Did a Cat Shit in Here?

The Problem with Dogs

2010-06-19T08:04:00.000-07:00

I don’t remember what I was trying to figure out. But I do recall getting the name of an expert in finding human remains. Somebody who’d gone to places like Chile, to look for the thousands of people that the dictatorship had murdered.

I called him, I’m sure, to ask a question about human remains detection dogs — HRD dogs, in the parlance.

I don’t remember my exact question, but I do remember he didn’t really answer it: instead, he said, “In my experience, dogs are best at detecting the urine of other dogs.”

Not very many responses you could make to a statement like that; I think he knew I was a dog handler, knew how provocative he was being. I don’t remember whether I offered a defense. In the first place, it really wasn’t my specialty, so I didn’t have a very knowledgeable defense to offer; in the second, it occurred to me that maybe an HRD handler had failed the man badly enough to earn that attitude.¹

Suffice it to say, we dog handlers sometimes struggle with a perception of our value that is, shall we say, rather deflated compared to what we think we deserve.

Check this one out.

Heather sent the link to me, flagging the claim that it takes 17 days for a buried body to be detectable — it certainly seems overly long to me, but frankly there are so little good data on what real detection dogs can do in the field that I'm not sure we could prove otherwise. I vaguely remember a study, but don’t have it at the tip of my keyboard.

What really caught my eye was the statement, “... in other words, it can map the odor plume coming from the ground where the body is buried, which can be a key factor in pinpointing the location of the grave or looking for victims in natural disasters.”

There are a couple of ways to interpret this. The simplest and more direct is that the guy doesn't think dogs can pinpoint the source of a scent — not effectively, at least — but that giving a human operator numbers, or maybe graphic representations, corresponding to smell intensity can.

I find that very difficult to believe.

One major misconception that I think lurks in the artificial scent detection world is that so-called “detection dogs” do just that — detect a smell. And if you're screening suitcases for bombs, fish for spoilage, or whatever, that may be mainly true. But as any dog handler in search and rescue or human remains detection can tell you, detecting the smell is the easy part. Most of the work goes into locating the source, and getting the dog to tell you when she’s done it.

Problem One, the “getting them to tell us” part, comes from the balance between what researchers call type 1 errors and type 2 errors. A type 1 error is when you fail to detect something that's there. Type 2 is when you get a false detection of something that isn’t there. The issue is that anything you do to reduce one error type tends to increase your errors of the other type. Worried about missing a signal? You can increase your sensitivity, but that will also increase your rate of false detections. Want a “bomb-proof” indication, with utter certainty that when the dog (or device) says it’s there it really is? Inevitably, you’ll increase your number of total misses.

I don’t think a device is any more or less “reliable” than a dog on this count — it’s a phenomenon of the physics of detection, independent of the detector. But I will grant you can probably work out the optimal balance more easily on a device — and engineers are probably better at dispassionately working out “I’m willing to accept an X rate of type 1 errors if I can get a Y rate of type 2 errors” than dog handlers, who tend to ignore the issue and try for zero type 2 errors and assume it means zero type 1 errors as well, which it almost always doesn’t.

Problem Two is that localization issue. And ladies and gentleman, it is one bitch of a problem. The difficulty revolves around the nature of the signal rather than the detector: scent plumes consist of discontinuous clumps of scent that don’t simply or clearly point the way to the source in a snapshot. As often as not, the source lies in the direction of the weaker scent. Researchers have learned a lot about how animals negotiate intermittent scent plumes quickly and efficiently — and surprise, surprise, they don’t try to build an exact map of the plume. They follow these simple but effective rules of engagement:

if you detect the scent, dash into the wind
if you lose the scent, cast back and forth across the wind in until you detect it again
if the wind dies down, even if you’re detecting scent, stop and wait for it to pick up again so you have the directional cue to know which way to go²

Believe it or not, under conditions of any significant convection, this is all you need to do to find the source. It doesn’t make the job easy — there’s a lot of casting about to be done before you get close enough to the source to make any real headway — but it’s rapid and accurate. (Dog handlers’ search patterns, by the way, are just fancy versions of casting, to make sure that, while searching for the plume, we’re fully covering the area within the artificial boundaries dictated for us by the command staff’s planning.)

I think that part of the problem is that the engineers who work on artificial noses understand detection but they don’t know anything about search. Going back to our “pure” detection dog, checking your suitcase to see if you’ve smuggled fruit, there really is no search function. It’s just: is the target scent there, yes or no?

For the police dog handler searching a basement for a buried body or a warehouse for a bad guy, the search part is simple enough that the dog pretty much does it unguided. In these circumstances, I think this detector might be able to help because it may be a matter of just walking around until the signal maximizes. I think that’s how dogs search such small areas, and how they work “scent pools” — in other words, find the source when there’s no wind moving the scent and you essentially have a uniform murk, the center of which you need to pinpoint.

But we wilderness handlers think in terms of areas of 40 to 160 acres. Certainly, if you’ve got a body that’s truly missing — as opposed to believing it’s in a modest-sized back yard but needing to pinpoint it — the kind of painstaking mapping of intensities that the artificial approach would seem not to be the way to go. You need to find the scent plume in the first place, which brings us back to dashing and casting, at which point the device’s lesser sensitivity would probably put it at a disadvantage compared with the dog.

I haven’t even touched the issue — found with bodies under water or under collapsed structures — that the scent doesn’t always come up directly over the body, but can often take a winding route to the surface so it emerges some distance away. That’s an in-built limitation of detection by scent that isn’t going to go away no matter what detector we’re using.

If you’re looking for a punch line, here it is: this is a short story I wrote, called “A Technical Fix,” which appeared in Cicada magazine. The only cheat when I wrote it was that I knew the technology wasn’t nearly as far-future as the setting I chose for it. Life imitating art imitating science fiction.

I’ve said it before: We dog handlers will eventually be put out of business, but it won’t be by artificial noses. It’ll be by something like a Star Trek communicator that immediately calls for help when you’re in trouble and gives a sub-meter-accurate location to the rescue crews looking for you. Our mobile phones are already so close; it may be that what takes the longest is working out the privacy issues of automatically sharing that kind of data with the authorities.

In the meantime, here’s my fear: that we’ll be replaced by something that isn’t as good, merely because we’ve failed to document our utility to the search effort. Or worse, because somebody screwed up, turning us all into suspected “urine detection dog handlers.” Either way, it’s a matter of the standards — operational standards, yes, but also standards of proof — to which we hold ourselves.

It may be more up to us than we realize.

¹Mind you, at that point nobody even knew about Sandy Anderson’s fraudulent “dog handler” activities. The man may very well have watched her work and come to certain conclusions long before the law came to the same conclusions.

²I’m simplifying a bit here. For one thing, different species do seem to riff differently depending on their specific scent mission. For another, even among the species that do employ dash-and-cast, there are different strategies for different atmospheric conditions. Dog handlers will have seen another pattern, called “weaving,” in which the dog works into the wind in a weaving pattern that gets narrower and narrower until you reach the source. There’s evidence that this behavior results from a superimposition of dashing and casting, a response to a relatively “clean,” low convection scent plume without large gaps of scent. Your major challenges under those conditions — usually at night or on cloudy, windy, or winter days — are to keep track of the edges of the plume so you don’t run out of it, and to keep your nose from desensitizing to the smell.

MEanderthal Me!

2010-06-02T22:39:00.000-07:00

This app, for Android or iPhone, is too good. (Droid, users, you can find it by searching for "MEanderthal" in the Market.)

For your amusement, me as a neanderthal:

Here I am as a hobbit (southeast Asian variety); something disturbing about this one:

Or Homo heidelbergensis -- I think it's my favorite:

About the Moderation ...

2010-05-20T21:13:00.000-07:00

I've hated to do it, but I've had to start moderating the comments -- not because of anything any of yinz have said, but because I've been getting a steady stream of Chinese-language (I think) "comments" that contain toxic links. So don't take it personally, and I'll approve your comments soon as I can get to them.

Thanks, as always, for you readership and commentary.

Yo-yos

2010-05-13T21:22:00.000-07:00

And again I see a spot that reduces me to near-speechlessness.

Here's my question, though: When a "dog hander" shows up in front of the cameras claiming to have made several thousand finds, why don't people apply the same measure of journalistic skepticism?

I'm Allergic

2010-05-12T19:35:00.000-07:00

Check out this New York Times article.

Say what? A lot of the food allergies people claim are either misinterpretations of what their docs said -- or outright misdiagnoses?

How could this be?

The next thing is they'll be telling me that many of the folks who claim allergies to my dogs are just people with phobias and other psychiatric malfunctions who're just using the suffering that people with real allergies have to live with -- often on a daily basis -- as a screen for their own need to control others!

Go figure.

'Nother radio spot

2010-05-12T19:32:00.000-07:00

Sorry for not getting to this last week -- but I've done another environmental-commentary radio spot for The Allegheny Front. This is a fun project!

I Are Radio Personality Big Good

2010-04-19T20:57:00.000-07:00

First, abundant apologies for neglecting the blog for so long -- assuming any of you are still out there. I intend to get back to it immediately; in the meantime, here's my latest project, for The Allegheny Front, an environmental news program from Pittsburgh's own, the incomparable public radio alternative music station WYEP, 91.3 FM (note you can live stream from the YEP site, which if you don't live in the Pgh area is a worthwhile thing to do).

The London Thing

2010-03-23T17:25:00.000-07:00

Weeks since I touched my blog, it's lame beyond the telling of it that this has to be the occasion. But no, I wasn't mugged in the UK, and yes, somebody hacked my Yahoo! account. So needless to say, don't send the $^&%$#^%s any money.

Hopefully I'll have something to talk about soon; lots of interesting developments, but nothing I can share right now.

I Wuzzint Doin It Right

2010-02-18T21:46:00.000-08:00

So my surgeon's partner is yanking on my toe with a great big frown on his face.

“There's less flexibility now than there was last time. I'm going to write you a prescription for physical therapy.”

I think I managed not to groan. It isn't that I really mind physical terrorism — I'd done well playing through the pain before the surgery, and doing the same through far less pain afterward. But we're talking about the Little Piggie that Went to Market. I am kind of known at this podiatry practice as the Patient Who Does So Well because He Always Complies; but really.

Still, Mister Compliant took the scrip in hand, showed up at physical therapy, and was lectured on how, really, a stiff big toe can completely mess up your gait and your sense of balance.

“But I have no sense of balance,” I said, “Never did.”

The doc who runs the PT practice overheard, and swooped in for a test. It's actually not uncommon for folks with a hinkey middle ear to do things like ski, mountain bike, and climb — they just (over)compensate using vision and by feeling the floor (proprioception). But we soon found out I was not one of these.

While I tried to balance on one foot, the doc observed that I wasn't actually doing badly at all — but I was maintaining my balance too much using my ankles and not enough using my toes.

“You have to dig in with the toes to maintain balance,” he said.

The man was telling me I'd never learned to stand properly. I felt like a Lolcat poster:

Standing still: Yer Not Doin It Right

Well, maybe there's more than that I haven't been doing right: hence today's entry, from Brian Duistermars and Dawnis Chow of Mark Frye's lab at UCLA. Using a wind tunnel, they tested whether fruit flies could turn in the right direction to find a scent source when an antenna on one side or the other was “occluded” with a tiny little glob of glue.

I kid you not.

This kind of research nearly always truns up a couple of surprises: for one thing, the flies are left handed: blocking the left antenna affected their ability to find the scent more than blocking the right. The Johnston's organ — the middle part of the insect antenna, which detects motion, unlike the outer part that detects smell — is necessary for proper turning into the scent, though not its detection.

But maybe the most amazing part of the experiment was that it worked at all: that flies need two antennae to track the direction of a smell in the wind, and that therefore it's possible to detect a difference of smell between antennae that are less than a millimeter apart.

To help me wrap my head around this, I actually emailed Mark Frye to ask him whether that inference was really warranted. He said yes, but threw a further monkey wrench:

“If you calculate the mean molecular concentration gradient across the fly antennae it is on the order of thermal flux (noise) ...”

So somehow the little bastards are detecting a difference against a noise background that's as loud as the signal.

Now, I've been bloviating on the dog lists for some time now about how I'm having trouble seeing how a dog's nostrils, which draw scent from about three inches apart, can detect a usable concentration gradient. I'd say the fly results pretty much put any doubt to rest.

Having said that, it occurs to me that what I was tripping over had less to do with whether they could detect a smell difference across that distance than how it would be useful. To see why that's an issue, let me explain how our understanding of what smell looks like has changed since the 1980s, when the scent theory explanation that most dog handlers have read was published.

Starting from the idea that, as wind blew scent along, it would diffuse outward and mix with the surrounding air, creating what we call a “scent plume:”

If you look at how the scent gradually decreases with downwind distance, there's a very subtle change that would be incredibly difficult to detect.

But wait; folks working with smoke in wind tunnels have found out that that old picture of a scent plume is vastly oversimplified. In reality, as the scent mixes with surrounding air, it does it turbulently. Think of how, if you stir a black coffee and then drip cream in, it doesn't mix evenly. Stronger chunks of cream remain visible for a while. Same thing with cigarette smoke, or a smokestack. The real scent plume looks like this (and note you can see a much better drawing, for which I wasn't able to get reprint rights, in this paper):

So even though I had the correct picture in my head of a filamentous scent plume, with really strong chunks of smell interspersed with increasingly large voids, I wasn't putting it all together: dogs don't have to detect subtle scent gradients — or at least not that subtle — because such gradients essentially don't exist in nature. All the pups need to do is detect the transition from no smell to strong smell and back, as it sweeps past: and for that, a different signal in each nostril actually does provide important information.

'Course, it's not as simple as turning toward the stronger scent, like you would in the “old” scent plume. If a filament has just swept by you, that would be the wrong direction. But by checking which nostril got the smell when, and what direction the wind was blowing from, you can develop a more involved strategy, something like the ones seen in insects and birds and fish — and unless my own, humble and as-yet-anecdotal observations are way off base, search-and-rescue dogs as well.

For the flies, that signal-to-noise problem still stands. But at least, finally, I think I may be on track to “doing it right.”

Phil Klass, aka William Tenn 1920-2010

2010-02-09T17:27:00.000-08:00

I made a jackass of myself the first time I interviewed — hell, spoke with — Phil Klass.

“You have no idea who I am, do you?” he asked, frustrated, after I’d posed a few questions over the telephone. I hadn’t yet connected him with his pen name.

To be honest, I hadn’t read much William Tenn at that point, even if I had known he and Phil were one and the same. And as a relative newcomer to Pittsburgh, I didn’t yet have an internal map of the local SF community’s leading lights. It wasn’t until later, when I looked Phil up in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, that I tumbled to how badly I’d blown the interview, which the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette had assigned me by way of covering ConFluence, the city's major SF convention.

For all his multicultural sophistication — he went to war as a socialist, Jewish U.S. soldier, the son of a Brit and a Russian — Phil Klass was an American original. He embodied so much of what makes me proud of this country. He had his opinions, and stated them courageously no matter what anybody thought; during the McCarthy era, he was one of a few SF authors openly parodying the Red Scare. He claimed no special courage, on the grounds that the folks who would have objected didn't read, and wouldn't have understood, science fiction.

Having done some intelligence work on captured Nazis, and despite the fact that he and they were each other's worst nightmares, Phil had utter contempt for torturers and their ultimately craven arguments of “utility.” Yet he told a story about dragging local townspeople in to see what had been happening in the death camp next store to them, belying their claims of “not knowing.”

Phil also told a captivating story of a major SF editor of the classic era — I think it may have been Campbell, but I'm not sure — confiding in him that “Jews probably are Homo superior” — an embarrassingly common trope of SF in its sophomore years — and how, despite his best attempts, he couldn't get the man to understand why this was so wrong, how it insulted rather than honored the memory of the Holocaust's victims. “I told him I was sorry to hear that, because it meant we'd learned nothing,” Phil said decades later.

Phil also was generous in advice, and gave good advice. I wish I could tell you how his tips transformed my SF career — but sadly, the industry is too much of a train wreck for anybody to provide the magic words. Suffice it to say he was bullish on nonfiction, bearish on creative nonfiction, and absolutely gloomy on science fiction. I've seen nothing to indicate that he got anything even slightly wrong in that.

Of course, Phil Klass, under pen name William Tenn, was a gifted science fiction author, a David-Bowie-like figure who maybe didn't get read as often as the Asimovs, Heinleins, and Herberts, but who was read by, and influenced, just about every subsequent major SF author. He was as honest in his fiction as he was in real life, arguing at a time when SF stories typically had genius inventors creating the first moon rocket in their back yards that it was going to take the finances and physical resources of a large government bureaucracy to reach the moon. It pissed people off to have someone puncture a cherished trope like that, but I note that it was a bloated, inefficient, can't-do-anything government agency called NASA that got the job done, and not private-sector venture capitalists.

But I digress.

Going over my notes from that first interview with Phil and my subsequent research, I had an inspiration: I would fight my every instinct. Rather than side-step my cluelessness, I would confront it. I opened the article with Phil’s exasperated words. It gave me a perfect entree into talking about the many reasons people come to an SF convention, and the uphill battle those of us with the SF-writing compulsion face.

After the piece ran, I ran into Phil at ConFluence, and introduced myself. He said simply, “I read your article, and it was mostly accurate. I was surprised!”

Phil, wherever you are, I'm going to take that as an indictment of modern journalism. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

Expectations

2010-02-07T07:14:00.000-08:00

Literally snowbound, it's hard to come up with excuses not to blog. And I suppose, on a frigid day, it's not too unusual to be put in mind of old flames.

Mind you, this wasn't someone I actually dated — more an unrequited torch, before th'wife, even before the Before Time. We're talking what cosmologists call Deep Time, back around the point when God was thinking maybe the neutron might be a good idea.

Her name was Kathy Ewing, and she was my Self, Culture, and Society lecturer at Hogwarts [1]. She was young, pretty, and smart as all get-out — and I had a fantastic crush on her, though doubtless she wouldn't remember me at all by now.

At least, I hope to God she wouldn't, the reasons being imminently obvious.

Required background: Like many of the common-core courses [2] at the University of Chicago, Self, Culture, and Society had two hour-and-a-half discussion sections each week, in which Kathy and about a dozen of us would discuss, argue, and hash out the course materials — in this case, a “Great Books” [3] mix of psychology, anthropology, and social science.

A side-note: the U of C is the intellectual equivalent of someone throwing a knife to you and hollering, “Now, come at me!” It's exactly the kind of place that pussy little right wingers like to bitch about being hostile to their ideas — only they're missing the point: it's hostile to everybody's ideas. It's all about forcing you to defend your beliefs, structure your arguments so that they make sense somewhere else besides the addled interior of your head ...

Anyway.

I don't remember whether it was every week, every two weeks, or what, but every once in a while all those little discussion sections met in a big hall for a lecture. The professors and lecturers teaching the study sections [4] would rotate this duty, each taking, I suppose, a topic of particular interest or expertise on which to hold forth.

So this particular upcoming lecture was Kathy's, and I was determined to sit front and center, nodding sagely at all the appropriate points, impressing her with my interest in her topic — and, strange as it seems now, thereby my interest in her. Not that I had it planned out even that clearly.

Only the night before, a good friend who will remain nameless had the latest in a series of fights with her boyfriend, another nameless good friend, and I spent much of the night and next morning sitting in a stairwell offering fantastic advice [5]. Didn't really get any sleep to speak of that night.

So picture me the next morning, bleary eyed, too late to get coffee at the dining hall, stumbling into the lecture hall, only just barely conscious enough for a fogged corner of my mind to remember the plan of the previous day.

Unfortunately, all it remembered was, “Sit front and center.”

I'm sitting there, then, about 10 minutes into Kathy's talk when the realization comes over me that there's no way I'm staying awake. Just can't keep the eyes open. I did my best to hide it — the old, cover-your-forehead-with-your-hand-while-you-look-down-at-your-notebook thing, the hunch-down-over-the-table thing, every trick I could think of. Needless to say, even five minutes afterward it didn't seem likely that I'd had much luck at hiding from Kathy that I was sleeping through her lecture.

Dashed expectations are the subject of today's entry, a bit from C. Eisenegger and pals at the Institute for Empirical Research in Economics in Zurich and other environs, about testosterone.

Now, in the words of Robert Sapolsky — of whom I'm an admirer — in his wonderful essay The Trouble with Testosterone, here's the gist of the results when you inject testosterone into a submissive male monkey:

“Take that third-ranking monkey and give him some testosterone. None of this within-the-normal-range stuff. Inject a ton of it, way higher than what you normally see in rhesus monkeys, give him enough testosterone to grow antlers and beard on every neuron in his brain. And, no surprise, when you check the behavioral data, he will probably be participating in more aggressive interactions than before.

So even though small fluctuations in the levels of the hormone don't seem to matter much, testosterone still causes aggression, right? Wrong. Check out number 3 more closely. Is he raining aggressive terror on everyone in the group, frothing with indiscriminate violence? Not at all. He's still judiciously kowtowing to numbers 1 and 2 but has become a total bastard to numbers 4 and 5. Testosterone isn't causing aggression, it's exaggerating the aggression that's already there.”

So you get the background here: testosterone as a vehicle of aggression, of conflict, if not social dominance.

Imagine Herr Eisenegger & Co.'s collective surprise, then, when they gave sublingual testosterone to a bunch of women [6] and then had them play one of those social-strategy games: In this case, they gave one woman $10 [7] and told her that she had to make an offer to another — to give that other woman $5, $3, $2, or nothing. If the second woman refused the offer, nobody got anything. If she accepted, she got what was offered and woman number one kept the rest. So there are two separate motivations: the less woman one offers, the more she gets to keep; but if she doesn't offer enough, woman two can play the spoiler.

The expectation, of course, is that testosterone will bring out woman one's inner total bastard, to use Sapolsky's words, and offer less, even at the risk of losing it all.

You've probably guessed that it didn't come down that way: in fact, testosterone made woman one offer not less to woman two, but more. On the average, she offered about fifty cents more than when she hadn't been given the testosterone.

This isn't necessarily a surprise; some experts the investigators had polled beforehand had actually predicted this result, on the grounds that testosterone would enhance the women's desire to take leadership: and one way to establish leadership is to make a more generous offer that makes the other gal more likely to trust and follow you.

But that's not the interesting bit. Eigenegger etc. then took their data, and sorted it differently. Instead of separating the “women one” who'd gotten testosterone vs. those who got a placebo, they separated by which of the two the women thought they'd gotten. And guess what? The women who thought they'd gotten testosterone acted, if not like total bastards, then at least like bastards: on average they offered a dollar less than the women who thought they'd gotten placebo.

That's right, the expectation of testosterone was more potent in terms of both size of effect and statistical significance than the real thing was. And it had the opposite effect of the real thing. For all the world, it looks like testosterone's bad rap in popular culture carries more weight than its biological effects in our little brainbones.

Deep waters here: did expecting testosterone make gals one a bit on the bitchy side, or did the bitchier girls expect they'd be given testosterone? And since the anti-placebo effect was stronger than the real thing, what thence?

Our authors did a bunch of work to control for various complications; you can read more about it in their paper. As always, a single experiment isn't going to be gospel. But it does give us a wallop of a lesson in being careful about our expectations.

I don't know what expectations Kathy had of me, if any — for obvious reasons I never had the guts to ask her about that day. But I got a disturbing window on the question a few years later, as a senior, when I ran into a fellow student from Kathy's study section.

When we figured out that we'd been in the same class, his eyes first narrowed, a bit angrily. Then the light bulb went on, and he said, “Oh, I remember you — you always asked the stupidest questions!”

Oh well; expectations be damned.

[1] A prospective student I was interviewing for the college put this metaphor into my head. Geeks surrounded by stone: God, yes. At Harvard, Heather may have been a resident tutor at Slytherin, but we had Lord Voldemort — I mean, Milton Friedman.
[2] U of C is one of those liberal-arts-and-a-bit-angry-about-it places — everybody shares the same common core of science, social science, and humanities courses before they get to take their major requirements and electives.
[3] Mostly dead white European men, though there were a few chicks in there — Mary Douglas and the like. And I understand they've been broadening it since.
[4] And I think most of them actually were lecturers or professors of varying type, and not grad students — that's another thing U of C is serious about to the point of it being a “thing.”
[5] I don't know what's harder to believe — that we actually did this, or that anybody would want to hear my advice.
[6] This, of course, is a loose end to the study: would the result have been different had you done the experiment with men? It's a quandary, though, since in men there'll be a normal variation between individuals and from day to day, and so, like the monkey, you have to give a snoot-load of it to make sure you're significantly changing what's already there — and then you have to worry about non-natural effects of what amounts to an OD of testosterone. And they won't let you do that with humans anyway. Women, at least, are more of a blank canvas, though you do have the possibility that their brains won't react in the same way that mens' will.
[7] Actually, it was “monetary units” — maybe euros — but you get the idea.

Who You Think You’re Fooling?

2010-01-25T18:30:00.000-08:00

The excellent Smartdogs’ blog has cited an interesting — if ill-advised — new way the government is wasting our money: building robots to train animals without human involvement.

Ba-rother.

Mind you, I do differ with Janeen in one important way: I’m not so sure you can’t, given the amazing robotics advances on their way in the next 10 to 20 years, build a robot that can train a dog. Given that the Japanese are starting to build robots with facial expressions, and even pheromone signals are beginning to make sense, I’m not so sure that this task is beyond near-future technology.

Now, I agree with Janeen in that the project is hopelessly naïve: at best it will take much, much longer than its creators realize (partly if they waste time with an all-operant box rather than starting by building a robot that looks and smells like a human trainer) [1]. But one important thing that a robo-trainer can have is perfect timing. Never a cue too late, never one too early. Never tired. Never distracted, pissed off, sinus-infected ...

