I know I have the fire service on the brain lately. It’s mainly because I’m at the “easy” part of the learning curve, in which you know so little that every gain — even if you’re taking only baby steps — seems huge. I think I’ll go elsewhere for inspiration next time, but I had one more fire-company story to share first.
Last week marked another “first” for me — the first time I participated in the Independence Day parade with my company.
You’ve got to understand, this is an iconic thing for me. As a tad I would line up to watch my grandfather and his brothers-in-law march down the street — I can’t remember whether South Hackensack had its own parade, or it was part of a larger procession in Hackensack, but in that, um, slimmer era firefighters marched as well as drove their trucks. South Hackensack Company Number Two being an informal (by the standards of the day, which seem fairly formal these days) production, the chieftaincy rotated; but I know my grandfather, Salvatore Gulino, served as chief for at least one term.
One of my earliest memories is of spending the night at my grandparents’, and of waking when the town horn went off — a Morse-code-like pattern told the firefighters where the fire was in that pre-scanner era. Outside my room, I could hear rustling as my grandfather got dressed and went out to help somebody who was in trouble.
The man was twenty feet tall.
So as you can imagine, marching with the company carried a huge amount of baggage — in the best possible sense of the word — for me. Last year I didn’t do it because, mere days into my membership, it didn’t seem right. Now I’ve responded to some calls, gotten some training, have some history with these guys. So this year, I knew I’d participate.
I had a welcome surprise coming; Neil, our assistant chief, took me aside and told me, “I want you to drive the squad.” Now, being assigned to drive was an unmitigated honor; but in all honesty, the “squad” — a van that carries odd roadside tools and which the guys at our substation chiefly use to get to incident scenes when the tanker isn’t needed — is a pretty lame vehicle.
As if I needed to be reminded of this, they had to pull one of the junior members off an engine — actually, it was my partner from Fire School — so we’d have more than one person in the vehicle. There weren’t going to be any volunteers, you see.
“How am I going to impress the chicks now?” he asked me.
In my best avuncular mode, I suggested, “You could always tell them it’s the pussy wagon.”
He brightened slightly: “Hey, that could work.”
“No, it won’t,” I laughed.
Anyhow, we lined up — I believe the brush truck came first, then the rescue truck, us, and then the engines, starting with “23” [1], and finally the tanker.
The parade was, of course, a low-velocity follow-the-leader thing down Main Street, plodding like ducks in a row; the squad having an automatic transmission, I was riding my brakes all the way. I didn’t see Heather and my Cleveland relations — we’d imported a houseful of them for the holiday — partly because I was so intent on monitoring my peripheral vision for any kids who might dash into the street. Between that, and the obligation to wave back as we drove by, my attention was surprisingly filled for what I think was a half-hour drive.
Anyhow, my point being, when your navigation consists of putting your nose into the next guy’s butt, it isn’t much of a challenge. Which brings us to our current entry, a fascinating video study of wayfinding by rats (note that this journal has a limited-time one-day free subscription, so if you hurry you can view this for free).
Primarily a brain-function study rather than a scent study, it consisted of having rats follow a scent trail to a food reward, and then — and it’s this second step that’s important — seeing what they did next, as the normal behavior would be to rush straight back to their hole to cache the goodies.
In some of the animals, the researchers had surgically damaged the ability of the hippocampus, a memory- and spatial-sense-associated part of the brain, to move information. This removed the animals’ ability to dead reckon — basically, get to where you want to go by remembering how you got where you are, without either following a guide or other external navigation method. They used dark conditions and little hoodies for some of the rats to make sure they weren’t navigating by sight.
Both the animals who received this surgery and those who received sham surgery — meant to rule out any effect from anesthesia or non-hippocampal-effects of the surgery — were able to follow the scent trails pretty well. Some individual variation, but I don’t believe any significant difference.
Again, though, it was that return trip that posed the problem: the hippocampal-operated rats just couldn’t do the quick, effortless dash back to the hole. They took longer; they made a lot of mistakes, sometimes going to the wrong hole; one enterprising individual even back-trailed on the scent trail. But their ability to simply remember the direct path back to their hole was no longer there.
I don’t have much to add to this one, except to point out how powerful the simple video is; and how amazing it is that web technology allows this kind of work, and this kind of journal, to exist.
Would it be cheesy to call it pathbreaking?
[1] Interesting fact here: soon after I joined, I learned that, of our three engines, 23, 23-2, and 23-3, 23 never rolls. I assumed at the time, and from the numbering, that 23 was the oldest engine and so the chief liked to employ it as a reserve instead of in daily use. Oh no, I come to learn: 23 is the replacement for the old 23, and is in fact the newest of the three. It doesn’t roll because the chief doesn’t want us to get it dirty. That taught me something about fire chiefs; I kid, but you know, the more I think about it, the more I think that mind-frame is a good thing in a chief.
Thursday, July 9, 2009
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Middle-Aged Men and Fire
Or, Runaway Hose
So I made it through Fire School. Here I was, a 47-year-old rookie, running around with teens and twenty-somethings, struggling to hold fire hoses on target [1], crawling on hands and knees in heavy turnout gear, my fire-resistant balaclava pulled over my face to simulate zero-visibility smoke, straining to control my breathing so I didn’t suck all the air out of my SCBA tank …
Man, was I sore on Monday. But I held my own, did better than some, and kept up with my pre-18 junior firefighter partner — a solid kid, by the way, I definitely want him there on a real call. We determined to volunteer to be the first to do everything, and damned near did.
Thanks to my joining Harmony Volunteer Fire Company a couple of weeks after last year’s Fire School, I’d been in the company for nearly a year before I had the opportunity, and so most of it turned out be a review of stuff I’d already been taught. But they had one exercise that was new to me: how to recover a runaway fire hose.
You see, at the end of an already-heavy fire hose is a metal coupling that can really hurt somebody if the hose gets loose, either from a break in a coupling, someone not following proper procedure and allowing a charged hose to turn itself on, or merely somebody taking a fall and losing control of the hose. Remember, the stream of water coming out of fire hose can be between 100 and 300 pounds per square inch — that’s a lot of specific impulse, and can make a hose end into a deadly projectile.
The safe way to wrangle a runaway hose is to straddle the hose, well upstream of the offending end, on your hands and knees, crawling as fast as you can while keeping the hose down with your hands. You dampen the erratic pendulum of the hose gradually, lessening its amplitude, and thus its potential for mayhem, finally getting hold of the coupling itself.
Only trick was, if the hose was behaving itself a little too much as we got toward the coupling, the instructor kicked it to send it moving. Thanks, dude; but I guess I did OK, all the same.
Today I thought I’d take on a scientific/ethical/moral quandary that is more complex, more like a runaway fire hose, than the many discussions you can find on the web often seem to fathom.
Was Josef Mengele a bad scientist, or merely an evil scientist?
It seems like you can’t take two steps without tripping over a gratuitous comparison of someone to Hitler. My own take, I think, is that Jon Stewart got it exactly right [2]. And as the Better Half has pointed out, comparing someone to the closest thing this world has ever seen to Sauron is tantamount to admitting you have nothing intelligent to say about them. It’s the ultimate ad-hominem attack; you don’t get many people in a generation, worldwide, whose evil is so profound and powerful that the reference isn’t, as bad as the person in question may be, a slur.
A few years back I had the opportunity, at a seminar connected with a major medical school’s graduation ceremonies, to watch a physician-turned-historian [3] give a talk on Nazi medicine that was spectacular. His argument was not the standard — that the Nazis subverted science — but that their entire belief system was, at the time, a logically justified, if undeniably evil, extrapolation of the best science of the day. His point was that science carries no moral polarity of itself; that no proper scientific knowledge is immune to being harnessed to the purposes of evil.
Eugenics — the narrow end of the wedge that led from the Nazis initially sounding, to some people anyway, as beneficent, to the practice of unapologetic mass murder — is exhibit A. Based on the evolutionary and genetic science of today, it’s a joke. Today we know it’s a fundamental misunderstanding, which failed because it didn’t account for the then-unknown phenomenon of genetic drift. The latter makes it impossible to improve or enhance the human race by weeding out the “unfit,” even if you had a morally defensible definition of that concept, as slippery as a runaway fire hose.
But scientifically, that’s hindsight. Based on the scientific understanding of the late 1930s, eugenics wasn’t a fringe belief: it was the mainstream of medical thought. And it was not uniquely Nazi or even German [4]; its leadership, arguably, hailed a generation earlier from America, where much eugenic legislation got its start, though thankfully it didn’t take hold (more about that in a moment).
Here’s the bitter pill that those of us trained to be researchers in liberal democracies have tremendous trouble swallowing: whether it is correct or incorrect, what we think we understand scientifically will not civilize people, will not necessarily help the Good Guys. And conversely, unpleasant, dangerous, and made-for-evil scientific discoveries are not, by definition, bad science. Evil, yes; not bad, in the sense of necessarily being improperly performed or producing incorrect discoveries.
Two observations along these lines. The first, though I’ve gotten to it late in the discussion, is the paper that launched me onto this topic in the first place: a treatise on the senses by Sir Kenelm Digby, and published in 1644. Amidst the archaic spellings, get a load of the following, regarding the sense of smell [5]:
“So that thofe mafters, who will teach vs that the impreffions vpon fenfe are made by fpirituall or fpiritelike thinges or qualities; which they call intentionall fpeciefes, muft labour at two workes: the one to make it appeare that there are in nature fusch thinges as they would perfuade us, the other to proue that thefe materiall actions we fpeake of are not able to performe thofe effects, for which the fenfes are giuen vnto livuing creatures. And vntill they haue done that, I conceiue we should be much too blame to admit fuch thinges, as we neyther haue ground for in reafon, nor can vnderftand what they are. And therefore, we muft refolue to reft in this beliefe, which experience breedeth in vs: that thefe bodies worke vpon our fenfes no other wayes then by a corporeall operation; and that fuch a one is fufficient for all the effects we fee proceede from them: as in the proceffe of this difcourfe we shall more amply declare.”
