Climate change: it’s not so new after all
Lately in the news, there’s been quite a bit of news about “global warming.” The public has a tendency to dismiss such claims as fear mongering by groups with an agenda. I used to dismiss them out-of-hand as well. The fact of the matter, though, is that global warming is real: there is no debate among real scientists doing real work in the field. The earth is getting warmer.
What is up for debate is whether humans have always caused global warming. It seems that we have. We succeeded in altering the climate by setting large forest fires to clear land for settlements and farming. (Ash, of course, is excellent fertilizer.) The old fashioned global warming trend was discovered by analyzing methane found trapped in pockets of air in 2,000 year old arctic ice.
The chemical fingerprint of stable types, or isotopes, of carbon atoms gives a record of methane in the atmosphere over the course of history, and where it came from.
It appears that much of the gas came from the burning of biomass - the likes of wood and grass - rather than other known sources of methane, such as the burning of fossil fuels, or natural emissions of methane from swamps and wetlands.
So it seems that we humans have been altering the climate for a long time. It should be noted that global warming thousands of years ago, while present, wasn’t present to the degree as it is today, given the mass fossil fuel consumption fueling established economies like the West, and the up-and-comers like China. It is the emerging economies that tend to skimp on things like pollution controls. It would be interesting to find a comparison of the levels of emissions comparing China to the US or Europe. Whatever the outcome of that would be, the fact remains that we’re seeing unprecedented evidence of global warming, such that the ice caps are beginning to melt and break away. The amount of useable land for smaller island groups like Micronesia has also decreased as ocean levels rise. Eventually, these islands will be totally submerged, and in the meantime, higher ocean levels make them more vulnerable to tsunamis.
I would hate to see someone point to this research and use it as an excuse to abuse the environment some more, because comparing climate change today with the climate change of thousands of years ago is spurious and misleading.
Structured v. creative learning
This struck me as an appropriate follow-up piece to the news post below regarding left and right brain activity. I mentioned that I thought that it was possible to learn to be both creative and utilitarian simultaneously. In fact, those that learn this skill tend to be more productive and come up with more innovative solutions that those who merely “think inside the box” (to reuse that horribly overused phrase). But I think I might have jumped the gun, and pre-emptied myself just a little bit. Children think creatively, using both sides of their brains; they are not bounded by an artificial reality — conformity to social standards dictating the use of a given object for a given task.
‘Children of this age learn to make friends as well as to use their imagination through role play,’ says Dr Rogers. ‘We know that they are capable of sustained and complex imaginative play and that capturing and engaging their interest is essential. Unfortunately, pressures on time and space, as well as the need to teach literacy, means that playing at shops, pirates and hospitals is difficult to fit into the timetable.’
It struck me that it would make an interesting experiment to take 50 children and conduct a longitudinal study, comparing “traditional” teaching methods where there are structured recess breaks and classroom times to a more free-flowing approach to education: allowing children to work or play as they say fit with minimal structured time to only teach children the absolute basics, such as reading. It would be interesting to see after ten years which group of individuals has “accomplished” more. Who are the better readers and mathematicians? Allow children to explore what they like on their own time and guide their own learning. I have no doubt that doing this would result in children who are exceptionally gifted in certain areas while astonishingly deficient in others. But what would the net result be of the group as a whole? By not establishing any status quo, would the free-wheeling group be more “capable” than those in a structured environment, or would we end up with a group of lazy kids who don’t want to learn or do anything except play?
Anyway, I’ve rather gotten off topic, but the study did show some other interesting aspects regarding the difference between the sexes.
The favourite theme for both boys and girls was ‘playing castles,’ although their drawings were strikingly different. The boys drew gory pictures of fighting and chopping off people’s heads, while the girls focused on princesses and ‘mums and dads’ and often embellished their pictures with colour and detail ‘to make it look prettier.’
The research highlights a number of gender differences in play. For instance, although girls sometimes combined traditional and less traditional roles, such as mum and astronaut, they more often chose to play domestic/maternal or nurturing and emotional caretaking roles. Boys, on the other hand, preferred to be robbers, superheroes or policemen in predominately action roles, despite teachers’ efforts to ‘de-gender’ role play.
I wonder if this is “hard-wired,” or if it’s a result of observing parental interaction and social dynamics at home when they are not at school. To answer that question (ethically), I think, will require studies of those children raised by same-sex parents. I believe that children raised by two parents of the same sex offers a whole host of insights into child behavior and development not previously available to researchers.