As th’ better half is fond of pointing out, accurate communication with the animal is a fundamental — and good timing of such can produce results in the face of muddy-headed methods, unsavory personality, and much else that’s wrong, wrong, wrong.

I think it could work.

I’m already a bit off-message: my point today has to do with building a machine that looks and smells like a person, at least to a dog. Before you say “could never happen,” recall the cuckoo.

This is the bird that lays its eggs in other birds’ nests, getting free child-rearing in the process (often, the cuckoo chick will kick the lawful denizens of the nest out, so the mama bird is actually losing her babies as she raises the changeling). But it’s all the more amazing in that the cuckoo chick doesn’t look anything like the chicks of the birds it parasitizes: it’s bigger, uglier, just a different, um, bird entirely.

How in the hell can mama bird not tell the difference? Could it be that easy to fool dogs as well? Granted, most dogs are smarter than most birds (though consider the amazing intelligence of the corvids and the psittacines, and don’t be too sure of yourself), but this seems to be well within the ability of a bird to sort out.

Except if they tried, it would be a disaster.

Today’s entry, courtesy Diazaburo Shizuka and Bruce Lyon at UC Santa Cruz, explains why. Not content with basking in the permanent sun we’re told they enjoy out that way, these folks took a look at coots — no, not volunteer dog handler/firefighters pushing 50, but the water birds. Coots are a special case because they sometimes parasitize the nests of their own species.

What the California Dreamers discovered is that mama coot actually does a fair job of kicking changelings out of her nest, even though they look a lot like her own. How? She uses the first-hatched chick as a template, and boots chicks that don’t look enough like it to the curb.

Why does this work? Because, of course, you don’t parasitize an empty nest — you sneak an egg into one that’s already got eggs in it. You therefore start out with a younger egg than the rightful owner’s. And because of that, the first-hatched is likely to be a chick who belongs there, and not an interloper.

Why can’t it work for the birds that cuckoos parasitize? Because cuckoos grow fast and big, the better to muscle out the competition. There’s a good chance that the first egg hatched in a cuckoo-parasitized nest will be a changeling — and if mama uses it as a pattern of whom to keep, fewer, not more, of her babies will survive.

Bird-brained indeed. Maybe I was hasty in rejecting Data’s cat; getting a dog to accept a robot trainer may have less to do with how convincing it is than with picking the right cues, and understanding how dogs think.

[1] Another thing: as I’m fond of telling people, technology is likely to put us dog handlers out of business, but not by creating a robotic searcher. Why? Because by the time they could develop one, it’ll be too easy to find people in other ways, such as reading the location of their GPS-equipped cell phone. (Though this, too, isn’t quite as easy as you’d think.)

Assumptions

2010-01-01T09:26:00.000-08:00

So on our way back from Jersey, visiting the Sicilians [1] for the holidays, we decide to take a little detour across the river into New York City to visit my old friend (and co-Best Man at my wedding) Mike Gelfman for an afternoon.

We met at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which was my clever way of getting spousal brownie points, hanging with an old buddy from the Before Time, and getting to look at cool old armor and weapons all at the same time.

In the event, though, we never got to the Met's amazing medieval arms exhibit because we got sucked into the far earlier pottery and artifacts exhibits from Egypt, Greece, Tuscany [2], and so forth.

I didn't feel cheated.

Tucked away in a case, one vase among thousands, was this customer [3]:

Heather immediately noticed that the descriptive signage, while full of interesting bits about the religious symbolism, left out an important, if puerile, fact: what seemed obvious to us was about to happen in the depicted scene.

We went back and forth over whether the writer was assuming that tidbit would be obvious to museum goers; while we often decry the rather pathetic state of the art in museum signage these days, the fact is the Met's signs mostly date from some time ago, and it seems far mor likely to me that the author, in a Looney Tunes kind of way [4], was presenting information that a proper, if educated and cosmopolitan, city slicker parent can read to a child while “getting” it at a more adult level.

'Course, that's an assumption, and assumptions can be dangerous. Leading us to today's entry, a study of how the smell-reactive structures of the mouse olfactory epithelium map to the sensations reported by human subjects coming from Yuichi Furudono and pals at, of all places, the Japan Tobacco company's [5] Science Research Center and the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Amagasaki, Japan.

They found, interestingly enough, that the patterns of nerve-cell activation in the mouse olfactory epithelium caused by 12 different odorants matches quite well with similarities and differences in the smells experienced by their human subjects when exposed to those odorants. It's a remarkable finding in its own right, in that it's a kind of Golden Spike that verifies what we're learning about the brain's encoding of olfactory experience by explicitly connecting a series of events in the nose and brain.

But let's take a moment to pick apart exactly what they were doing: they were watching the patterns of nerve-cell activation in the mouse's nose, using that information to figure out how the brain transforms those signals into the smells that we experience — as if we were certain that what happens in the mouse nose reflects perfectly what happens in the human nose, and to some extent brain to brain as well.

Now, the authors are careful to point out that this assumption carries some dangers, and discuss the issue at some length in the paper. But what really pops for me isn't that they're making this assumption, but that the odds are so fat that it's likely to be a sound assumption: from everything we know about the remarkable similarities in the sense of smell among vertebrates, I don't think anybody's losing sleep over the formal possibility that something vastly different can be happening in the mouse brain vs. human to produce similar patterns.

How far we've come.

Anyway, let me wrap up by taking a moment to wish everybody the best New Year Possible — Lord knows, we all could use a better year — and a belated Happy Other Holidays. And please, consider donating some dough to Wikipedia so that this remarkable resource can be there for us all.

[1] Aka my relatives.
[2] The Etruscans, who are a new interest of mine and worth a check-out.
[3] It's a krater, not a vase, apparently. Whatever.
[4] There's a New Year's Day marathon on today.
[5] Check out the link, there's an interesting, if coincidental, connection with the dumpling poisonings in Japan in 2008.

Let’s Start a Fight

2009-12-03T21:13:00.000-08:00

I’ve bought myself a bit of reprise in doing a blog entry this week by getting my latest nonfiction project into print: an article about my former town and what it’s been doing to stop the wholesale devouring of its woods. It’s certainly nice to get back on that horse — I’d done a bunch of work for the Pittsburgh City Paper back in the late ’90s and early aughts, but not recently.

Seems I’ve been scooped by th’wife — “Professor Chaos” indeed. Let me say this about anything that might be said on that particular blog: I remember the day she talks about, and will admit I purposely avoided the farm for a long time because I knew I’d react the same way she did. As Treebeard said:

“Many of those trees were my friends, creatures I had known from nut and acorn; many had voices of their own that are lost for ever now. And there are wastes of stump and bramble where once there were singing groves. I have been idle. I have let things slip. It must stop!”

The reasons for my unwillingness entirely to condemn the new wave of developers are now a matter of record; I don’t feel it necessary to respond to comments from the Peanut Gallery.

Context

2009-11-19T20:48:00.000-08:00

On a summer day quite a few years ago, Lilly and I were waiting for Mel and Heather to find us on a beautiful fallow farm that today is rapidly become a bulldozed memory. Sitting on the lee side of a collapsing barn, I knew they’d have a bit of trouble getting us — scent tends to get trapped on the downwind side of structures — and that therefore Lilly and I had some time to kick back and just enjoy a golden southwest Pennsylvania afternoon.

Lilly, as she often did, was chowing down on the tall, broad grass leaves (they were, I found out later, timothy) growing around the abandoned farm buildings. Now, usually we humans have a (justified) skepticism about the culinary preferences of someone who finds cat shit an irresistibly crunchy snack; but just that once, I decided to give it a try.

I chewed the tough, raspy leaves, and soon got a wonderful note of garlic and green. Very tasty, actually.

That day, I got one of many ongoing lessons about giving my dog the benefit of the doubt.

Heather gave me minor hell for the framing story in What Died? — my skeptical account of Lilly apparently detecting 20-year-old graves. Her basic point was, “Why didn’t you just trust your dog, idiot?”

I think she missed an important point of context, a point that a lot of dog handlers get chronically wrong: when and how you express your skepticism matters to the level of trust you’re showing your dog. To make it more concrete, handlers tend to build their dogs’ performance in retrospect: pure confusion the day of a search becomes, with the hindsight of knowing the subject’s eventual location, a clear indication that the dog was on the right track. Some dog handlers compound it by historically revising their level of certainty: “I knew Sparkie was onto it.”

No, our dogs don’t lie to us: but neither do we always understand what they’re trying to tell us.

Though I can’t hold myself forward as any sort of example, I think we need just the opposite approach. In the context of a search task, we need to be respectful of the dog’s abilities but coldly honest: if it had been a real search, the proper report for the potter’s field alert would have been, “I could be wrong, but Lilly sure looked like she was detecting cadaver. I think we need to check it out.” The proper line to take now, nearly 20 years later, is that I don’t really know for sure what she was doing, though the corroborative evidence I’ve seen encourages me to take that alert at face value.

It’s a matter of context.

Context of a different sort is the gist of today’s entry, care of Jostein Gohli and Göran Högstedt at the University of Bergen, Norway: namely, when does garish coloration make a prey animal safe rather than lunch?

The classic explanation is that prey critters like the monarch butterfly use bright colors to warn predators (a strategy called aposematism) that they taste very bad — short-circuiting the potential problem that tasting bad is a little late to really help you not get killed or seriously hurt by a predator. But that explanation poses its own problem: a bird that tries to eat one monarch won’t try for a second. But that still leaves the first pretty much screwed.

The predators could be genetically disposed to avoiding the bright colors — but that argument just moves the issue further back in time, since at some point the first, behaviorally and genetically naïve, predator had to give it a try.

Gohli and Högstedt put it extremely well: “When aposematism first evolved, all predators were inexperienced and the population of aposematic prey would have been very small. Sampling (killing) would likely have led to an early extinction of this fragile population.”

Word.

The explanation, as you may have guessed from the context that I’m talking about it, hinges on smell. If a bad-tasting prey animal also smelled bad, that smell would double down with the bright colors to warn even a truly naive predator off. Both individual associative learning and evolution of the population would strengthen the predators’ reluctance to take the first bite.

But why bother with the color when you already smell bad? While you could argue a number of ways that you get from camouflaged and stinky to neon-bright and stinky, the Norsemen have provided a compelling explanation via mathematical modeling: the stink may actually have driven the evolutionary change in color.

In their computer model, bright colors only tended to get you killed more often, up until a certain level of stink — at that point, the e-animals with subdued coloring tended to get munched more often. And once that potential is there, the small variations generated by genetic drift will inevitably start to push you toward brighter and brighter colors.

It all hinges on the idea that a garish prey animal makes a predator stop and assess rather than jump in to feed, giving it a chance to notice the bad smell. This makes sense; I’ve seen videos of divers chasing after fleeing great white sharks in clear water — while I wouldn’t think this is a bright thing to try in any case, nobody would venture it in murky water, where the fish are known to bite first and ask questions later.

Predation is, after all, an extremely dangerous lifestyle; it pays for a predator to be a bit conservative. Prey fights back, so if you see something you don’t already know is tasty and relatively easy to catch, it makes sense to stop and think rather than risk tangling with something that may seriously injure you (or, in the case of aposematism, poison you).

The theoretical argument even pays itself back. The Viking Veracitators note that, to work on completely naive predators, you need to excrete your stink continuously, even though almost no insects with chemical defenses do this today: they use it only when they need it. The authors’ suggestion: as the heavy lifting shifted from smell to color, continual stink became less necessary to ward the predators off. While they haven’t reported that calculation, it would be nice to see, in future work, whether the bright coloration, once it comes, eases the pressure on the animal to expend the metabolic cost of permanent funk.

Of course, computer modeling ain’t the real world. The experimentalists will need to take this model and run with it, see if it plays out in the field. But it’s a nicely self-consistent argument that seems more than worthy of the experimental verification.

In the context of plausible ideas, it’s a winner.

Still Ticking

2009-11-07T05:02:00.000-08:00

Doing well on surgery +5, now on one crutch -- huge in terms of improved mobility, I can climb stairs and sleep in the bed instead of downstairs like another of the dogs. Hopefully the stitches will come out next Friday, but we'll see.

Heather and Pip are in Virginia, helping look for a kid who went missing after a Metallica concert in October. Sucks for a lot of reasons, but there's always the hope that they'll find something that helps the family -- mainly, evidence that the kid just ran away and will be calling home sometime.

Right now I have some writing to do -- stay tuned for a post on a freelance project that hopefully will be web-posted so I can send yinz there.

Thanks for all the well wishes -- hoping I'll be back on something like a normal routine shortly.

By the way, anybody know how to take your own picture using that @$#%^$ little camera at the top of the Mac screen? I can't find anything in iPhoto that refers to it, and the search function in Macs always seems to miss the point for me ...

Is Roof!

2009-11-02T02:03:00.001-08:00

It was even more of a squeaker than it looks -- sundown came moments afterward.

Anyhow, next stop is the hospital -- I'll post subsequently, but at least that's done!

We Who Are about to Be Butterflied II

2009-10-31T06:55:00.000-07:00

Well, I've been remiss again, but have a good reason. In addition to the desperate attempt to re-roof our barn by the drop-deadline, I have the reason for that deadline: left-foot surgery this Monday.

So. "Low risk" surgery aside, petitions to the appropriate deities, wooden fetishes, and beneficent secular concepts are appreciated -- under the circumstances, I'm not fussy. In the next two weeks of my convalescence I will, hopefully, have some time to do an entry or two ...

What Died?

2009-10-19T19:54:00.000-07:00

One day, in the Before Time, Heather, I, and our beloved Lilly were out taking a walk on the grounds of a certain defunct Massachusetts mental hospital. The state had abandoned the place decades earlier, and though the buildings stood ominous and dilapidated, the surrounding woods — themselves adjacent to a community park called Rock Meadow — were a wonderful place to train for SAR, ski, ride bikes, or just play.

I think that day we were doing the latter: just walking around, enjoying a beautiful New England autumn day. Lilly was little more than a puppy; Heather and I were little more than children. I’m not much given to wistful reflection on times past, but I think that the three of us were pretty damned happy with each other that day.

Anyhow, we were walking across a clearing alongside the old, unpaved road that ran back from the rear of the facility when Lilly’s body went taut, her tail came up, and she began frantically sniffing at the ground.

Curious as to what she was scenting, I walked behind her, looking at the ground. I saw a puzzling series of rectangular stones set flush with the earth, inscribed with mysterious numbers: P-17; P-33; P-48. Then the numbers changed: C-54; C-22; C-12. Like that.

It wasn’t until I approached a stone dais bearing only the bottom of a crumbled statue that the penny dropped for me: all that remained was the feet, but they were unmistakable: emerging from under a dress or robes, they stood upon a snake.

This Sicilian boy didn’t need to be reminded of his iconography: this had been a statue of the Virgin Mary [1]. And the numbers now made sense: Protestant number 17; Catholic number 22.

We were in a graveyard — the place where the hospital had buried patients who had died without family to take their remains. And though it took me about five minutes to piece that together, Lilly had known almost instantly.

I can’t be sure, either then or today, whether that last statement is actually true. After 18 years of working and training with search dogs, even I have trouble believing what I saw that day: Heather checked later, that graveyard hadn’t had a new tenant in the 20 years since the facility had closed.

Like most wilderness SAR handlers, we had cross-trained our dog to find human remains. But we’d been thinking in terms of finding a fresh, whole body for those tragic but inevitable times when we arrived too late — not detecting the bare bones of a two-decade-old Potter’s Field. I still don’t really know for sure, wonder if my eyes had tricked me somehow.

Well, today’s offering speaks to this question in a fairly direct way: Arpad Vass and homeys, from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the FBI’s Laboratory Division, were able to detect 478 unique decomposition-associated gasses from over human graves at the University of Tennessee Anthropological Research Facility. Even more interesting, they observed this nasty bouquet beyond 18,000 “burial accumulated degree days” — the number of days the body was buried times the average daily temperature in that location. Since that part of Tennessee gets 5,234 BADD per year, that means that at least some of the smelly compounds are still going strong three and a half years after burial, and after all the soft tissues are gone.

Pretty amazing, really.

The researchers did a couple of things that puzzled me. They ranked 30 of the compounds they found by “perceived importance,” but don’t seem to define that term in this paper. It appears that an earlier paper from 2004 sampled gases from a decomposing exposed body and ranked them somehow, but I haven’t been able to get hold of it yet. My guess is somebody smelled the test tubes and the rankings correspond with each compound’s contribution to the stink, but I need to get hold of that paper to be sure.

The guys also had a puzzling series of pie charts that show “differences in bone odor composition” in dogs, humans, deer, and pigs — but instead of the intuitive series of a pie chart for each animal showing the percent of aldehydes, amides, alcohols, and ketones in that beast, a la:

they have one chart for each chemical compound with percentages for each animal, thusly:

It shows amply that the four critters have major differences even at this broad level, I suppose, but I’m stumped as to what each percentage means in the latter — they don’t add to 100, for each animal, between graphs. May just be relative proportions reduced to percentages, but I find that a bit confusing.

Anyhow, they pick up only 19 of the 30 gases from cadavers on the surface. They don’t know whether the missing compounds, only seen in buried bodies, are the product of anaerobic decomposition that can’t take place on the surface, or are products of the interaction between the scent gases and the dirt and its microbes, so that’s a question for another day. They also identified 12 of the 30 that emanate from human bones.

This paper pokes a hole in a couple of old dog handlers’ tales: One, that pigs are chemically similar enough to humans to stand in for us as “training materials” for cadaver dogs: the pigs showed profoundly different scent signatures. The other — a rumor circulating among us scent wonks, if not the general dog-handler community — was that polyamines such as cadaverine and putrescine would prove central to “death smell,” and were pretty much the whole sum of certain commercial artificial scents. As I’d understood that these compounds were pretty much characteristic of decomposition, their total absence was a bit of a stunner for me. Gotta get hold of that earlier paper, because it might cast a different light, but right now the only thing even reminiscent of a polyamine on the list is methenamine, at number 28, and as a cyclic it isn’t really the same thing. Other expected stinkies, like the sulfur-containing compounds — dimethyl disulfide and –trisulfide, sulfur dioxide, carbon disulfide, etc. — are present and accounted for.

Again, I need that earlier paper to find out what the rankings actually mean — either the polyamines aren’t as important as I’d thought, or they’re present in a body at the surface but not underground. The latter would be remarkable, given that polyamines are the products of the kind of anaerobic decomposition you’d expect from a buried body especially. So I’ve got more work to do in understanding this one.

While the authors trot out the old trope of the “robotic scent detector” — one that doesn’t really impress me, as a wilderness handler, because the localization problem in my field is far more difficult than the detection problem — but also come down on the side of the angels in that they’re interested in producing standard, verified, published scent tools [2] that can be used to train and verify cadaver dogs. While I remain not-yet-entranced by the idea of artificial scents — you’d better be damned sure you’re giving the dogs something that really is representative of the target scent to train them, or you’re screwed — I recognize that real “training aids” suffer from a huge amount of quality variation [3]. I’m skeptical, but more than willing to see where the research leads.

Most amazing, though, is how this study really leaves the door open for how long these scents persist. I hope the researchers left their apparatus in place, and intend to come back in 10 years or so and see what’s coming out of these graves.

I still don’t know for sure that Lilly had been scenting 20-year-old graves. But I certainly can’t rule it out.

[1] I just love the poetry of this one: the saint whose bywords are nurture, forgiveness, gentleness is the only one who treads Satan below unprotected feet.
[2] Hear that, you companies with proprietary mixes who won’t even release data on how you verified their efficacy? We really aren’t too dumb to understand this stuff, you can keep your secrets but just tell us why you think it works.
[3] Very reminiscent of herbal medicines.

Connected

2009-09-30T23:30:00.000-07:00

Every culture has its own comfort foods; every family samples from that culture; everyone has his own personal favorites, connected to a million intimate family memories.

For me, comfort foods stem from a little finished basement in South Hackensack, New Jersey. Several folks had a claim to sovereignty over that space: for example my grandfather, Salvatore Gulino, who owned the house; my great-grandfather, Melchiorre Occhipinti, who presided as a kind of family elder statesman over everything we did.

A quick word about my great-grandfather, my “Nannu” — that’s not a misspelling of the Italian, by the way, it’s Sicilian dialect for “grandpa” [1] — or as he was known by my mother’s generation, “Pop.” My mom and her sisters were terrified of him; I mean, this man was a holy terror in his day. My great-uncle, Pete Occhipinti, told a story about facing down union organizers in Pop’s small factory [2]: Uncle Pete told me about how he was yelling at the union rep, trying to scare him off, and that the guy started to get real pale, looked worried. “I thought I was scaring him real good,” my uncle said. “Then I turned around, and saw Pop standing behind me with a big lead pipe in his hand.” The other story was about Pop throwing a guy through a window because he didn’t like the way the guy was dancing with my great-grandmother.

We Sicilians can be an intense people. Very few of us are as placid and pleasant as yours truly.

By the time I came ’round, though, Pop was this kindly, gentle 90-something who, whenever I came by, would give me a dollar bill and a 7-Up and set me to drawing pictures on the vine-covered back porch of his house, next door to my grandparents’.

Man oh man, is it good to be the first grandson in a Sicilian family. I recommend it highly. But I digress.

Arguably, that big, second-kitchen, one-family events center in the basement of my grandparents’ house belonged most of all to my grandmother, Margherita Gulino. If my grandfather Sam was the strength of the family, quiet and gentle and protective, my grandmother, his profoundly beloved “Marge,” was the emotional center. We read the opening to Corinthians 13 at her funeral — a rare reading for a funeral — because it was just, so, her:

If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, enough to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions and hand over my body to be burnt but do not have love, I gain nothing. Love is patient and kind. Love is not envious, boastful, arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way. Love is not irritable or resentful. Love does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. Now faith, hope and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love [3].

Among many cherished memories, I remember, and try to emulate, my grandmother’s cooking. Variations on simple pasta are a mainstay in my house to this day [4]; I recently reproduced a promising, if not-quite-there, cauliflower pie; one of these days I’ll have to try to re-create her tomato-covered mackerel, which was amazing.

But if there’s one thing I remember most fondly of all, it was her ravioli. She’d make them from scratch, of course, rolling out a sheet of pasta dough, spooning out the cheese — her secret ingredient was a little sugar, and sometimes some cinnamon [5] — and then covering it with a second sheet, using a little tool I’ve got to get hold of to cut and crimp at the same time …

To this day, ravioli conjures up a flood of connected memories, partly because memory is so intrinsically linked to the sense of smell. I swear, if somebody exhumes the rotting carcass of Proust’s Madeleine passage one more frigging time, I’ll puke [6] — but the guy got it right nevertheless.

Today, however, we’re going to go a bit farther afield than the, in evolutionary retrospect, unsurprising idea that the structures in the brain that govern memory are connected to those that govern smell. We’re going to talk about the link between metabolic state and smell (as well as taste).

Submitted for your approval: Mssrs. Bronwen Martin & Co.’s review of connections between the metabolic hormones and the olfactory and gustatory systems.

I remember a lecture in a college endocrinology class, when the professor told us a harrowing story of a toddler with a fatal kidney dysfunction who would eat handfuls of salt. Somehow, the kid knew what he needed, even if it couldn’t save him … Then there are the women who become nauseated at the drop of a hat when they’re pregnant — maybe, their bodies are making them avoid any hint of toxin to protect the baby …

Well, today’s paper surveys what we know about how the body’s metabolic state modifies our sense of smell and taste to point us toward what we need.

Maybe the best-understood actor in this context is glucagon-like peptide 1, or GLP-1. It’s a key actor in the body’s system for sensing satiety — when your stomach says, “enough.” GLP-1 release by the intestines signals that the body has taken up a load of glucose, and that it’s time to ratchet up insulin production — which itself is a signal for cells to take up and store the sugar from the blood— and ratchet down glucagon, which has the opposite effects to insulin.

Turns out that GLP-1 is also produced in the taste cells of the tongue, and in the glomerular layer of the olfactory bulb that receives signals from the smell-sensing neurons in the olfactory epithelium. More interesting, GLP has the ability to shift the sense of taste, reducing sensitivity to sweetness and increasing sensitivity to umami, that meaty “fifth flavor” [7] that Westerners didn’t know about until relatively recently, because, well, we’re barbarians. That’s right, the same hormone that tells the body that we have enough sugar on board makes us hanker less for sweets [8]. Its role in smell isn’t as clear, but we know it’s there.

Martin’s crew talk about a number of hormonal actors: for example cholecystokinin, another intestinal signal that encourages digestion of fat and proteins, somehow affects social memory. Neuropeptide Y, a potent natural appetite stimulant/sedative with effects not unlike a good Thai stick, is a major affector of smell as well, encouraging the generation of new olfactory neurons — a process necessary for long-term reprogramming of the nose’s sensitivity to various smells.

Most topical, perhaps, was the mention of leptin, a hormone produced in fatty tissues and whose absence has recently been linked to obesity. Mice who have mutations that make them unable to produce leptin have increased preference for sweets (and also swell up like balloons). Harder to fit into the picture, but as provocative as it is interesting, is the fact that high serum leptin levels are associated with superior odor-discrimination ability in men — but low capacity for odor discrimination by women.

At one level, these connections are almost predictable: of course there are direct links between the body’s systems for digesting food and those that help us find, make us want, to eat more — and what to eat. Of course problems with maintaining healthy body weight are going to involve breakdowns in these signals. Hell, they haven’t even completely nailed all these connections down yet, but it seems a safe bet that, somehow, it will all connect up eventually.