Get that? He’s refuting the theory that we smell things through a fairy-like transmission of qualities in favor of a corporeal contact between the object being smelled and the nose. He’s anticipating the concept of airborne chemicals constituting scent by at least a couple of centuries.
When I first read the above, it made me think of the Nazi eugenics movement — and its uncomfortable origins in science that has now been refuted, but was cutting-edge in its day — and made me want to set Digby and Mengele up as opposite ends of the spectrum: the former coming to the right conclusions despite the fact that he was using an unscientific method, the latter going so very wrong, morally at the very least, while following the scientific method, including peer review, experimental design, all nine yards. In retrospect, though, I’m going to give Digby a pass, as the standards of his day did uphold his work as scientifically valid.
We want to dismiss Mengele as an anomaly, and certainly we would be spurious to take the logical leap of blaming Nazism on genetic and evolutionary science, as some do [6]. But we can’t get off the hook that much of the laudable science of today will turn out to be just as incorrect as the eugenic beliefs of then. What matters is not whether we’re wrong or right — I can’t tell you how many PR bosses I’ve had who didn’t understand the critical fact that much of science is wrong for perfectly valid reasons — but how we apply the knowledge we think we’ve learned. And that’s not science; it’s morality.
Which brings me to eugenics in America, and one of the shimmering events that helped prevent the insidious practice from gaining a permanent (or more extended than it was, anyway) foothold here.
In 1905, both houses of my own Pennsylvania’s legislature voted in favor of a measure to force sterilization of “idiots” [7]. The state was poised, I believe, to become the first in the nation to enact a radical eugenic agenda.
Enter Governor Samuel Pennypacker, who vetoed the bill with words that continue to ring with all the right stuff a century later:
“Scientists, like all other men whose experience has been limited to one pursuit … are prone … to lose sight of broad principles outside of their domain … To admit such an operation would be to inflict cruelty upon a helpless class … which the state has undertaken to protect.”
Go, boy.
Though the legislature failed to override Pennypacker’s veto, he did not kill politically sanctioned eugenics in the U.S. — two years later, Indiana enacted a similar bill, and of course there’s the gut-wrenching, if not strictly eugenic, Tuskegee study, which shamefully didn’t end until 1972 [8]. But Pennypacker’s stand, seeing past the scientific question to the moral imperative beyond, put the eugenicists on notice that there would be resistance. And it set the stage.
Some of us, you see, know how to ride a runaway fire hose.
[1] In some ways, the 1.75-inch hose is a bigger beast than the 2.5-inch hose — for the latter, you tend to use a four-man rather than two-man team, and of course the former has a higher operating pressure (I’m afraid I can’t remember the respective pressures at the moment, and they depend on what kind of nozzle you’re using as well; I’ll have to ask).
[2] Stop reading my blog and watch this video right now.
[3] It’s a shame, I can’t find this guy on the web, can’t recall his name; all I remember was that he was of Asian descent, and that he made a damned good case.
[4] Richard Evans makes a case that the Nazis dominated the medicine of the age, but that’s a distinct issue.
[5] Remember, the “fs” have an “S” sound, not an “F” sound.
[6] I haven’t bothered to give a link here, because if you Google “Nazi evolution” you’ll get a craw full of people making gratuitous Hitler and Nazi accusations (along with treatises trying to convince us that Nazi science was fundamentally flawed).
[7] Whistling in the dark, if you know anything about the Pennsylvania legislature.
[8] Nineteen-fucking-seventy two. Makes you want to puke.
Man, was I sore on Monday. But I held my own, did better than some, and kept up with my pre-18 junior firefighter partner — a solid kid, by the way, I definitely want him there on a real call. We determined to volunteer to be the first to do everything, and damned near did.
Thanks to my joining Harmony Volunteer Fire Company a couple of weeks after last year’s Fire School, I’d been in the company for nearly a year before I had the opportunity, and so most of it turned out be a review of stuff I’d already been taught. But they had one exercise that was new to me: how to recover a runaway fire hose.
You see, at the end of an already-heavy fire hose is a metal coupling that can really hurt somebody if the hose gets loose, either from a break in a coupling, someone not following proper procedure and allowing a charged hose to turn itself on, or merely somebody taking a fall and losing control of the hose. Remember, the stream of water coming out of fire hose can be between 100 and 300 pounds per square inch — that’s a lot of specific impulse, and can make a hose end into a deadly projectile.
The safe way to wrangle a runaway hose is to straddle the hose, well upstream of the offending end, on your hands and knees, crawling as fast as you can while keeping the hose down with your hands. You dampen the erratic pendulum of the hose gradually, lessening its amplitude, and thus its potential for mayhem, finally getting hold of the coupling itself.
Only trick was, if the hose was behaving itself a little too much as we got toward the coupling, the instructor kicked it to send it moving. Thanks, dude; but I guess I did OK, all the same.
Today I thought I’d take on a scientific/ethical/moral quandary that is more complex, more like a runaway fire hose, than the many discussions you can find on the web often seem to fathom.
Was Josef Mengele a bad scientist, or merely an evil scientist?
It seems like you can’t take two steps without tripping over a gratuitous comparison of someone to Hitler. My own take, I think, is that Jon Stewart got it exactly right [2]. And as the Better Half has pointed out, comparing someone to the closest thing this world has ever seen to Sauron is tantamount to admitting you have nothing intelligent to say about them. It’s the ultimate ad-hominem attack; you don’t get many people in a generation, worldwide, whose evil is so profound and powerful that the reference isn’t, as bad as the person in question may be, a slur.
A few years back I had the opportunity, at a seminar connected with a major medical school’s graduation ceremonies, to watch a physician-turned-historian [3] give a talk on Nazi medicine that was spectacular. His argument was not the standard — that the Nazis subverted science — but that their entire belief system was, at the time, a logically justified, if undeniably evil, extrapolation of the best science of the day. His point was that science carries no moral polarity of itself; that no proper scientific knowledge is immune to being harnessed to the purposes of evil.
Eugenics — the narrow end of the wedge that led from the Nazis initially sounding, to some people anyway, as beneficent, to the practice of unapologetic mass murder — is exhibit A. Based on the evolutionary and genetic science of today, it’s a joke. Today we know it’s a fundamental misunderstanding, which failed because it didn’t account for the then-unknown phenomenon of genetic drift. The latter makes it impossible to improve or enhance the human race by weeding out the “unfit,” even if you had a morally defensible definition of that concept, as slippery as a runaway fire hose.
But scientifically, that’s hindsight. Based on the scientific understanding of the late 1930s, eugenics wasn’t a fringe belief: it was the mainstream of medical thought. And it was not uniquely Nazi or even German [4]; its leadership, arguably, hailed a generation earlier from America, where much eugenic legislation got its start, though thankfully it didn’t take hold (more about that in a moment).
Here’s the bitter pill that those of us trained to be researchers in liberal democracies have tremendous trouble swallowing: whether it is correct or incorrect, what we think we understand scientifically will not civilize people, will not necessarily help the Good Guys. And conversely, unpleasant, dangerous, and made-for-evil scientific discoveries are not, by definition, bad science. Evil, yes; not bad, in the sense of necessarily being improperly performed or producing incorrect discoveries.
Two observations along these lines. The first, though I’ve gotten to it late in the discussion, is the paper that launched me onto this topic in the first place: a treatise on the senses by Sir Kenelm Digby, and published in 1644. Amidst the archaic spellings, get a load of the following, regarding the sense of smell [5]:
“So that thofe mafters, who will teach vs that the impreffions vpon fenfe are made by fpirituall or fpiritelike thinges or qualities; which they call intentionall fpeciefes, muft labour at two workes: the one to make it appeare that there are in nature fusch thinges as they would perfuade us, the other to proue that thefe materiall actions we fpeake of are not able to performe thofe effects, for which the fenfes are giuen vnto livuing creatures. And vntill they haue done that, I conceiue we should be much too blame to admit fuch thinges, as we neyther haue ground for in reafon, nor can vnderftand what they are. And therefore, we muft refolue to reft in this beliefe, which experience breedeth in vs: that thefe bodies worke vpon our fenfes no other wayes then by a corporeall operation; and that fuch a one is fufficient for all the effects we fee proceede from them: as in the proceffe of this difcourfe we shall more amply declare.”
Get that? He’s refuting the theory that we smell things through a fairy-like transmission of qualities in favor of a corporeal contact between the object being smelled and the nose. He’s anticipating the concept of airborne chemicals constituting scent by at least a couple of centuries.
When I first read the above, it made me think of the Nazi eugenics movement — and its uncomfortable origins in science that has now been refuted, but was cutting-edge in its day — and made me want to set Digby and Mengele up as opposite ends of the spectrum: the former coming to the right conclusions despite the fact that he was using an unscientific method, the latter going so very wrong, morally at the very least, while following the scientific method, including peer review, experimental design, all nine yards. In retrospect, though, I’m going to give Digby a pass, as the standards of his day did uphold his work as scientifically valid.
We want to dismiss Mengele as an anomaly, and certainly we would be spurious to take the logical leap of blaming Nazism on genetic and evolutionary science, as some do [6]. But we can’t get off the hook that much of the laudable science of today will turn out to be just as incorrect as the eugenic beliefs of then. What matters is not whether we’re wrong or right — I can’t tell you how many PR bosses I’ve had who didn’t understand the critical fact that much of science is wrong for perfectly valid reasons — but how we apply the knowledge we think we’ve learned. And that’s not science; it’s morality.
Which brings me to eugenics in America, and one of the shimmering events that helped prevent the insidious practice from gaining a permanent (or more extended than it was, anyway) foothold here.