Schizotypal creativity
Pretty much everyone is familiar with the phrase “There’s a fine line between genius and insanity.” Well apparently, this is truer than anyone previously thought. People characterized by odd behavior and language who are not fully psychotic or schizophrenic rely more heavily on the right sides of their brains than the rest of the population. This means that they are more likely to be creative than most people, leading to individuals like Mozart, Einstein, Newton, and van Gogh. (Whether van Gogh was sane is still open for discussion, though.)
It has been known for a long while that these “schizotypal” personalities are more creative, but no one has looked into the behavioral manifestations how they experimentally correlate to neurological function. Until now, that is. Brad Folley and Sohee Park of Vanderbilt University recently conducted two experiments to compare the creative thinking processes of schizotypes and schizophrenics, and used normal people as control subjects. The results were interesting: schizophrenics and normal people performed comparably to one another while performing creative tasks, while the schizotypes tended to excel at creative thinking.
In the first experiment, the researchers showed research subjects a variety of household objects and asked them to make up new functions for them. The results showed that the schizotypes were better able to creatively suggest new uses for the objects, while the schizophrenics and average subjects performed similarly to one another.
“Thought processes for individuals with schizophrenia are often very disorganized, almost to the point where they can’t really be creative because they cannot get all of their thoughts coherent enough to do that,” Folley said. “Schizotypes, on the other hand, are free from the severe, debilitating symptoms surrounding schizophrenia and also have an enhanced creative ability.”
The second experiment involved monitoring the prefrontal lobe of the brain while the same subjects were asked to identify new uses for household objects and perform a basic control task. The results showed that all groups used both brain hemispheres for creative tasks, but that the right side activity of the schizotypal personalities was far greater than the normal controls and the schizophrenics. The popular notion that people are “right-brained” if they are creative is largely bunk because creativity requires the use of both hemispheres to come up with anything coherent.
The “coherency” (for lack of a better term) stems from the left side of the brain which identifies objects with their common use, while the right brain might suggest a different use for a given object. To (over?)simplify things, it is up to the left brain to temper the right side’s suggestion to keep it within the bounds of reality.
From personal experience, this “thinking outside the box” behavior can be learned. I think that most people ignore most creative input, opting instead to do the normal thing with the normal tools at hand. Perhaps this is why children are so much more creative than adults most of the time: young children haven’t learned the social value of conformity. And it is this embraced creative input that schizotypal personalities exhibit that cause them to be labelled “abnormal.”
Revisiting the Easter Island mathematical modeling
Dr. William Basener, whose approach to modeling a societal collapse I wrote about a few days ago, left me some comments, but they got truncated for some reason, so I asked him to continue. He responded, and what he has to say is so extensive (not to mention interesting) that I opted to turn it into a feature article. I hope he doesn’t mind; it’s quite fascinating and readable.
I’ve always found the the behind the scenes stuff more interesting than the press release itself. Come on inside and check it out!
Q&A with Dr. William Basener on his Easter Island collapse model
Parasitic brainwashing and African sleeping sickness
The other day I was watching Smallville season 2 (hooray Netflix), and the next morning I read this story about parasitic hairworms “brainwashing” their grasshopper hosts, causing them to jump into water, effectively committing suicide. Anyway, the episode I was watching involved parasitic worms causing their human hosts to do crazy things. Go figure that I dismissed the idea as fun science fiction, only to read the next morning about the same thing happening in the insect world. (I shouldn’t have been surprised though, given the stupid things people do while cracked out on PCP.)
The parasitic Nematomorph hairworm (Spinochordodes tellinii) develops inside land-dwelling grasshoppers and crickets until the time comes for the worm to transform into an aquatic adult. Somehow mature hairworms brainwash their hosts into behaving in way they never usually would – causing them to seek out and plunge into water.
Once in the water the mature hairworms – which are three to four times longer that their hosts when extended – emerge and swim away to find a mate, leaving their host dead or dying in the water. David Biron, one of the study team at IRD in Montpellier, France, notes that other parasites can also manipulate their hosts’ behaviour: “‘Enslaver’ fungi make their insect hosts die perched in a position that favours the dispersal of spores by the wind, for example.”
Now scientists have worked out the mechanism by which these worms cause this mass suicide. The worms produce proteins which directly and indirectly affect the grasshopper’s central nervous system. (Video available; be warned, watching worms larger than their hosts look as though they’re being excreted from crickets and grasshoppers creeps me out.) While the explanation seems rather vague, it can be definitively be said that the grasshoppers and crickets and spiders are not in control of themselves when they take the plunge: they are not doing it willingly.