But a step back, and the mind reels with the delicate intricacy of the signals and counter-signals. Everything is connected; from the simple quorum-sensing molecules that bacteria use to communicate with each other nature has developed a rich, complex dance of molecules and electric impulses that make it all work.

Connections.

One more food/connections story about, or rather from, the basement on Leuning Street: it’s from a day when Heather was a brand-new girlfriend, come down to meet my family maybe for the first time. My aunt Dorothy was still alive, and my aunt Barbara and my mother were still talking to each other. The discussion came down to braciola, a southern Italian specialty of flank steak, pounded flat, and rolled up with spices and pine nuts in tomato sauce — if you do it right, there’s a hard-boiled egg in the center. But not everybody does it right [8].

My aunt Dee was trying to remind my mother of a neighbor they’d had, decades before. “He lived in that brick house,” Aunt Dee said, and I wondered, from the way she’d said it, if the house even existed any more. Certainly, it wasn’t spurring any memories for Mom.

Dee thought for a moment, then brightened, and said, holding up a fork, “He choked to death on a braciola string.”

That did it: Mom had it now; everybody nodded, and went back to the meal.

[1] Note that many folks believe that Sicilian deserves status as a language in its own right, separate from Italian.
[2] What can I say: we were rare, for the period, Italian-American Republicans. I actually worked in that building one summer, for a machine shop that was leasing it from Uncle Pete. I’ll have to post on it sometime, but let’s just say if it hadn’t been for who my uncle was they’d have fired my clumbsy ass.
[3] Say what you want about Paul; I defy you to argue he didn’t get this one right.
[4] I consider myself no slouch. Maybe my best dish is cacciatore, which I admit I tinkered with for years to duplicate not my grandmother’s recipe, but Michelle’s Restaurant’s, in Garfield, which now seems to have become a banquet hall. Not the same thing; you really can’t go home.
[5] I know it sounds a bit weird. But it works.
[6] Which I just did. Blaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaugh.
[7] Add it to sour, salty, sweet, and bitter, the four “classical” flavors. Everything else in flavor comes from the aroma, not the actual taste.
[8] Until I looked up the Wikipedia entry, I didn’t know the name braciola was a misnomer common to Italian-Americans. How ’bout that.

Multitasking

2009-09-19T09:32:00.000-07:00

It was an ugly scenario, I’ll give you that.

We’d gotten the call on a Friday night, I think, for a Saturday morning response — someone had left a note in a small West Virginia state park saying he’d murdered two women and stashed the bodies at the park. Who knows how seriously the authorities would have taken that note, if it weren’t for the fact that two local teens were unaccounted for. They had to assume the worst.

By the time we got there, though, the picture had muddied. The teens had shown up, safe and sound, and the authorities were beginning to believe the note was a hoax. But they had a tiger by the tail — they’d initiated a search, and now didn’t know how to stop it. If they kept going and somebody got hurt looking for bodies that weren’t there, they’d have a legal problem on their hands; if they called the search off and somebody’s grandma found two women’s bodies two weeks later, it would be even worse.

Fortunately, one of the services that volunteer SAR teams with good incident-command training can offer is a set of mechanisms for deciding when and how to wind a search down, ethically and by the book. In some ways, when we roll up on a search like this we’re even bigger heroes to the local authorities than when we actually find somebody.

In this case, we had a number of clues of uncertain significance to follow up on, and a few bald spots in the previous search efforts to cover, before we could suspend.

Before I left for the search, I got a call from our incident commander, Don Scelza, who said, “Bring your caving gear.”

At the time, AMRG wasn’t a cave rescue team. But a number of us were cavers, and had taken at least the introductory National Cave Rescue Commission rescue class. In this case, Don had something very specific in mind. A dog of unknown quality had alerted near a maze of rocks — essentially, a little cave system that had lost its roof — and Don wanted me to explore the maze thoroughly to rule out any, well, dead people being in there.

What I did not bring, and this is going to become poignantly relevant, was a dog. With Moe’s untimely and still-frustrating medical discharge [1], we’d gotten caught with only one operational dog — and Heather and Pip, along with our teammate Bill Evans, had gone to Mississippi, as part of the post-Katrina response, duly deputized by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania [2].

When I rolled up on the search scene, I had something else to do before I did any caving. At the time, before our team had its trailer, our gear had a habit of dispersing among the officers. Since I was then communications officer, I had our radios in my car and needed to set up our communications net as job one.

The base radio was a challenge. We had no electric power in the picnic shelter that served as a command post; I tried plugging the radio into a car cigarette-lighter inverter I had, only to find that, between the power loss at the plug, the inverter itself, and the power supply, we didn’t have enough juice to run the radio.

“You know, the radio runs on 12-volt DC,” Don said, looking over my shoulder, and I felt a little dim. I pulled the power supply off the radio, hooked the damned radio up directly to my car battery, and voila, we had a communications net. I wasn’t absolutely sure I’d be going home without a jump, but I had cables.

So I put my helmet, kneepads, and gloves on over my uniform, slung my gas-mask-bag cave pack over one shoulder, and hiked up to the grotto.

Normally you don’t do SAR tasks alone; and you never do cave tasks by yourself. But this wasn’t exactly a cave, and a grid team was covering an area right next to me, within easy shouting distance. So I dove in, starting at a big opening and working my way around counter-clockwise, crawling into every crack, every opening I could find.

The task was utterly uneventful until I was nearly back where I started from, at the far side of that big opening. Standing there, I had to admit that something smelled dead.

I thought, “Think like a dog.” Knowing the scent would likely rise in the daytime, I moved into the big opening and started climbing. From the top, I was able to move down into the smell, finding, eventually, the dead fox that was its source.

Can’t tell you what a relief that was. But I felt I had a good explanation of what the dog had alerted on — and that somebody needed to go back and do some remedial training.

I drew two other tasks that day; one, the field team leader’s nightmare, was to lead a team made up of park rangers, state troopers, and local firefighters in the day’s last area-search task.

I said to myself, “If you screw up, these guys will turn on you in a second.” We did have a difficult moment, when a rose thicket broke our line like the 20th Maine broke the Alabamians on Little Round Top. But I guess I handled it all right, because despite a little grumbling about how thoroughly I was making them perform a task that we all knew was pro forma, we had no major mutinies.

Earlier, though, I’d been making my way out to my last solo task of the day — a culvert leading from the reservoir that another dog had alerted on — and reflected on how utterly, totally cool I was. I was Joe SAR. I could do anything the incident required.

Multitasking? Bring it on, thought I …

Cruelly abandoned to hold down the farm on my own while th’wife was masterminding adoptions for nearly 250 rescued dogs in Montana — a different but still difficult multitasking mission — I’d been a little too busy to do a full entry recently. Instead I thought I’d give a quick smattering of stuff that caught my eye recently, but that has piled up way too fast for me to blog — or whatever it is I do in these pages — on them. In the event, this post got delayed by the timely capital punishment/high school reunion issue, but here goes now:

First, in my Fortnight of Multitasking, something I was already suspecting — namely, let’s not kid ourselves about what great multitaskers we are. The people who multitask the most, apparently, suck at it the most. I think that multitasking gives the subjective impression of productivity without actually producing all that much.

A surprisingly sympathetic — and harrowing — story about what happens to cockroaches when deprived of social interactions. Answer: the poor little buggers get clinical depression.

Finally, and maybe most importantly, there’s this item about the movement behaviors of white blood cells. A bit of context first: you may recall me getting into a bit of a twist trying to understand how having more receptors on one side of the cell would help one of these cells find the source of a chemical gradient, given that the difference in concentration of that chemical at each end of the cell has to be negligible. Then I saw this piece in Nature about a new method for observing individual cells in a living animal, through its intact skin. Turned out that not too long ago, folks used this technique to see that white blood cells moving toward an infection don’t move in a uniform front. They bob and weave, in apparent random motion.

Well, I’ve got an alternative explanation: they’re casting for scent, just like a moth trying to regain a pheromone plume he’s lost — or, maybe, a SAR dog trying to zero in on a search subject in difficult scent conditions.

Be that as it may, I had my own little epiphany about searching — and the limitations to multitasking — as I was crawling up that culvert, green slime dripping on my back [3]. It struck me that I’d never had to crawl up a culvert like that before, and I realized immediately why — normally, I’d have sent my dog.

And that’s when it hit me: I had no dog, but they’d given me all the dog tasks anyway. I really was just a dog’s sidekick.

Humbled, and again relieved at once again finding nothing, I trudged back to base to report.

[1] Happy ending: Moe has today found fulfillment and gainful employment as head of homeland security for our little farm.
[2] This is literally true. Soon after they left, I learned that the text of the mutual aid agreement between Pennsylvania and Mississippi that governed the response had been hastily scraped over, word for word, from the one that sent Pennsylvania state troopers down there, and included full police powers (remember, this was post-Katrina, and everybody was scrambling). For reasons that would be obvious to anybody who knows Bill or Heather, we didn’t tell either of them until they got back.
[3] Ruined my @$%#^$ uniform shirt.

Experts and Testimony

2009-09-09T21:43:00.000-07:00

Lord, but the Real World has a way of hijacking — or, perhaps less dramatically, riffing on — this space. A recent post was a fairly “insider’s” view of the professionalism issues facing the search-and-rescue dog-handling community, and as such I was a bit concerned about whether it would be of interest to all of DACSIH’s readers.

Huh. The state of Texas, it turned out, had other plans. But I get ahead of myself.

So there I was, at the Woodcliff Lake Hilton, New Jersey, built literally on the corpse of the farm stand where I used to get cider and cinnamon doughnuts as a boy. But we won’t dwell on the evils of suburban sprawl, because it was a happy occasion: my 30th reunion, Pascack Hills High School Class of 1979.

Heather had pulled a muscle in her back from the fucking smoker’s cough she’d brought back from her Billings adventure, and of course this really wasn’t her thing anyway, so she spent much of the evening on a couch outside the meeting room. That turned out to be perfect for me, because the experience, while enjoyable, was also a bit intense: I’d spend half an hour reminiscing with people, walk out, hang with Heather for a while, and go back in once I’d de-intensified for a little while.

Much of what we did was tell stories about getting into trouble when we were at school together. I had a particularly interesting talk with Greg Bunce, who’d been first-chair trombone when I was second-chair trumpet. As band geeks, we’d spent an incredible time together; virtually every moment we weren’t in class, we were in the band room, playing or shooting the bull.

On the date of note, however, we weren’t doing any of that — I think that we may have already graduated, in fact. But in any case, Greg tells me a story I knew well:

“I remember that time that I rear-ended you — you were driving that old Mustang of yours, weren’t you? I tell my kids about that even now.”

Which came as a surprise to me, because I had good reason to remember it differently. I’m fairly certain of my facts, because I have far more details and because I vividly remember being dragged into the insurance agent’s office for the talk about teen drivers letting their attentions wander. Which was all bullshit, of course, because although none of the adults knew it, the accident had been a direct effect of egregiously and willfully dangerous horseplay.

I’d been driving, and not my 1967 candy-apple red squareback Mustang — I think it may already have died by then — but my mother’s late-60s Pontiac Le Mans, which she’d bought second-hand from her sister. The other car was Doug “Beaner” Weinstein’s, a little Mazda roadster that he pampered as his baby.

Heh. The Le Mans and I had different plans.

I don’t remember what we were coming back from, but we were on our way home on a fairly lonely stretch of road that included a causeway across a local reservoir. I was in front, my car full of wiseasses — including Greg, of course. Doug was driving behind us, and I think his car was empty because he was going a different way back.

I stopped at a light; behind me, the gentlest bump.

I look in the rearview; Doug’s grinning at me like he just ate a turd sandwich. Asshole.

At a stop sign, the same thing; I stop, he bumps me. Now he’s laughing.

At this point we hit a short four-lane stretch, and I slow down. Doug makes the amazing mistake of passing me.

Perhaps you can see where this is going; but you probably haven’t got the full picture yet.

At the next intersection, Doug encounters a red light. Who could have known the levies would fail, but as it so happens when I pull in behind him I give him a bit of a bump. But I don’t stop there: having made contact, I gently ease my foot onto the gas.

A Glory Days, unapologetic American V8 purrs to life, the raw power even at low revs starting to push the little Mazda forward, into the intersection.

Kids, I can’t stress this enough — don’t try this at home.

Doug tries his foot brake. Tries the hand break. Tries putting it into reverse — as if; the little rotary engine whines in impotent truculence, but that little car is still headed into the intersection, red light or no. Big daddy says forward, and at this point Detroit is still capable of bitch-slapping Hiroshima [1].

In my defense, I do have a carful of little shitheads howling with laughter and egging me on. Which, of course, made it all right …

Allow me to break frame for a moment, and tell you what neither I nor Doug nor our demonstrably unsympathetic fellows knew. In fact, the Le Mans’ bumper had almost no overlap with the much-lower Mazda’s. At this moment what was pushing Doug forward was about an inch of intersection between his bumper and my Mom’s.

Or rather, the torpedo nose in the front center of the Le Mans’ bumper.

The impact, when it happened, was almost gentle. Just the slightest shock, and from the feel I wouldn’t have even known it — Doug certainly didn’t, because when the light changed he just drove off.

Those of us behind him, however, had the awful evidence before us: a huge dent in his trunk, shaped exactly like the Le Mans’ torpedo nose (which didn’t, of course, have so much as a scratch).

For a moment, we all sat there in utter, awful silence. Then I hit the gas, tried to come alongside Doug and motion him to pull over. He just drove faster — thought I was trying to drag.

Eventually we managed to motion him over. He got out of his car, that big old grin still on his face until he rounded the rear and saw. The smile, and all the color, drained from his face.

That’s when we all huddled and got our story straight. We were smart kids, developed a short but believable scenario that would minimize the shit-storm I’d be in when my old man found out. I was going to have to take the fall; that was so obvious it didn’t need to be stated — but true friends are ones who help you construct an alibi that will soften the blow.

The punch line, though, is a phone conversation I had with our first-chair trumpet, Seth Rivkin, soon afterward — Seth hadn’t made it to the reunion, so I told him about Greg telling me the slightly revised story.

“Wasn’t I driving that day?” Seth asked.

I’ll be damned. Well, there’s your reliability of eyewitness testimony.

Which brings me to that earlier post — about how bogus scent-dog evidence seems to have helped convict a couple of innocent people in Texas — and today’s post — about how, in a grim finding no one could consider any kind of victory, anti-capital-punishment activists may have finally gotten what they were warning us was coming: evidence that a man was executed for a crime he did not commit.

Texas, again [2].

The particulars you can find in the excellent New Yorker article. But here’s the recap. A man named Cameron Todd Willingham was executed in Texas in 2004 for setting fire to his house and killing his children. Much of the case was made by expert testimony saying that the fire couldn’t have been accidental. Unfortunately, the case began to unravel almost immediately after the conviction:

• The “expert testimony” from the fire marshal that pretty much made the case that a man had burned his family to death turned out to be little more than folklore-based.
• Research available well before the man was executed showed that the “evidence” investigators found for arson can happen naturally in any house fire, robbing us of the “it was OK by the standards of the time” argument.
• The Texas board responsible for clemency judgments seems to have willfully ignored a brief from one of the nation’s foremost researchers on fire forensics that pretty much established the state’s case didn’t hold up, and that the fire appeared to have been accidentally caused by a space heater or faulty wiring.
• Many of the witnesses who testified in court about the man’s “unnatural calm” while his kids burned up had originally described him as frantically trying to get back into the house to save them — but remembered the day differently after they found out the authorities had accused the man of a monstrous crime. Again, so much for eyewitnesses, which I’m beginning to think are a vastly overrated mode of evidence.
• The other “damning” evidence came from a jailhouse stoolie who, years later, offered this reassuring addendum (from the New Yorker article):
“After I pressed him, he said, ‘It’s very possible I misunderstood what he said.’ Since the trial, Webb has been given an additional diagnosis, bipolar disorder. ‘Being locked up in that little cell makes you kind of crazy,’ he said. ‘My memory is in bits and pieces. I was on a lot of medication at the time. Everyone knew that.’ He paused, then said, ‘The statute of limitations has run out on perjury, hasn’t it?’”

One might ask if I have an agenda, where I stand on the issue. Fair enough. I tend against the death penalty for two reasons: first, I don’t believe in perfection, and so I can’t get around the irrevocability if you find out your guy was innocent. Second, I don’t like giving the state any more right to take its citizens’ lives than absolutely necessary — a cop defending himself or a bystander, that’s fine; but nobody should have the right to kill citizens in cold blood, the government the least of all. Even when the son of a bitch deserves it.

I say “deserve,” because what I will not do is waste a tear over the pieces of crap who are guilty of murder. They probably do have it coming [3].

More to the point today, I have a bug up my ass about a few words, particularly when people apply them to themselves. A “perfectionist” is someone who makes huge mistakes because he’s so obsessed with trivial detail. A “paisano” is, as my Dad once told me, a fellow Italian-American who’s about to put his hand in your pocket. And an “expert” is someone who’s been around for long enough that he feels nobody should ever be allowed contradict him again.

We’ve got a lot of this kind of “expert” in the dog handling community. God forgive me if I ever start to call myself an expert.

There are real experts in this world, although you’d have a hell of a time getting many of them to admit to it. My mother for example: all her life she’s been humble about her own smarts; but on more than one occasion she was able to see through walls, as the saying goes.

The incident with the Le Mans and the Mazda was no exception. As I’d said, we were careful to build a story and stick to it; and to my knowledge, none of the adults ever pierced the construct.

Um. My mother, it seemed, had different plans.

In a quiet moment, when nobody else was around, she grabbed my arm, and said, “Now I want you to be honest with me. Just between us. You were screwing around, weren’t you?”

No flies on Mom.

For my part, when Mom’s instincts I ’fessed up. Takes a pretty low character to lie to his mother.

[1] That sounds awful, but in fact this is where Mazda was founded.
[2] I like Texas. I like Texans. Texas women, in particular, kick ass. But let’s face it, yinz have got a blind spot a mile wide when it comes to the death penalty.
[3] I still think Tolkien got this exactly right. If you read Gandalf’s take on the death penalty — or watch it in the movie, it was portrayed faithfully to the text — it doesn’t deny that some people deserve death, and doesn’t really say the death penalty is never warranted. What it does do is make us question why we want to see it applied — and whether it’s truly out of a sense of justice, or out of fear and malice.

Love Goggles

2009-08-15T08:35:00.000-07:00

I like to tell the story of how I proposed to th’wife, partly because, at its most shallow level, it’s exactly what people would have expected of us — I popped the question on a mountaintop, with a stunning panorama surrounding us.

Even better, at a deeper level, it’s even more apt. You see, I proposed to Heather about two or three days behind schedule. And it was nobody’s fault but her own.

Every backpacker has one trip that is the gold standard, against which every other trip is measured. For me, that’s the trough-hike Heather and I made of Isle Royale National Park.

Isle Royale is the largest island in Lake Superior, just off Thunder Bay in Canada but for historical reasons a part of Michigan. It gets sometimes ferocious weather, including winters so severe that they practically originated the terrifying Algonquin Windigo legends, and summers so wet that people have transited the island’s roughly 45-mile length without once seeing the sun (though we had an unprecedented run of 11 days without rain when we were there that June).

Having said that, its unique climate and natural history — it has species you won’t find on any other island in the lake, including a famous population of wolves — and rugged remoteness make it a great place to spend the better part of two weeks alone. Or alone with somebody special.

Which kind of gets us to the “nobody’s fault but her own” part (I can feel my comments section heating up even now, in anticipation of the rebuttal). Heather is better than special — she’s unique. Perhaps one of her best qualities, admired from afar, can be her most irritating up close, though: she has a child’s sense of wonder at the world around her. Getting her moving in the woods can sometimes be a trial; every berry [1], every piece of wolf scat, every lizard is worthy of stopping for intense examination.

Which, given N days planned to walk from one end of the island to the other, and N+1 days of food, was an issue for me.

OK, maybe it was partly my fault — I’ve learned to be a little less goal oriented in the outdoors since then, we were both in our 20s — but the upshot was I hadn’t yet learned how to pace myself for hiking with Heather. When I was in the lead she’d lag behind, and bitch about not getting as long to rest as me when I’d stop for her to catch up; when I was behind her, I’d be nearly bumping up behind her, pissing her off and making the progress even more agonizing for me. (I’m one of those folks who gets through the painful stretches of trail by putting my head down and barreling through; Heather, not so much.)

Upshot being, by the time we bagged our first summit — just a hill, really, but in Isle Royale’s harsh climate, above the treeline nevertheless — I was too pissed off at the girl to propose to her. And the second. And maybe the third.

We settled into a rhythm, finally, and the urge to give just the gentlest little push as she started down a steep bit waned and even turned into something like the warm glow I’d had before. But by then, the weight of our packs and the rockiness and steepness of the trail had worn us to a nub.

Mount Desor, Isle Royale, was the setting — the high point of the island, according to the sources I find today, though I could swear our trail guides at the time said the tops was Sugar Mountain, a forested round-top to the southeast offering little by way of a view. We’d plodded a good three quarters of the island, northeast to southwest, and emerged from the rim of slim, white-barked beech trees that marked the treeline into the open, rocky, grassy summit, to collapse on a nice, cool boulder. I finally figured it was time. But neither of us had much energy to commit to the business. Our conversation, amidst decidedly unromantic panting, went something like:

“So you wanna get married?”

“OK.”

And thus, in a most romantic location but with rather unromantic style, began a pairing that, while maybe not the stuff of legend, then at least, I hope, was the cause for more than one person to say, after we’ve left the room, “Who was that awful couple?”

Romance is quite literally in the air with our current entry: a study of how romantic, passionate love affects a woman’s ability to smell human body odors.

Now, a finding that women prefer the smell of their mate to that of others would not be much of a eureka moment: that’s fairly well established. But Johan Lundström and Marilyn Jones-Gotman of the ubiquitous (in smell research) Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia have done something cleverer than that: they’ve asked whether love is, olfactorily, blind. And it turns out that it kind of is.

The City of That Other Kind of Love (No, Not That One) team employed a tool called the Passionate Love Scale — a 30-statement psychological test that gauges just how much a girl’s current partner glows her plug by asking her to one-to-10 rate statements like “In the presence of my boyfriend, I yearn to touch and be touched.” Chick shit like that. They then measured each volunteer’s ability to identify the body odor of their Main Squeeze, a female friend, and a male friend of no stated romantic interest.

The result may not be exactly what you’d expect: romance seemed not to have much effect on the women’s (reasonably accurate) identification of either their boy toys’ or their gal pals’ scents. But accuracy of identification plunged for their “just friends” guys’ scent as the romantic involvement increased: fully 40 percent of these women’s ability to identify a Platonic male friend’s scent tracked negatively with how much they stood by their men. Which by psychology standards is, like, huge [2].

The four most besotted gals, with Luv Scores crossing the 240-out-of-300 Rubicon, were bumping up against zero percent accuracy with their guy pals. Even more interesting, two of these four, whose accuracy with male friends was truly pathetic, were among the best at identifying Mr. Right or She-Homey [3].

So there you have your Love Goggles: love doesn’t give a girl an unerring ability to sniff out the object of her affection; but it makes her a lot less observant, at somewhere between the “Smells like team spirit” and scent-receptor levels, of the smell of other men.

Love is, surprisingly, scent-blind; just not in the sense of the aphroism.

There is a bit of a sequel to my proposal story, by the way: a few minutes after the exchange above, when some iodiney water and PBJs had brought us both back into the land of the living, Heather shattered my plans for a leisurely betrothal by saying, “We need to set a date for the wedding; maybe in a year. If we don’t, nobody will take it seriously.” Seeing that the game was up, I agreed, albeit with a bit of a gulp.

Obviously, she was talking about our relatives and friends.

[1] She’ll call me on this if I don’t admit that I was eating the berries. Red-green insensitivity, folks!
[2] How can I put this without offending? We have to employ slightly different standards with our quantitatively challenged friends in the behavioral sciences. Boy, is that one likely to come back to haunt me, or what?
[3] Different two for each, but still …

Crowded House

2009-07-30T17:01:00.000-07:00

Her name was Janet, and she had impossibly long, brown hair. Cute as all get-out, and smart to boot: she was one of the pack of new graduate students that year at my biochemistry and biophysics program [1]. More importantly, she seemed possibly interested in me — so I asked her out.

That Friday night, I came by her lab — she was doing a rotation with the biophysics group, a cool subspecialty in which people used x-rays to create patterns of dots that computers helped them decode into the shapes and structures of protein molecules [2] — to pick her up. The plan was dinner, maybe a coffee afterward.

But a lab mate of hers invited himself along.

“I can drive,” he said. I can’t remember whether he was a grad student or a postdoctoral fellow, only that he was older than both of us; but since he had the car, I’m thinking postdoc.

I was pissed off. I was also seriously uncertain of the terrain: was he truly trying to horn in? Did anybody have that kind of gall? Or cluelessness? Or had she set it up, to “de-date” the situation? She certainly hadn’t said she didn’t want him along, which didn’t bode well for my prospects. Still, as a matter of philosophy, my ire centered on this guy [3] — competition, OK; but I draw the line at interference.

So we have our “three’s a crowd” date, with increasing comprehension that I wasn’t going to get anywhere here. But lacking a graceful way of bowing out early, I had to follow through, as if everything were cool, with the whole God-damned dinner. I had my pride [4].

Finally, we’re done; we took her home first. I can’t remember why — I may have left my bike there — but I asked him to drop me off back at the lab. He pulls up to the building, and as I open the door and step out, I allow one crack in my “it’s all good” demeanor of the evening [5].

I asked, “Aren’t you going to walk me to the door?”

