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 …
Saturday, August 15, 2009
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Crowded House
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.
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.
Friday, July 24, 2009
Now On Sale!
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!
“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!
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Oops
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.
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.
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.
Thursday, July 9, 2009
Pathbreaking
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.
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.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Middle-Aged Men and Fire
Or, Runaway Hose
So I made it through Fire School. Here I was, a 47-year-old rookie, running around with teens and twenty-somethings, struggling to hold fire hoses on target [1], crawling on hands and knees in heavy turnout gear, my fire-resistant balaclava pulled over my face to simulate zero-visibility smoke, straining to control my breathing so I didn’t suck all the air out of my SCBA tank …
Man, was I sore on Monday. But I held my own, did better than some, and kept up with my pre-18 junior firefighter partner — a solid kid, by the way, I definitely want him there on a real call. We determined to volunteer to be the first to do everything, and damned near did.
Thanks to my joining Harmony Volunteer Fire Company a couple of weeks after last year’s Fire School, I’d been in the company for nearly a year before I had the opportunity, and so most of it turned out be a review of stuff I’d already been taught. But they had one exercise that was new to me: how to recover a runaway fire hose.
You see, at the end of an already-heavy fire hose is a metal coupling that can really hurt somebody if the hose gets loose, either from a break in a coupling, someone not following proper procedure and allowing a charged hose to turn itself on, or merely somebody taking a fall and losing control of the hose. Remember, the stream of water coming out of fire hose can be between 100 and 300 pounds per square inch — that’s a lot of specific impulse, and can make a hose end into a deadly projectile.
The safe way to wrangle a runaway hose is to straddle the hose, well upstream of the offending end, on your hands and knees, crawling as fast as you can while keeping the hose down with your hands. You dampen the erratic pendulum of the hose gradually, lessening its amplitude, and thus its potential for mayhem, finally getting hold of the coupling itself.
Only trick was, if the hose was behaving itself a little too much as we got toward the coupling, the instructor kicked it to send it moving. Thanks, dude; but I guess I did OK, all the same.
Today I thought I’d take on a scientific/ethical/moral quandary that is more complex, more like a runaway fire hose, than the many discussions you can find on the web often seem to fathom.
Was Josef Mengele a bad scientist, or merely an evil scientist?
It seems like you can’t take two steps without tripping over a gratuitous comparison of someone to Hitler. My own take, I think, is that Jon Stewart got it exactly right [2]. And as the Better Half has pointed out, comparing someone to the closest thing this world has ever seen to Sauron is tantamount to admitting you have nothing intelligent to say about them. It’s the ultimate ad-hominem attack; you don’t get many people in a generation, worldwide, whose evil is so profound and powerful that the reference isn’t, as bad as the person in question may be, a slur.
A few years back I had the opportunity, at a seminar connected with a major medical school’s graduation ceremonies, to watch a physician-turned-historian [3] give a talk on Nazi medicine that was spectacular. His argument was not the standard — that the Nazis subverted science — but that their entire belief system was, at the time, a logically justified, if undeniably evil, extrapolation of the best science of the day. His point was that science carries no moral polarity of itself; that no proper scientific knowledge is immune to being harnessed to the purposes of evil.
Eugenics — the narrow end of the wedge that led from the Nazis initially sounding, to some people anyway, as beneficent, to the practice of unapologetic mass murder — is exhibit A. Based on the evolutionary and genetic science of today, it’s a joke. Today we know it’s a fundamental misunderstanding, which failed because it didn’t account for the then-unknown phenomenon of genetic drift. The latter makes it impossible to improve or enhance the human race by weeding out the “unfit,” even if you had a morally defensible definition of that concept, as slippery as a runaway fire hose.
But scientifically, that’s hindsight. Based on the scientific understanding of the late 1930s, eugenics wasn’t a fringe belief: it was the mainstream of medical thought. And it was not uniquely Nazi or even German [4]; its leadership, arguably, hailed a generation earlier from America, where much eugenic legislation got its start, though thankfully it didn’t take hold (more about that in a moment).
Here’s the bitter pill that those of us trained to be researchers in liberal democracies have tremendous trouble swallowing: whether it is correct or incorrect, what we think we understand scientifically will not civilize people, will not necessarily help the Good Guys. And conversely, unpleasant, dangerous, and made-for-evil scientific discoveries are not, by definition, bad science. Evil, yes; not bad, in the sense of necessarily being improperly performed or producing incorrect discoveries.