In 1905, both houses of my own Pennsylvania’s legislature voted in favor of a measure to force sterilization of “idiots” [7]. The state was poised, I believe, to become the first in the nation to enact a radical eugenic agenda.
Enter Governor Samuel Pennypacker, who vetoed the bill with words that continue to ring with all the right stuff a century later:
“Scientists, like all other men whose experience has been limited to one pursuit … are prone … to lose sight of broad principles outside of their domain … To admit such an operation would be to inflict cruelty upon a helpless class … which the state has undertaken to protect.”
Go, boy.
Though the legislature failed to override Pennypacker’s veto, he did not kill politically sanctioned eugenics in the U.S. — two years later, Indiana enacted a similar bill, and of course there’s the gut-wrenching, if not strictly eugenic, Tuskegee study, which shamefully didn’t end until 1972 [8]. But Pennypacker’s stand, seeing past the scientific question to the moral imperative beyond, put the eugenicists on notice that there would be resistance. And it set the stage.
Some of us, you see, know how to ride a runaway fire hose.
[1] In some ways, the 1.75-inch hose is a bigger beast than the 2.5-inch hose — for the latter, you tend to use a four-man rather than two-man team, and of course the former has a higher operating pressure (I’m afraid I can’t remember the respective pressures at the moment, and they depend on what kind of nozzle you’re using as well; I’ll have to ask).
[2] Stop reading my blog and watch this video right now.
[3] It’s a shame, I can’t find this guy on the web, can’t recall his name; all I remember was that he was of Asian descent, and that he made a damned good case.
[4] Richard Evans makes a case that the Nazis dominated the medicine of the age, but that’s a distinct issue.
[5] Remember, the “fs” have an “S” sound, not an “F” sound.
[6] I haven’t bothered to give a link here, because if you Google “Nazi evolution” you’ll get a craw full of people making gratuitous Hitler and Nazi accusations (along with treatises trying to convince us that Nazi science was fundamentally flawed).
[7] Whistling in the dark, if you know anything about the Pennsylvania legislature.
[8] Nineteen-fucking-seventy two. Makes you want to puke.
Saturday, June 20, 2009
What We Know for Sure
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
– Mark Twain (maybe)
I think my favorite thing about that quote is that I’ve seen it attributed, with utter certainty, to a number of people. Will Rogers supposedly said it about Herbert Hoover — but then, maybe he was unapologetically quoting Clemens [1]. I’ve also seen claims it originated earlier, with Franklin, but it doesn’t really sound either like Big Ben or his insipid (by his own admission, I think) alter ego, Poor Richard [2].
Anyhow, sorry for the two-week absence — I was indeed busy, first with Fire School and then with helping provide medical coverage for the 24 Hours of Big Bear mountain bike race.
We were busy at the latter event, but thankfully not too busy. They camped us out a little short of mile 7 — the course itself is 12 miles long, and either relay teams or a few hardy solo bikers do indeed pedal it for 24 hours, the highest number of laps winning each category — at the bottom of a ferocious hill.
I’d had a chance to ride that hill, along with about six miles of the course, on the Friday before the race, and can attest that it’s a tricky son of a bitch. It isn’t so much that it’s steep, though a couple of sections were steep, as that it’s rocky — rocks big enough that you need to keep your speed up, for fear of one stopping you cold, but also big enough that staying on top of them is non-trivial. You basically have to aim for the biggest rocks and pedal as fast as you dare, to make sure you bounce along the top. An earlier series of downhill hairpin turns don’t help either, nor does the fact that the downhill section is so long.
I pedaled into camp Friday night, trashed, just as the sun was setting: thankful I hadn’t had to do it in the dark, or as fast as I could, like the racers. The race itself began noon Saturday, and we had a steady but slow stream of patients throughout the ensuing 24, though again we only had one who scared me — but that’s a story for another day.
We did have time to see to the betterment of our trainees; in fact I was called upon to whip up a quick navigational course for them to practice map and compass skills.
I hate doing navs courses on the fly like that; you almost always get a cluster fuck. But in the event, our newbies gave us a different kind of cluster than I was expecting — looking for their first flag, they lost a radio belonging to another search team.
Now, I want to make this clear: to the extent that they didn’t take proper care of another team’s equipment, I blame that squarely on us experienced members. We never should have let them leave camp with something that expensive — I think they’re going for $500 list — improperly secured. So in addition to the obligation of needing to recover that radio for the team’s honor, I also felt a lot of personal responsibility. When the newbies headed out to look for it, accompanied by Carl, an experienced member of the other team, as a matter of course I grabbed my pack and went with them.
Carl and the recruit who’d been carrying the aforementioned radio were trying to retrace the latter’s steps, but in literally trackless West Virginia mountain terrain, covered in greenbriar and, in some spots, rhododendron with boughs as thick as a tree’s, I was dubious that it could be done by eye. Instead, I took the right flank, started at their original jumpoff point, and tried to duplicate the compass bearing they’d been walking.
When I couldn’t get a straight answer from them about what that bearing had been, it told me something. When, as we climbed, we hit an overgrown wood road and they said they’d broken their bearing to follow it uphill, it told me something more.
We stress a very practical style of navigation in search and rescue: we seldom expect people to walk compass bearings, instead teaching them to locate their target on the map and then piece together a path from “travel routes” — trails, ravines, ridgetops, gas lines, whatever is easy to walk — that may be less direct but gets you there faster and with less fatigue, by virtue of being easier to walk than a compass bearing. But when you’re taking travel routes, you take travel routes; when you walk a bearing, you have to walk an accurate bearing. Mixing and matching doesn’t work so well.
What I figured out, by the time we climbed near the ridgetop, was that they’d been veering steadily to the right as they ascended. So that “left flank” that Carl and the newbie were still trying to reconstruct was likely to be a lot farther in my direction than theirs.
If you want to lose something, by the way, a radio isn’t such a bad choice, because for a while at least, if you call it, it will call back to you. Fair is fair, Carl’s invaluable contribution to the exercise was a low-power tone he had his personal radio programmed to deliver, making the nearby (hopefully) lost radio beep at us, but not the other radios on the net, which at that point were still in use by the medical support teams.
We’d been moving, stopping, straining to hear, then repeating for a few iterations when, as faint as you can imagine, I thought I heard beeping.
“I think I hear it,” I said.
Carl: “What direction?”
“I’m not sure; it’s too faint.”
“Let’s move uphill a bit.”
Lather, rinse, repeat.
“Still not sure, but it’s louder now.” Now the second newbie, in line to my left, also thought he heard it.
Another iteration. Much louder now, and to my right. They’d drifted so far to the right that, even adding in my guesstimation of their error to the bearing they should have walked, I’d still undershot by more than the width of our little picket line. I moved toward the noise; lying on the ground in front of me, in a thankfully clear spot of ground, was the errant radio.
“I’ve got it!”
Basically, I rock.
The whole exercise, as it turned out, was emblematic of the Twain quote: the surer we’d been about the path our beginning navigators had walked, the wider the margin by which we’d have missed our mark.
Today’s entry is an exercise in taking stock of what we know and what we don’t about how the MHC genes determine humans’ choice of mates, courtesy of Jan Havlicek and S. Craig Roberts at Charles University in Prague and the University of Liverpool, respectively.
Briefly, the proteins made by the MHC genes are master actors in the vertebrate body’s defense against infection. They help identify infected cells, among other related functions, by grabbing hold of fragments of the invading microbe and displaying those fragments on the cells’ surfaces. This “antigen presentation” both alerts the immune system to the microbe’s presence and marks the infected cells for destruction.
Over the last couple of decades, researchers have been shedding light on another, surprisingly different function of the MHC: in most vertebrates, it seems to dictate an individual odor that somehow influences mate choice. In rodents — the best-studied specie for this phenomenon — females definitely choose mates whose MHC genes are different from theirs, and the effect takes place via a more- or less-attractive odor to that particular female. One girl’s Romeo is another’s Norman Bates [3].
Havlicek’s and Roberts’ concern, though, was whether this phenomenon reaches higher up the evolutionary tree — namely, to human beings. A growing body of research indicates that MHC genes — called HLA in humans — may actually play a role in our choice of mates. “Animal magnetism” may have a very aromatic cause, and one that comes literally through the nose.
The two investigators reviewed the current literature, and found a decidedly mixed bag, with studies showing that people pick HLA-dissimilar mates, that they pick HLA-similar mates, or no HLA effect at all. But the former outnumber the latter, and our hosts believe that there really is an effect there, though one that’s maybe a bit more complicated than we’d initially expected.
One of the more interesting sets of experiments are those in which subjects are given a piece of clothing worn by members of the opposite sex and asked which ones smell the most attractive. The results vary somewhat, but tend toward the conclusion that men with HLA genes that are different than a woman’s smell better to her than men with similar HLA genes.
But thereby hangs the tale: the researchers in the different studies asked their subjects different questions, ranging from “which smells best” to “which smells ‘sexiest’” to “which smells like someone you’d want a long term relationship with.” Those are very different questions!
An interesting exception — though not one that shows up in every study — is that women who are on birth control pills reverse the trend: they pick men whose HLA genes are more similar to theirs. It’s tempting to think that the pill, which basically prevents ovulation by tricking a woman’s body into thinking she’s pregnant, is uncovering a powerful set of biological imperatives: when you mate, outbreed; but when you’re pregnant, seek out relatives, who are more likely to help you raise the child [4]. But pregnancy is a heck of a lot more complicated than the two hormones present in most pills, and post-facto evolutionary arguments can be as slippery as they are compelling.
One series of experiments I hadn’t heard of before reading this paper was those studying the HLA effects on perfume preference: it turns out that people tend to prefer similar perfumes when they have similar genes, and some researchers think that’s because we use perfumes to enhance and complement, rather than simply hide, our natural body smells.