He turned away for a moment, couldn’t look me in the eye; and for the first time that evening, I found something to like about the guy — at least he had a sense of shame.

As crowded as that date was, it was considerably less so than the vomeronasal organ is turning out to be. This “pheromone sensor” is sometimes in the roof of the mouth, sometimes in the nasal cavity of vertebrates; but it’s absent in humans and great apes.

In the beginning, the concept of the VNO, also known as the Jacobson’s organ, was simple.
We already knew — because we had one — that the olfactory organ conveyed a sense of conscious smell, a flexible and rapid sensor for whatever chemical cues the environment cared to throw at us, which we then could use to craft a flexible, highly situation-specific, and even individualized response.

The VNO, on the other hand, was supposed to be the sensor for a kind of molecular secret code — a species-specific series of chemical communications that were far more specialized, and which elicited hormonal and reflexive actions that didn’t require conscious sensation of the signal.
This picture developed from the situation in insects, in which these chemical signals, called pheromones, were first discovered and studied. One insect creates a pheromone, another member of its species receives it, and that reception causes a characteristic response — whether to court and mate, show aggression, horde up, whatever [6]. Same pheromone, same response, every time.

Mother Nature, though, finds human beings’ need to classify to be utterly and hopelessly quaint. From the beginning, scientists warned us that it might not be that simple in higher organisms. They were right.

For one thing, and I’ll repeat myself here, mammals don’t do anything for just one reason — pheromone signals seem to enter a kind of voting process that takes in a lot of input and tries to create the best possible response. For another, when the lab geeks started picking apart the receptor proteins that served as the chemical sensors of the system, they rapidly found a diversity that hinted at a much more complicated situation.

The first “pheromone receptors,” it turned out, could be split into two families; interestingly, one of them is predominant in one part of the VNO, the other family in the other part. One immediate possibility was that the two parts of the organ essentially fractionated the pheromone molecules, with one set of sensors responding to one type, maybe those that volatilized into the air efficiently, while the other responded to those that didn’t volatilize well and had to enter the organ in a water solution or other liquid form. Without more to go on, a number of other possibilities fit the bill as well.

Then came the news that the VNO also contained receptors that, for all the world, looked like the ones in the olfactory organ. Was the VNO contributing to the conscious sense of smell? Or were the olfactory receptors in the organ allowing molecules that normally acted as conscious odorants convey a reflexive, pheromone-type signal as well? Investigators also discovered a fourth family of receptors, the trace amine-associated receptors, which sense volatile amines — a toxic family of molecules that contribute to the smells of decomposition, old fish, ammonia, and urine, among others. Maybe conveying reflexive aversion to toxins?

As if four weren’t enough of a crowd, today’s paper, from Mssr. Stéphane Rivière at the University of Geneva and buds, reports the discovery of yet another receptor family in the VNO: formyl peptide receptor-like proteins.

Formyl peptide receptors play a very interesting role elsewhere in the body. They help guide white blood cells to the site of an infection, using chemicals associated with pathogens and tissue damage as the cue. The City of Peace Posse tested that idea out, and found out that the genes for these VNO receptors were able to convey the ability to respond to these cues to nerve cells and that the VNO tissues themselves are sensitive to them.

The connections between smell and immunity, once suggested by Lewis Thomas as the scientific equivalent of a “spitball” idea, are getting harder and harder to ignore. Thomas’ pure concept, that the body may have co-opted the immune system to create a sense of smell (or, more likely, the other way around) mostly isn’t true; not only are most of the molecular actors in immunity and smell different, but they generally are different types of molecules with very different mechanisms [7].

Still, the parallels are striking. As we better understand olfactory receptors, they seem less the pat, lock-and-key, one-odorant/one-receptor, enzyme-like sensors we might have expected (though the “original” VNO receptors are, for a number of reasons, exactly that kind of beast) and more like a cloud of molecular recognition hovering in wait of the next odorant, old or novel, to come along. No one receptor “belongs” to, say, the acetic acid molecule that gives vinegar much of its smell; rather, all share varying responsibility for the acid, with a small number vastly better than others. Dogs’ larger repertoire of receptors than humans’ may help give the former a more acute sense of smell not because it detect more odorants per se, but because it’s got more overlapping ability to sense the same potential swarm of odorants, and so tends to do the same job with more sensitivity. That sounds a lot less like enzymes and a lot more like antibodies, the immune system’s way of doing a similar job.

The discovery of the formyl peptide receptors in the VNO immediately suggests two different but very important possible new roles for the organ.

Rodents (the study was in mice) are good at detecting and declining tainted food; rats are legendary in their ability to evade attempts to poison them. The formyl peptide receptors in the VNO could be playing an active role in subverting the animal’s appetite when food is dangerous (along with the trace amine-associated receptors, see above). On the other hand, the chemicals that these receptors detect can be found in a number of secretions, including urine: this may be a system for identifying infected animals of your own species, so you can avoid them.

Which brings us, again, to dogs. Any owner of a pack of them has probably seen how, when one is sick or somehow “not right,” the others may, shattering our boy-scouts-in-fur-coats anthropomorphization, gang up on it and harass it. Well, it now seems very possible that setting up an antagonistic stance toward a sick pack mate is a role of the VNO [8]. Along those same lines, this could be the receptor responsible for the amazing ability of dogs to detect cancerous tissues in humans — an ability whose proponents tend to forget hasn’t been proved to be any more accurate or cost-effective than standard diagnostic methods, but which nevertheless seems real.

’Course, the “all of the above” and “none of the above” possibilities remain in play. The VNO began its conceptual life as a pure mystery; in the absence of data, some folks attributed to it an almost supernatural character. The reality, now that we have the data, is a bit more prosaic, but no less mysterious, and in some ways far more majestic in scope: we have only begun to understand the large number of important functions that this organ plays in social interactions, speciation, and survival.

The naked ape, also, stands awkwardly in the room: we and our close relatives don’t appear to have a VNO, but we do have VNO-like receptors in our olfactory organs. Are any or all of the above playing roles in our unconscious behaviors?

Stay tuned. Sometimes, a crowded house is a good thing.

[1] Long before th’ better half entered the scene. Not that I'm worried about frying pans.
[2] On a topical note, one project they were working on at the time was an ongoing study of the hemagglutinin molecule, the grappling hook that the flu virus uses to gain entry into human cells.
[3] Lest you think I was attributing the worst intent to a well-intentioned but clumsy attempt to cover for a friend who was too timid to say “no,” he did wind up dating her afterward — so the vibe I was getting, that he wasn’t being altruistic, had merit.
[4] Married for 17 years as of last month, I have no further use for pride.
[5] OK, it’s just possible that I was glowering throughout the evening. I attempted the closest I could manage to cool, anyway.
[6] A little more complicated than that, because classically there were “releasing” pheromones, which cause responses, and “primer” pheromones, which set you up for later responses — in the current Wikipedia article, that list has grown to 10 types, plus an “other” category. But the classic view was it was always the same response, and required no more consciousness than is available to a fly.
[7] One important exception: the same proteins that help identify fragments of invading pathogens may also help cherry-pick the odorants that make up our individual body odors.
[8] Again, nothing for just one reason — doubtless visual and behavioral clues play a role as well.

Now On Sale!

2009-07-24T19:00:00.000-07:00

I’m extremely pleased to report that Triangulation: Dark Glass, featuring my horror science fiction short story “Imaginal Friend,” is now on sale at lulu.com.

“Imaginal Friend” is about a group of colonists on an extinct alien world finding out that its former inhabitants don’t like trespassers — and can do something about it, a thousand years after destroying themselves.

Triangulation is the latest of a series of similarly named anthologies put out by PARSEC, Pittsburgh’s literary speculative fiction fan club. As such it’s been a bit of a sleeper in the past — no offense to previous editors, it was always good. But editor Pete Butler and crew have, in the last couple of years, kicked it up to a new league, putting it on the map nationally. I’m looking forward to reading the other stories; I’m also looking forward to the publication party tonight at Confluence, PARSEC’s annual convention.

Truth be told — I want to say this diplomatically — they did well enough that this particular rat wanted to jump onto the ship, and submitted for the first time this year. Can’t tell you how delighted I was that they took “Imaginal Friend,” which is one of my own favorites.

Look for my regular post — on the mysterious vomeronasal organ, and a newly discovered function for it — in the next couple of days. And if you’re anywhere near the Pittsburgh area, consider coming out to Confluence; I’ll see yinz there!

Oops

2009-07-19T11:30:00.000-07:00

A couple of days into the search, things were not looking so good for our subject.

For one thing, there was his physical condition. Diabetes, a kidney transplant, and what the family described as “near-blindness” all argued against him getting very far or surviving very long from where and when he’d mired his quad [1].

For another, we had the results of our efforts to date — or lack of results. We’d plastered the immediate area around that damned quad, with several dog teams and grid teams sequentially covering the same ground. I believe I took one of the last of these tasks — I think it was a hasty that walked us past the ATV, though it’s been a while and may just have been one of those “start at the quad and spiral outward” deals. On this task I was the sidekick for my first SAR partner and ever-reliable anchor, Lilly, and a Civil Air Patrol cadet who’d already demonstrated himself to be a sharp navigator and all-around handy fellow [2].

Lilly showed some interest immediately upon encountering the ATV — but that didn’t mean much to me, as so many people had already covered the area, and Lilly was not “scent-discriminating,” identifying the scent of a specific person. She searched for all human scent. I was marginally more interested when she put her nose down, trailing along the dirt road into and through a clearing up ahead, where the jeep trail ended in a T intersection.

Again, I wasn’t sure what to make of it — so many people had been through the area. Still, it wasn’t impossible that it could be our guy Lilly was following, so I tried to keep an open mind.

Something caught my walker’s eye; he paced into the intersection, knelt down — and called me over.

Lying on the ground was a Virginia Slims butt.

Now, middle-aged, male, western Pennsylvania kidney recipients don’t smoke Slims …

“The daughter,” I said aloud.

We’d been less than thrilled by the family’s insistence on going out on their ATVs on a private search the previous night — both because untrained searchers can inadvertently destroy evidence and otherwise interfere with the organized search effort and, frankly, because the noise had kept us from sleeping well. In particular I’d been peeved by the incident command staff’s inability to put their foot down and stop the freelancing — though, with a heck of a lot more experience under my belt and without a young man’s impatience, today I understand why they just couldn’t do it.

Be that as it was, I realized right away how profound a scent-contamination problem we had surrounding that quad — and how unlikely it was that we had anything left to discover in the immediate area. I told the debriefing officer as much; while I have no doubt that my report didn’t carry any greater weight than anybody else’s, it is a fact that, soon after, the plans section folks started writing up tasks farther away from the ATV — on the third of these, a grid team found this nearly crippled, diabetic, blind subject over a mile away, awaiting help next to the creek that had kept him hydrated while we were looking for him [3].

The guy walked himself out.

When I tell this story — as, in fact, with a lot of SAR war stories having to do with contaminating scent — I know that it automatically begs a question: if it’s possible to ask a dog to search for a specific person’s scent, why would you not do that every time?

There are a few reasons, actually. For one thing, uncontaminated “scent articles” — things that the subject has recently worn, carried, sat upon, touched, etc. — are harder to come up with than you may think. Generally everybody in the family has handled it before you get hold of it — remember, the daughter’s contaminating scent was an issue here. And that’s if you’re lucky, and the entire police and fire departments haven’t passed it among one another. Good scent-discriminating-dog handlers have some tricks, and some training background, that helps them deal with a small amount of contamination (at least, if they know about it); but you get to a point where you’re essentially searching for all human scent anyway.

For another reason, an airscent dog doesn’t need to scent discriminate. If you’re following a scent trail on the ground, you’re inevitably going to encounter other trails, and you need to stay on the right one. But if you’re searching an area in the hope of encountering the wind-borne scent coming off a person at that moment, you can just follow the scent to its source and, if it isn’t your guy, you’ve at least got someone you can ask: “Have you seen him?” Usually, all you’ve lost is a few minutes [4].

Ultimately, though, there’s an even better reason for us air-scent handlers to engage in discrimination cautiously, if at all: it’s flippin’ hard to do right, and if you screw it up it’s worse than useless.

Without taking away the slightest from what trailing handlers do, the tactical, navigational, and team leadership demands on an air-scent handler require a pretty serious, ongoing time commitment to acquire and maintain; the challenges of working with and communicating with a dog who’s working at liberty aren’t trivial either [5]. By no means is it impossible to do this alongside training for scent discrimination. But it ain’t easy, and again, if you don’t do it at a very high level of accuracy indeed, you’re by definition sucking at it.

Enter item number one, shared by th’ wife: a lawsuit against the only dog handler in Texas who uses scent lineups to identify crime suspects. Seems that at least two of the folks his bloodies fingered — so to speak — turned out to be innocent, and now they’re out for, um, blood.

Now, I don’t know this guy or his training methods. His dogs may be 99 percent accurate — but that still leaves one suspect out of a hundred who’s screwed, if the courts accept the dog’s nose as evidence.

More to the point, I doubt that anybody has put a numerator to his denominator and found out, for training or in the field, what his accuracy actually is [6]. And that’s a big part of the problem. Get this, from a lawyer with the Innocence Project of Texas:

“This is junk science. This isn’t even science. This is just junk.”

Now, in my book the Innocence Project folks are among the Good Guys. It hurts to hear one of them say this; it hurts even worse that, by the current standards of practice, he’s probably right.

The problem is that it’s so hard to work with a dog without cueing her as to what you want her to do. For us airscent dog handlers, it’s relatively simple: just don’t tell me where the training subject is hidden; either I find him or I don’t, and in theory at least it should be simple to demonstrate whether having the dog with me increases my search effectiveness or not [7].

For scent discrimination the task is harder. You can do a certain amount of screwing up without messing up a non-discriminating air-scent dog’s training; but every time you reward a discriminating dog, you train her; every time she self-rewards without being corrected for a faulty identification, you train her. Most discriminating handlers, therefore, spend most of their training time unblinded; they know what the answer is, so they can jump in and reward the right and correct the wrong.

The problem is, sometimes, without realizing, we jump in before the dog has actually committed to a choice, even by a fraction of a second: and thus we train the dog to tell us what we want or expect rather than the real answer. Good discriminating handlers proof themselves periodically with a blinded problem; but I worry that a lot of practicing handlers haven’t done that, or if they have, haven’t kept track of how often they mess up.

What we want and expect matters to our dogs. It seems undeniable to this working handler that our dogs read us far more effectively than we will ever be able to read them. The slave knows the master better than the master knows himself, as Heather is fond of abstracting the otherwise inabstractable Hegel.

The end result is that, even among the best scent-discrimination handlers, I don’t know how well established the standards of practice are for high-stakes lineup identification — not that you’re not doing well, just that you don’t have a handle on the actual number, and so can’t be sure.

Perversely, as we see from a review in Science, when the stakes are highest is exactly when we’ll do what we don’t want to. A phenomenon called the “ironic monitoring process” stems from the fact that intending not to do something requires us, at some level, to focus on it — which in turn makes us more likely to do it.

People do have the ability not to “mention the war:”

Our brains can, in fact, achieve the tricky balance of concentrating just enough on something to avoid it without concentrating enough to dive straight into it. But it’s difficult, and if we’re tasked with other stuff — whether actual distractions or the distraction of stress — we’re more likely to blurt out something about Hitler.

Particularly interesting in this context is a task in which one person who can see four shapes — say, a small triangle, a circle, a heart, and a large triangle — is asked to point out the small triangle to someone who can’t see the large one. It’s not at all uncommon for the first person to refer to the target shape in a way that tips off what the hidden one is: for example, by saying “look at the small triangle.” And they’re more likely to do that if you tell them to keep the large triangle a secret than if you don’t.

There is, for us dog handlers, another way: in the early days, defense attorneys were more than leery about DNA forensics. They anticipated, quite correctly, that if we didn’t hold the field to high standards, it would result in bullshit convictions. But the guys in the DNA forensics field did their homework, refined their numbers, and today I think that in general defense lawyers love DNA testing: in the cases for which it’s relevant and doable, and when the meaning of its results are accurately reported to the jury, it is the quickest, easiest way to get innocent defendants back to their lives.

We can do this in the dog community. We can do our homework, put numbers to our abilities, and find out exactly what we can and can’t do reliably; and at that point, a jury can take our evidence for exactly what it is.

A few years back I did an article for Advanced Rescue Technology about SAR dogs and olfaction. I had the opportunity to interview Larry Myers, one of the few scent researchers who’s consistently interacted with working dog handlers, for that piece, and along the way we got into a discussion about the reliability of dog scent evidence in legal proceedings. The editor decided to let me do this as a sidebar to the scent article; my only regret is that I didn’t think of proposing it as a more in-depth, stand-alone article, but you can read it here.

The short version is that, for the level of certainty of probable cause — the gauge of reasonable suspicion a cop, once he’s stopped you for a traffic violation, needs to have in order to search your car for contraband — Larry thinks that dog evidence is OK; but for beyond reasonable doubt — what you need to convict someone of a crime — not so much. For what it’s worth, I tend to agree with him.

Nor should we feel like second-class citizens in being asked to do this. Reasonable doubts have begun to pop up with a number of common identification procedures, ranging from polygraphy to eyewitness identification [8] to, of all things, fingerprints. The common factor of these methods: they came into use before the courts started looking at the scientific bases behind methods, and so got enshrined based on “common sense” or, maybe even worse, the opinions of “experts,” itself a slippery term that I tend to try to avoid. Quantitative evidence is the wave of the future: we hold it at bay at the risk of bringing about our own irrelevance.

[1] Yes, it occurred to me too. But it’s not the strangest thing I’ve encountered regarding a search or a search subject.
[2] Briefly: on an earlier task the previous day — a hasty along the top of a ridge to the east of the ATV — a ranger, because of a miscommunication with the operations folks, left us off at a completely different location than our intended jump-off point. In those pre-GPS days, it amounted to leaving us in the middle of the woods without the slightest idea of where we were. Efforts to align our surroundings to the terrain proofed fruitless until my walker noticed that we were standing next to the confluence of two creeks — and our map only showed one such intersection. Once we knew our spot, it was simply a matter of shooting a bearing to where we’d intended to start, and then following through with the task. We never had to ask for help, and completed our assignment — took us a few extra hours, but we did it.
[3] If you don’t have anything to eat, you don’t need your insulin.
[4] At least once, I did have reason to believe we’d missed a subject on a real search because my dog had been distracted by finding someone else in my area. But that’s more an argument for not letting people — either civilians or other searchers — get into each other’s assigned areas than for scent-discrimination per se.
[5] For the record: as I train to become a trailing handler, I find the level of handler-dog communication necessary to work trailing to be daunting. But it’s a distinct and different type of communication from that of an airscent team.
[6] As some of you may know, we’re in the process of doing something much like this with our own dogs’ performance. The preliminary results are encouraging in terms of showing something objective; but it’s a long-term project, and I don’t know how long before we get results that I’d subject to peer review. Stay tuned.
[7] Again, stay tuned.
[8] Wikipedia also has an article that encompasses the “anti” argument fairly well, though it has been tagged for non-neutrality.

Pathbreaking

2009-07-09T19:36:00.000-07:00

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.

Middle-Aged Men and FireOr, Runaway Hose

2009-06-27T08:53:00.000-07:00

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.

What We Know for Sure

2009-06-20T07:48:00.000-07:00

“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.

Houlie’s Choice

2009-05-30T11:23:00.000-07:00

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.

Happy Memorial Day

2009-05-25T06:42:00.000-07:00

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.

Who Goes There?

2009-05-17T16:36:00.000-07:00

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.

Smoke and Mirrors II

2009-05-09T07:35:00.000-07:00

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.

There She Be

2009-04-30T17:15:00.000-07:00

With all the press lately about piracy, I hope nobody thinks it’s too insensitive of me to relate the story of my short career as a buccaneer.

The place was Floodwood Mountain Scout Reservation in New York state; or, to be more specific, that summer camp’s West Pine Pond. Three of us patrol leaders, our members off doing whatever they did when we weren’t tormenting them, got bored of an afternoon and decided to take a sailboat onto the lake. We checked out a Sunfish, piled on, and tacked out onto the water.

Well, three young teenagers are too many for a little Sunny. We were having trouble merely hanging on and staying afloat, let alone maneuvering a craft with which we were only a couple of lessons away from pure novicehood. Perhaps it was inevitabile, given nobody else on the pond was much better at it; perhaps a little miscreance on the part of the other kids played a role — but the next thing we knew we were being rammed, broadside.

The bow of the other Sunny skipped atop our deck, slamming into Skip Remington — I swear to God, that was his name. Skip was skinny as a rail, looked like he would blow away in a stiff wind; but he was also a berserker. Hurt and angry, giving an animalistic bellow, he grabbed their bow with both hands and, impossibly given the wind resistance of a sail and the water resistance of a keel, flipped them over. We sailed away, hooting at them as they scrambled to de-capsize.

We took the moment to take stock, and realized that the encounter was not only not traumatic — it had actually been kind of fun.

“Let’s sink another one,” I said.

So we picked out another sailboat — this one, shame on us, crewed by a single, small boy — and bore down on it. I don’t know how I wound up the unofficial skipper, but at this point I said, “Pull up on his windward side — that way, we’ll becalm him.”

For yes, little geek that I was, I’d read up on windjammer battle tactics, and new the secret of the weather gauge — the fact that, when one sailing vessel puts another downwind of it, the upwind craft literally steals the wind from the other’s sails. The hapless downwind vessel is rendered therefore unable to maneuver, and vulnerable to the upwind craft’s cannon.

Well, we didn’t have any cannon, and I’m not sure what my plan was supposed to be at that point — because events overtook the pace even of my fevered little brain. Inexperts that we were, we’d jibed — turned our stern to the wind, which in a fore-and-aft rigged boat like our little Sunny, meant that our sail suddenly caught the breeze and swung around violently. We had the luck of the unrighteous, though, since given the 50-50 chance of either pitching us off our deck or slamming into the other boat’s mast, it did the latter.

The force of the hit neatly flipped him over. A second Ship Taken, Sunk, or Burned: we were pretty obviously the undisputed scourge of West Pine Pond.

Sailing away, we felt much of ourselves — so much that our next choice of encounter was with a rowboat, which resulted in a lot of splashing and invective but nothing by the way of a conclusive result. At that point a camp counselor on a motorboat — the U.S. Navy of Floodwood Mountain, in effect — came out to arrest us and banish us from the waters for the rest of the day.

I bring this story up because our entry this week has to do with the crucial question asked by all pirates — as well as all dog handlers: Where be she?

I’ve burned the Webwaves on at least one dog-handler list regarding my conceptual difficulty understanding how in the world a dog can tell the direction of a trail of scent on the ground. I know they can do it; I just know enough about the difficulty of the task to wonder how.

An airscent dog, picking up the smell of a search subject on the wind, encounters not a uniform cloud of scent but a discontinuous, complex cloud of intense filaments of scent, with little or nothing to smell in between. The task of figuring out the direction it’s coming from would be a killer, if it weren’t for the obvious clue: the wind direction. Now, wind directions change, and so the filamentous cloud isn’t always a straight shot upwind. But that’s a refinement of a strategy that basically depends on there being at least a little air movement.

Trailing dogs have no such easy directional clue. Because the scent in the air is discontinuous, I think it’s probably safe to say that a ground trail is essentially a “footprint” of discontinuous filaments on the earth and vegetation. But regardless, you’ve got a trail, possibly hours or even days old, in which a dog, to tell which direction she has to move, presumably has to detect an increase of intensity between pieces of scent that fell from the subject’s body seconds apart.

Now, there’s always the possibility that a dog’s nose is sensitive enough to discern the one-gazillionth difference in intensity between the two bits of smell. But I’m leery of any argument that ends with, “because dogs’ noses are so awesomely sensitive.” I want to know how, and when it seems impossible to get from point A to point B — even when I can see it happen — I get the feeling that we’re missing something important.

Well, Akihiko Nishikimi and the Crazy 88 of Kyushu University and elsewhere have helped make my life even more complicated; they figured out the internal mechanism by which neutrophils — white blood cells that ooze their way toward infections by following a trail of chemical signals called chemoattractants — create a pseudopod that allows them to crawl in the direction of the infection. What caught my eye, though, was a comment in an accompanying commentary that mentions that the needed chemical structure “accumulates at the site of the plasma membrane that senses the highest concentration of the extracellular stimulant.”

Now hold on a second: a neutrophil is only 12 to 15 micrometers across — about 1,700 of them lined up side by side would make an inch [1]. Assuming a concentration swing like that of the chemoattractant interleukin-6, which can vary by 1,000-fold in the bloodstream, that means that in order to find its way from, say, the entrance of my femoral vein to an infection in my toe — about a meter distance — that white blood cell would have to detect an average concentration difference, if my math is right, of 2 percent or less from one end of the cell to the other. Offhand it may not be hard to imagine a cell telling the difference between 102 and 100 from one end to the other — but remember, while it’s doing that it’s also sensing a level between 102 and 100 on all sides. And it doesn’t produce 102 pseudopods on the “hot” side for every 100 on the “cold” side. It just makes a pseudopod in the direction it wants to move: somehow, it's translating 102 vs. 100 into 1 vs. 0.

If you assume the gradient is uneven — say, the cell gets hit with a sudden increase when the blood flow brings a wave of attractant to it — it could make the difference across the cell much larger. But that would only explain how it starts moving, not how it keeps moving once that big increase is over and it has even less of a difference to detect. [2]

Except — and I’m guessing here — maybe the neutrophil isn’t a trailer, but an airscenter. Maybe the direction of the blood flow is the cue it needs to make sense of the complex series of attractant pulses that come its way, as the chemoattractant mixes turbulently in the blood and forms filaments of scent. Alternatively, the cells just ride the bloodstream, excited by the surge of attractant, until they’re right on top of the infection, and then the local concentration gets really high — but the impression I got was that the concentrations in the blood were enough to get them moving, which argues against that.