Two observations along these lines. The first, though I’ve gotten to it late in the discussion, is the paper that launched me onto this topic in the first place: a treatise on the senses by Sir Kenelm Digby, and published in 1644. Amidst the archaic spellings, get a load of the following, regarding the sense of smell [5]:
“So that thofe mafters, who will teach vs that the impreffions vpon fenfe are made by fpirituall or fpiritelike thinges or qualities; which they call intentionall fpeciefes, muft labour at two workes: the one to make it appeare that there are in nature fusch thinges as they would perfuade us, the other to proue that thefe materiall actions we fpeake of are not able to performe thofe effects, for which the fenfes are giuen vnto livuing creatures. And vntill they haue done that, I conceiue we should be much too blame to admit fuch thinges, as we neyther haue ground for in reafon, nor can vnderftand what they are. And therefore, we muft refolue to reft in this beliefe, which experience breedeth in vs: that thefe bodies worke vpon our fenfes no other wayes then by a corporeall operation; and that fuch a one is fufficient for all the effects we fee proceede from them: as in the proceffe of this difcourfe we shall more amply declare.”
Get that? He’s refuting the theory that we smell things through a fairy-like transmission of qualities in favor of a corporeal contact between the object being smelled and the nose. He’s anticipating the concept of airborne chemicals constituting scent by at least a couple of centuries.
When I first read the above, it made me think of the Nazi eugenics movement — and its uncomfortable origins in science that has now been refuted, but was cutting-edge in its day — and made me want to set Digby and Mengele up as opposite ends of the spectrum: the former coming to the right conclusions despite the fact that he was using an unscientific method, the latter going so very wrong, morally at the very least, while following the scientific method, including peer review, experimental design, all nine yards. In retrospect, though, I’m going to give Digby a pass, as the standards of his day did uphold his work as scientifically valid.
We want to dismiss Mengele as an anomaly, and certainly we would be spurious to take the logical leap of blaming Nazism on genetic and evolutionary science, as some do [6]. But we can’t get off the hook that much of the laudable science of today will turn out to be just as incorrect as the eugenic beliefs of then. What matters is not whether we’re wrong or right — I can’t tell you how many PR bosses I’ve had who didn’t understand the critical fact that much of science is wrong for perfectly valid reasons — but how we apply the knowledge we think we’ve learned. And that’s not science; it’s morality.
Which brings me to eugenics in America, and one of the shimmering events that helped prevent the insidious practice from gaining a permanent (or more extended than it was, anyway) foothold here.
In 1905, both houses of my own Pennsylvania’s legislature voted in favor of a measure to force sterilization of “idiots” [7]. The state was poised, I believe, to become the first in the nation to enact a radical eugenic agenda.
Enter Governor Samuel Pennypacker, who vetoed the bill with words that continue to ring with all the right stuff a century later:
“Scientists, like all other men whose experience has been limited to one pursuit … are prone … to lose sight of broad principles outside of their domain … To admit such an operation would be to inflict cruelty upon a helpless class … which the state has undertaken to protect.”
Go, boy.
Though the legislature failed to override Pennypacker’s veto, he did not kill politically sanctioned eugenics in the U.S. — two years later, Indiana enacted a similar bill, and of course there’s the gut-wrenching, if not strictly eugenic, Tuskegee study, which shamefully didn’t end until 1972 [8]. But Pennypacker’s stand, seeing past the scientific question to the moral imperative beyond, put the eugenicists on notice that there would be resistance. And it set the stage.
Some of us, you see, know how to ride a runaway fire hose.
[1] In some ways, the 1.75-inch hose is a bigger beast than the 2.5-inch hose — for the latter, you tend to use a four-man rather than two-man team, and of course the former has a higher operating pressure (I’m afraid I can’t remember the respective pressures at the moment, and they depend on what kind of nozzle you’re using as well; I’ll have to ask).
[2] Stop reading my blog and watch this video right now.
[3] It’s a shame, I can’t find this guy on the web, can’t recall his name; all I remember was that he was of Asian descent, and that he made a damned good case.
[4] Richard Evans makes a case that the Nazis dominated the medicine of the age, but that’s a distinct issue.
[5] Remember, the “fs” have an “S” sound, not an “F” sound.
[6] I haven’t bothered to give a link here, because if you Google “Nazi evolution” you’ll get a craw full of people making gratuitous Hitler and Nazi accusations (along with treatises trying to convince us that Nazi science was fundamentally flawed).
[7] Whistling in the dark, if you know anything about the Pennsylvania legislature.