Of course, preference is all well and good, but it doesn’t always wind up at the altar: there’s a body of evidence suggesting women like rugged he-men faces for one-night stands, but gentler faces for long-term relationships [5]. When our Euro Reviewers surveyed studies of actual mate choice, the picture got murkier, with two studies suggesting people choose dissimilar mates, one similar, and a whopping seven showing no statistically significant effect at all.
This isn’t particularly surprising, though: as I’ve said before, higher mammals don’t do anything for just one reason. It may well be that HLA-associated body odor plays an important role in mate selection, but that a number of other factors also enter into it, and they’ll tend to obscure the odor effect.
H & R raise a very interesting possibility along these lines, which comes from a study of facial preference: When you show women pictures of men’s faces, they tend to pick those more HLA-similar to them as potential long-term mates. The authors don’t mention whether this study controlled for pregnancy or birth-control use, but there’s more straightforward way in which this result can make sense: maybe we’re looking for a Goldilocks level of difference with our mates, rather than just maximizing difference.
Though we know that inbreeding can be very bad, we’ve never nailed down the idea that maximal outbreeding is necessarily good. In fact, our authors map out no fewer than four possible reasons that we may seek HLA differences, or general outbreeding, with our mates, any or all of which may be true — or not. They cite research that suggests an intermediate level of outbreeding may be best.
What emerges from the murk of insufficient data is that we may have battling preferences: our eyes tell us to seek similarity, our noses to seek difference. As in many other biological systems, the struggle between two opposed systems pushes us toward an equilibrium that maximizes benefit.
To be fair, though my account of the Affair of the Missing Handheld above is writ from a singular perspective, in retrospect I can see the friction between the contradictory set of tactics we were following may indeed have put us closer to the target than either one alone could have. I don’t think the two searchers on my left flank could have realistically retraced the newbie’s steps; but by the same token, if I’d simply tried to reproduce the bearing they were supposed to have walked I would have wound up far to the left of where we needed to be.
“All things in moderation, including moderation” — but even so, sometimes, despite what we want, what we need is a nice medium.
[1] As an interesting side note, there’s a common phenomenon of historical figures apparently, from our modern-day vantage, trying to rip off earlier writers, when in fact they were just making quotes that were so obvious to their listeners that an attribution wasn’t necessary. I’ve often wondered whether Roosevelt’s “my crowded hour” wasn’t such a quote, since it sounds very Shakespearian — but I don’t know where it appears in the Bard, if at all.
[2] Dick may have been a pratt, but Ben was the original Buckaroo Banzai — maybe not so much with the gun- and swordplay, but show me any scientist in history who was such a fucking dangerous enemy to make. He’s a hero of mine; so is Roosevelt, for that matter.
[3] I exaggerate — the effect is more subtle than that, but very real.
[4] Scary possibility: some studies suggest that women who met their mates while on birth control are more likely to be unfaithful than those who aren’t. One possibility is that the pill undermines natural mate choice, sticking you with a guy you’re less thrilled with in the long term. The other, formal mind you, possibility is that girls on the pill are tramps — not that there’s anything wrong with that, some of my best friends in grad school were tramps. God bless ’em.
[5] On the average, ladies; and I’m sure that many, many guys wouldn’t turn down a roll in the hay with, say, a Tara Reid — I’m just picking a name off the top of my head, mind you — but want a girl with more existential substance for the long haul.
– Mark Twain (maybe)
I think my favorite thing about that quote is that I’ve seen it attributed, with utter certainty, to a number of people. Will Rogers supposedly said it about Herbert Hoover — but then, maybe he was unapologetically quoting Clemens [1]. I’ve also seen claims it originated earlier, with Franklin, but it doesn’t really sound either like Big Ben or his insipid (by his own admission, I think) alter ego, Poor Richard [2].
Anyhow, sorry for the two-week absence — I was indeed busy, first with Fire School and then with helping provide medical coverage for the 24 Hours of Big Bear mountain bike race.
We were busy at the latter event, but thankfully not too busy. They camped us out a little short of mile 7 — the course itself is 12 miles long, and either relay teams or a few hardy solo bikers do indeed pedal it for 24 hours, the highest number of laps winning each category — at the bottom of a ferocious hill.
I’d had a chance to ride that hill, along with about six miles of the course, on the Friday before the race, and can attest that it’s a tricky son of a bitch. It isn’t so much that it’s steep, though a couple of sections were steep, as that it’s rocky — rocks big enough that you need to keep your speed up, for fear of one stopping you cold, but also big enough that staying on top of them is non-trivial. You basically have to aim for the biggest rocks and pedal as fast as you dare, to make sure you bounce along the top. An earlier series of downhill hairpin turns don’t help either, nor does the fact that the downhill section is so long.
I pedaled into camp Friday night, trashed, just as the sun was setting: thankful I hadn’t had to do it in the dark, or as fast as I could, like the racers. The race itself began noon Saturday, and we had a steady but slow stream of patients throughout the ensuing 24, though again we only had one who scared me — but that’s a story for another day.
We did have time to see to the betterment of our trainees; in fact I was called upon to whip up a quick navigational course for them to practice map and compass skills.
I hate doing navs courses on the fly like that; you almost always get a cluster fuck. But in the event, our newbies gave us a different kind of cluster than I was expecting — looking for their first flag, they lost a radio belonging to another search team.
Now, I want to make this clear: to the extent that they didn’t take proper care of another team’s equipment, I blame that squarely on us experienced members. We never should have let them leave camp with something that expensive — I think they’re going for $500 list — improperly secured. So in addition to the obligation of needing to recover that radio for the team’s honor, I also felt a lot of personal responsibility. When the newbies headed out to look for it, accompanied by Carl, an experienced member of the other team, as a matter of course I grabbed my pack and went with them.
Carl and the recruit who’d been carrying the aforementioned radio were trying to retrace the latter’s steps, but in literally trackless West Virginia mountain terrain, covered in greenbriar and, in some spots, rhododendron with boughs as thick as a tree’s, I was dubious that it could be done by eye. Instead, I took the right flank, started at their original jumpoff point, and tried to duplicate the compass bearing they’d been walking.
When I couldn’t get a straight answer from them about what that bearing had been, it told me something. When, as we climbed, we hit an overgrown wood road and they said they’d broken their bearing to follow it uphill, it told me something more.
We stress a very practical style of navigation in search and rescue: we seldom expect people to walk compass bearings, instead teaching them to locate their target on the map and then piece together a path from “travel routes” — trails, ravines, ridgetops, gas lines, whatever is easy to walk — that may be less direct but gets you there faster and with less fatigue, by virtue of being easier to walk than a compass bearing. But when you’re taking travel routes, you take travel routes; when you walk a bearing, you have to walk an accurate bearing. Mixing and matching doesn’t work so well.
What I figured out, by the time we climbed near the ridgetop, was that they’d been veering steadily to the right as they ascended. So that “left flank” that Carl and the newbie were still trying to reconstruct was likely to be a lot farther in my direction than theirs.
If you want to lose something, by the way, a radio isn’t such a bad choice, because for a while at least, if you call it, it will call back to you. Fair is fair, Carl’s invaluable contribution to the exercise was a low-power tone he had his personal radio programmed to deliver, making the nearby (hopefully) lost radio beep at us, but not the other radios on the net, which at that point were still in use by the medical support teams.
We’d been moving, stopping, straining to hear, then repeating for a few iterations when, as faint as you can imagine, I thought I heard beeping.
“I think I hear it,” I said.
Carl: “What direction?”
“I’m not sure; it’s too faint.”
“Let’s move uphill a bit.”
Lather, rinse, repeat.
“Still not sure, but it’s louder now.” Now the second newbie, in line to my left, also thought he heard it.
Another iteration. Much louder now, and to my right. They’d drifted so far to the right that, even adding in my guesstimation of their error to the bearing they should have walked, I’d still undershot by more than the width of our little picket line. I moved toward the noise; lying on the ground in front of me, in a thankfully clear spot of ground, was the errant radio.
“I’ve got it!”
Basically, I rock.
The whole exercise, as it turned out, was emblematic of the Twain quote: the surer we’d been about the path our beginning navigators had walked, the wider the margin by which we’d have missed our mark.
Today’s entry is an exercise in taking stock of what we know and what we don’t about how the MHC genes determine humans’ choice of mates, courtesy of Jan Havlicek and S. Craig Roberts at Charles University in Prague and the University of Liverpool, respectively.
Briefly, the proteins made by the MHC genes are master actors in the vertebrate body’s defense against infection. They help identify infected cells, among other related functions, by grabbing hold of fragments of the invading microbe and displaying those fragments on the cells’ surfaces. This “antigen presentation” both alerts the immune system to the microbe’s presence and marks the infected cells for destruction.
Over the last couple of decades, researchers have been shedding light on another, surprisingly different function of the MHC: in most vertebrates, it seems to dictate an individual odor that somehow influences mate choice. In rodents — the best-studied specie for this phenomenon — females definitely choose mates whose MHC genes are different from theirs, and the effect takes place via a more- or less-attractive odor to that particular female. One girl’s Romeo is another’s Norman Bates [3].
Havlicek’s and Roberts’ concern, though, was whether this phenomenon reaches higher up the evolutionary tree — namely, to human beings. A growing body of research indicates that MHC genes — called HLA in humans — may actually play a role in our choice of mates. “Animal magnetism” may have a very aromatic cause, and one that comes literally through the nose.
The two investigators reviewed the current literature, and found a decidedly mixed bag, with studies showing that people pick HLA-dissimilar mates, that they pick HLA-similar mates, or no HLA effect at all. But the former outnumber the latter, and our hosts believe that there really is an effect there, though one that’s maybe a bit more complicated than we’d initially expected.
One of the more interesting sets of experiments are those in which subjects are given a piece of clothing worn by members of the opposite sex and asked which ones smell the most attractive. The results vary somewhat, but tend toward the conclusion that men with HLA genes that are different than a woman’s smell better to her than men with similar HLA genes.