Well, either I’ve gotten something figured wrong or there’s more to the story. I’m going to see if I can learn more. If I figure it out — or find out if anybody else figured it out — I’ll give you all a hail.

[1] Which is actually pretty big, considering we’re talking about single cells here.
[2] Of course this is another unrealistic end of the spectrum. Probably the concentration falls off rather sharply from the source, then begins to level out to a low level farther out. This gives us the opposite problem: easy to find source from close in, even harder from far away.

Press the Buzzer ... 183 Times???

2009-04-20T18:30:00.001-07:00

Ya gotta check this one out.

I've got just one question: if it takes 183 times, how in the hell is it the magical cure for the ticking time bomb?

Smoke and Mirrors

2009-04-19T11:09:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, coming back from a SAR training [1], we pulled to the side of the road as a fire truck, lit up like Times Square [2], passed by in the opposite diretion. It was my peeps, the tanker truck from my very own substation.

I waved encouragingly with my crutch, which is about all I can do to help at this moment.

A few months back, though, I was considerably more active. Maybe the most interesting training I did was my first, rookie go with the SCBA, a scenario in which my little team was to find a fake fire in a house filled with smoke from a smoke generator. Since it was a training, I had the rare privilege of being the nozzle man: the guy holding the business end of the hose and therefore the tip of the spear. Dan, a more experienced firefighter, played team leader, right behind me, two more teammates carrying various tools of destruction behind him.

The number one rule in entering a house on fire is that you never lose contact with the wall or your teammates. In a smoke-filled room, you simply can’t keep your bearings effectively and need that contact to know where you are, what your primary route of retreat would be, and whether anybody has gotten separated. If you have to leave the wall — say, to search for a patient trapped by the fire — you have a teammate who is in touch with the wall hold onto your ankle.

Everything, I should add, happens on your hands and knees (because the smoke and toxic gas tends to rise), tapping the floor in front of you for structural integrity.

Anyhow, and perhaps predictably, the very first thing I did was forget rule number one. Pumped up on adrenaline — even though it was only a training — I shot straight into the room, and immediately lost track of where anything was. Dan later told me, “I keep forgetting how green you guys are, or I would have reminded you.”

So here I am, facing the double uh-oh of realizing that I’ve butt-lost myself, and lost my teammates in the bargain [3]. Three dead guys led by one dead idiot. Fresh fish, as they say …

Clausewitz wrote about the “fog of war:” the fact that, in the presence of an enemy whose numbers and disposition aren’t immediately clear, the unknowns multiply in your head, creating confusion so profound that trained officers in immediate danger for their lives can nevertheless freeze up and wait to be slaughtered. The ability to think under that kind of pressure can be trained to a certain point — people can learn to act reflexively when they’re scared to death, or for that matter excited or angry or whatever beyond the ability to think clearly. But to lead under those conditions is another thing entirely.

My metaphorical fog caused by the literal smoke at that training came to mind when I came across today’s entry — one of those wonky pieces that I just love. Jennifer C. Brookes and posse from University and Imperial Colleges, London, asked a simple question to try to dispel the fog of another question: why do odorants that are enantiomers — molecules that consist of the same components but which are non-identical mirror images of each other — sometimes smell the same and sometimes smell different?

First, a bit of background. Below are two versions of an enantiomeric molecule, showing how, though they are mirror images of each other, no amount of turning them around will get them to match up with each other. Generally, in biological systems, enantiomers have very different activity because a receptor that evolved to recognize one version can’t recognize another.

Public-domain image from Wikimedia Project, creator Yakobbokay.

Now imagine that your left hand is a receptor meant to interact with the version on the left. The black triangle attaching the hydrogen atom (H) to the carbon (C) at the center means that the H is sticking out of your screen; the dashed triangle attaching the methyl group (H3C) means the latter is sticking backward, away from you. So when your hand reaches out for this molecule from the left, your index finger touches the H, your pinkie the H3C, and your thumb the ethyl group (H3CH2C).

Now, it doesn’t take a lot of groping your screen to realize that you can’t get your left hand to touch the chemical groups of the right hand version of this molecule in this way — not without twisting your fingers around painfully. Well, mostly this is how receptors and their ligands work; though it’s a bit of a simplification, you can think of proteins and the molecules they interact with as Tinkertoy models, with atoms (the wooden disks with holes in them) attached to each other by chemical bonds (the dowels). The disks can twist around the dowels, but with enough attachments you’re fairly limited as to how everything can move.

The problem is, both versions of some enantiomeric odorants smell the same — which implies that, somehow, the olfactory receptors are achieving this kind of contortion. Which a single protein receptor isn’t supposed to be able to do [4]. This problem with the receptor model for smell is one reason the vibration theory, a 1934 alternative to the more widely accepted lock-and-key model, refuses to die [5].

Problem is, some enantiomeric-odorant pairs, such as (1R,4S)-(+)- and (1S,4R)-(–)-fenchone, have the same smell (camphor, in fenchone’s case); but others, such as (4R)-(–)- and (4S)-(+)-carvone, smell quite different (former, spearmint; latter, caraway). Brookes and buds decided to take a survey of the structures of a large number of odor-characterized enantiomers and, with computer modeling, asked whether the flexibility of those molecules could predict anything about how similar each pair smells.

Most of the enantiomeric pairs, they quickly realized, actually are somewhere in between the two extremes: either they smell similar but distinct, or they smell the same but one is much more intense than the other. The phenomena of two enantiomers smelling pretty much exactly the same — or clearly different — were actually fairly rare.

But maybe their most interesting finding was, maybe, the opposite of what you might expect: the more flexible enantiomers were actually more likely to smell different. Twisting and turning makes two enantiomeric forms of an odorant less, not more, interchangeable.

That took me a moment to digest, but it actually makes sense. As I said above, to get an enantiomer to fit with a single receptor’s structure actually takes so much contortion that the molecules can’t do it. Ain’t enough flexibility in all of Christendom to make that work.

More to the point, the researchers propose an “other” way of looking at the odorant-receptor interaction that blends ideas from both the lock-and-key and vibration hypotheses. I’ll see that idea and raise it a gross simplification that may make some protein biochemists [6] wince:

Olfactory receptors, it turns out, are nearsighted.

Think of an odorant molecule not as an in-focus tinker toy, but a blurred (or fogged) version thereof. If you have an enantiomeric odorant, then, it looks to the receptor something like this:

Where the red and blue blobs are recognizable chemical groups, and the center of the mirror image is the asterisk.

Now, if you consider that odorant’s enantiomer:

You can see how, in a loosey-goosey way, the two look pretty much the same provided they’re rigid; red on one side, blue on the other. But if they start moving, version A looks like this:

While version B looks like:

Now, one is red on one side, blue on the other, and the other is red and blue touching each other. It’s the different motions those two structures can accomplish, rather than their static structures, that the receptor is looking at.

This could, of course, be a vibrational thing. But I prefer the authors’ (not completely contradictory) suggestion that the receptor isn’t interacting with every form of an odorant, but rather with a rare contortion. It would explain why olfactory receptors are such sucky receptors — with binding affinities a thousand times weaker than “real” receptors, such as my old nemesis the insulin receptor protein. The damned things are only seeing the small fraction of the odorant population that’s twisted in exactly the right way, and so you need more of the odorant around just to have enough in the right deformation to fit the lock.

Still, I have to admit that ideas from the lock-and-key and the vibrational hypotheses may be coming together to answer the question more satisfactorily than either could do by itself.

The fog may be parting.

My own, personal, fog of battle parted when I decided to strike out, as straight as I could, in the hope of finding the far wall. I hit, by chance, an entryway to the next room. In it stood one of our instructors, who told me to assume I’d hit a solid wall and keep working my way around.

This time I had the sense to hug the wall, working around clockwise until I came upon a lit flashlight. The light, indeed, went off: I’d found our “fire.”

“I assume you don’t want me to blast the flashlight,” I said to the instructor, who’d followed me. The hose I carried was under full pressure: you can’t simulate what it’s like to carry a hose around on your hands and knees if it isn’t charged, it’s far heavier and more rigid than when it’s dead [7].

“No,” he answered, “don’t.” Instead, he had me blast the hose out a nearby window, thus demonstrating to us how you can use a water stream through a window to blow the smoke out of a room [8]. Slowly, the smoke cleared, and the room came into sharper view: I could see the walls, and the doorway behind us.

The fog of battle, the envelope of ignorance, had dispelled. Which is what it’s all about, after all.

[1] Heather taught, I did precious little other than keep a teammate’s pickup truck’s tailgate warm.
[2] Which is still lit up, but full of Disney shit these days — like going to a God-damned suburban mall. I’m not sure they weren’t better off with the hookers and peep shows.
[3] Of course, we could always follow our hose back out — but I’d screwed the pooch on searching the room effectively for our fire.
[4] One possiblity is that there are two receptors, one for each version; but for a number of reasons the authors discuss, this isn’t a very attractive explanation.

[5] Full disclosure, I’ve been fairly dismissive of the vibration theory — one reason being it’s one of those early guesses that were made before we really understood how proteins work. To be fair, it’s gotten some serious scientific argument made in its favor much more recently. But read on, it turns out it may have some currency after all.
[6] I am a true apostate of that school.
[7] All right, stop the snickering.
[8] An application, I believe, of the Bernoulli principle.

Some Assembly Required

2009-04-10T19:27:00.000-07:00

I don’t know if it’s ironic or merely pathetic, but despite almost 20 years as a medical science journalist, as a patient I am as clueless as any.

Monday morning, we roll up to the same-day surgery center and undergo the million bureaucratic steps that I know help the staff keep track of who’s who and ensure safety — but are no less irritating for the knowledge. Finally, in my pre/postop suite, the IV line started in my hand and the anesthesiologist en route to deliver the sleepy time, my doc’s resident — a young, tall woman who could have been a fashion model [1], came to discuss the operation they were going to do on my right foot.

“Right foot?” I asked. “I thought we were going to do both.”

She looked dubious. “I don’t think Dr. ——— ever does both at the same time. But you can discuss it with her when she gets here.”

We did discuss it, and although my doc gave a number of good reasons for doing them one at a time, the most obvious to me now, two days later, is that I wouldn’t be able to move myself around at all if we’d done them both. Nevertheless, it was an unwelcome miscommunication to discover at that point, particularly since it meant the six to eight weeks I’ll be spending at limited activity will only be half the time I lose to the damned thing.

I was more than a little crestfallen; since we operated on the worst foot first, I’m seriously considering seeing how I get around with only one repaired, and maybe putting off getting the second one done indefinitely. We’ll see.

Anyhow, the moment we discovered the misunderstanding — or so it seemed — my doc started talking to Heather instead of me. That may well have been because they’d given me the sedative and I wasn’t going to be with them for much longer, but I confess that it felt like she’d decided which of the two was smarter.

Thanks to the magic of anesthesia, that’s all I remember, until waking up to see Heather there, my foot swathed in a nearly spherical bandage, ouchie ouchie. Better Half drove me home, where I’ve been slowly regaining something approaching normality, given the fact that I’m going to be off work this week and on crutches for at least a week longer.

Yes, pay no attention to the blog of last Sunday behind the curtain, my three days of crutches have lengthened to two weeks — another miscommunication, discovered yesterday when the doc’s office called to follow up and see how I was doing.

Now, I have a postop release form in my living room right now that says, “partial weight bearing, heel only.” But the first time I tried that, my foot told me, “Oh, no you will not,” and I figured I’d take it seriously. So when the assistant told me, “No, you don’t want to put weight on it, just keep it elevated and talk with Dr. ——— on Friday,” I was relieved to find out I hadn’t been babying it, just being appropriately prudent. Today I had my post-op appointment, and the picture was a little rosier than that: Monday I'll get the stitches out, and at that point I'll be off the crutches as well.

Still, I could take an attitude. I could dwell on 18 years of physicians insisting to me that the gobbledygook they’d put on paper was perfectly comprehensible to their lay-level patients, and I didn’t dare edit it. Let alone tell the story from earlier life when, as a biochemistry grad student, I was looking up drug names for my grandmother so she’d understand what the hell her doc had prescribed for her.

The fact of the matter is, I don’t really have that out. I speak gobbledygook pretty fluently. So I think, rather, that it’s more likely an issue of “presumed comprehension,” in which doc tells patient 90 percent of the message, and they both fill in the remaining 10 percent — only differently. Yeah, part of the doc’s job, just like mine, is to make sure the patient/reader understands. But I’m in no position to cast asparagus on that point. At least everything is going well in the recovery, so I’m not inclined to complain.

One thing I have learned in 18 years is that you can’t word anything so that everybody understands it; attempts to reach universal comprehension wind up with worse gobbledygook than if you just try to make it clear and direct in the first place.

Getting a clear message across is the gist of another entry from Donald E. Frederick & Co. from Leslie Kay’s group at Wire Mommy [2], in Behavioral Neuroscience this month. This is another installment in the ongoing quest to decipher the code by which odor-carrying molecules are translated into perceptions of smell in the brain.

DACSIH? has touched on this issue before; but this time I think it’s appropriate to take a step back and discuss more fully the standard hypothesis that the new work is overturning.

One good summary of the hypothesis can be found in a review paper about insect odor processing by Hong Lei and Neil Vickers, in volume 34 of Journal of Chemical Ecology (that issue, by the way, being a trove of information about how critters perceive and then home in on the scents that are important to them).

We first need to remember that, unlike enzymes and the chemicals they have evolved to recognize, odors and their receptors are not specifically matched to each other. The body creates a spectrum of different receptor types in the nose (or antenna, if you’re an insect or crustacean) and then tries to make sense of how the odors it happens to encounter stimulate those receptors.

Even a simple, molecular odorant, then, will likely interact with more than one receptor — it’s the range and intensity of interactions that mark each odorant. So, complex smells, made up of dozens or hundreds of odorants, wind up being a smear of overlapped spectra of their different components. In the simplest formulation, say odorant A tweaks the spectrum of receptors like this:

With the darker boxes representing receptors with which odorant A is interacting most strongly. Now, say you have another odorant, B, that shows this pattern of activation:

Well, if you combine A and B into one complex smell, you get:

Which, it isn’t hard to see, is a combination of odorants A and B. This is what smell researchers call elemental processing — because the elements of the complex smell are still there and identifiable when you look at the higher-level perception. For a real-life example, think of smelling apple pie, but being able to smell the apples and cinnamon as separate components of the smell.

It gets more complicated when you have two odorants, A and A′, that smell similar to each other. If A′ looks like:

Then the combination of A and A′ will look something like:

If the code were this simple, you’d already have a mishmash that wouldn’t allow you to tell whether A and A′ were both there, or you just had a lot of either A or A′ alone. But it gets even more complicated, because similar odorants actually interfere with each other. The resulting perception actually looks more like:

So that, not only can’t you recognize that the A and A′ patterns are there, you actually start getting something that doesn’t look much like either one. This is called configural processing, in which the combination of two similar smells actually smells different than either does separately, and there’s no way of picking out components. This one is harder to give an example for, but one (possibly stretched) example would be how, on different people’s skin, the same cologne starts to smell very differently.

So that’s been the given wisdom: similar smells undergo configural processing to create utterly new sensations; different smells undergo elemental processing and retain their character. It was simple, clear, and explained a lot of what people were seeing in lab experiments with organisms as different as insects, fish, and mammals.

In retrospect, it almost had to be wrong.

Enter Mssr. Frederick & associates of the fine metropolis and University of Chicago, who’ve put yet another nail into the coffin of the simple configural/elemental duality. They did this by showing how a series of odorant pairs, selected so that both their subjective sensations and the pattern of glomeruli they activate in the rat olfactory bulb differ incrementally, don’t follow the pattern at all.

Briefly, they chose a bunch of odorants ranging from the indistinguishable — (+)- vs. (–)-limonene (orange smell) — to the very different hexanal (green, leafy smell) vs. ethylbenzene (gasoline smell) — and checked to see whether a rat trained to recognize the combined odorants could then recognize the components. Things just about immediately went wrong with the configural/elemental hypothesis, with rats recognizing the (+,–)-limonene mixture elementally — in other words, the mixture and the components looked the same, once you corrected for differences in intensity.

Still, that one was slippery — if the two versions of limonene were truly indistinguishable, they might not actually represent different odors. [3] You wouldn’t expect an odorant to interfere with itself. [4] The hexanal/ethyl benzene combination was more interesting along these lines, since you’d expect the two very different smells to maintain their character in the mixture. Once again, the simple expectation was wrong: rats trained on the mixture recognized hexanal, but not ethyl benzene. Similar to the group’s earlier paper, they were seeing overshadowing processing, in which one component effectively masked the other. They got the same result with the similarly mismatched odorant pair of isoamyl butyrate (fruity/banana) and butyric acid (depending on context, either sharp cheese or sour/nasty). If you plot the similarity of their odorant pairs to the results they saw, you get no significant pattern.

So where does that leave us? Well, as the researchers point out, nowhere is it written in stone that dissimilar odors can’t interfere with each other, at some point in the chain of events from receptor to higher-brain perception. In addition, the configural/elemental hypothesis had come from a limited data set of not-completely defined odorants. In particular, the fact that the current study is based on the extent to which the odorants they’re working with affect differently the smell-routing center of the brain is new. It looks like we’re at the beginning of a (possibly long) process to figure out how it all really works.

As with my damned foot, some assembly is going to be required. One week off work, and then the long, semi-mobile Mickey-Mouse-boot recovery period. The aim is, again, to make Fire School in early June. Wish me luck.

[1] I note this only because, thinking about it, it seems logical that a female surgeon might attract female residents, surgery still being a bit of a Boy’s Club.
[2] They’re going to start thinking I’m some kind of groupie, but the fact is this paper caught my eye before I saw the authors.
[3] I’m skipping over a world of possible significance here: on a purely theoretical basis, two mirror-image isomers like (+)- and (–)-limonene should not smell the same. Look to a soon-to-come blog about isomers and the vibration theory of smell for the missing detail. For the present, let’s just accept that they’re virtually indistinguishable smells.
[4] Nothing if not thorough, they actually tested whether (+)-limonene could interfere with its own odor — and excepting a little statistical noise, it didn’t.

We Who Are About to Be Butterflied ...

2009-04-05T15:53:00.000-07:00

Well, tune in next week — or maybe later this week — for your usual DACSIH? entry. At the moment I’m rushing around to get a few things done before an early bed-time: and a 5:45 appointment tomorrow to have bunion surgery.

Not a growth on the foot, as I thought myself, but a malformation of the bones behind the big toes, bunions make it impossible for the first phalanges (toebones of the big toes) to slide atop the metatarsals when the heel comes up. What that means in practical terms is that your big toes have a click that hurts like the bejezzus when you try to walk (not fun for XC skiing, either). For anybody, that would be a problem that might make one consider surgery; for a dog handler who needs to be able to walk and walk, and who’s already done the medical treatment bit for his lower back and left knee ...

Well, I always said I wouldn’t go for surgery if I had a choice. My only other choice is to lose my ability to field with a dog in a few years.

Anyhow, partly because of new techniques and partly because my own case isn’t yet extreme, my doc is at the moment only anticipating three days on crutches (though she says some patients stay on the crutches a few days longer because it’s more comfortable). After that, six to eight weeks in Mickey Mouse boots, but more-or-less mobile. Obviously I’ll be a base camp weenie at any searches that come up before mid- to late-May. Target, which doc thinks is reasonable, is going to Fire School early June, and a normal summer. Wish me luck.

In the meantime, I’ve run out of time to write my usual blog tonight, though if next week goes well enough, I may have some time to do a post — though I’m only supposed to be on crutches for three days, it’s Vicodin for the first week, so I’m not doing any driving and am taking the week off. Hopefully I won’t be too much of a crybaby, or too zonked out, to post on an interesting finding on the code that helps the nose identify the components of a complex smell — or not.

Giving Back

2009-03-29T12:39:00.000-07:00

From Science, March 6, 2009, cover image. Reprinted with permission from AAAS.

Our voyageuring trip in the Algonquin Provincial Park, Ontario, was one of the last true adventure vacations Heather and I have managed to swing [1]: the better part of two weeks on our own [2], without resupply, paddling and portaging our way across a vast system of lakes that differed from each other in stunning ways. One portage away from a brown-water lake thick with reeds, waterfowl, and the occasional, terrifyingly close bull moose, we would encounter one that seemed identical from the water level up: but deep, with a bottom strewn with rectangular rocks that you could almost touch. Then you’d look back at the guidebook, and find out those rocks were boulders, a hundred feet below you, made visible and hauntingly close by absolutely glass-clear water.

It was a damned fine trip, but for one or two very early pieces of misfortune.

We had decided — wisely, it turned out — to take a water taxi to the longest portage available from our entry lake. It accomplished several things, among them being it got us away from a motorboat-legal area in minimal time. It also put a mile-and-a-half carry of a 17-foot canoe and two really heavy dry bags behind us immediately, which seemed the best way to buy solitude as quickly as possible.

As I said, it was a wise decision, though it didn’t exactly go as planned. First, the moment I stepped off the water taxi, a hornet tagged me on a Tevaed f00t (not, at that moment, treading the jeweled thrones of the Earth). It wasn’t just the pain that had me cursing — a few seconds later I’d have had my heavy backpacking boots on, and the little bastard couldn’t have gotten me in such a critical body part. Heather pulled out the Sawyer Extractor [3], got my paw bandaged up, and I pulled on the boots and just cowboyed up.

Well, next thing was that, trying to lift the 17-footer on my own, I immediately broke the piece-of-junk yoke. That, though, turned out to be good luck in disguise: we realized that the unusual top-of-the-frame cargo extensions on our JanSport pack frames actually were a perfect shelf on which to balance a canoe. Not only could we ferry the dry bags easily, by attaching them to the frames as we’d planned, but the canoe carry itself proved easy. We had to do the portage in two goes, but then we’d been expecting to do that anyway.

I don’t remember which part of the three-legged trip it was, but I do vividly remember the sight of the woman standing at the bottom of a downhill stretch of trail, waiting with a certain tenseness as Lilly led us over the crest. Lilly had topped the hill first, seen the woman, and then come back to tell us about it.

When she saw us, the woman relaxed visibly. She later admitted, “I thought she was a wolf.”

Now, if you’re going to encounter a 73-pound she-wolf on a trail, Algonquin is a pretty logical place for it to happen. They most certainly do have wolves, whom we heard just about nightly — or at least, when the loons would shut the frack up. And I admit that there’s something unmistakably wolf-like about an uncharacteristically [4] quiet, self-possessed, mostly black German shepherd with a dark face.

Heather pretty much summed it up, though, in her unique, kill-a-man-at-20-paces-with-her-sarcasm way, when she said, “Very few of the wolves around here wear red backpacks.”

Both the woman’s error and the mythical black wolf that lurks in our collective unconscious may be doubly ironic: black color is rare among wolves, and according to a report in the March 6 Science by Tovi Anderson and a cast of characters from Stanford and a bunch of other places, it may not be “natural” to wolves (or at least, those in North America) at all.

The researchers analyzed the DNA sequence of the K locus, which causes black color in wolves, in individuals on both sides of the tundra/boreal forest divide in northwest Canada, and compared those data with dog sequences. They found out that, when you look at polymorphisms in the DNA — essentially, mutations that build up over time — for either dogs alone or dogs and wolves together, enough changes have racked up in the gene to account for the black-color mutation being nearly 50,000 years old. [5] Which is provocative, because that starts to bump up against a couple of very interesting dates: The Great Leap Forward, when among many other things human art jumped from crude representation to works like the achingly beautiful high art of Lascaux; and the upper range of the more conservative dates for the domestication of dogs.

The stunner, though, was that when they analyzed the wolf data alone, the gene appeared to be much younger: as young as 12,000 to 14,000 years, which bumps against the human colonization of the New World through the Bering Straight.

Anderson & Co.’s conclusion: New World wolves appear to have lost the gene for black color, possibly before the domestication event, and may well have regained it by back-crossing with dogs in astonishingly recent times.

Now, I hear some of you saying [actually, it’s Heather, more or less over my shoulder]: “Makes no sense. The gene for black color predates fur, for Pete’s sake: you can find it in fish, birds, and, well, us. How could it only be 50,000 years old?”

Interesting fact, though: that gene is for the Melanocortin 1 receptor, and causes black color through a slightly different tweak of the same biochemical pathway as the K locus. Different beast. [6]

So it appears that North American wolves had no black-furred individuals at all until people brought their homeys over the land bridge. But that’s not the really neat part.

Anderson et al. made another discovery, when they looked at the geographical distribution of the K locus: tundra wolves have the black version far less often then boreal forest wolves. It looks very much like the wolves who make their daily bread [7] in the dark of the pines are experiencing evolutionary selection in favor of black color.

So there you have it: domestication may not be a one-way street. Human activity can, sometimes, bring favorable genes back into wild populations. [8] It doesn’t change the devastation our footprint can bring in the slightest. But it does, perhaps, signal a glimmer of hope that our presence need not always be disaster personified.

And it feels good to know that our companions maybe gave something back.

[1] Responsibilities, time, and yes, some significant aches and pains, if you must know.
[2] Heather, me, and our two first SAR partners, Lilly our steadfast anchor and Mel our superstar.
[3] Debunked, as it turns out, as a treatment for snakebite, but to my mind still a credible tool for managing insect stings.
[4] Based on what’s being bred now, for the most part. Don’t get me started.
[5] Huge error bars here, as is often the case with these kinds of dates. But I’m using the mean because that’s where the probability maxes out.
[6] Dogs also have a second black-color gene, though wolves don’t share it.
[7] Well, sweetbreads anyway.
[8] Sure, we may be the threat that they need dark color to evade. What a cynical bunch you guys can be!