[8] Nineteen-fucking-seventy two. Makes you want to puke.
Man, was I sore on Monday. But I held my own, did better than some, and kept up with my pre-18 junior firefighter partner — a solid kid, by the way, I definitely want him there on a real call. We determined to volunteer to be the first to do everything, and damned near did.
Thanks to my joining Harmony Volunteer Fire Company a couple of weeks after last year’s Fire School, I’d been in the company for nearly a year before I had the opportunity, and so most of it turned out be a review of stuff I’d already been taught. But they had one exercise that was new to me: how to recover a runaway fire hose.
You see, at the end of an already-heavy fire hose is a metal coupling that can really hurt somebody if the hose gets loose, either from a break in a coupling, someone not following proper procedure and allowing a charged hose to turn itself on, or merely somebody taking a fall and losing control of the hose. Remember, the stream of water coming out of fire hose can be between 100 and 300 pounds per square inch — that’s a lot of specific impulse, and can make a hose end into a deadly projectile.
The safe way to wrangle a runaway hose is to straddle the hose, well upstream of the offending end, on your hands and knees, crawling as fast as you can while keeping the hose down with your hands. You dampen the erratic pendulum of the hose gradually, lessening its amplitude, and thus its potential for mayhem, finally getting hold of the coupling itself.
Only trick was, if the hose was behaving itself a little too much as we got toward the coupling, the instructor kicked it to send it moving. Thanks, dude; but I guess I did OK, all the same.
Today I thought I’d take on a scientific/ethical/moral quandary that is more complex, more like a runaway fire hose, than the many discussions you can find on the web often seem to fathom.
Was Josef Mengele a bad scientist, or merely an evil scientist?
It seems like you can’t take two steps without tripping over a gratuitous comparison of someone to Hitler. My own take, I think, is that Jon Stewart got it exactly right [2]. And as the Better Half has pointed out, comparing someone to the closest thing this world has ever seen to Sauron is tantamount to admitting you have nothing intelligent to say about them. It’s the ultimate ad-hominem attack; you don’t get many people in a generation, worldwide, whose evil is so profound and powerful that the reference isn’t, as bad as the person in question may be, a slur.
A few years back I had the opportunity, at a seminar connected with a major medical school’s graduation ceremonies, to watch a physician-turned-historian [3] give a talk on Nazi medicine that was spectacular. His argument was not the standard — that the Nazis subverted science — but that their entire belief system was, at the time, a logically justified, if undeniably evil, extrapolation of the best science of the day. His point was that science carries no moral polarity of itself; that no proper scientific knowledge is immune to being harnessed to the purposes of evil.
Eugenics — the narrow end of the wedge that led from the Nazis initially sounding, to some people anyway, as beneficent, to the practice of unapologetic mass murder — is exhibit A. Based on the evolutionary and genetic science of today, it’s a joke. Today we know it’s a fundamental misunderstanding, which failed because it didn’t account for the then-unknown phenomenon of genetic drift. The latter makes it impossible to improve or enhance the human race by weeding out the “unfit,” even if you had a morally defensible definition of that concept, as slippery as a runaway fire hose.
But scientifically, that’s hindsight. Based on the scientific understanding of the late 1930s, eugenics wasn’t a fringe belief: it was the mainstream of medical thought. And it was not uniquely Nazi or even German [4]; its leadership, arguably, hailed a generation earlier from America, where much eugenic legislation got its start, though thankfully it didn’t take hold (more about that in a moment).
Here’s the bitter pill that those of us trained to be researchers in liberal democracies have tremendous trouble swallowing: whether it is correct or incorrect, what we think we understand scientifically will not civilize people, will not necessarily help the Good Guys. And conversely, unpleasant, dangerous, and made-for-evil scientific discoveries are not, by definition, bad science. Evil, yes; not bad, in the sense of necessarily being improperly performed or producing incorrect discoveries.
Two observations along these lines. The first, though I’ve gotten to it late in the discussion, is the paper that launched me onto this topic in the first place: a treatise on the senses by Sir Kenelm Digby, and published in 1644. Amidst the archaic spellings, get a load of the following, regarding the sense of smell [5]:
“So that thofe mafters, who will teach vs that the impreffions vpon fenfe are made by fpirituall or fpiritelike thinges or qualities; which they call intentionall fpeciefes, muft labour at two workes: the one to make it appeare that there are in nature fusch thinges as they would perfuade us, the other to proue that thefe materiall actions we fpeake of are not able to performe thofe effects, for which the fenfes are giuen vnto livuing creatures. And vntill they haue done that, I conceiue we should be much too blame to admit fuch thinges, as we neyther haue ground for in reafon, nor can vnderftand what they are. And therefore, we muft refolue to reft in this beliefe, which experience breedeth in vs: that thefe bodies worke vpon our fenfes no other wayes then by a corporeall operation; and that fuch a one is fufficient for all the effects we fee proceede from them: as in the proceffe of this difcourfe we shall more amply declare.”