But thereby hangs the tale: the researchers in the different studies asked their subjects different questions, ranging from “which smells best” to “which smells ‘sexiest’” to “which smells like someone you’d want a long term relationship with.” Those are very different questions!
An interesting exception — though not one that shows up in every study — is that women who are on birth control pills reverse the trend: they pick men whose HLA genes are more similar to theirs. It’s tempting to think that the pill, which basically prevents ovulation by tricking a woman’s body into thinking she’s pregnant, is uncovering a powerful set of biological imperatives: when you mate, outbreed; but when you’re pregnant, seek out relatives, who are more likely to help you raise the child [4]. But pregnancy is a heck of a lot more complicated than the two hormones present in most pills, and post-facto evolutionary arguments can be as slippery as they are compelling.
One series of experiments I hadn’t heard of before reading this paper was those studying the HLA effects on perfume preference: it turns out that people tend to prefer similar perfumes when they have similar genes, and some researchers think that’s because we use perfumes to enhance and complement, rather than simply hide, our natural body smells.
Of course, preference is all well and good, but it doesn’t always wind up at the altar: there’s a body of evidence suggesting women like rugged he-men faces for one-night stands, but gentler faces for long-term relationships [5]. When our Euro Reviewers surveyed studies of actual mate choice, the picture got murkier, with two studies suggesting people choose dissimilar mates, one similar, and a whopping seven showing no statistically significant effect at all.
This isn’t particularly surprising, though: as I’ve said before, higher mammals don’t do anything for just one reason. It may well be that HLA-associated body odor plays an important role in mate selection, but that a number of other factors also enter into it, and they’ll tend to obscure the odor effect.
H & R raise a very interesting possibility along these lines, which comes from a study of facial preference: When you show women pictures of men’s faces, they tend to pick those more HLA-similar to them as potential long-term mates. The authors don’t mention whether this study controlled for pregnancy or birth-control use, but there’s more straightforward way in which this result can make sense: maybe we’re looking for a Goldilocks level of difference with our mates, rather than just maximizing difference.
Though we know that inbreeding can be very bad, we’ve never nailed down the idea that maximal outbreeding is necessarily good. In fact, our authors map out no fewer than four possible reasons that we may seek HLA differences, or general outbreeding, with our mates, any or all of which may be true — or not. They cite research that suggests an intermediate level of outbreeding may be best.
What emerges from the murk of insufficient data is that we may have battling preferences: our eyes tell us to seek similarity, our noses to seek difference. As in many other biological systems, the struggle between two opposed systems pushes us toward an equilibrium that maximizes benefit.
To be fair, though my account of the Affair of the Missing Handheld above is writ from a singular perspective, in retrospect I can see the friction between the contradictory set of tactics we were following may indeed have put us closer to the target than either one alone could have. I don’t think the two searchers on my left flank could have realistically retraced the newbie’s steps; but by the same token, if I’d simply tried to reproduce the bearing they were supposed to have walked I would have wound up far to the left of where we needed to be.
“All things in moderation, including moderation” — but even so, sometimes, despite what we want, what we need is a nice medium.
[1] As an interesting side note, there’s a common phenomenon of historical figures apparently, from our modern-day vantage, trying to rip off earlier writers, when in fact they were just making quotes that were so obvious to their listeners that an attribution wasn’t necessary. I’ve often wondered whether Roosevelt’s “my crowded hour” wasn’t such a quote, since it sounds very Shakespearian — but I don’t know where it appears in the Bard, if at all.
[2] Dick may have been a pratt, but Ben was the original Buckaroo Banzai — maybe not so much with the gun- and swordplay, but show me any scientist in history who was such a fucking dangerous enemy to make. He’s a hero of mine; so is Roosevelt, for that matter.
[3] I exaggerate — the effect is more subtle than that, but very real.
[4] Scary possibility: some studies suggest that women who met their mates while on birth control are more likely to be unfaithful than those who aren’t. One possibility is that the pill undermines natural mate choice, sticking you with a guy you’re less thrilled with in the long term. The other, formal mind you, possibility is that girls on the pill are tramps — not that there’s anything wrong with that, some of my best friends in grad school were tramps. God bless ’em.
[5] On the average, ladies; and I’m sure that many, many guys wouldn’t turn down a roll in the hay with, say, a Tara Reid — I’m just picking a name off the top of my head, mind you — but want a girl with more existential substance for the long haul.
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Houlie’s Choice
For a girl with a fairly active life, the Better Half has a singular talent for getting hurt doing absolutely nothing.
We were at the county fair, walking along the stables and schmoozing with the horses and their owners. Heather’s always had that girl/horsie thing going; I don’t spend too much time thinking about that.
In this particular fairground, the equestrian stadium is a modest oval track with a surrounding fence and a set of aluminum bleachers at one end — nothing more than you’d see at your average youth baseball field. The stables, a series of outward-facing paddocks with solid wooden gates about chest high, stand a couple hundred yards away, at a right angle to the bleachers.
So as we stand there, checking out the Persons of Hoof, a double-plus-ungood commotion arises from the overflow crowd standing around the bleachers. I take a step in that direction, and a hand grabs my arm — Heather, reminding me of Rule Number One in SAR, EMS, what have you: “scene safety,” making sure the problem that created your N patients doesn’t make you into patient number N+1, and thus worse than useless.
The crowd parts, and we can see a mare, trailing a sulky in the worst possible way — namely, not on its wheels but bouncing all the hell around — run around the far side of the bleachers. She caroms off a tree — I was sure the poor thing would go down then and there, all her limbs mangled, but fortunately no — then, pinball-like, bounces off another tree — this one finally stripping the ruined sulky from the harness — and takes off into the open.
Straight toward us.
We stand there for a moment, our back to the stable gate and with no place to go that seems any safer than where we are.
Now’s the point where I tell you What We Didn’t Know: the panicked horse was, in fact, running from her own sulky. Never having been cart-broken, she had nevertheless been harnessed by a young equestrian scheduled to compete in the sulky competition but whose regular horse was for some reason not able to compete. Attached to — chased by — a Horse Eating Thing that she couldn’t outrun, she went nuts. And now she was running for the safest place she knew in that fairground: her paddock.
Directly behind us.
The horse comes right at us; I dive right, Heather dives left. My direction was better. The mare pulls up just short of hitting the stable gate — if we’d just opened the damned thing we would have been fine, 20/20 hindsight — but not short of Heather, who she body blocks into the gate, and who dribbles a few times between solid wood and a half a ton of Frenchman’s sandwich before losing enough momentum to actually fall.
I’m looking at my wife through the horse’s stamping hooves, aching to get to her but physically unable, for about a second or so — it seemed a lot longer — before the horse runs off to my left. I close the 10 feet to Heather, drop to one knee, and as I begin the trauma assessment she says:
“What took you so long?”
I told her I’d come as fast as I could; but a better question would have been why I ducked right when she ducked left. There are thousands of little moments like that in a complex organism’s life, when it has no time to think a situation through and just acts first, thinks second. When it works out, we call it instinct; when it doesn’t, we call it Hate to Be You.
Of course, there’s a determinist school that says there is no choice: that every critter’s behavior is essentially the product of a vast equation that factors in all genetic predisposition and all life experience to create merely the illusion of free will. Heather tended left when I tended right because of a gigantic number of factors that forced us, in extremis, to do just that. A lot of neurobiologists, who are successfully dissecting surprisingly complex decisions into their neural components, are thinking that way these days.
Well, Martin Heisenberg [1] says their mamas wear Army boots — or the collegial, respectful, academic version thereof — in a thought-provoking essay in Nature that rescues free will, though maybe not exactly in a way completely agreeable to Judeo-Christian-Islamic belief.
Heisenberg’s argument is that chemical chaos and his dad’s indeterminacy principle between them more than rescue the concept. Randomly generated action has been seen in organisms a simple as fruit flies to bacteria; in Heisenberg’s own words:
“… my lab has demonstrated that fruit flies, in situations they have never encountered, can … solve problems that no individual fly in the evolutionary history of the species has solved before.”
His crew can even observe flies improvising, much as corvid birds and many other species do.
Ironically enough, while the idea poses problems for neurobiological determinism, it pretty much underlies behaviorist theory (my own beef with which being elsewhere, in the absolute behavioral flexibility inferred by the purest forms of that school of thought, which breaks down big time in the real world). The whole idea behind operant conditioning is that organisms solve problems by generating random behavior, and stick with those behaviors that elicit a reward. ’Course, their formulation isn’t exactly bullish on free will, either ...
Still, while Heisenberg argues persuasively that what we know about chemical randomness rescues the idea of free will, he makes the point that nothing in this formulation requires it to be conscious, which is not the usual way we think about it. But he also says an interesting thing that many religious thinkers may have missed [2]: consciousness can act upon free will, make the choice wiser, but there’s no requirement that the initial impetus behind the choice be conscious. To put it another way, which perhaps takes it farther than the author intended, maybe free will isn’t about the conscious choice: it’s about an urge to act that may not be in consonance with our standards of right and wrong. Maybe consciousness’ and morality’s roles have more to do with editing free will than creating it [3].
Of course, it’s interesting whether some of the theological arguments over free will might not only be recast in our current understanding of the biology, but also, paradoxically, grow in relevance somewhat. Whatever you think of the ultimate question of religious belief, the folks who did some of this thinking were nobody’s dummies, and understood the problems posed by the concept of free will in a predetermined universe.
Also interesting is the fact that the classic Roman Catholic formulation of free will reconciles it with the state of grace — God’s omniscience and sole ability to save souls pretty much meaning that the choices we make are pre-writ, and so how free can they be? — by positing a creator who exists outside time. So Catholics opted for an essentially relativistic basis for free will, while biologists may eventually push us toward quantum mechanics.