A Rush to Judgment

2009-03-22T10:54:00.000-07:00

I still have friends there, so I won’t say where or when. But I was a young dog handler, not operational yet, attending the first meeting in a certain state of a mixed federal-volunteer program that was later to become the FEMA task forces. [1] I did not, at the time, necessarily expect to be part of the developing system to make available volunteers capable of responding to 9/11-type disasters nationwide. [2] But I was hoping to get to know the folks in the SAR community beyond my team, and maybe see if I could be useful somehow.

I remember, vividly, introducing myself to a member of another team, saying that I was a rookie with XXX, my team at the time.

“Yeah, I know XXX, ” he said. “YYY runs that, right? You might want to consider changing teams. Some people don’t belong in search and rescue, and we’re going to make sure he’s out.”

Now, the awkward fact of the matter is that YYY did, in fact, turn out to be a crook. But significantly, at that point he’d done nothing wrong to the speaker or the SAR system in that state, and even when YYY did fall from grace his sin was against us, his teammates. Maybe more importantly, the quest to oust him, and sideline even the innocent among XXX, involved so much unethical and downright dirty behavior that these guys dug themselves a hole in the muck far lower than the high ground they thought they had.

I don’t think there is any situation in which I’d be so assured of my moral and ethical standing that I would put a young, 20-something dog handler trainee in that position. No matter how bad the team he thought I was on, the fact was that I might, someday, become an asset. And that possibility argued strongly against a display of asshole behavior, pretty much calculated to alienate me from interaction with the larger SAR community that is so important for young SAR responders to learn and grow and make their own teams better. [3]

It turned SAR into a zero-sum game that assured the biggest loser would be the lost person we’re all supposed to be concerned about. It’s a game I despise, and have tried to discourage throughout the 18 years I’ve been in SAR.

The point of the story, though, is that my own instinct is to shy away from judgment. I’ve seldom seen the person who’s so evil that I would feel comfortable condemning him wholesale. [4]

Today’s entry: a Feb. 27 Science study by H. A. Chapman and folk from the University of Toronto. They filmed the faces of people:

· experiencing a bitter, pleasant, or neutral flavor in their mouths
· looking at pictures, of things ranging from the pleasant to the disgusting
· being treated fairly or unfairly in an economic game

Then they measured changes in the relative positions of facial features — particularly the distance between the bottom of the nose and the top of the upper lip. And they found out that, for all the situations above, the only ones in which the distance between nose and lips predictably decreased were gustatory, visual, and ethical/moral disgust.

They weren’t taking a stab in the dark: there’s a longstanding literature suggesting that, when we say that a bitter taste, poo, and incest are all “disgusting,” it’s more than a metaphor. There seems to be a direct link between a physical feeling of revulsion and the moral judgments that a particular human behavior is unclean. Chapman and pals argue that we have constructed our higher-level sense of disgust using the building blocks that developed in the brain to help us avoid poisonous foods.

What really puts a hook in me is the side issue that, as in all things, human beings exist on a continuum. Some of us are far more easily moved to disgust than others; and some evidence suggests that our proclivities along these lines push us toward our political and religious affiliations. In short, the most (socially) conservative of us may be that way partly because we are more quickly and completely moved to real, physical disgust when we see something that disgusts us conceptually. On the other hand, the social liberals (including libertarians, on this issue) are slower to reach this point, keeping the moral and ethical on a more intellectualized level.

I would argue against a rush to ... judgment on this idea, since it isn’t immediately clear that either side is either practically or morally “better.” To some extent, I buy into the conservative argument that liberals are often so in love with exploring both sides of a moral argument they dither. I also hold with the liberal belief that conservatives are often so in love with acting on their gut feelings of right and wrong that they stumble into debacle. Pick your favorite example from recent history, both sides have plenty of ammunition.

Now, humans, like all mammals, never do anything for just one reason. And there’s evidence that, even among conservative religious groups, we may be experiencing significant shifts in exactly what defines of morality: Barack Obama had a surprisingly strong showing among young Roman Catholics and Christian fundamentalists. [5] Even if the link between conceptual and physical disgust is real, it can attach different sensibilities of what constitutes the unclean. In addition, a commentary on the Chapman study in the same issue of Science pointed out alternative explanations for their results to a real, biological link between physical and conceptual revulsion.

But it all does suggest that we split ourselves into ethical tribes because we’re literally put together differently. And that allowing voice to both outlooks helps us with the difficult balance of thinking things through vs. trusting our guts.

Of course, maybe that attitude itself marks me as fundamentally liberal — though I hate the term, and am far more conservative on some issues. No matter: my old team is still there, if transformed by time, and I’m certainly still here. Being able to see both sides doesn’t necessarily make you a pushover: so next time you judge, do so carefully.

[1] Since I’ve found some people associated with the FEMA system to be a bit ... ahem ... thin-skinned, I’ll just say that the state wasn’t Pennsylvania, and at least avoid antagonizing my neighbors. For the record, and for many reasons, I’ve never even tried to become part of that system.
[2] Though this was long before 9/11.
[3] Some of my current team’s best members came to us after concluding that their prior teams did not meet with their personal expectations and standards of quality and behavior. Gotta give people the chance to come to that conclusion on their own.
[4] Seldom doesn’t mean never. Yeah, yeah, Hitler, bin Laden, Saddam, Kim il Jung. I’m not a pacifist. Interestingly enough, though, I’ve only encountered one person in my SAR years that I have no interest in ever working with again — and it’s not the guy in this story.
[5] Deep water: our religious affiliations don’t parallel this phenomenon any better than our political affiliations. There’s certainly a strain of refusing to judge others in christianity; still, I think most of you know what I’m talking about. Point being, the Obama votes from a new generation of traditionally right-wing voters was about more than just the economy: the definitions may be changing.

Unable to Dance, I’ll Crawl

2009-03-15T11:10:00.000-07:00

There may come a day when I’ll dance on your grave
Unable to dance I'll still crawl across it
Unable to dance I'll still crawl
Unable to dance I'll still crawl
Unable to dance I'll crawl.
– “Hell in a Bucket,” The Grateful Dead

There’s a certain individual Heather and I know through SAR — he’ll remain nameless for today’s purposes — who really tried to fuck us over, once upon a time. It led to many hard feelings and the kind of mutually assured destruction that almost always follows a feud. I think we wound up losing less from the exchange than the other party did; a public fight with more-established personality in the SAR community probably gave us a stature and notoriety [1] that we probably didn’t otherwise merit.

Still, it was an upsetting and intense time, and I have it on good authority that bad feelings persist to this day on both sides, many years later. Heather, for one, looks forward to pissing on a certain grave; I’m less sanguine, and suspect this person may in fact be immortal. So the piss may fly in the opposite direction, at least where my final resting place is concerned.

Heather’s emotion — known, hilariously enough, by a German word, schadenfreude — is pretty much a human universal: that dark but satisfying feeling of joy we get from viewing another person’s (usually someone we dislike or envy) misfortune.

Fast forward to this morning, when I saw our Sophie, lying in the living room, going to town on a cow bone as big as her head. Just outside the sliding doors stood our Moe, whom Heather had let out for a restroom break. When I caught him watching her intently, I wondered how and whether what was going on in his head mapped to what a person goes through when he or she feels envy.

If you have multiple dogs, you’ve seen that they experience envy. The possibility always exists, though, that it’s in some way more primitive, or at least less conceptualized, than ours.

Which brings us to a Feb. 13 Science report by Hidehiko Takahashi and buds at a number of institutions, including the National Institute of Radiological Sciences in Chiba, Japan; Tokyo Medical and Dental University; and the Japan Science and Technology Agency in Saitama, Japan. They wondered what relationship the abstracted emotions of envy and schadenfreude had with the basic biological sensations of pain and pleasure, and decided to test the question with functional magnetic resonance scans of people’s brains as they experienced these emotions.

The answer was, “more than you might imagine,” with a side order of “can of worms.” Through a clever series of scenarios, they got their (human) subjects to imagine good and bad things happening to folks with whom they identified fully; whom they envied; and with whom they had little in common, reducing the tendency to envy. The idea is that if you see someone who reminds you of yourself, or even who’s different enough from you that you can’t make a comparison, you’re likely to vicariously share their good and bad fortune. But when it’s somebody you envy, then by Gaad you’re going to rue everything good and enjoy the hell out of everything bad that happens to them.

Their results stunned me, in that way that something you should have guessed but didn’t does. When their subjects experienced envy, the scans [2] displayed activation of areas of the brain’s periaqueductal gray, anterior cingulate cortex, and thalamus. These brain areas are known for their activation when a person is experiencing physical pain; they’re also associated with social exclusion, grief, and the experience of injustice.

When the same folks experienced schadenfreude, the brain areas that lit up were the ventral tegmentum, ventral striatum, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, and amygdala. Think, physical pleasure, the feeling of virtue, experiencing a fair exchange, cooperation, and altruism.

Let’s stop for a moment to think about that last one: the parts of the brain that activate when we get jollies out of seeing some bastard receive what’s coming to him are essentially the same ones that light up when we rescue a baby from a burning building.

How messed up is that?

I suppose one valid observation would be the amazing way with which our complex minds have been cobbled together out of basic, even primitive components. It speaks to my earlier point that maybe we humans are special for a combination of otherwise biologically unremarkable features that, when united, create an awesome synergy. Certainly, there’s little new under the evolutionary sun; but oh, the amazing things you can unlock when you turn the tumblers to the right sequence.

Of course, we also have what Freud called the superego: that nanny-of-the-mind who comes along and scolds us into doing what society expects. A very interesting follow-up experiment would be to catch the subjects in the throes of schadenfreude and make them aware of what they’re doing. Shame in failing to uphold our own universal self image of being the good guy in the story, I’d suspect, would knock us back to activating the pain centers of the mind. And what next? Would atonement bring the pleasure centers once again online?

Me, I’m all too human; by no means have I gotten over our old resentments. But I suspect that, if our nemesis checked in before I did, I’d go to the funeral and keep a low profile. Because that would, at least, respect the brotherhood of SAR responders.

It may well be just another change of the pain-vs.-pleasure guard in my brain, deriving an ultimately petty charge out of offering props to someone not because he deserves it, but because I want to feel superior. But I’ve given up on worrying about what’s going on in people’s heads — it’s what we do that counts. The one person you have to try to respect, after all, is yourself.

[1] Note the etymological commonality with the word notorious.
[2] Of course, right now there’s an eye-gouging fight going on over the meaning of brain areas lighting up in an MRI scan. Functional MRI shows us which brain areas are receiving blood flow, which mostly equates to which are active. But recent reports suggest that the brain will also fire up an area that it doesn’t need quite yet but might need soon — so we can’t take these scans as gospel. (Sorry, for the life of me I can’t find that reference.)

Darwin, Finallyin which DACSIH? finally recognizes the 200th anniversary

2009-03-06T10:51:00.000-08:00

I once made the mistake of visiting Alan Lattimore, a good friend from Wire Mommy Alma Mater, when he was living in Baltimore. In the summer.

Now, don’t take offense if you’re a fan of the town; I like the place. But you’ve got to admit, it can be a miserable, humid, hot environ in the summer.

Anyhow, one time of day was nice, and that was in the evenings, when it started to cool down. We could repair to his apartment’s mercifully shaded, cool, brick front porch, lay back, and sip lemonade.

I don’t remember whether our unexpected guests were Saints or Jehova’s Witnesses. But they came walking door-to-door, and in an Antebellum kind of way it seemed only natural for two ex-College Know-it-All Hippies [1] to invite them up to take a load off, drink some lemonade, and shoot the breeze for a while. It soon became obvious that nobody was converting anybody that day — but we had one of those civilized, respectful exchanges of ideas that human beings are supposed to be able to manage but somehow often can’t.

I don’t remember how we got onto the topic of evolution, either. But I do remember the question one of them asked me, and which encapsulates a lot of the confusion over the issue:

“If humans evolved from apes, why aren’t we still evolving?”

The second part was the easy one, if the answer had a bit of an “all of the above” feel to it:

evolution is so incredibly slow with a species that takes the better part of 20 years to mature that it’s very hard to see within a human lifespan
there’s some reason to suspect that the way our technology allows us to assist each other may be slowing or at least changing the way we evolve

But the first clause of his conditional question carries a mammoth misconception that many even of evolution’s defenders, including the teachers who teach it, consistently get wrong: human beings did not evolve from apes. We and apes each evolved from a common ancestor, which was neither one nor t’other.

That idea takes some getting used to. It’s relatively easy to imagine the common ancestor of a fish and a lizard looking something like a newt or a frog. It’s much more difficult, with the exceptional place we humans hold in our own minds — and, in terms of our impact on our surroundings at least, clearly have — to imagine a more “primitive” ancestor that shared some orangutan characteristics, say, and some human characteristics. It involves, perhaps, breaking through a wall of Mary Douglasist taboo to even think of such a creature, let alone to accept that it would pre-date anything as “primitive” as an orangutan.

The flaw in the above statement is the casual use of the word “primitive,” which in evolutionary terms doesn’t quite mean what we usually take it to mean. In the realm of evolutionary biology, a bacterium and a shark are in many ways every bit as “modern” as a human being. In some ways their forms are more perfect than ours, as they have survived, with remarkably few changes necessary, for 3 to 4 billion and 420 to 450 million years, respectively, to our measly 250,000.

Still, as mistakes go, it may be that regarding humans, evolutionary biologists have been making the biggest one of all — one that they’ve only recently recognized. Enter an article by Erika Check Hayden in the Feb. 12 issue of Nature. [2]

We make much of the fact that humans and chimpanzees, our nearest surviving relatives, share 94 percent of our DNA sequence. The simple explanation for that was that six percent of our genes are so important that they can make the vast difference between a very intelligent but still “natural” animal and the hyper-tool-using-communicating-building-environment-altering phenomenon that H. sapiens has become.

Only, it didn’t turn out to be simple at all.

For one thing, most of the differences lie in what molecular biologists are increasingly embarrassed to have nicknamed “junk DNA.” The majority of the DNA in eukaryotes (organisms with complex cells that include a nucleus to contain the genetic material) tends to consist of sequences that don’t encode genes or anything else of known function. Even the scientists who originally coined the phrase probably knew that it wasn’t going to be accurate — in some ways, it’s an ironic reference to our inability to figure out what much of the genome is doing. We’re pretty sure it ain’t junk; but it isn’t genes or anything we really understand, either.

For another thing, the fact that two DNA sequences are different doesn’t necessarily mean that they act any differently: many of the differences may be essentially meaningless silent mutations.

Finally: a couple of these DNA differences — such as those within FOXP2, associated with human speech, and ASPM and MCPH1, associated with brain size — do fall within genes for proteins associated with important human characteristics. But researchers are increasingly coming to realize that most of the differences that do mean something nevertheless may be acting only marginally. All told, they just don’t capture what makes us human. [3]

You see, we’d left out culture.

As amazing as it seems, human culture has had such a profound effect on our evolutionary path that it has completely redefined what human evolution means.

Consider: about 50,000 years ago, the human race experienced “The Great Leap Forward” — when our technology began to change and improve radically, in an accelerating fashion. Our genetic evolution took a turn soon after: based on current human genetic diversity, our SNPs — one-base changes in the DNA sequence — expanded noticeably about 40,000 years ago.

Now, none of these numbers is etched in stone just yet: but note that the genetic change seems to have come after the cultural explosion, and certainly not well before it.

There’s a similar pattern, if more tightly grouped, around the Neolithic Revolution about 10,000 years ago. Consider the following:

earliest evidence of agriculture: 10,000 years
first evidence of dogs distinguishable from wolves: 14,000 to 17,000 years (but read on for more about this)
horse domestication: 5,500 years
trephination — early cranial surgery that, amazingly, many patients survived: 8,500 years
rice cultivation: 8,000-10,000 years
cattle: 10,000 years
sheep: 9,000 to 11,000 years
chickens: 10,000 years
cities: 10,000 years (or a little less)

Now, many of those dates wobble compared with each other. And it isn’t clear which do so because we just don’t have them accurately pinned down, and which do because they happened at different times. They didn’t have to have changed all at once to uphold the point we’re discussing: clearly, ’round about 10,000 years ago, everything changed.

Oh, and that 40,000-year estimate of the initial burst of SNP changes in H. sapiens? That’s based on a more-precise calculation of an explosion of 3.9 million SNPs that researchers looked at in modern humans from Europe, Africa, and elsewhere.

Care to guess how many years ago that burst happened? 10,000 years ring a bell?

Again, the DNA changes did not happen before the cultural changes. At most they were simultaneous, and even may have followed — may have been caused — by the technological and cultural changes.

Why? That comes back to my second answer to our Baltimore visitors: technology, culture, how humans interact and adapt their environment to their needs rather than the other way ’round, makes it possible for us to start collecting new traits that would mean a nasty, brutish, and short life as a pre-hunter-gatherer, but which allow for the kind of specialization of abilities and aptitudes that a complex society needs. It also lets us collect a bunch of behaviors that are learned rather than inherent, and maximize our flexibility of lifestyle because someone will teach you what you need to know, so you don’t need to maintain behaviors in your genes.

Note I said “pre-hunter-gatherer” above, because by the time you get to a hunter-gatherer society your technological and cultural levels are already very complex. As an example, once Heather made the observation that a person we knew who was no good with dogs wouldn’t have survived as a hunter-gatherer. I had the perfect counter: not if, along with a lack of ability to empathize and work with dogs, came a knack for chipping out the best flint spearheads. Somebody like that would more than pull his weight in a hunter-gatherer society, because others could do the dog work.

In real life it probably isn’t quite that pat, but clearly the cultural complexity can and probably did drive the genetic diversity. Increasingly, evolutionary biologists are working this insight into their work as a fundamental property of human evolution.

I mentioned above that I would get back to the 14,000- to 17,000-year date for genetically and anatomically distinct dogs. Dogs, that is, that we can be sure were dogs, because their skeletons or DNA were different from those of the wolves that almost certainly started to hang around human settlements for the bonanza of yummy garbage (and the occasional kid). Many folks — my better half is certainly one of them — suspect that dogs that were distinguishable from wolves by their behavior but not their bodies (i.e., a wolf that sleeps with you and doesn’t eat the cave-bear-rugrats) arose much earlier than that.

When? Well, we don’t have a very good answer for that one; we’re not even all that sure when wolves and coyotes split. So the range of estimates for the earliest possible domestication — 15,000 to 140,000 years — is so broad it isn’t of much help to us. But that range does bracket The Great Leap Forward, and that makes me wonder:

Two events? Dogs as hunting partners 70,000 years ago, before The Great Leap, and as pastoral and agricultural partners 15,000 years ago, before the Neolithic Revolution? Could our dogs have helped trigger the cultural changes that in turn directed our evolution?

There’s no doubt we’ve directed our partners’ development in profound ways. Has the relationship been more mutual than we ever thought? Is domestication co-evolution?

I don’t know the answers to those questions. But it’s something to think about, sitting on your porch, sipping lemonade, with your best friend curled up beside.

[1] God help me, one of the South Park characters looked exactly like me.
[2] While normally I start with primary sources, or at least peer-reviewed review articles, this news piece brought together so many important ideas that I’m making it a special case.
[3] Human exceptionalism is a trap, of course. We move from characteristic to characteristic — language, tool use, empathy — desperate to find one that makes us unique. But maybe the old saying about German shepherds is more to the point: “They’re not number one at anything, but they’re number two or three at everything.” Many little differences, none of them unique, adding up to more than their simple sum.
[4] Scientific observations of teaching among primates, orvids, and canids notwithstanding. Not to mention common experience among dog owners with freely interacting packs!

Vote for Moe!

2009-03-03T05:41:00.000-08:00

You may notice the ruggedly handsome fellow to the right, in the place where Pip is usually getting familiar with our barn cat, Gollum. Well, this is Moe, Son of Pip, and Director of Homeland Security at our farm. He’s in the running in a photo contest that could, if he wins, put a whole buttload of money into National English Shepherd Rescue. Most of you probably already know about the Montana English Shepherds, as well as, unfortunately, the pinheaded viral email about that rescue operation that’s making the rounds; but suffice it to say the organization can dearly use the funds, with over 200 dogs that may soon need homes. Please click on the doggie, and vote now; the balloting is over after March 10.

Notes of Brimstone, Cherry, and Gouda

2009-02-27T11:38:00.000-08:00

I ’ll try to make this as non-partisan as I can, because I have no illusions that the phenomenon doesn’t cross party lines — but I was incensed by Gov. Bobby Jindal’s swipe at volcano monitoring research, as were more than a few people with a greater-than-elementary-school education. [1]

Some of you may be mercifully unaware of the latest entry in the political grandstanding game of picking out a research project that has a strange title and making it seem like a waste of tax payer money — without bothering to find out what it’s actually meant to study. Gov. Jindal, in a rebuttal to President Obama’s televised talk on the state of the nation (if not a formal State of the Union Address), singled out $140 million to be spent on volcano monitoring, and asked, possibly intending an Andy Rooney vibe, what the heck volcano monitoring was.

Now, in view of how little they’re taught about — well, anything — gov. jocks have no right to be spouting out about science. Not without either educating themselves (as some do) or hiring somebody who knows something about it (as far too few do). But while I’m appalled at Gov. Sarah Palin panning fruit fly research [2], at least I get that. It comes from an ignorance of the science — and ignorance is no sin, only the attempt to cling to it is — meeting up with what, after all, is an odd avenue of research if you don’t know the scientific history. How anyone who’s old enough to remember Mount Saint Helens blowing a big chunk of Washington State to Kingdom Come could think that volcano monitoring, even if you haven’t heard the term before, isn’t a very serious matter of human life and death is far beyond my humble imagination.

One amusing, if disturbing, possibility: the 1971-born Jindal has speechwriters who aren’t old enough to remember Mount Saint Helens, and Jindal doesn’t review their work ahead of time. Sounds ridiculous, but it’s no more ridiculous than explanation #1.

Whatever you think of Gov. Jindal’s political positions, I hope that the fact you’re reading means you’d support his consignment to the infernal regions for crimes against science [3].

Still, every once in a while you come across a research paper that, while completely valid in its own right, simply begs for a punch line. Such as teaching mice to discriminate between different wines.

Noboru Takiguchi and friends at Hiroshima and Osaka universities found out that they could train 10 mice to 70 percent concordance (i.e., 20 percent better than a random, even-odds chance) in discriminating between red wine, white wine, rose, sake, and plum liqueur.

But the interesting result came when they took their mice (trained, remember, to tell between red wine and other alcoholic drinks) and tried to see if they could tell the difference between different red wines (Japanese reds Bon Rouge and Bistro Red, and Beaujolais Villages, from the admittedly more familiar wine-associated country of France). Six mice couldn’t do it better than random chance (50 to 67 percent concordance), and only two could do the job, with an average concordance of 75 percent.

I suppose nobody’s going to be firing their sommeliers and buying mouse cages over a 25-percent-better-than-guessing result, but the fact that the remaining two mice had a concordance lower than 30 percent is amazing.

Think about that: the mice were discriminating effectively between the choices, but making the wrong choice anyway, even though they were being rewarded for the right one. Takiguchi and his kameraden think it may have to do with the mice concentrating on the wrong odorant components. While it isn’t immediately clear to me how that would work — wouldn’t it explain inaccuracy rather than the observed “reverse accuracy?” — it’s a damned interesting idea that, not that I have to say it, is worth pursuing. No wait, I do get it. The idea is that the odorants you use to tell between wine and sake are different than the ones that distinguish between different wines. Even more interesting, because there’s a parallel issue in SAR dog handling: do dogs that are distingushing between the scent of individual humans pay attention to different odorants than those simply telling human scent from other animals? Still, we don’t know for sure; another paper by this group, showing that just about all mice can distinguish between reds if trained to do so, would help strengthen the argument.

Or is it shades of Punished by Rewards? Were the mice, resentful of the patronizing task of choosing between a decent French red and two less-than-inspiring domestics [4], trying to send the researchers a message? [5]

I see a result either way. Contrary to what politicians seem to think, research is its own reward.

[1] Also check out this Yale Daily News piece.
[2] Hey, fruit flies are funny. Even Did a Cat Shit In Here? got into that game.
[3] No, I’m not going easy on Barack for the who-invented-automobiles gaffe. It’s equally embarrassing; but at least it wasn’t the core of an attack on a line of research.
[4] Good sake is fantastic — but let’s face it, Japan will never be famed for its vineyards.
[5] Hey, the first reader who can tell me the title and author of an SF short story I read ages ago, in which a psychology researcher awakes to find himself in an alien’s Skinner Box, gets an arbitrary, probably not valuable ... um, reward ... of my choosing.

Who the F@#k Are You?

2009-02-19T12:48:00.000-08:00

The charge was as ridiculous as it was unexpected. Last summer, Heather opened up a letter from the Pittsburgh Traffic Court that said I needed to come pick up my car from the impound lot, said vehicle having been towed for illegal parking.

If I remember correctly, she stuck her head out the front door to confirm that my blue 2001 Subaru Impreza hatchback was still parked in front of the house. Then she noticed that the impounded vehicle was a red Ford pickup truck. Also, on the date of the ticket we were both in West Virginia on an extended search-and-rescue training exercise.

Apparently, the ticketing officer had made a slight error in entering the license plate number — the tag number on the ticket was mine, which was why the letter had come to our house. But state records clearly show that that number doesn’t belong to a red pickup, so we were puzzled as to how the mistake had gotten so far without anybody catching it.