Get that? He’s refuting the theory that we smell things through a fairy-like transmission of qualities in favor of a corporeal contact between the object being smelled and the nose. He’s anticipating the concept of airborne chemicals constituting scent by at least a couple of centuries.
When I first read the above, it made me think of the Nazi eugenics movement — and its uncomfortable origins in science that has now been refuted, but was cutting-edge in its day — and made me want to set Digby and Mengele up as opposite ends of the spectrum: the former coming to the right conclusions despite the fact that he was using an unscientific method, the latter going so very wrong, morally at the very least, while following the scientific method, including peer review, experimental design, all nine yards. In retrospect, though, I’m going to give Digby a pass, as the standards of his day did uphold his work as scientifically valid.
We want to dismiss Mengele as an anomaly, and certainly we would be spurious to take the logical leap of blaming Nazism on genetic and evolutionary science, as some do [6]. But we can’t get off the hook that much of the laudable science of today will turn out to be just as incorrect as the eugenic beliefs of then. What matters is not whether we’re wrong or right — I can’t tell you how many PR bosses I’ve had who didn’t understand the critical fact that much of science is wrong for perfectly valid reasons — but how we apply the knowledge we think we’ve learned. And that’s not science; it’s morality.
Which brings me to eugenics in America, and one of the shimmering events that helped prevent the insidious practice from gaining a permanent (or more extended than it was, anyway) foothold here.
In 1905, both houses of my own Pennsylvania’s legislature voted in favor of a measure to force sterilization of “idiots” [7]. The state was poised, I believe, to become the first in the nation to enact a radical eugenic agenda.
Enter Governor Samuel Pennypacker, who vetoed the bill with words that continue to ring with all the right stuff a century later:
“Scientists, like all other men whose experience has been limited to one pursuit … are prone … to lose sight of broad principles outside of their domain … To admit such an operation would be to inflict cruelty upon a helpless class … which the state has undertaken to protect.”
Go, boy.
Though the legislature failed to override Pennypacker’s veto, he did not kill politically sanctioned eugenics in the U.S. — two years later, Indiana enacted a similar bill, and of course there’s the gut-wrenching, if not strictly eugenic, Tuskegee study, which shamefully didn’t end until 1972 [8]. But Pennypacker’s stand, seeing past the scientific question to the moral imperative beyond, put the eugenicists on notice that there would be resistance. And it set the stage.
Some of us, you see, know how to ride a runaway fire hose.
[1] In some ways, the 1.75-inch hose is a bigger beast than the 2.5-inch hose — for the latter, you tend to use a four-man rather than two-man team, and of course the former has a higher operating pressure (I’m afraid I can’t remember the respective pressures at the moment, and they depend on what kind of nozzle you’re using as well; I’ll have to ask).
[2] Stop reading my blog and watch this video right now.
[3] It’s a shame, I can’t find this guy on the web, can’t recall his name; all I remember was that he was of Asian descent, and that he made a damned good case.
[4] Richard Evans makes a case that the Nazis dominated the medicine of the age, but that’s a distinct issue.
[5] Remember, the “fs” have an “S” sound, not an “F” sound.
[6] I haven’t bothered to give a link here, because if you Google “Nazi evolution” you’ll get a craw full of people making gratuitous Hitler and Nazi accusations (along with treatises trying to convince us that Nazi science was fundamentally flawed).
[7] Whistling in the dark, if you know anything about the Pennsylvania legislature.
[8] Nineteen-fucking-seventy two. Makes you want to puke.
Saturday, June 20, 2009
What We Know for Sure
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
– Mark Twain (maybe)
I think my favorite thing about that quote is that I’ve seen it attributed, with utter certainty, to a number of people. Will Rogers supposedly said it about Herbert Hoover — but then, maybe he was unapologetically quoting Clemens [1]. I’ve also seen claims it originated earlier, with Franklin, but it doesn’t really sound either like Big Ben or his insipid (by his own admission, I think) alter ego, Poor Richard [2].
Anyhow, sorry for the two-week absence — I was indeed busy, first with Fire School and then with helping provide medical coverage for the 24 Hours of Big Bear mountain bike race.