It turned out that in another article, in the previous week in Science — an otherwise good perspectives piece on human volition based on brain scans — Patrick Haggard says something nonsensical:
“Every day we make actions that seem to depend on our ‘free will’ rather than on any obvious external stimulus. This capacity not only differentiates humans from other animals, but also gives us the clear sense of controlling our bodies and lives.”
Not to pick on the guy, but how the hell does he know that humans have this faculty while animals don’t? The brain structures that the scans show produce the actions and conscious urges associated with free will — the motor cortex and parietal cortex, respectively — exist in animals as well as us. Who’s done that experiment?
It speaks to something that’s bugged me about scientific discussions of animal intelligence for a while: we seem to have exchanged a chauvinistic, unreflective anthropomorphic view of animals with a chauvinistic, unreflective Cartesian view [4].
Nor is what’s coming out of mathematical, physical, and biological research necessarily kind to the reductionist ideal that every organism — everything — is a linear product of its parts that can be understood by disassembling them and learning how they individually work. Too many systems, ranging from planetary dynamics to brain function to weather patterns, seem to proceed in a complicated, nonlinear way that makes them essentially unpredictable.
I don’t mean to pillory reductionism — it’s had a great run that will likely continue, and has given us some great stuff. But I do think it’s got its limitations — and understanding limitations in as dispassionate a way as possible is kind of the whole point of scientific investigation, no?
Heather, as it turned out, had chosen badly but not too badly — the horse, credit where it’s due, hadn’t stepped on her, and she was pretty scraped up but not really hurt. The horse people, initially wary that we might start screaming for a lawyer, were relieved and then intrigued by the way we shrugged the experience off. You get to a point where you dust yourself off, check for any serious injury, and if you don’t find one, say “I guess I won’t try that again,” and move on. Free will is like that.
I’ll close with a quote from Tolkien, one that I used to open my doctoral dissertation:
“… he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.”
For my dissertation, it worked on so many levels.
Like anything else, the sentiment can be overdone. But it ain’t a bad thought for a sunny spring day, with the farm chores done, some time on your hands that you need to decide how to use, and not a runaway horse to be seen.
[1] His son.
[2] I could be wrong, I’m no theological scholar — anybody knows better, please chip in.
[3] Though, dang it, what of the choice of whether or not to give into the urge?
[4] Anthropomorphism is an modern urban/suburban thing, I think, and thus may be much newer than the 19th-century thinkers who scorned it realized. I think our ancestors were much smarter than us on this account. If you look at hunter-gatherers, pastoralists, or traditional farmers, they seem to have a handle on animal minds that recognizes them for what they are — animal minds, neither human minds in fur coats nor cog-and-wheel machines.
We were at the county fair, walking along the stables and schmoozing with the horses and their owners. Heather’s always had that girl/horsie thing going; I don’t spend too much time thinking about that.
In this particular fairground, the equestrian stadium is a modest oval track with a surrounding fence and a set of aluminum bleachers at one end — nothing more than you’d see at your average youth baseball field. The stables, a series of outward-facing paddocks with solid wooden gates about chest high, stand a couple hundred yards away, at a right angle to the bleachers.
So as we stand there, checking out the Persons of Hoof, a double-plus-ungood commotion arises from the overflow crowd standing around the bleachers. I take a step in that direction, and a hand grabs my arm — Heather, reminding me of Rule Number One in SAR, EMS, what have you: “scene safety,” making sure the problem that created your N patients doesn’t make you into patient number N+1, and thus worse than useless.
The crowd parts, and we can see a mare, trailing a sulky in the worst possible way — namely, not on its wheels but bouncing all the hell around — run around the far side of the bleachers. She caroms off a tree — I was sure the poor thing would go down then and there, all her limbs mangled, but fortunately no — then, pinball-like, bounces off another tree — this one finally stripping the ruined sulky from the harness — and takes off into the open.
Straight toward us.
We stand there for a moment, our back to the stable gate and with no place to go that seems any safer than where we are.
Now’s the point where I tell you What We Didn’t Know: the panicked horse was, in fact, running from her own sulky. Never having been cart-broken, she had nevertheless been harnessed by a young equestrian scheduled to compete in the sulky competition but whose regular horse was for some reason not able to compete. Attached to — chased by — a Horse Eating Thing that she couldn’t outrun, she went nuts. And now she was running for the safest place she knew in that fairground: her paddock.
Directly behind us.
The horse comes right at us; I dive right, Heather dives left. My direction was better. The mare pulls up just short of hitting the stable gate — if we’d just opened the damned thing we would have been fine, 20/20 hindsight — but not short of Heather, who she body blocks into the gate, and who dribbles a few times between solid wood and a half a ton of Frenchman’s sandwich before losing enough momentum to actually fall.
I’m looking at my wife through the horse’s stamping hooves, aching to get to her but physically unable, for about a second or so — it seemed a lot longer — before the horse runs off to my left. I close the 10 feet to Heather, drop to one knee, and as I begin the trauma assessment she says:
“What took you so long?”
I told her I’d come as fast as I could; but a better question would have been why I ducked right when she ducked left. There are thousands of little moments like that in a complex organism’s life, when it has no time to think a situation through and just acts first, thinks second. When it works out, we call it instinct; when it doesn’t, we call it Hate to Be You.
Of course, there’s a determinist school that says there is no choice: that every critter’s behavior is essentially the product of a vast equation that factors in all genetic predisposition and all life experience to create merely the illusion of free will. Heather tended left when I tended right because of a gigantic number of factors that forced us, in extremis, to do just that. A lot of neurobiologists, who are successfully dissecting surprisingly complex decisions into their neural components, are thinking that way these days.
Well, Martin Heisenberg [1] says their mamas wear Army boots — or the collegial, respectful, academic version thereof — in a thought-provoking essay in Nature that rescues free will, though maybe not exactly in a way completely agreeable to Judeo-Christian-Islamic belief.
Heisenberg’s argument is that chemical chaos and his dad’s indeterminacy principle between them more than rescue the concept. Randomly generated action has been seen in organisms a simple as fruit flies to bacteria; in Heisenberg’s own words:
“… my lab has demonstrated that fruit flies, in situations they have never encountered, can … solve problems that no individual fly in the evolutionary history of the species has solved before.”
His crew can even observe flies improvising, much as corvid birds and many other species do.
Ironically enough, while the idea poses problems for neurobiological determinism, it pretty much underlies behaviorist theory (my own beef with which being elsewhere, in the absolute behavioral flexibility inferred by the purest forms of that school of thought, which breaks down big time in the real world). The whole idea behind operant conditioning is that organisms solve problems by generating random behavior, and stick with those behaviors that elicit a reward. ’Course, their formulation isn’t exactly bullish on free will, either ...
Still, while Heisenberg argues persuasively that what we know about chemical randomness rescues the idea of free will, he makes the point that nothing in this formulation requires it to be conscious, which is not the usual way we think about it. But he also says an interesting thing that many religious thinkers may have missed [2]: consciousness can act upon free will, make the choice wiser, but there’s no requirement that the initial impetus behind the choice be conscious. To put it another way, which perhaps takes it farther than the author intended, maybe free will isn’t about the conscious choice: it’s about an urge to act that may not be in consonance with our standards of right and wrong. Maybe consciousness’ and morality’s roles have more to do with editing free will than creating it [3].
Of course, it’s interesting whether some of the theological arguments over free will might not only be recast in our current understanding of the biology, but also, paradoxically, grow in relevance somewhat. Whatever you think of the ultimate question of religious belief, the folks who did some of this thinking were nobody’s dummies, and understood the problems posed by the concept of free will in a predetermined universe.
Also interesting is the fact that the classic Roman Catholic formulation of free will reconciles it with the state of grace — God’s omniscience and sole ability to save souls pretty much meaning that the choices we make are pre-writ, and so how free can they be? — by positing a creator who exists outside time. So Catholics opted for an essentially relativistic basis for free will, while biologists may eventually push us toward quantum mechanics.
It turned out that in another article, in the previous week in Science — an otherwise good perspectives piece on human volition based on brain scans — Patrick Haggard says something nonsensical:
“Every day we make actions that seem to depend on our ‘free will’ rather than on any obvious external stimulus. This capacity not only differentiates humans from other animals, but also gives us the clear sense of controlling our bodies and lives.”
Not to pick on the guy, but how the hell does he know that humans have this faculty while animals don’t? The brain structures that the scans show produce the actions and conscious urges associated with free will — the motor cortex and parietal cortex, respectively — exist in animals as well as us. Who’s done that experiment?
It speaks to something that’s bugged me about scientific discussions of animal intelligence for a while: we seem to have exchanged a chauvinistic, unreflective anthropomorphic view of animals with a chauvinistic, unreflective Cartesian view [4].
Nor is what’s coming out of mathematical, physical, and biological research necessarily kind to the reductionist ideal that every organism — everything — is a linear product of its parts that can be understood by disassembling them and learning how they individually work. Too many systems, ranging from planetary dynamics to brain function to weather patterns, seem to proceed in a complicated, nonlinear way that makes them essentially unpredictable.
I don’t mean to pillory reductionism — it’s had a great run that will likely continue, and has given us some great stuff. But I do think it’s got its limitations — and understanding limitations in as dispassionate a way as possible is kind of the whole point of scientific investigation, no?
Heather, as it turned out, had chosen badly but not too badly — the horse, credit where it’s due, hadn’t stepped on her, and she was pretty scraped up but not really hurt. The horse people, initially wary that we might start screaming for a lawyer, were relieved and then intrigued by the way we shrugged the experience off. You get to a point where you dust yourself off, check for any serious injury, and if you don’t find one, say “I guess I won’t try that again,” and move on. Free will is like that.
I’ll close with a quote from Tolkien, one that I used to open my doctoral dissertation:
“… he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.”