After talking with the traffic court folks on the phone, Heather sent a letter to the court explaining everything, and we forgot all about it.

Well, early this year the calls started coming from the collection agency. Not only had justice been blind enough to miss the more-than-reasonable doubt of the case, not only had she ignored Heather’s letter, but she had, Star-Chamber-like, carried out a legal proceeding without notifying the accused — remember, the summons for a traffic violation is the ticket, their letter was just an extra notification — found me guilty, waited until I was in default of the ruling I never heard about, and then passed me onto the collection folks.

The latter were hilarious; when I called with the evidence that it couldn’t have been my car, they not only said they couldn’t take it into consideration, but that I might wind up having to pay the ticket because it had gone into collection and so couldn’t be re-adjudicated by the court.

I’m normally a fairly placid guy (Heather tells stories of Sicilian fits of temper, but given her own short fuse, who really believes her?), but people who know me know I can be a stubborn son of a bitch when I think I’m right. I explained to the collection rep that I intended to call my attorney and make sure that they spent more getting the fine out of me than the state would pay them for the collection.

Amazing how talk of lawyers brings out the reasonable side of some people. She told me that I could certainly send whatever documentation I had to prove the vehicle in question couldn’t have been mine (for all I know, it’s still sitting in a Pittsburgh impound lot).

Well, I called the traffic court for some details on the actual violation, and when the woman there heard my story she said she could make the issue go away. I’ve got all the documents saved in case I need them, but since then I haven’t heard from the collection folks. We’ll see, anyway.

All of which is to say, identification is important, and a change in context — say, the same license tag on a different vehicle — shouldn’t mess up an accurate ID if you’re careful. This week’s entry is a study showing how the individual smell that each of us possesses remains identifiably constant despite the fact that our environment clouds the issue. The report comes from Jae Kwak and a team from Gary Beauchamp’s crew at the very interesting Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia.

First, some background. Eighteen years ago, Kunio Yamazaki (also from Beauchamp’s lab) reported that mutations in a gene normally associated with identifying pathogens and rejecting transplanted organs somehow made one mouse smell different than another.

What emerged in the next decade of research was a picture in which a system that everybody thought was meant only to help the body tag dangerous invaders (and the body’s cells they had co-opted) for destruction may actually have another, even older function: Picking and choosing among the many bits of protein, fats, and other chemicals that we ingest to create a unique bouquet of smells that belongs to each individual.

The genes involved are called the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) in vertebrates, or the human leukocyte antigens (HLA) in humans specifically. The produce a family of proteins that are the body’s ID cards, which infection-fighting white blood cells examine, like bouncers, to determine who belongs and who does not.

The MHC proteins, in their originally understood role, pick up fragments of the normal components in a healthy cell and display them in a kind of one-two code. If the MHC protein and the fragments are normal, the white blood cell does nothing. If either is wrong, though — say, the right MHC protein, but displaying a fragment of a virus that has infected the cell — the bouncer calls in the cops: “killer” white blood cells that destroy the infected cell before the virus can spread. It works like this:

Well, it turned out that the MHC proteins also seemed to be able to pick up fragments of normal cellular products, ingested food, perfume, who knew what, and released them from the body as smells. Since each individual (except identical twins) has a unique spectrum of these proteins, he or she also has a unique spectrum of smells. That works this way:

You can read a more complete explanation of how the system works on AMRG’s website.

This discovery resonated strongly with what search-and-rescue dog handlers had known for years: both our genetics and the smells that normally surround us contribute to an individual scent that a trailing dog can follow, if given a scent article that individual has touched.

But the problem was, how can a dog recognize an individual human by smell — or any animal recognize another — when, potentially, you could give the smellee a substantially different bouquet just by changing environments? In other words, change utterly the palette of potential externally derived smells form which the MHC proteins select?

Well, Kwak and the Philadelphia gang showed that even when you change a mouse’s environment radically, the MHC proteins are able to scrape together enough familiar odor-carrying chemicals that another mouse trained to identify that individual could still tell that the smells were coming from the same mouse.

It’s a classic case of scientists confirming something dog handlers pretty much knew, but which is still vitally important in understanding the basics of how scent work happens. And, not inconsequentially, it establishes that, provided you do the training right [1], further demonstrates that there’s a healthy scientific basis for what dog handlers do to help find lost people.

Anyhow, Pittsburgh Traffic Court could take some lessons from tasks that dogs (and mice) carry out just about every day. We’ll see who turns out to be smarter.

[1] Do not, do not get me started.

Broken

2009-02-12T08:35:00.000-08:00

Broken cutters, broken saws,
Broken buckles, broken laws,
Broken bodies, broken bones,
Broken voices on broken phones.
Take a deep breath, feel like you're chokin’,
Everything is broken.
– Bob Dylan, “Everything Is Broken”

The first person I ever helped to rescue killed himself, years later, after being accused of molesting children.

What do you do with that? How do you make sense of it?

This past week has offered a number of strange and maybe-not-so-coincidental connections, which started with “The Smell of Fear,” a Did a Cat Shit In Here piece about the link between fear responses and the protein underlying mad cow disease and CJD, the human brain-wasting disease. They ended with my vivid memory of a chilly morning in the woods of New Hampshire, the smell of a little survival fire hanging in the air, when a search team I led saved someone who may have gone on to hurt people.

It begins with Prp-Sc, a mangled version of Prp-C, itself a protein produced in the brain but until recently having no known function. Prp-Sc is a bizarre type of infectious agent called a prion — no living thing, no parasite with its own agenda, but rather a protein that folds incorrectly. Such a small thing, a single protein molecule: but Prp-Sc has a terrible ability to cause its “healthy” Prp-C neighbors also to misfold, the end result being a tangle of broken protein that kills brain cells.

Slowly, inch by inch, a human being — or a sheep, or a cow, or a deer — goes away. Never to return.

Broken.

Well, nature doesn’t create anything for no reason. The simplest explanation, perhaps, is that Prp-C has a function so important that having it is worth the risk of it converting to its harmful Prp-Sc alter ego. And Bruno Lobão-Soares and colleagues at the University of Sao Paulo found a hum dinger of an important function: mice that lacked it failed to display the normal fear of a nearby predator.

Now, fear responses are often triggered by smells. But the connection to smell turned out to be far stronger than that: Claire E. Le Pichon and crew at Columbia University and elsewhere have now reported evidence that mice without Prp-C lose their sense of smell. They lag behind normal mice at finding hidden cookes; they can’t find cookies any better than a strain of mice known to have no sense of smell; and reintroducing Prp-C into the brain restores their sniffers. The mutation seems to disconnect activity in the brain’s olfactory bulb from the rhythm of breathing — normally they’re pretty much synchronized — and generally dampens the normal electrical oscillations in that vital first routing point of the sense of smell.

Broken.

Well, we have two further connections: one predictable, if frustrating; the other blindsided me, and brought me back to that New England hillside.

As reported on Pet Connection — rapidly becoming a go-to source for information on both pet and human food safety — the FDA is playing down the potential risk that meat from an elk with chronic wasting disease may have entered the food chain. Now, I’m no FDA basher: the story of how rookie FDA medical officer Frances Oldham Kelsey stretched her authority to the breaking point to prevent thalidomide from being given to pregnant women in the U.S. is a hero’s tale that screams for a dramatic treatment, and ought to be told to our young around the cooking fire. It set a tone that, despite wobbles, has kept the FDA in the “drug cops” role, protecting us from the most egregious effects of over-eager (to be charitable) pharmaceutical salesmen.

Still, whether we’re talking poisoned dog food, peanut products for human consumption, or E. coli-tainted spinach, I think it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the FDA still doesn’t get food safety right (mainly because of scant funding).

The system is ... broken.

And finally, what did my wondering eyes encounter in the January 22 issue of Nature but an obituary of Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, the microbiologist who led the team that discovered prions. Gajdusek’s discovery hasn’t paid off yet — we still don’t know enough about prions and how they cause disease — but when we do come up with an agent that can rescue people from the long, slow dissolution of self that prions threaten, it’s a good bet that his work will underlie it.

Thing is, Daniel Carleton Gajdusek was also a convicted child molester. Something about him, if you trust the courts, was undeniably broken.

What do you do with that? How do you make sense of it? Is anybody going to refuse his elderly parents a treatment based on these discoveries because of what and who their discoverer was?

But that’s not the whole reason I bring this up. Here, in the interest of fairness and in-context understanding, I present the entirety of the relevant paragraph of the obit:

“Eccentricity was the source of Gajdusek's genius as a scientist, and of his notoriety late in life. In 1997, he was imprisoned on a child molestation charge involving one of the more than 50 Micronesian and Melanesian children he had adopted and brought to the United States. On his release in 1998 he moved to Europe, which he regarded as less puritanical than his home country.”

“Eccentricity?” “Puritanical?”

I think — I hope — that implicit in this paragraph was the author’s belief that the charges were unjust, and Gajdusek wasn’t in fact guilty of molesting a child. The author is from the Netherlands, to which Gajdusek emigrated after getting out of prison, and so there may be an issue of understanding the full implications of the English text, however well the author may speak the language.

I view this more as an utter failure of editing: How can an editor encounter that paragraph and not jot, in the requisite blue ink, “Please clarify — this sounds like you’re making an apologia for child molestation”?

Would it be impertinent to suggest that the editorial process here was ... well, broken?

I’m sure interested in checking out Nature’s Correspondence section in the coming weeks.

But returning to my original question: How do you make sense of all of this? I guess it depends on what kind of sense you’re looking for. If you want the sense that science can offer, then it has to do with the difficult tradeoffs in evolving complex organisms. Somehow, the crucial function of Prp-C — the structure that its chemical function dictates — brings with it the potential to go rogue. Somehow, giving a human being powerful reproductive urges brings with it the potential for those urges to be appallingly misdirected. (And that is my link to today’s celebration of Darwin’s birthday.) [1]

The problem with what the scientific explanation can offer us lies precisely in its objectivity. We don’t want child molestation to be a matter of objectivity; we want those who commit it to be evil, we want to judge. But in the words of Colonel Kurtz:

“You have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that; but you have no right to judge me. It’s impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means.”

What is it like to be broken? How, if we ever reduce the phenomenon of human misbehavior to a matter of chemistry, do we make sense of that?

But I’m ready to answer my first question. My answer may be a nonsensical, fuzzy mix of Hegel and Tolkien. But it got me through the long nights after the phone call that told me of Scott’s suicide, and I still draw from it. The fact is that I’m not smart or wise or good enough to make the call of who lives and dies; I’m broken myself, in my own, hopefully small ways, and that gives me no right to ask, certainly not before the fact, whether this or that lost person is “worthy” of being found.

We do our best to find them, to bring the lost sheep home, because that’s what human beings, as broken as we may be, do. If you need more meaning than that, you’ll have to look elsewhere.

D. melanogaster, We Hardly Knew Ye

2009-02-04T11:52:00.000-08:00

I get the most adorable dominance displays from people with modest scientific backgrounds who assume I’m “just a dog handler.”

The incident of the day had started out mutually respectful, at least. The individual in question — an animal behaviorist [1] who’d come to a SAR conference to lecture to us on drives — had actually given me a lot of interesting new ideas to think about and employ. Mostly it took the form of an expanded list of instinctual drives that, in their combination, help decide an animal’s reaction to different situations and stimuli — prey drive, social drive, defensive drive, etc. Heather later told me it was pretty standard fare in dog training terms, but it had been new enough for me.

The changeover came after the talk, when I approached the lecturer to ask a question. I asked, got my answer, and then, perpetual optimist I am, offered a philosophical observation:

“Of course, we’re prisoners of our terminology, aren’t we?” I said. “We can’t be sure if any of these drives actually exist.”

I think I read a mix of emotions on her face: amazement at my temerity, engaging her as if I could grasp the material at her level; anger at what she perceived was a challenge to her entire career; pity at the possibility anybody could be so ignorant.

“These are the drives,” she said. “Of course they exist.” Then she got herself the hell away from me.

Of course, my statement was a bit over-reaching. The drives do exist, as a statistically valid entity; as a concept that can help us aim and craft our training goals; and I’d never disparage the power of metaphor for understanding the world. But on the day that we can put a portable combined PET/MR scanner on a dog’s head and actually see what her brain is doing when she is defending her litter, or cuddling with her pups, or chasing a ball, I’ll lay a bet that what we see is not three different brain states but a murky amalgam of subtle shifts in activity and unexpected overlaps that offer no neurological justification for what we thought were the basic modules of behavior.

My animal behaviorist couldn’t see that possibility, because her own training had been limited to just her craft. She’d never stepped outside the paradigm, and so could not see the ways in which the terminology she was using — the names she had been given by her teachers to use — had taken on a reality that might not be entirely, well, real.

Names are the crux of a brouhaha, recently reported by Rex Dalton in Nature, that’s, well, brewing among species taxonomists over the not-so-humble common fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster. More data have been generated from this tiny beast and how its genes govern its development, anatomy, and behavior than possibly any other.

Thing is, it may have the wrong name.

It all has to do with how species are defined in the first place. When a scientist thinks she’s discovered a new species — whether it’s a live critter or fossilized bones — she needs to produce a type specimen. This is an example of the species that will serve as the benchmark for any other critters found. If the newcomer is too different from the type specimen, e voilà, chances are it’s a different species.

Just as species — in the fruit fly’s case, that’s its second name, melanogaster — are defined by a type specimen, the genus — the first name, Drosophila — has a type species. All candidates for membership in the genus are judged against that species. If you’re too different, again, you may wind up in a different genus.

You might think that D. melanogaster, having the high-powered, monkey-navigated support that it does, would be the type species for Drosophila. But genuses and species are defined historically, first come first served, and in this case another fruit fly, D. funebris, has precedence, having been identified by a dude with the suspicious-sounding name of Johann Fabricius in 1787.

Well, on second look, D. melanogaster doesn’t look as much like D. funebris as it ought. [2] It’s different enough, in fact, that some taxonomists are seriously thinking of renaming it Sophophora melanogaster, promoting what had been a subgenus to the status of a full genus. [3]

As I said, D. melanogaster has friends in the kinds of places where opposable thumbs can do a lot for you. The heresy of renaming one of the most important research species on the cinder was too much for some researchers, who’ve proposed that the type species for Drosophila be changed from funebris to melanogaster.

It isn’t clear what changing such an important animal’s name would do to the scientific literature. In the early Pleistocene, when I went to grad school and you had to look up articles in paper reference books, it would have meant utter chaos. Modern electronic referencing systems may make the switchover relatively invisible. But ya gotta love any science story that quotes a researcher — in this case, Therese Markow of UC San Diego — as saying:

“If this were some obscure beetle, you could rename it Godzilla and it wouldn’t make much difference.”

Well, at the time of publication, the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature had not yet ruled on the issue, and had even suggested they might just leave it up to the researchers to sort out without an official nod. So maybe a fly is a fly is a fly after all.

For more discussion on the concept of species, and how it’s getting a little wear-worn, check out some interesting back-and-forth on Stephen Bodio’s blog. But please, remember: There is no such thing as “just a dog handler.”

[1] Yeah, the title itself loses any real meaning, ranging from Skinnerian operant conditioning technicians to ethologists -- interestingly, the Wikipedia entry is almost entirely ethological and hasn’t garnered a peep of protest from the Skinnerites.
[2] Or rather, their genes don’t look enough alike — the new relationships have been coming out of studies of the species’ DNA sequences.
[3] Taxonomists — don’t get me started.

The Death of Due Process?

2009-01-29T11:26:00.001-08:00

Check out this pitt-bull-ban story — as well as the earlier posts on the story. Whatever happened to reasonable search and seizure?

I’ll Be Damned

2009-01-29T08:06:00.000-08:00

I can’t claim to be one of the major actors: But I was there, and part of the Greek chorus, when DKL LifeGuard began to come crashing down.

To set the scene, it was the quarterly meeting of the Appalachian Search & Rescue Conference’s board of directors at the University of Virginia, where our sister team the Blue Ridge Mountain Rescue Group is based. At this particular meeting, two guest speakers presented a rescue device they were selling: the DKL LifeGuard, an artifice for detecting the heartbeats of hidden and/or trapped disaster victims, lost persons, what have you. The device detected human, and only human, heartbeats, they said.

Today I can’t remember with certainty what tweaked my skeptical bone that day. I’ve heard too much of the ensuing story, learned too many amazing things about what this device was — or rather, wasn’t — to sort out the source of my own concern. But I do remember thinking that the way of using the device (a gun-like detector pivot-mounted on a pistol grip) [1], moving it in a straight line from side to side (without, mind you, making an arc), would inevitably keep its business end pointed at whatever you were facing.

It may be a little hard to believe, but that was how it worked: You pointed it at your suspected subject’s location, moved it side to side, and if a human heart beat behind a wall, or trees, or whatever, the thing would supposedly point at the source.

Something other than Newtonian mechanics lay behind my disquiet, though. While the head rep talked to us, his assistant was standing behind him, waving the damned thing at us like a long-haired 1970s magician. Without looking back, senior guy says, “Joe [or whatever his name was], quit it.”

A bell went off in my head; a whiff of snake oil (or maybe cat shit).

Well, if these guys had planned to dazzle the natives, they’d picked the wrong village. ASRC has always been a bit of a geek kingdom within search and rescue, and on that day we had some people there who were far more qualified than me to see the holes in the LifeGuard story. When, following the presentation, a group of us shared lunch, Keith Conover, MD, emergency physician and a founder of my own Allegheny Mountain Rescue Group as well as the ASRC itself, pointed out that, since animal and human EKGs are electromagnetically indistinguishable, the claim that the device can distinguish between them was ridiculous on the face of it. A lifelong HAM, he also pointed out that the length of the device’s antenna was wrong [2].

It got worse. Gene Harrison, another founder of the ASRC, was also there. I’m not sure Gene has a website; at the time, at least, he worked for Mitre, a nonprofit organization that advises Free World governments on technical issues, often at the highest levels of secrecy. Gene worked on communications in a manner that would have obligated him to kill us if he’d told us more. He, too, was buying none of it.

And they both, I believe, used the same word, a word many of us were thinking but didn’t dare voice:

FRAUD

Some of the folks at that little lunch were scandalized: not by the presentation, but by the baldness of that conclusion. I was among a third group, who shared grave doubts about the “technology” but shied from the harshness of the word, as apt as it turned out to be.

I won’t retell the whole story, because Keith does it so well and completely on his website; but subsequent revelations included an evaluation by Sandia National Laboratories that showed the damned things weren’t any better than random chance, and that the devices contained an open circuit bridged by a human hair — yes, an old dowsing standard. Keith was one of the heroes of the story, pushing this with the authorities (some of DKL’s defenders among whom turned out to have been early purchasers, possibly desperate to avoid embarrassment) and pushing back, quite effectively, when DKL’s lawyers threatened.

I’ve wanted to use the LifeGuard story for a while on this blog, but had resisted precisely because it’s such a high-powered context: You present any scientific finding next to it, and the concept of fraud hangs over the whole enterprise. I wanted to be very careful before loading anybody’s research with that kind of context.

Hadn’t occurred to me that I might use it in a completely opposite way: To frame the story of a scientific finding (two findings, in this case) that forced me to re-evaluate something I’d thought was hooey, but may in fact be absolutely legitimate.

I’m talking about aromatherapy, a hippie-dippy, loosey-goosey, on-the-face-of-it ludicrous alternative therapy that I’d thought was on par with homeopathy — but which, I am amazed to learn, may have some significant scientific backing [3].

In a slightly elderly (2005) report just indexed on MEDLINE (“MEDLINE Daily Update,” no less), Mamoru Tanida and crew from Osaka and Niigata universities report that rats who smelled essential oil of grapefruit — or its major component limonene — experienced an increase in blood pressure, a reduction in vagal gastric nerve activity, and an increase in nerve activity to the kidneys. The important thing here is that the Osakans could prevent all of the above effects with classical interventions for blocking the sense of smell, such as bathing the nasal cavity with zinc sulfate or surgically damaging the olfactory bulbs. So we can be pretty sure the effect is working through the sense of smell rather than, say, the limonene being absorbed and acting in the bloodstream or elsewhere.

Takakazu Oka and company from the University of Occupational and Environmental Health in Kitakyushu and Yamaguchi University, in a year-old piece from PsycINFO, showed that “green odor” — a 50/50 combination of 3Z-hexenol (leaf alcohol) and 2E-hexenal (leaf aldehyde) that invokes the smell of green leaves — prevents changes in blood pressure in humans caused by immersing the hand in slushy ice water. Interestingly, most of the 19 subjects’ blood pressure rose from the unpleasant “cold-pressor test,” and green odor prevented that rise; but the smell kept blood pressure steady even among the two subjects who showed an atypical fall in blood pressure from cold pressor alone. Significance here is that they were reproducing in humans an effect previously seen only in animals.

Your next thought may well be my own: What if it’s all in their heads? Oka’s department at UOEH is, in fact, the Psychosomatic Medicine Division. But we get into deep water when we talk about psychosomatic effects in animals — not that I think they don’t exist, it just gets tricky to define them. And more importantly, as long as a real physiological response begins with a smell, I think that this argument reduces to a squabble about which circuitry it follows: Does it go through the higher brain, or does it exist at a more reflexive level? Either way, clearly, it’s statistically robust enough to be real.

And aromatherapy, in my eyes, has leaped many, many notches above the now-defunct LifeGard. I’ll be damned.

[1] Ten of 10 for cool, though: The larger version looked like a Klingon disruptor.
[2] Wild, but true: if your receiver’s antenna isn’t close to an even fraction of the wavelength you want to pick up, it can’t capture the radio waves. If your transmitter’s antenna is the wrong size, the radio waves can’t get out, and will bounce around inside your radio, eventually frying the works.
[3] Disclaimer: though it’s obviously new to me, there appears to be a body of literature on this topic of which I was blissfully unaware. Apologies to the aromatherapy folks.

Instinct Defined?

2009-01-21T11:57:00.000-08:00

Heather and I have — or had, anyway, in the early ’90s — a bête noire.

I think that I disliked the man instinctively — or at least had deep reservations — the instant I saw him. It may sound strange coming from me, a round-spectacled dude. But there’s a kind of passive-aggressive (or sometimes just aggressive) asshole who takes on the crunchy-earthy, round-glasses demeanor to hide a level of human empathy that would make the average Wall Street speculator seem grandmotherly.

He was a sales clerk at the main L.L. Bean store in Maine, and as I said I got a weird vibe from him the second Heather and I came into the backpack section. I was looking for a new external-frame pack to take on what was to be a life-transforming, 45-mile through-hike of Isle Royale National Park. He took me to a stand of internal-frame packs, and asked me why I was set on an external.

“Educate me,” he said. I wondered if he realized that I wasn’t dumb enough to miss his patronizing tone.

I don’t remember what I said, but it was probably something along the lines of not wanting to pay more for a pack that wouldn’t tolerate the kind of itinerant-tinker style of packing I was doing at the time. I certainly don’t feel all that strongly about the issue and, both then and now, owned more than one internal frame pack. What turned me off was the feeling that he wanted me, the customer, to justify my choice.

Needless to say, we didn’t buy. But the punch line was that every time thereafter, whenever we visited the main store, we ran into him. Didn’t matter what department; didn’t matter what day of the week, he’d be there. And his looks were nondescript — or maybe context-typical — enough that at first we wouldn’t recognize him. We’d be talking to a clerk, and at some point in an increasingly off-putting conversation we’d realize it was him.

One time, at least, I did recognize him instantly. I saw him, about halfway across the fairly large main floor, standing behind a service counter. Our eyes met, and — I swear to God — he pounded the counter with both fists, like a cave man. It might have been intimidating if it hadn’t been so damned distractingly bizarre.

All of which to make the point that I don’t know why the first encounter with this fellow started off on a weird footing — but a lot of researchers are open to the idea that smells may have something to do with it.

I’m talking about pheromones: airborne chemicals that members of the same species use to communicate with each other. The signal can serve sexual, social, alarm, or even identification purposes. Though the concept is hardly new — people have realized for thousands of years that a bitch in heat will draw males by smell — the word, and the specific definition of what a pheromone is and does, is exactly 50 years old this month, a bit of trivia I learned from an essay in Nature by Oxford pheromone expert Tristram D. Wyatt.

People use the word “instinctive” quite a bit without stopping to think of how meaningless it is. When we say an animal — let alone a human — reacts instinctively to a situation, in fact we’re saying we don’t have the slightest idea how or why she reacted that way, only that, in retrospect, the reaction was appropriate for reasons she couldn’t have thought through.

But what, then, is instinct? How does anybody’s “gut” tell them how to react, often in a split second? Subtle visual cues? ESP? Or are we just judging after the fact, putting a label on lucky guesses and conveniently ignoring the times our guts told us wrong?

The existence of pheromones in species from bacteria to mammals argues that, at least for some situations, the cue may be chemical. And it may be very real.

Now, pheromones are a tricky business in vertebrates, and especially mammals. In insects, where the concept was first defined, it couldn’t be simpler: a male moth encounters a female’s pheromone plume in the air, and he homes in to do the dirty (or try to talk her into it). Signal, response. Easy to conceptualize, easy to measure.

Problem is, mammals don’t do anything for just one reason. So rather than a clear signal/response arc, you get increased interest — subtle, and hard-to-pin-down, changes in behavior as each of the many factors that weigh in on what the animal does next gets its vote. Another level of complication comes from the fact that pheromone signals aren’t single molecules; they’re tightly controlled bouquets of different chemicals, containing strict ratios of each component. That’s one reason the same molecule can be a vital component of the come-hither signal for both Asian elephants and 140 kinds of moth, as Wyatt points out.