We were busy at the latter event, but thankfully not too busy. They camped us out a little short of mile 7 — the course itself is 12 miles long, and either relay teams or a few hardy solo bikers do indeed pedal it for 24 hours, the highest number of laps winning each category — at the bottom of a ferocious hill.
I’d had a chance to ride that hill, along with about six miles of the course, on the Friday before the race, and can attest that it’s a tricky son of a bitch. It isn’t so much that it’s steep, though a couple of sections were steep, as that it’s rocky — rocks big enough that you need to keep your speed up, for fear of one stopping you cold, but also big enough that staying on top of them is non-trivial. You basically have to aim for the biggest rocks and pedal as fast as you dare, to make sure you bounce along the top. An earlier series of downhill hairpin turns don’t help either, nor does the fact that the downhill section is so long.
I pedaled into camp Friday night, trashed, just as the sun was setting: thankful I hadn’t had to do it in the dark, or as fast as I could, like the racers. The race itself began noon Saturday, and we had a steady but slow stream of patients throughout the ensuing 24, though again we only had one who scared me — but that’s a story for another day.
We did have time to see to the betterment of our trainees; in fact I was called upon to whip up a quick navigational course for them to practice map and compass skills.
I hate doing navs courses on the fly like that; you almost always get a cluster fuck. But in the event, our newbies gave us a different kind of cluster than I was expecting — looking for their first flag, they lost a radio belonging to another search team.
Now, I want to make this clear: to the extent that they didn’t take proper care of another team’s equipment, I blame that squarely on us experienced members. We never should have let them leave camp with something that expensive — I think they’re going for $500 list — improperly secured. So in addition to the obligation of needing to recover that radio for the team’s honor, I also felt a lot of personal responsibility. When the newbies headed out to look for it, accompanied by Carl, an experienced member of the other team, as a matter of course I grabbed my pack and went with them.
Carl and the recruit who’d been carrying the aforementioned radio were trying to retrace the latter’s steps, but in literally trackless West Virginia mountain terrain, covered in greenbriar and, in some spots, rhododendron with boughs as thick as a tree’s, I was dubious that it could be done by eye. Instead, I took the right flank, started at their original jumpoff point, and tried to duplicate the compass bearing they’d been walking.
When I couldn’t get a straight answer from them about what that bearing had been, it told me something. When, as we climbed, we hit an overgrown wood road and they said they’d broken their bearing to follow it uphill, it told me something more.
We stress a very practical style of navigation in search and rescue: we seldom expect people to walk compass bearings, instead teaching them to locate their target on the map and then piece together a path from “travel routes” — trails, ravines, ridgetops, gas lines, whatever is easy to walk — that may be less direct but gets you there faster and with less fatigue, by virtue of being easier to walk than a compass bearing. But when you’re taking travel routes, you take travel routes; when you walk a bearing, you have to walk an accurate bearing. Mixing and matching doesn’t work so well.
What I figured out, by the time we climbed near the ridgetop, was that they’d been veering steadily to the right as they ascended. So that “left flank” that Carl and the newbie were still trying to reconstruct was likely to be a lot farther in my direction than theirs.
If you want to lose something, by the way, a radio isn’t such a bad choice, because for a while at least, if you call it, it will call back to you. Fair is fair, Carl’s invaluable contribution to the exercise was a low-power tone he had his personal radio programmed to deliver, making the nearby (hopefully) lost radio beep at us, but not the other radios on the net, which at that point were still in use by the medical support teams.
We’d been moving, stopping, straining to hear, then repeating for a few iterations when, as faint as you can imagine, I thought I heard beeping.
“I think I hear it,” I said.
Carl: “What direction?”
“I’m not sure; it’s too faint.”
“Let’s move uphill a bit.”
Lather, rinse, repeat.
“Still not sure, but it’s louder now.” Now the second newbie, in line to my left, also thought he heard it.
Another iteration. Much louder now, and to my right. They’d drifted so far to the right that, even adding in my guesstimation of their error to the bearing they should have walked, I’d still undershot by more than the width of our little picket line. I moved toward the noise; lying on the ground in front of me, in a thankfully clear spot of ground, was the errant radio.
“I’ve got it!”
Basically, I rock.
The whole exercise, as it turned out, was emblematic of the Twain quote: the surer we’d been about the path our beginning navigators had walked, the wider the margin by which we’d have missed our mark.