For my dissertation, it worked on so many levels.
Like anything else, the sentiment can be overdone. But it ain’t a bad thought for a sunny spring day, with the farm chores done, some time on your hands that you need to decide how to use, and not a runaway horse to be seen.
[1] His son.
[2] I could be wrong, I’m no theological scholar — anybody knows better, please chip in.
[3] Though, dang it, what of the choice of whether or not to give into the urge?
[4] Anthropomorphism is an modern urban/suburban thing, I think, and thus may be much newer than the 19th-century thinkers who scorned it realized. I think our ancestors were much smarter than us on this account. If you look at hunter-gatherers, pastoralists, or traditional farmers, they seem to have a handle on animal minds that recognizes them for what they are — animal minds, neither human minds in fur coats nor cog-and-wheel machines.
Monday, May 25, 2009
Happy Memorial Day
This week belongs to the ones who never came home; I'm taking a break and will be back in sevenish.
Happy, safe weekend to yinz all.
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Who Goes There?
It isn’t a pleasant memory.
We’d spent the better part of the morning looking for a lost child, hope waning, our fears growing, as we did. Lilly, as always, was doing her part; but the general gloom of a clouded-over, gray sky melded with a kind of cohesive murk within my little dog team.
You see, I was in Another State, working with people who didn’t know me, and my subordinates — local, trainee dog handlers assigned to me at the command post — didn’t like the way I was doing things and weren’t trying very hard to hide it.
Today I’ll admit, rookie handler that I was, I may have been a little bloody minded about doing things by the book. I’d been taught that search teams often missed search subjects who were on the boundaries between search tasks, and so I was intent on avoiding that by covering just a tiny bit beyond my assigned area. My two teammates might well not have batted an eyelash at that, but in this particular case it required us to cross a boggy little creek and tramp along the swampy opposite side.
Frankly, I thought at the time, and may well have been right, that they were just being lazy. Maybe I didn’t try very hard to hide that [1].
Soon after, gridding inward from the creek, I looked up to see a disturbing thing: a crumpled little body dressed in white, lying on the ground. One of my walkers must have seen it the same moment I did, because we both paced toward it — quickly but not at a run, in what for me, at least, was a moment of profound ambivalence.
And we walked up on a crumpled, white plastic bag, lying on the ground.
“I thought …” my walker began.
“Me too,” I replied to her, too relieved to say more.
But I had seen that body …
The morning of July 3, 1863, and the legendary Robert E. Lee was looking up the long, naked slope of Cemetery Ridge toward the Federal Army of the Potomac, dug in on its summit. What he saw was a thinly protected line, denuded by virtue of the fact that his opposite number, George Meade, had been pulling men out of there to protect his flanks from the brutal strikes Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia made on them the previous day.
The Confederates had swept the Federals off Seminary Ridge, to the west, on July 1; on the 2nd they’d failed to dislodge the northerners from Cemetery Ridge, but it had been very close. Now Lee could see their weakness in the center; he could feel that they were a push away from crumbling, as they had done so many times before.
Trouble was, Lee was in the decided minority among his own army. James Longstreet, one of his best generals and the man to whom he would entrust the upcoming attack, had been arguing since the previous day that it was doomed to fail. Neither of the two could have known that, technically, Lee was right, in that Meade only had about 5,000 men defending a ridgetop about to be hit by 11,000 Confederates. But Longstreet, even without the virtue of hindsight, could see that the position was so strong — Longstreet’s men would have to walk, under artillery and rifle fire, for nearly a mile in the open, before reaching the Federal line — that it wouldn’t take very many men to stop them.
“General,” historian Shelby Foote, in his magnificent tome about the Civil War, quotes Longstreet, “I have been a soldier all my life … and should know as well as anyone what soldiers can do. It is my opinion that no 15,000 men ever arrayed for battle can take that position.”
It’s emblematic that Longstreet got the number of men in his own command wrong — for one thing, a couple of the divisions he would send into combat were leant from another general’s corps; for another, he understandably hadn’t kept up with the massive casualties his own corps had been taking over the previous two days. But Lee saw it differently, and gave him a direct order. Longstreet, in turn, ordered the charge — with a voiceless nod to division commander Major General George Pickett, captured in agonizingly accurate visual detail in the movie Gettysburg. And an attack began that ended with Pickett, upon Lee telling him that he needed to gather his retreating men to defend against a possible Union counter-strike, replying in anguish: “General Lee, I have no division now.”
He was exaggerating; his division had suffered only 60 percent casualties.
Lee had seen that the Federal center was weak …
It’s happened with nearly every search dog we trained, and, almost by the calendar, at exactly one year of age. In a dusk training problem, the dog encounters the practice subject unexpectedly, because the wind is blowing the wrong way.
The dog, seeing a human — their eyesight is quite good, particularly at twilight — but not smelling him, sees … an ogre. A dog who has learned the find-refind-lead the handler back sequence, has performed the routine with unerring fidelity until this moment, not only refuses to approach. She barks that shrill but powerful panic bark you usually hear only from adolescent dogs.
You have to jolly her up, reassure her (without coddling) that she’s wrong, there is nothing to fear there, just a person, maybe someone she already knows, and it’s perfectly safe to approach. She does, and greets the subject with over-the-top affection and what looks to all the world like embarrassment. Seldom does the dog need this treatment more than once; she’ll be confidently making dusk and dark finds without a hitch.
But that first time, she sees the monster …
It’s a borderline cliché that we see what we expect to see. But Hendrikje Nienbord and Bruce Cumming from the National Eye Institute have produced new findings that suggest that the very wiring of our nervous system conspires to delude us.
The Eye Guys took monkeys and trained them to perform a task that depended on whether the center of a circular pattern displayed before them was protruding or receding; they then recorded the activity of sensory neurons from the eye that were sending visual signals up to the brain.
The general idea had been that the eye detects the light pattern, it sends signals through the sensory neurons to the higher brain, and then the brain decides whether the dot is approaching or receding. But it didn’t work out that way.
Bear with me on this one, it’s a real head-banger of a paper, very dense stuff to parse out.
* As the subtlety of the choice got harder over time, the coupling between the visual neuron’s activity and the accuracy of the monkey’s choice (in other words, the nerve saying, for example, “innie,” and the monkey making the “innie” choice) didn’t decrease, which is what you’d expect if the signal only traveled from eye to nerve to brain. Right or wrong, the nerve cell’s activity — remember, it’s supposed to be sending signals up to the brain — was more and more reflecting what the monkey was going to choose rather than what it had to be seeing.
* Increasing the reward increased the accuracy of the monkey’s choice, but decreased the coupling between nerve cell and choice. This rather upside-down result made more sense when they dissected what was happening over time: for a window of about one second, the larger reward got the monkey to focus on the image rather than its expectations. After that second, it started to see what it expected to see — again, the sensory neuron was tracking more closely to what the monkey was going to choose than what it actually saw.
* If I understand the paper correctly, the relationship between the nerve cell activity and the choice was strongly affected by what the monkey had seen previously. Again, the monkeys’ visual experience was tracking with their biases, not the image being shown to them.
Like I said, it’s not an easy one to think through: but taken together, it looks like the signal didn’t move from the eye to the nerve to the brain as much as the eye and the brain argued over what the nerve cell was going to do. And the brain often won; the monkeys were seeing what they expected to see.
As an accompanying article in that issue of Nature quotes Cumming, “In a way, the brain is tampering with the data.” The reason? As he told Nature, it may be that it’s better to have a preconception ready to act upon than to wait on the facts — and get squished in the meantime.
Still, that imperative only goes so far — maybe a second or two. The next time you have more time than that to decide something important — God forbid, of life-and death — and are sure you see something, take another look.
[1] I don’t remember if, at the time, it had occurred to me that there would be a political price to pay for my insistence. Political trouble did, in fact, come from that direction, well over a year later. Today I know that a number of factors made this come about; what I don’t know is whether their report back to their teammates that day was one of them.
Saturday, May 9, 2009
Smoke and Mirrors II
No names — the guilty, as well as the innocent, are sometimes expedient to protect — but between the many nonprofit organizations that suck up my time, I recently had an opportunity to experience an unpleasant exercise in serial hypocrisy.
I was the hypocrite.
In no particular order, I chatted amiably with a person I detest; bit my tongue when an opportunity to dish on incompetence, with a person who showed every sign of being sympathetic, presented itself; and pretended I wasn’t angry over a situation that was frustrating the hell out of me.
The reason I did all these things was neither an over-active sense of propriety, nor an unwillingness to be confrontational.
You see, I figured I had something to gain.
In each of these situations I walked away with a bit of information I didn’t have earlier; made, hopefully, just the right kind of impression for my purposes; put off a battle for another day, when I could wage it from a position of increased strength.
I have become a game person. I take very little joy in it, but it’s a fact.
That statement probably requires some explanation. A while back I read an essay [1] arguing that there are, essentially, two types of intelligence: puzzle intelligence, and game intelligence. The former is what all us nerds are born with; it is the ability to figure out puzzles, to tease apart the workings of an essentially static system no matter how complex. It’s how you figure out the structure of the DNA molecule, the equations that describe the motion of an object near the speed of light, or how an animal’s sniffer works.
Game intelligence is another thing entirely; it’s the ability to outwit an intelligent opponent in a contest that has no one solution — you have to be adjusting your strategy continually to counter the other player’s. No two contests will be the same, and so the rational faculties that break a puzzle apart, while still useful, aren’t alone sufficient to win.
That, by the way, is the ultimate answer to the wiseass crack, “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” Fact is, money is a game — and therefore many of the people we see as smart are nevertheless ill-equipped to compete for it [2].
I’m not rich; Lord knows. But I have been able, over the years, to pick up a few pointers on how to face off against game people. I don’t like it; but I need to be able to do it, and so, after a fashion, I’ve learned its ways.