What’s even more interesting from a human point of view, is what this means for insect behavior and how it affects human beings. In the case of the Nematomorph worm, which starts out microscopic and grows to be larger than its host when it finally takes over, it causes the insect or spider to commit suicide. In the same vein, a parasitic organism like Trypanosoma may cause the host insect to have an increased appetite. This means that the vector — the tsetse fly in this case — may be more aggressive in feeding. This, in turn, can mean greater rates of infection because the odds of an infected tsetse fly biting are greater than those of a non-infected fly, which means more African sleeping sickness being spread.
Two girls for every boy
In the Aamjiwnaang community near Ontario, Canada, there has been a sharp fall off in birth rates of male children. Between 1999 and 2003, 86 girls were born compared to just 46 males. Assuming gender is random, it is within the realm of possibility that this could happen assuming one birth is independent from the next, but it’s extremely unlikely. Birth rates of males began dropping around 1993, and the ratio has become more skewed since then, almost certainly pointing to some external cause.
The probable cause is high levels of hexachlorobenzene (HCB) — which can disrupt hormone balances — and phthalates. Phthalates are plasticizers: they make hard plastic malleable, such as turning PVC into a flexible plastic. They’re also found in things like nail polish. Those living in the Aamjiwnaang community haven’t been tested for chemicals for some reason, but the chemicals at the top of the list of possible culprits.
Most guys might love to be born into a community where the ratio of men to women is skewed so badly, but many of the males born have slight birth defects, as male fetuses exposed to phthalates in the womb have smaller penises than males who have not.
While not conclusive until chemical testing has been done — despite what the New Scientist article says — this is the first research being done that might show direct evidence of chemicals feminizing fetuses in the womb.
Modeling the collapse of the Easter Island culture
William Basener, an assistant professor of mathematics has created the first mathematical formula to “accurately model [Easter] island’s monumental societal collapse.” I am skeptical of this claim because no historical records were kept by the islanders regarding what actually happened, so claiming something is accurate when it cannot actually be verified seems a little disingenuous to me. I don’t like things being presented as fact when they are not falsifiable. Nonetheless, this is a press release, so I suppose that such language is to be expected.
The story is interesting, though, because Easter Island might be an accurate microcosm of what could happen here on Earth in the next couple of thousand years, assuming we don’t all wipe each other out first.
Between 1200 and 1500 A.D., the small, remote island, 2,000 miles off the coast of Chile, was inhabited by over 10,000 people and had a relatively sophisticated and technologically advanced society. During this time, inhabitants used large boats for fishing and navigation, constructed numerous buildings and built many of the large statues, known as Tiki Gods, for which the island is now best known. However, by the late 18th century, when European explorers first discovered the island, the population had dropped to 2,000 and islanders were living in near primitive conditions, with almost all elements of the previous society completely wiped out.
“The reasons behind the Easter Island population crash are complex but do stem from the fact that the inhabitants eventually ran out of finite resources, including food and building materials, causing a massive famine and the collapse of their society,” Basener says. “Unfortunately, none of the current mathematical models used to study population development predict this sort of growth and quick decay in human communities.”
The reason that such models haven’t been developed is simply because population groups that live long enough in isolation to collapse are few and far between. This same collapse will happen to Earth eventually, since this is actually a planet with limited resources. This is one of the many reasons that space exploration is so important. Not for us here and now, perhaps, but certainly for our progeny, because a time will come when we do run out of resources here on Earth.
Dr. Basener plans to turn his formula to the Mayan and Viking populations next, and eventually hopes to modify his work to predict population changes in the modern world. He hopes that it will lead to the development of better population management skills so that future famines and population collapses may be averted.
Unfortunately for Dr. Basener, population “collapses” as a result of famine are relatively uncommon — they usually happen as a result of war: historically it has been common for one group to conquer another, kill all the men and children, and dilute their gene pool by raping their women. It is difficult to find significant population groups that remain isolated for long periods of time where they could implode under their own pressure. Humanity’s biggest threat in the near future isn’t imploding due to famine and mismanagement; it’s imploding due to something akin to nuclear winter. (Though now that the Cold War is over, this seems unlikely, though the possibility still exists.) In any event, I believe that Dr. Basener’s work would be much more interesting if it were applied to the world as a whole rather than just small populations within the world.
Update: There is a Q&A with Dr. Basener here.