Today’s entry is an exercise in taking stock of what we know and what we don’t about how the MHC genes determine humans’ choice of mates, courtesy of Jan Havlicek and S. Craig Roberts at Charles University in Prague and the University of Liverpool, respectively.
Briefly, the proteins made by the MHC genes are master actors in the vertebrate body’s defense against infection. They help identify infected cells, among other related functions, by grabbing hold of fragments of the invading microbe and displaying those fragments on the cells’ surfaces. This “antigen presentation” both alerts the immune system to the microbe’s presence and marks the infected cells for destruction.
Over the last couple of decades, researchers have been shedding light on another, surprisingly different function of the MHC: in most vertebrates, it seems to dictate an individual odor that somehow influences mate choice. In rodents — the best-studied specie for this phenomenon — females definitely choose mates whose MHC genes are different from theirs, and the effect takes place via a more- or less-attractive odor to that particular female. One girl’s Romeo is another’s Norman Bates [3].
Havlicek’s and Roberts’ concern, though, was whether this phenomenon reaches higher up the evolutionary tree — namely, to human beings. A growing body of research indicates that MHC genes — called HLA in humans — may actually play a role in our choice of mates. “Animal magnetism” may have a very aromatic cause, and one that comes literally through the nose.
The two investigators reviewed the current literature, and found a decidedly mixed bag, with studies showing that people pick HLA-dissimilar mates, that they pick HLA-similar mates, or no HLA effect at all. But the former outnumber the latter, and our hosts believe that there really is an effect there, though one that’s maybe a bit more complicated than we’d initially expected.
One of the more interesting sets of experiments are those in which subjects are given a piece of clothing worn by members of the opposite sex and asked which ones smell the most attractive. The results vary somewhat, but tend toward the conclusion that men with HLA genes that are different than a woman’s smell better to her than men with similar HLA genes.
But thereby hangs the tale: the researchers in the different studies asked their subjects different questions, ranging from “which smells best” to “which smells ‘sexiest’” to “which smells like someone you’d want a long term relationship with.” Those are very different questions!
An interesting exception — though not one that shows up in every study — is that women who are on birth control pills reverse the trend: they pick men whose HLA genes are more similar to theirs. It’s tempting to think that the pill, which basically prevents ovulation by tricking a woman’s body into thinking she’s pregnant, is uncovering a powerful set of biological imperatives: when you mate, outbreed; but when you’re pregnant, seek out relatives, who are more likely to help you raise the child [4]. But pregnancy is a heck of a lot more complicated than the two hormones present in most pills, and post-facto evolutionary arguments can be as slippery as they are compelling.
One series of experiments I hadn’t heard of before reading this paper was those studying the HLA effects on perfume preference: it turns out that people tend to prefer similar perfumes when they have similar genes, and some researchers think that’s because we use perfumes to enhance and complement, rather than simply hide, our natural body smells.
Of course, preference is all well and good, but it doesn’t always wind up at the altar: there’s a body of evidence suggesting women like rugged he-men faces for one-night stands, but gentler faces for long-term relationships [5]. When our Euro Reviewers surveyed studies of actual mate choice, the picture got murkier, with two studies suggesting people choose dissimilar mates, one similar, and a whopping seven showing no statistically significant effect at all.
This isn’t particularly surprising, though: as I’ve said before, higher mammals don’t do anything for just one reason. It may well be that HLA-associated body odor plays an important role in mate selection, but that a number of other factors also enter into it, and they’ll tend to obscure the odor effect.
H & R raise a very interesting possibility along these lines, which comes from a study of facial preference: When you show women pictures of men’s faces, they tend to pick those more HLA-similar to them as potential long-term mates. The authors don’t mention whether this study controlled for pregnancy or birth-control use, but there’s more straightforward way in which this result can make sense: maybe we’re looking for a Goldilocks level of difference with our mates, rather than just maximizing difference.
Though we know that inbreeding can be very bad, we’ve never nailed down the idea that maximal outbreeding is necessarily good. In fact, our authors map out no fewer than four possible reasons that we may seek HLA differences, or general outbreeding, with our mates, any or all of which may be true — or not. They cite research that suggests an intermediate level of outbreeding may be best.
What emerges from the murk of insufficient data is that we may have battling preferences: our eyes tell us to seek similarity, our noses to seek difference. As in many other biological systems, the struggle between two opposed systems pushes us toward an equilibrium that maximizes benefit.