The big question, of course, is whether human beings respond to pheromones. We have a number of tantalizing hints that we do:

our olfactory epithelia contain receptors similar to those that detect pheromones in other species
our armpits (with some help from bacteria) produce molecules similar to animal pheromones
we tend to marry people whose pheromone-associated genes complement our own
all those musky colognes and perfumes, which employ animal pheromones to get oomph
the college roommate thing

That last one deserves some elaboration. A lot of people have the common-wisdom version of this story: In 1971, Martha K. McClintock reported that women who lived together tended to synchronize their menstrual periods. In the popluar imagination, this has translated into: when women room together, they have their periods at the same time.

The key word, though, was “tended;” the kind of lock-step synchronization that people often assume doesn’t happen more often than we’d expect by chance. What McClintock actually saw was that, when women lived together, their periods would move toward each other a modest amount that was statistically greater than random chance. She didn’t actually see anything like perfect timing. And subsequent researchers have questioned whether the phenomenon even takes place.

Which is not to say that humans don’t use pheromones to transmit chemical messages that transcend verbal or visual cues. I think that we’re likely to see that idea verified by more data; but the jury’s still out at the moment.

Still, I know there was something I didn’t like about that guy ...

The Smell of Fear

2009-01-14T12:22:00.000-08:00

Looking back on it, the kid was rattled — I think that, even through the distortion of hindsight, that’s a valid memory.

I was taking a break from dog tasks in the search for a missing adolescent girl. When I showed up at the command post, exhausted but willing to fly a desk for a while, they put me in the Operations Section, and set me to debriefing teams as they came in from the field.

A bit about debriefing: it is perhaps the second-most important part of any search, behind the “planning” function of deciding where to assign teams to search. Most searches that I’ve seen fail did so not because a searcher missed the subject, but because no searcher ever got within a reasonable detection distance of the subject. The second-most common mode of failure, though, is when important information fails to make its way from the field to the Planning Section.

The very young field-team leader before me had been assigned to search a neighbor’s farm. He and his grid team of human searchers had found nothing in the parts of the task he’d been able to accomplish; but what really stood out was how emphatically he pushed the need to send other searcher back to check the parts he couldn’t access because of locked gates.

“You need to check those fields,” he’d said. Yes, even then I was surprised that such a common on-task occurrence had fazed him so badly. Patronizingly, I admit, I put it down to his youth and inexperience.

Still, I dutifully entered, in the debrief section on the flip side of his TAF, or task-assignment form, something like: FTL reports parts of areas inaccessible: advises follow up.

That was enough, I know, to get the area searched again, and it was, more than once. What I hadn’t known at the time was that Heather — we’d arrived at the search separately, and were on different sleep cycles so I hadn’t seen much of her — had taken a dog out to that same farm the previous night, and had also come back rattled, reporting an inability to get to the whole farm but begging Ops to get another team in there.

Heather don’t rattle so easily.

They were both, in retrospect, absolutely correct to be agitated: as the parallel police investigation began to center on the caretaker for that farm, the incident gradually became a criminal search. Eventually, searchers found our subject’s quad rider, buried in manure, which along with a confession helped lead the police to a not-so-shallow grave that the perp had dug with a back hoe.

Now I don’t know whether odor had anything to do with the instinctive fear both team leaders apparently experienced at a murder scene with a body nearby. Certainly, there’s a literature linking odors to fear responses. And it beats the hell out of ESP as an explanation. But the story did come to mind when I encountered a surprising paper linking mad cow disease with fear responses.

Bruno Lobão-Soares and colleagues at the University of Sao Paulo were looking at the curious effect of a gene called Prp-C. This gene makes a protein that becomes, all by its lonesome, an infectious agent merely by becoming misfolded. In ways we don’t completely understand yet, the misfolded, Prp-Sc, protein gains the ability to convert its brethren to its derangement. This chain reaction causes a slow buildup of junk protein in the brain that leads to massive destruction of tissues and a variety of brain-wasting diseases: mad-cow, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, in cattle; scrapie in sheep; chronic wasting disease in deer and moose; and Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease in humans.

This is a particularly frightening family of disorders, because unlike viral or bacterial infections, there is no living (if I can push the definition, for a virus) pathogen you can kill to prevent spread. Because the disease comes from an infectious protein, called a prion, it’s extremely difficult if not impossible to make contaminated tissues safe to eat: heat, radiation, chemical agents all tend to leave the Prp-Sc protein unscathed, and able to devastate a mind, if consumed. That’s why reports of scrapie, or mad cow, result in thousands of animals being killed, burned, and buried rather than eaten; it’s why hunters across the country are examining their kills carefully before they have them butchered.

But here’s the interesting thing the Brazilian Beat saw when they exposed PrpC-genetically engineered mice to a snake:

Both mice engineered to lack the protein and those engineered to have unnaturally high levels of it were singularly incautious in the presence of snakes (one of the signs being decreased sniffing behavior). But there was an important difference:
The over-endowed mice were hyperactive, fearless, and bizarrely motivated to seek sensual stimulation — by sight, touch, and smell.
The mice without the protein simply had no ability to concentrate on anything, fearful or otherwise — as the authors wrote, “... the Prp-C deficiency might lead to attention deficits.”

Now, linking prions to fear responses — which we know can be initiated by smells — would have been enough to warrant notice in these august pages. But what really floated this bloggist’s boat was the tricky similarity of symptoms brought about by completely opposite problems.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that I’m winging it here — I might be all wrong — but I’m fascinated by the possibility that two people we might call, at first glance, “impulse-control impaired” or even “hyperactive” could be acting that way because of profoundly different causes. One has diminished ability to attend to details; the other has an over-active urge to focus on them.

Isn’t science fun?

But I’ll tell you one thing: the next time I sense that level of anxiety in an incoming team leader, I will add to the TAF: FTL wigged out as all shit — this may be something real.

There Ain’t No Justice

2009-01-09T10:24:00.000-08:00

I wasn’t there to see it — I think I was out on a task with my airscent dog, Pip — but better-half Heather described it vividly enough that I think I have a pretty accurate picture in my mind.

As the dog handler stood in front of her, waiting for a search task in a search for a missing turkey hunter, she reviewed the standard form that our search managers have all dog handlers fill out. It lists a number of the possible certifications that a search-and-rescue dog-and-handler team might have earned to demonstrate their competency in searching for lost people.

Too often, “dog handlers” check off none of the boxes; I think that I’ve been able to check two of them [1]; we’re happy when we get handlers with one cert.

This guy had checked off pretty much every one.

“I notice you have DCNR certification,” I can clearly hear Heather saying in my head. God, I know that tone — head for cover when you hear it, brother. “Who was your evaluator?”

“I can’t remember his name,” came the foolish reply. He should have been running, not talking.

“That’s interesting,” she said, “because I’m the only DCNR evaluator in this part of the state, and I don’t remember you.”

What happened next may have not exactly been dramatic — the search managers simply didn’t give this individual a search task to perform — but over the next few weeks the bureaucratic equivalent of a Tsunami came down on this truth-impaired individual. Posts to NASAR and DCNR confirmed he’d never tested with either organization; both sent him cease-and-desist letters. And as far as I know, nobody who’s at all integrated into our local SAR command structure has used him since.

“Heather is my hero,” Vicki Coup, the head canine evaluator for DCNR, told me later.

It was one of the few times I’ve ever seen bald-faced misconduct in the SAR community meet with anything approaching effective punishment, at least from the community (a few have fallen afoul of the courts, I’m afraid); probably that Vicki had ever seen, too. That’s because even fairly serious misbehavior tends to elicit only groans and protestations that “nothing can be done.” People just don’t have the stomach to be the bad guy, to take the time and trouble to follow through on dispensing punishment. In this case, the consequences happened only because Heather wouldn’t let it go.

But here’s the rub: in Pennsylvania’s decentralized commonwealth system, many of the local law enforcement agencies are not well connected to the SAR community and don’t know whom to turn to — and whom to avoid — when they have a lost person on their hands. For all I know, someone may be counting on this guy, who maybe doesn’t know the first thing about what he’s doing and certainly isn’t trustworthy, right at this moment.

And that, boys and girls, is the topic of my late-but-under-the-wire post today [2]: The cost of punishment to the punisher, and the difficult scientific job of understanding why people and other organisms who get no immediate payoff from doing anything but look out for Number One engage in altruistic behavior.

My spur was a recent paper by Hisashi Ohtsuki, of Tokyo Insitute of Technology and Kyushu University, and crew in Nature, and accompanying commentary by Bettina Rockenbach of the Univesrity of Erfurt, Germany, and Manfred Milinski of the Max Planck Institute for Evoltionary Biology in Plön. Ohtsuki carried out a series of theoretical calculations to see what conditions could make the cost of punishing a bad guy persist.

There’s a broad mismatch between scientific thinking on altruism — which stipulates that, in order to have evolved in the first place, altruism somehow has to offer a payback that covers (or exceeds) its cost — and common-sense observation. As a one-time biologist myself, I can’t get around the former. On the other hand, folks like Kristen Monroe have written pretty persuasively about the latter: how this theoretical underpinning sometimes falls on its face in view of how people actually act.

What the current papers point out is just how far (assuming they need to get payback) people will go to avoid taking on the cost of punishing someone. While I’m with Monroe in the larger sense, I have to admit that my own experience in the world of policing misbehavior among volunteer SAR responders tracks with Ohtsuki findings.

The problem, in the Tokyo-led group’s computer simulations, is that punishing a bad guy costs the punisher enough that rational decision makers would tend to avoid it [3]. If there’s little or no information on who the good guys and bad guys are, everybody tends to assume the worst and simply look out for themselves. If there’s reasonably good identification of good guys and bad guys — particularly when people can trade information on past behavior — the best strategy ought to be “CD,” for cooperate with good guys and defect, or just decline to work with bad guys. This is probably the most common strategy I see in real life among SAR teams faced with problem teams and individuals.

But. There is a Goldilocks set of conditions — when reasonably good information is available on past behavior, and punishing bad guys can establish you as a good guy — in which “CP,” for cooperate with good and punish bad — can arise and persist.

“Heather is my hero,” you may recall the head DCNR evaluator telling me.

Even more interesting was a bit that Rockenbach and Milinski added, to the effect that their own research suggests that CD and CP can co-exist and were actually more stable than CD-only, when participants had the option of avoiding bad guys but punishing really bad guys.

Again, for reasons that I hope to write about in the not-too-far, Monroe poses some serious challenges to the simple idea that there has to be a payoff; even on a theoretical basis, Rockenbach and Milinski say of the more complex regime in which reaction to bad guys is conditional, “Such a possibility sets a challenge for theorists.” And Ohtsuki and pals admit that a system can persist, for quite some time, even when it’s not completely optimal.

Read Heart of Altruism if you want to know more right away about Monroe’s work, I can certainly recommend it. But I’m damned if the virtual actors in these latest reports aren’t, under what amounts to “what’s in it for me” rules, acting a lot like some people I know.

One word of advice, though: if you’re going to piss somebody off, try not to make it Heather.

[1] Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources Air-Scent K9, and my current cert, National Association for Search and Rescue Canine SARTECH II.
[2] I’m embarking on new territory, seeing if I can get permission to republish figures from several journal articles for a series on the structure of airborne scent plumes and what nature has to tell us about how best to follow them to source. Wish me luck.
[3] Yes, I know. The trick is, then, that irrationality must offer a payback that makes it persist, which almost takes you back to square one — though it can in fact offer a payback for some other context, unrelated to altruism, that offsets its cost in the altruism context.

Now Wait a Minute ...

2008-12-29T08:30:00.000-08:00

It was exactly the kind of search that members of our all-volunteer team are not supposed to be doing: A missing despondent, spouse couldn’t account for all the guns in the house, and a very suburban setting to boot. It’s what we simply call a “law enforcement search,” three guesses who has the training, equipment, and authority to conduct it.

Having said that, just because we couldn’t look for the subject didn’t mean we couldn’t help at all. Our folks took places in the incident command post; among other field-search specialists, Barbara Butler, then a rookie member of our team, and I accompanied a local law officer on a house-to-house survey of the neighborhood, to find out if anybody had seen our guy.

I scored some points out of the gate, by asking the officer if he knew if anybody in the neighborhood was out of town or of any houses otherwise unoccupied. He realized right away what I was getting at, and drove us over to a house that we canvassed quickly to make sure there weren’t any open or unlocked doors or windows. Dead end, but it’s always good to be pitching ideas they like [1].

It was also a bit of an education as to how the world looks to our law-enforcement colleagues: I recall our reception at one house. The officer had commented on these folks being frequent fliers, as it were, and they were bristling with hostility the instant they saw the squad car pull up. But when he introduced us as the department’s search-and-rescue team [2], and it became clear we were looking for their missing neighbor and wanted their help, not to roust them, they brightened up and did what they could. They hadn’t seen anything, but I like to think it may have helped both family and cop down the road to have had at least one interaction that wasn’t adversarial.

But the reason I bring this story up is what happened just as we were saying goodbye to those folks: the officer’s radio crackled with the news that a state trooper had found our guy, not too far from where we stood. Barb and I piled into the back of the cruiser and got quite a ride.

As we careened down the suburban avenues, lights and sirens going, other local and state police cars filed in with us until we were something of a parade. It was fantastic, like being the cameraman for an episode of Cops.

So we pull up to the verge of a small, wooded local park, and the officers pile out of their cars, running into the woods. I don’t think that at the time I knew the full story — that the subject had come at a state trooper with a knife — but it was pretty clear that the situation was their bailiwick. Not for us untrained, unarmed volunteers.

Barb is walking after them.

My hand comes down on her shoulder: “No you are not,” I say, in what probably wasn’t the only time I’ve pulled rank on a junior team member, but may be the only time it ever worked. A few minutes later, we see the police escorting the guy to one of their cars — the trooper had had a Knock on Wood [3] moment and come through with flying colors, disarming a mentally ill subject without having to hurt him.

This is not to pick on Barb, by the way: in the rush to go help, rescuers often get themselves into situations they can’t handle. Tunnel vision kills rescuers: that’s why it frustrates me when everybody lionizes a local rescuer who leaves a widow(er) and kids behind attempting something he or she wasn’t trained to do. You’re always supposed to survey any rescue scene and make sure there isn’t a situation that could make you patient number two; you’re always supposed to stay within the limits of what you’ve been trained to do — and just because people make understandable, very human mistakes, teammates are supposed to rein you in now and again.

All the best intentions aside, somebody just has to say, “Now wait a minute ...”

Enter a paper from last year on ground-scent tracking by humans, which came to my attention again because an automated PychINFO search tagged it (possibly because it just entered that database). The leaders of the multi-institutional team that did the study were Jess Porter of UC Berkeley and Noam Sobel of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.

We have to keep one big thing in mind: These guys were studying whether humans could follow a ground trail, much as a search-and-rescue trailing dog does, mainly because they wanted to study the phenomenon of ground trailing with the benefit of subjects that can tell you what they’re thinking and what strategies they’re using, and will accept all sorts of nose and head attachments that might get you bit by other subjects. On these terms they succeeded amply [4].

The idea was simple: Could they produce a trail of a scent that humans can detect — chocolate — that humans could follow, without the use of their eyes or other senses? And what would that experience teach about how other species follow ground scent?

The short answer: People could not only learn to follow a chocolate scent on the ground, they could get much better at it with practice. Even more interesting:
* Just as in dogs, a higher frequency of sniffing allowed a more accurate and speedy trail.
* As in critters as different as maggots and rats, both nostrils have to be in play for a good, efficient trail, further cementing the human subject as relevant to what the animals are doing.

The latter observation was particularly interesting from the SAR perspective, because it isn’t at all clear how two nostrils, right next to each other, can give you any useful information about which direction to move along a trail. How can a dog’s nostrils, maybe an inch apart, tell you anything about the age of scent in either direction when the microscopic skin particles that carry ground-based scent are only a fraction of a second older than those an inch farther down the trail?

The human subjects simply told Porter, Sobel et al. how they did it: They worked along the edges to keep themselves oriented, in much the same way that a smoke-blinded firefighter sticks to the wall to keep form losing his way in a burning building. And much the same way a number of species follow airborne scent plumes. And for that, the small separation of vertebrate nostrils is more than wide enough, as the outside edges of a scent plume can be fairly sharp.

So this pretty much looks like a win for nurture over nature, right? Maybe humans can become good enough at scent tracking to do without the bloodhounds? Even the researchers said their findings “... suggest that the poor reputation of human olfaction may reflect, in part, behavioral demands rather than ultimate abilities.”

The moderation of that statement with “in part” aside, there’s only one problem with this idea, and it’s where the nurture-conquers-all take starts to fall apart. Instead of leaving trace scent on the ground, which is what SAR dogs follow, the researchers used a string soaked in odorant to create their “ground scent.” That means that, instead of the scent impression left behind by a moving point source of scent, which is what a SAR dog has to trail, their subjects were traveling along a linear source of relatively constant scent. The ersatz trail doesn’t vary nearly as much, if at all, in age and, presumably, intensity as you go along. This isn’t immediately important to the researchers’ findings, but it does cast a shadow on the the long-term relevance (though they could re-design the experiment to get around this).

A string soaked in chocolate is a much stronger, more consistent scent source than a moving human being, whose microscopic debris are hitting the ground in a ragged path partly dictated by crosswind and possibly varying quite a bit in intensity as it goes along. The humans may be able to do the scent-string task, and they may even get good at it: but it’s not the same job the dogs do. And when you compare what humans can do with a continuous, presumably strong scent source versus a dog following a trace trail that’s a day or two old — this experimental design can’t even touch the subject of trail aging realistically — and you realize that the dog is achieving something vastly harder.

Worse, the information this experiment gives on how the human subjects followed the scent trail may not be relevant to real-life scent trailing: because the trail doesn’t vary along its length like a real one does, the directional cue is vastly different. The researchers don’t say, but it looks like their subjects basically knew which way to turn once they hit the trail, they just needed to know they’d hit it — and to stay with it once they did. As such, the situation is far closer to that of detecting airborne scent plumes, as in the research I cited above and as airscenting SAR dogs do, than it is to ground scenting. That’s because in the former, there’s also a cue as to which direction to head when you hit the scent: the direction of the wind. For modeling ground scent, it maybe isn’t so germane [5]:

[Note that the scent actually takes the form of delicate filaments, not the dots I have here — I haven’t figured out how to draw that effect yet.]

Which doesn’t really constitute a serious critique of the present experiment — as I said, I think they can redesign it to be more realistic, and in any case they succeeded in meeting their initial goal of showing humans can trail at all. But it does remind us that something is going on between the dog’s prominent nose, ample receptor repertoire, massive olfactory bulbs, and who knows what else, that transcends anything our environment can do to help us use our smellers better.

And Barb? Well, she’s been with the team for quite a few years now, and unlike your’s truly, actually went through the official training and certification for incident staff members. At a search, she’s the boss of me.

If you want to know whether she’s ever had to rein me in, you’ll have to ask her.

[1] And you can bet that, if we’d found anything important, I would have happily given him the credit — local law enforcement are our clients.

[2] No, we’re not actually affiliated with that department. But I never argue when they take ownership of us — again, they’re our clients, and it’s a good thing when they want you. Our uniforms, by the way, were designed to look decidedly not like police uniforms.

[3] The version of the song I knew was

The Mighty Mighty Bosstones’, and it’s great — but I was surprised to find that it has a 42-year history I hadn’t known about.

[4] I’m not going to get into the difference between tracking and trailing as dog handlers use the terms, partly because you’ll get different answers from different handler, and partly because the design of this experiment obscures the issue.

[5] Without going into a ton of detail, a scent plume in the air — and probably a trail on the ground, since it’s in effect an imprint of earlier airborne scent — is pretty ragged and intermittent. Though it may seem obvious that you head into the stronger scent, in practice the direction of the stronger scent may be anything but obvious.

Latest Fiction Offerings

2008-12-23T08:13:00.000-08:00

Happy Holidays.

Today I’m departing from our usual fare to update folks on my latest fiction projects.

I just received my author’s copy of the January/February 2009 issue of Cicada, which contains my short story “And Yet It Moves,” an historical piece on Galileo’s confession. This is my first resale of a story (it appeared in Paradox in 2003), and although it’s a departure from my usual science fiction offerings it is one of my favorites. The Cicada website no longer seems to allow you to buy single issues of the magazine, but I’ve found that most Barnes & Noble stores stock it; if they don’t, they can order it for you; just tell the salesperson that Cicada is the young-adult literary magazine published by the Cricket Magazine Group.

More of a professional risk on my part is A Matter of Gravity, my novel now posted to authonomy.com. Briefly, A Matter of Gravity is a book about communication — and how understanding someone's language is crucial to unpuzzling his intent. Michiko Kawachi, a young linguist with humanity’s first-contact mission with the nont’h alien race, must decode the aliens’ language to prevent war — and discover a secret that will upend humanity's understanding of the universe. Please check out the link to the book, which will take you to the authonomy.com site that allows you to read and rank it.

The context: authonomy.com is an innovative site started by HarperCollins to allow new writers to bypass the slush-pile process. For those who aren’t familiar with the industry, the slush pile is the stack of novels they give to an under-paid, over-worked junior editor, with the instruction, “Find the good stuff: But if you take too long at it, or waste our time with books we don’t like, we’ll likely fire you within a year.” For a long time, many writers have suspected the slush-pile process was too overloaded to produce good decisions, and with so few publishers now accepting manuscripts from new writers it’s become rather hopeless even to get noticed, let alone read, considered, bought, etc.

Authonomy.com represents HarperCollins’ answer to the proposition that the slush pile process is fundamentally broken and needs to be replaced. They say they’ve had luck with it, in that by allowing visitors to the site to read and rank the books they’ve in essence recruited an army of slush-pile readers who may well be more representative of the general readership. Books that do well get considered for publication by HarperCollins: no guarantees, but at this point I have to say that if I don’t have enough confidence in my book to expose it to this process, well ...

So please check it out; you may also find other offerings on authonomy.com that you might want to read and rank. Heck, it’s free books to read, and you may discover your next favorite writer.

The Buzzer Buzzes On

2008-12-22T10:40:00.000-08:00

Well. In answer to the question, “Would Americans still do this?” here is the answer.

I’m not terribly surprised that we did do this today — the memory of 9/11, and the ensuing feeling we had to let the authorities do whatever they needed to if we wanted them to protect us, is still fresh enough. You might say Abu Ghraib et al. might have taught us better, but then the original Milgram subjects had been reading about a Nazi war crimes trial in the papers just before recruitment.

I’m maybe less surprised than saddened by the fact that it was so easy for them to find subjects who hadn’t heard of the Milgram experiment.

“Did we need to repeat this experiment?” was the other question that immediately leapt to my mind. At first I wanted to say, “No,” but maybe the identical result it obtained argues otherwise. Maybe every generation needs to repeat this experiment, if Milgram was so easily forgotten.

BTW, check out my wife’s blog on this — I haven’t read it yet, but I think she may have a different take.

We All Pressed the Buzzer

2008-12-16T06:44:00.000-08:00

I can’t believe I forgot another connection with yesterday’s alcoholism-treatment study — “Buzzer,” the amazing new song from Dar Williams, which I heard on the incomparable WYEP this morning while driving to work. It should be required listening for all human beings.

The song is about the Milgram experiment, a chilling psychology study from the early ’60s. Briefly, Milgram set the experiment up to look like a study of memory and learning in which the experimental (human) subject, called the “learner,” would be punished for wrong answers via an electrical shock delivered by another volunteer participant, the “teacher.” An “experimenter” monitored the process, telling the teacher when to up the voltage.

The trick was that the teacher, not the learner, was the experimental subject; and the study wasn’t about memory, but about people’s willingness, while the Adolf Eichmann war-crimes trial was still under way, to follow an authority figure’s instructions to do something awful. The learner was actually an actor, who received no electrical shocks but agonized and screamed and finally pretended to lose consciousness under the fake torture. If the teacher balked, he or she received the following set of instructions, with the experimenter escalating the commands for every objection raised:

1. Please continue.
2. The experiment requires that you continue.
3. It is absolutely essential that you continue.
4. You have no other choice, you must go on.

The shocking thing was, the experimenters got 65 percent of the teachers to go all the way to 450 volts, the point at which the actor lost consciousness. Only one teacher refused to go on before hitting 300 volts.

Turns out, under the right conditions, just about all of us are shits.

The Milgram experiment, like our alcoholism study, would probably never be approved these days. But though Milgram got his share of flak on ethical grounds, I think what this experiment taught us is too terrible and momentous to ignore, and probably in the long run justifies the damned thing. (Though some of the people who “verified” his results later on did things that make me angry, like doing it for real, with a puppy as the victim — and no, I’m not making that up.)

A lot of people know about Milgram; fewer know about what folks like psychologist Lauren Slater found out many years later. The teachers who went all the way, it turned out, weren’t the people you’d necessarily think, and neither were the folks who, at one point or another, refused to go on. One obeyer was devastated when he learned what the study had been about, and used the experience as a prod to change his life. He came out of the closet and became an activist for gay rights. One refuser went on to a long career in the military; and while I wouldn’t read too much into that, his reasons for stopping the experiment stemmed from the effect the stress was having on him, not out of concern for the victim. Two points don’t constitute much of a data set, but they show us that the details confound our broadest brush-strokes.

So here it is: We can all be shits. We all pressed the buzzer.

But.

We all get to be individuals. We can choose to change ourselves, make ourselves more honest, braver, better. We can rise above our mistakes. Bilbo was meant to find the Ring. Hope isn’t the last refuge of the clueless.

And it begins with a one-syllable word, a word that comes easily when we’re two but not so much when we're 32:

NO.