In reflecting on the images I cast — the image in my own mind, the image I attempt to project, and the image received, all of which I know all too well may be very different from each other — I see another connection to enantiomers, those (usually organic) molecules that are chemically identical, but spatially different: non-identical mirror images.
Last time I used a really pretty image that, because I didn’t look at it closely enough, showed two enantiomers but didn’t make it clear that they were mirror images of each other. So let’s try an uglier version, of my own construct, to show the point (again, the dark triangle shows a molecule or chemical group coming out of your screen; the dashed-line triangle shows one going away from you, into the screen):
Although free-solution chemistry can’t really distinguish between the two, an enzyme or other biomolecule, which by definiton reaches out to touch each of these in space, quickly realizes that they’re different:
No matter how you rotate these two, they can’t match up.
Nature has made stunningly complex use of this phenomenon; we’ve already discussed how and why sometimes the olfactory system can tell the difference between enantiomers and sometimes it can’t. Today we’ll discuss a paper by Yuko Ishida and Walter Leal from UC Davis investigating how two closely related species of beetle use enantiomeric pheromones to find the right mate — and avoid the wrong one.
Closely related species, particularly when they’re not separated by a physical barrier like a mountain range or the like, present a major challenge to the evolutionary process. It’s easy keeping a moth from mating with a whale. But two closely related animals — their species separated, perhaps, by specialization to take better advantage of two different food sources — will have a much harder time not inter-breeding, and thus losing the advantage of that specialization. Pheromones — airborne chemical social signals — help keep the two apart.
In the case of the Japanese beetle Popillia japonica and the Osaka beetle Anomala osakana, the two species coexist in nature but don’t inter-breed. Part of the way they’ve accomplished this is that each species has chosen a different enantiomer of the same molecule — either (S)- or (R)-japonilure — as a mating pheromone. (S)-japonilure is a sexual attractant for the Osaka beetle; the (R) enantiomer is an attractant for the Japanese beetle.
It gets even more interesting. The Japanese beetle doesn’t merely “get no kick” from (S)-japonilure; the molecule repels the little buggers. The evolutionary process, then, has double assured that Japanese beetle bachelors don’t hook up with osakana chicks.
Which is where Ishida and Leal’s work comes in. From the antennas of japonica males they’ve isolated an enzyme that chews up both molecules — but it’s measurably better at chewing up the attractant than it is the repellant.
The difference isn’t huge — the half-lives of the attractant and repellant, respectively, in the presence of the enzyme are 30 thousandths of a second versus 90 thousandths of a second. But in the world of olfactory response, that’s a fairly big difference; as our authors note, following an intermittent, turbulent scent plume to its source requires a complex series of decisions based on intensity of smell, wind direction, and attack angle. As dog handlers have noticed and moth researchers have documented, it often takes a lot of dashing, casting, and weaving to home in on the source of a smell. You need to be able to detect changes in your attractant quickly to find its source; and therefore, it’s useful to destroy an attractant as soon as you’ve detected it. Clearing the olfactory palette as quickly as possible leaves you better prepared to detect the next change [3].
The situation is very different for a repellant. You don’t need to find its source; you don’t want to get anywhere near its source. Letting it stick around a little longer is therefore a good thing: it helps stop you, literally, from even going there.
So there we have it: Three species, two games, two sets of smoke and mirrors. One clouds the issues; the other makes them very clear.
I won’t engage in the pseudo-philosophical (let alone exaggerated) species-bashing of comparing nature’s beauty to mankind’s brutality. Evolution itself, I realize, is the biggest game of all. I will play the game as long as I need to. But on the whole, I prefer the puzzles.
[1] Sorry, it’s been way too long and I don’t know where I read it.
[2] Yeah, yeah, they all say they’re not interested in money — but might that not be because they’re not interested in the games that go with it?
[3] There’s an old dog-handlers’ tale out there that dogs’ noses are “so sensitive” that they don’t desensitize like ours do — think of how, after a while in a room with a strong floral scent, you don’t notice it. Well, don’t you believe it: desensitization is a powerful tool for keeping the nose maximally sensitive to changes in an odor. Our dogs couldn’t do without it.
I was the hypocrite.
In no particular order, I chatted amiably with a person I detest; bit my tongue when an opportunity to dish on incompetence, with a person who showed every sign of being sympathetic, presented itself; and pretended I wasn’t angry over a situation that was frustrating the hell out of me.
The reason I did all these things was neither an over-active sense of propriety, nor an unwillingness to be confrontational.
You see, I figured I had something to gain.
In each of these situations I walked away with a bit of information I didn’t have earlier; made, hopefully, just the right kind of impression for my purposes; put off a battle for another day, when I could wage it from a position of increased strength.
I have become a game person. I take very little joy in it, but it’s a fact.
That statement probably requires some explanation. A while back I read an essay [1] arguing that there are, essentially, two types of intelligence: puzzle intelligence, and game intelligence. The former is what all us nerds are born with; it is the ability to figure out puzzles, to tease apart the workings of an essentially static system no matter how complex. It’s how you figure out the structure of the DNA molecule, the equations that describe the motion of an object near the speed of light, or how an animal’s sniffer works.
Game intelligence is another thing entirely; it’s the ability to outwit an intelligent opponent in a contest that has no one solution — you have to be adjusting your strategy continually to counter the other player’s. No two contests will be the same, and so the rational faculties that break a puzzle apart, while still useful, aren’t alone sufficient to win.
That, by the way, is the ultimate answer to the wiseass crack, “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” Fact is, money is a game — and therefore many of the people we see as smart are nevertheless ill-equipped to compete for it [2].
I’m not rich; Lord knows. But I have been able, over the years, to pick up a few pointers on how to face off against game people. I don’t like it; but I need to be able to do it, and so, after a fashion, I’ve learned its ways.
In reflecting on the images I cast — the image in my own mind, the image I attempt to project, and the image received, all of which I know all too well may be very different from each other — I see another connection to enantiomers, those (usually organic) molecules that are chemically identical, but spatially different: non-identical mirror images.
Last time I used a really pretty image that, because I didn’t look at it closely enough, showed two enantiomers but didn’t make it clear that they were mirror images of each other. So let’s try an uglier version, of my own construct, to show the point (again, the dark triangle shows a molecule or chemical group coming out of your screen; the dashed-line triangle shows one going away from you, into the screen):
Although free-solution chemistry can’t really distinguish between the two, an enzyme or other biomolecule, which by definiton reaches out to touch each of these in space, quickly realizes that they’re different:
No matter how you rotate these two, they can’t match up.
Nature has made stunningly complex use of this phenomenon; we’ve already discussed how and why sometimes the olfactory system can tell the difference between enantiomers and sometimes it can’t. Today we’ll discuss a paper by Yuko Ishida and Walter Leal from UC Davis investigating how two closely related species of beetle use enantiomeric pheromones to find the right mate — and avoid the wrong one.
Closely related species, particularly when they’re not separated by a physical barrier like a mountain range or the like, present a major challenge to the evolutionary process. It’s easy keeping a moth from mating with a whale. But two closely related animals — their species separated, perhaps, by specialization to take better advantage of two different food sources — will have a much harder time not inter-breeding, and thus losing the advantage of that specialization. Pheromones — airborne chemical social signals — help keep the two apart.
In the case of the Japanese beetle Popillia japonica and the Osaka beetle Anomala osakana, the two species coexist in nature but don’t inter-breed. Part of the way they’ve accomplished this is that each species has chosen a different enantiomer of the same molecule — either (S)- or (R)-japonilure — as a mating pheromone. (S)-japonilure is a sexual attractant for the Osaka beetle; the (R) enantiomer is an attractant for the Japanese beetle.
It gets even more interesting. The Japanese beetle doesn’t merely “get no kick” from (S)-japonilure; the molecule repels the little buggers. The evolutionary process, then, has double assured that Japanese beetle bachelors don’t hook up with osakana chicks.
Which is where Ishida and Leal’s work comes in. From the antennas of japonica males they’ve isolated an enzyme that chews up both molecules — but it’s measurably better at chewing up the attractant than it is the repellant.
The difference isn’t huge — the half-lives of the attractant and repellant, respectively, in the presence of the enzyme are 30 thousandths of a second versus 90 thousandths of a second. But in the world of olfactory response, that’s a fairly big difference; as our authors note, following an intermittent, turbulent scent plume to its source requires a complex series of decisions based on intensity of smell, wind direction, and attack angle. As dog handlers have noticed and moth researchers have documented, it often takes a lot of dashing, casting, and weaving to home in on the source of a smell. You need to be able to detect changes in your attractant quickly to find its source; and therefore, it’s useful to destroy an attractant as soon as you’ve detected it. Clearing the olfactory palette as quickly as possible leaves you better prepared to detect the next change [3].
The situation is very different for a repellant. You don’t need to find its source; you don’t want to get anywhere near its source. Letting it stick around a little longer is therefore a good thing: it helps stop you, literally, from even going there.
So there we have it: Three species, two games, two sets of smoke and mirrors. One clouds the issues; the other makes them very clear.
I won’t engage in the pseudo-philosophical (let alone exaggerated) species-bashing of comparing nature’s beauty to mankind’s brutality. Evolution itself, I realize, is the biggest game of all. I will play the game as long as I need to. But on the whole, I prefer the puzzles.
[1] Sorry, it’s been way too long and I don’t know where I read it.
[2] Yeah, yeah, they all say they’re not interested in money — but might that not be because they’re not interested in the games that go with it?
[3] There’s an old dog-handlers’ tale out there that dogs’ noses are “so sensitive” that they don’t desensitize like ours do — think of how, after a while in a room with a strong floral scent, you don’t notice it. Well, don’t you believe it: desensitization is a powerful tool for keeping the nose maximally sensitive to changes in an odor. Our dogs couldn’t do without it.
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