To be fair, though my account of the Affair of the Missing Handheld above is writ from a singular perspective, in retrospect I can see the friction between the contradictory set of tactics we were following may indeed have put us closer to the target than either one alone could have. I don’t think the two searchers on my left flank could have realistically retraced the newbie’s steps; but by the same token, if I’d simply tried to reproduce the bearing they were supposed to have walked I would have wound up far to the left of where we needed to be.
“All things in moderation, including moderation” — but even so, sometimes, despite what we want, what we need is a nice medium.
[1] As an interesting side note, there’s a common phenomenon of historical figures apparently, from our modern-day vantage, trying to rip off earlier writers, when in fact they were just making quotes that were so obvious to their listeners that an attribution wasn’t necessary. I’ve often wondered whether Roosevelt’s “my crowded hour” wasn’t such a quote, since it sounds very Shakespearian — but I don’t know where it appears in the Bard, if at all.
[2] Dick may have been a pratt, but Ben was the original Buckaroo Banzai — maybe not so much with the gun- and swordplay, but show me any scientist in history who was such a fucking dangerous enemy to make. He’s a hero of mine; so is Roosevelt, for that matter.
[3] I exaggerate — the effect is more subtle than that, but very real.
[4] Scary possibility: some studies suggest that women who met their mates while on birth control are more likely to be unfaithful than those who aren’t. One possibility is that the pill undermines natural mate choice, sticking you with a guy you’re less thrilled with in the long term. The other, formal mind you, possibility is that girls on the pill are tramps — not that there’s anything wrong with that, some of my best friends in grad school were tramps. God bless ’em.
[5] On the average, ladies; and I’m sure that many, many guys wouldn’t turn down a roll in the hay with, say, a Tara Reid — I’m just picking a name off the top of my head, mind you — but want a girl with more existential substance for the long haul.
– Mark Twain (maybe)
I think my favorite thing about that quote is that I’ve seen it attributed, with utter certainty, to a number of people. Will Rogers supposedly said it about Herbert Hoover — but then, maybe he was unapologetically quoting Clemens [1]. I’ve also seen claims it originated earlier, with Franklin, but it doesn’t really sound either like Big Ben or his insipid (by his own admission, I think) alter ego, Poor Richard [2].
Anyhow, sorry for the two-week absence — I was indeed busy, first with Fire School and then with helping provide medical coverage for the 24 Hours of Big Bear mountain bike race.
We were busy at the latter event, but thankfully not too busy. They camped us out a little short of mile 7 — the course itself is 12 miles long, and either relay teams or a few hardy solo bikers do indeed pedal it for 24 hours, the highest number of laps winning each category — at the bottom of a ferocious hill.
I’d had a chance to ride that hill, along with about six miles of the course, on the Friday before the race, and can attest that it’s a tricky son of a bitch. It isn’t so much that it’s steep, though a couple of sections were steep, as that it’s rocky — rocks big enough that you need to keep your speed up, for fear of one stopping you cold, but also big enough that staying on top of them is non-trivial. You basically have to aim for the biggest rocks and pedal as fast as you dare, to make sure you bounce along the top. An earlier series of downhill hairpin turns don’t help either, nor does the fact that the downhill section is so long.
I pedaled into camp Friday night, trashed, just as the sun was setting: thankful I hadn’t had to do it in the dark, or as fast as I could, like the racers. The race itself began noon Saturday, and we had a steady but slow stream of patients throughout the ensuing 24, though again we only had one who scared me — but that’s a story for another day.
We did have time to see to the betterment of our trainees; in fact I was called upon to whip up a quick navigational course for them to practice map and compass skills.
I hate doing navs courses on the fly like that; you almost always get a cluster fuck. But in the event, our newbies gave us a different kind of cluster than I was expecting — looking for their first flag, they lost a radio belonging to another search team.
Now, I want to make this clear: to the extent that they didn’t take proper care of another team’s equipment, I blame that squarely on us experienced members. We never should have let them leave camp with something that expensive — I think they’re going for $500 list — improperly secured. So in addition to the obligation of needing to recover that radio for the team’s honor, I also felt a lot of personal responsibility. When the newbies headed out to look for it, accompanied by Carl, an experienced member of the other team, as a matter of course I grabbed my pack and went with them.
Carl and the recruit who’d been carrying the aforementioned radio were trying to retrace the latter’s steps, but in literally trackless West Virginia mountain terrain, covered in greenbriar and, in some spots, rhododendron with boughs as thick as a tree’s, I was dubious that it could be done by eye. Instead, I took the right flank, started at their original jumpoff point, and tried to duplicate the compass bearing they’d been walking.
