they have also been called bioplasts). Mitochondria are only found in more complex eukaryote organisms.
 
Nick Lane in Power, Sex, Suicide writes "They are "sine qua non of the eukaryotic condition...The acquisition of mitochondria was the pivotal moment in the history of life." (Lane)
The Sense of Biology is Evolution
 
Biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky put it best when he said, "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution."
 
The group of Haplorrhinae which we are identified with is the Catarrhines (Catarrhinae) which include our species and the Platyrrhine which are the American monkeys and both are usually grouped together in a common category; the anthropoids apes (Anthropoidea) - often referred to as anthropoids.
 
Both of these groups are diurnal - except the South American owl money (Aotus trivirgatus) which descended from diurnal ancestors but now appears to be nocturnal.
 
A prominent feature of anthropoids is their frontal positioning for their eyes which provides a wide field of vision which is stereoscopic (3-D).
 
Our three dimensional vision enables us to gauge distances, without which we would not have such good basketball players and nobody could catch a football very well and I couldn't get that wadded up paper into the trash can - the the alternative would be a very messy office. (more than it already is)
 
Anthropoids also have larger brains and in our case a newborn is born to a large degree undeveloped and must get through the pelvic bone before the brain grows to it's normal large size. Our olfactory lobes are reduced and we perceive the world essentially as images rather than odors. My dog has a big advantage over me in that regard. But while my vision is limited to light frequencies I do see better than they do during the day, but not better at night since the see things twice - entering their eye and as light reflected off their retina and back out (notice how dog and cat eyes seem to light up at night).
 
There is also an absence of the third molar in adult in Homo sapiens because there is less need for us to have this masticatory molar. Our species is classified with hominoids. Old World monkeys are a subgroup called Cercopithecidae. The hominoid group includes the primates referred to as apes. We're APES.
 
It isn't just theory that we're APES. Desmond Morris referred to us as the Naked Apes (in his book years ago) and the book which inspired me to keep current since we were really on the cusp of awareness back then in the 70s when I read the book to the great increase in understanding we have today.
 
There has been attempts to classify evolution as mere speculation, as was done in Cobb County in Georgia when they tried to put stickers on their high school biology textbooks which stated: "
 
"This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a Fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered."
 
It didn't pass the legal test and in a legal action, Selman v. Cobb County School District on January 13, 2005, the federal judge found the Cobb County policy to be unconstitutional.
 
Science uses the word theory for tested (challenged) facts whereas the popular use of the word refers to unsubstantiated information; even a guess. It is no guess that Evolution is fact based and supported by all variety of evidence. It is as well supported a fact as gravitation and other models explaining elements of physics and chemistry, etc. In biology there is no competing theory which does as good a job as the Theory of Evolution.
 
Hank Roth
Suggested Reading:
 
  1. Cavalier, Smith T. The origin of eukaryotic and archaebacterial cells.
  Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. 1987;503: 17.
  2. Warburg O. Metabolism of Tumors. London: Arnold Constable, 1939.
  3. GRASP - (Great Apes Survivor Partnership) - www.unep.org/grasp/
 
 
All quoting per the Fair Use Doctrine
for educational and discussion purposes pursuant to
Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, Copyright Law.
 
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Okinawans have the longest life expectancy and those living over 100 years are claimed to be about 34 per 1,000,000. HOWEVER, surveys done in various geographical locations and investigations have demonstrated that all records of longevity are extremely unreliable. It seems that life expectancies from old age; senescence, have never varied that much. People die of old age now at the about the same age as they always did. People died younger at earlier times because of the brutishness and harshness of life, not because of natural aging. Most early deaths are caused by disease and accidents, but aging, an occurance after reproduction has stayed pretty stable.
 
The leading causes of death continue to be cancer and heart disease. You can include strokes in with that data. Strokes are usually also age related. However, when you make an effort to reduce these diseases by eating less, taking vitamins, exercising, eating in moderation - or even starving yourself on a calorie restricted diet you only gain a few years. Cancer and heart disease kill about HALF of all people in industrialized societies. HOWEVER, if all cancer was eliminated people would gain ONLY about two years overall. If heart disease was eliminated you would get another 4 to 6 years and that is it. We have already achieved the level of longevity from natural aging.
 
There are several theories why people age. One of the most popular now is cellular damage from oxidative stress. Antherwords aging as a consequence of free radical leakage. Another theory is the varying length of chromosomal telemeres; little tails at the end of chromosomes and each time they replace themselves which happens 80 to 90 times in a lifetime the telemeres get shorter until there are barely any left. It is more complicated than that but this is the short answer. Aging is a combination of multiple causes - and among them are telemere shortening and free radical oxigen leakage.
 
Free radical leakage results from the manufacture of Adenosene Triphospates (ATP), which is the energy which fuels all of your cells and organs, a photon pump process in mitochondria. This is a multi-stage process which takes place only in mitochondria.
 
Eukaryotes have nucleated cells and lots of mitochondria. Animals and plants have nucleated cells. Our ancient ancestors, bacteria do not have a nucleus and they did not die. They just kept on dividing. And at some time after about 4.5 billion years, LIFE took a new direction, merging took place and mitochondria joined the family. The theory is it only happened once because every eukaryote on the planet is related to each other and they are also related to our bacterial cousins. All life on this planet is related. Think about that next time you swat a fly or step on a roach or kill a snake [that could be you].
 
AND every eukaryote contains mitochrondria, usually from their mother - or in some cases they had mitochondria and lost it. That has happened. And on rare instances the father's mitochondria made its way into tissue cells but that is a rarity. And mitochondria is about the size of bacteria, which is very much smaller than regular cells. Mitochondria DNA evolved with a eukaryotic cell's nucleated DNA and both depend on each other - which is why mitochondria is an organelle and not a symbiont.
 
For a cell to have mitochondria is pretty much sine qua non that the cell is a eukaryote and a eukaryote must have a nucleus. Eukaryotes are generally much bigger than proeukaryotes (bacteria) but some are as small - or smaller, i.e., the pico-eukaryotes.
 
What is interesting to me is the amount of collaboration which takes place between eukaryotes and prokaryotes and with mitochondria which as an organelle (similar to other organs in the body), it has the job of manufacturing the fuel or energy for the host it inhabits. All this cooperation to keep everything working.
 
Aging is a tough topic. There is a lot of research on how to extend life. There are groups of transhumanists who are interested in extending life, and think they can but this also involves augmentation which can make humans more like borgs than human beings. It's nevertheless fascinating and you can look it up on the Internet if you are interested in knowing more about transhumanism.
 
Also a paradox is why if there was so much collaboration between proeukaryotes and eukaryotes, why not more evolutionary forms and divergence in cells and other microorganisms - from this really great collaboration? Well, for one thing we are always discovering new forms of microorganisms and the numbers are astonishing. The more we look in SMALL places for SMALL things and in EXTREME places the more we find, i.e., the pico-eukaryotes. And a wide spectrum exists which we have yet to explore or discover. We may only be scratching the surface. While we explore our outer space, we have a huge inner space - inside our planet - deep in the oceans and even in us which remains unexplored or only partially explored or not at all.
 
Of course it is astonishing in itself that a merger occurred between mitochondria and resulted in multicellular, more complex organisms, and gave rise to animals like us. And practically everyone seems to be agreed that the acquisition of mitochondria, which was really the GREAT LEAP in multi complexity only happened once and thus WE ARE ALL RELATED and this great event was something of a miracle - as much as I dislike using that word. Why only once? Why us?
 
The pico-eukaryote live in extreme environments with micro-plankton in acidic rivers or high iron rivers (i.e., the "River of Fire" in southern Spain. and at the bottom of the Antarctic and other environments, like black smokers, i.e. thermo-vents, once thought to be the sole domain of only archaia extremophiles. The pico-eukaryote is a sub-species of the larger eukaryotes. Scientists have discovered perhaps 20-30 different sub-species of pico-eukaryotes, all of which are only about a micron in diameter, small as, or smaller than bacteria.
 
Mitochondria holds the key to our evolution and maybe also the key to why we only live so long and bacteria doesn't die NATURALLY, it just clones (it dies by accident, or antibiotics kill it) AND though we technically die thermodynamically; there is equilibrium, although we dissipate as energy back to the environment.
 
  Hank Roth
 
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Today is Friday June 19, 2009

Have a Glass of Tomato Juice
  with your Apple a Day
 
Tomatoes can be very good for you. Tomato juice may just keep those dangerous blood clots at bay.
 
A glass of tomato juice a day keeps the clots away according to a recent study, which is very good news for those with cardiovascular disease, which is just about everyone. Occlusions of arteries seems to increase with age. It is a matter of stress and free radical leakage, resulting from mitochondria respiration and cell manufacture of ATP for tissue regeneration.
 
"After drinking 250 ml of tomato juice every day for three weeks, a group of people with diabetes experienced a much reduced level of blood clotting activity."
 
(as per a study conducted by dietetics PhD student, Sherri Lazarus at  University of Newcastle - from article by Kylie Walker, Tomato juice keeps  dangerous clots at bay - AAP General News (Australia) August 26, 2004)
 
The problem with these treatments is our evolutionary predisposition to disease, and in the case of heart disease, to atherosclerosis. Although it  may slow down that which ails us, all the precaution in the world is not going to prevent the disease if we are naturally susceptible because of our  genes. We have genes which promote craving for fatty foods and starches, carbohydrates and sugars.
 
We will eventually fail. It is guaranteed. When you are born you emerge with an evolutionary plan to reproduce and then fall apart. We can prolong  the inevitable but we can't really stop it (although some folks are trying to do just that). The fact of the matter is we are engaged in a perpetual  arms race against which we ultimately lose.
 
We love to eat because there may be times when there is no food. We evolved a biological system where a lot of things work together to keep all the parts working but we adapted millions of years ago to a different life; where we hunted and gathered in small groups on the plains of Africa.
 
On the plains of Africa, we consumed as much fatty food when food was available as we could to carry us over to period of famine - or when there was just less food and today that is for most of us not a problem but since it takes hundreds of thousands of years for us to adapt and selection to do its eliminating we are still running around with the same adaptive bodies our ancestors had in the distant past.
 
It takes a long time for natural selection to do its magic and the current epidemic with cardiac diseases, pancreatic diseases and cancers are the consequences of having the wrong adaptation for the wrong time because genes do not change that fast, if at all and since natural selection is only operative for reproduction, a younger body that is fit and reproduces is successful and modification won't apply to their descendants.
 
The same physiology which would predispose to heart disease if we overindulged on those fatty foods existed hundreds of thousands of years ago but were harmless then because our ancestors did not eat at Burger King have a Big Mac for lunch.
 
It would be too costly to cull out post-reproductive disease disposed individuals, besides being impossible. Post reproductive individuals succumb to senescence. An aging body which doesn't reproduce is not going to influence future generations and natural selection plays no role.
 
Beware of Killer Tomatoes
 
The first tomatoes grew wild, discovered by native people in Peru and Equador thousands of years ago. As these Indians migrated north to Central America, they took their tomato plants with them and the Conquistadors after conquering Mexico in the early 1500, took some to Spain. Interestingly, they thought them dangerous; killer tomatoes - which could only be eaten cooked in stews, sauces or soup.
 
 
Hank Roth
http://inyourface.info