When I couldn’t get a straight answer from them about what that bearing had been, it told me something. When, as we climbed, we hit an overgrown wood road and they said they’d broken their bearing to follow it uphill, it told me something more.
We stress a very practical style of navigation in search and rescue: we seldom expect people to walk compass bearings, instead teaching them to locate their target on the map and then piece together a path from “travel routes” — trails, ravines, ridgetops, gas lines, whatever is easy to walk — that may be less direct but gets you there faster and with less fatigue, by virtue of being easier to walk than a compass bearing. But when you’re taking travel routes, you take travel routes; when you walk a bearing, you have to walk an accurate bearing. Mixing and matching doesn’t work so well.
What I figured out, by the time we climbed near the ridgetop, was that they’d been veering steadily to the right as they ascended. So that “left flank” that Carl and the newbie were still trying to reconstruct was likely to be a lot farther in my direction than theirs.
If you want to lose something, by the way, a radio isn’t such a bad choice, because for a while at least, if you call it, it will call back to you. Fair is fair, Carl’s invaluable contribution to the exercise was a low-power tone he had his personal radio programmed to deliver, making the nearby (hopefully) lost radio beep at us, but not the other radios on the net, which at that point were still in use by the medical support teams.
We’d been moving, stopping, straining to hear, then repeating for a few iterations when, as faint as you can imagine, I thought I heard beeping.
“I think I hear it,” I said.
Carl: “What direction?”
“I’m not sure; it’s too faint.”
“Let’s move uphill a bit.”
Lather, rinse, repeat.
“Still not sure, but it’s louder now.” Now the second newbie, in line to my left, also thought he heard it.
Another iteration. Much louder now, and to my right. They’d drifted so far to the right that, even adding in my guesstimation of their error to the bearing they should have walked, I’d still undershot by more than the width of our little picket line. I moved toward the noise; lying on the ground in front of me, in a thankfully clear spot of ground, was the errant radio.
“I’ve got it!”
Basically, I rock.
The whole exercise, as it turned out, was emblematic of the Twain quote: the surer we’d been about the path our beginning navigators had walked, the wider the margin by which we’d have missed our mark.
Today’s entry is an exercise in taking stock of what we know and what we don’t about how the MHC genes determine humans’ choice of mates, courtesy of Jan Havlicek and S. Craig Roberts at Charles University in Prague and the University of Liverpool, respectively.
Briefly, the proteins made by the MHC genes are master actors in the vertebrate body’s defense against infection. They help identify infected cells, among other related functions, by grabbing hold of fragments of the invading microbe and displaying those fragments on the cells’ surfaces. This “antigen presentation” both alerts the immune system to the microbe’s presence and marks the infected cells for destruction.
Over the last couple of decades, researchers have been shedding light on another, surprisingly different function of the MHC: in most vertebrates, it seems to dictate an individual odor that somehow influences mate choice. In rodents — the best-studied specie for this phenomenon — females definitely choose mates whose MHC genes are different from theirs, and the effect takes place via a more- or less-attractive odor to that particular female. One girl’s Romeo is another’s Norman Bates [3].
Havlicek’s and Roberts’ concern, though, was whether this phenomenon reaches higher up the evolutionary tree — namely, to human beings. A growing body of research indicates that MHC genes — called HLA in humans — may actually play a role in our choice of mates. “Animal magnetism” may have a very aromatic cause, and one that comes literally through the nose.
The two investigators reviewed the current literature, and found a decidedly mixed bag, with studies showing that people pick HLA-dissimilar mates, that they pick HLA-similar mates, or no HLA effect at all. But the former outnumber the latter, and our hosts believe that there really is an effect there, though one that’s maybe a bit more complicated than we’d initially expected.
One of the more interesting sets of experiments are those in which subjects are given a piece of clothing worn by members of the opposite sex and asked which ones smell the most attractive. The results vary somewhat, but tend toward the conclusion that men with HLA genes that are different than a woman’s smell better to her than men with similar HLA genes.
But thereby hangs the tale: the researchers in the different studies asked their subjects different questions, ranging from “which smells best” to “which smells ‘sexiest’” to “which smells like someone you’d want a long term relationship with.” Those are very different questions!
An interesting exception — though not one that shows up in every study — is that women who are on birth control pills reverse the trend: they pick men whose HLA genes are more similar to theirs. It’s tempting to think that the pill, which basically prevents ovulation by tricking a woman’s body into thinking she’s pregnant, is uncovering a powerful set of biological imperatives: when you mate, outbreed; but when you’re pregnant, seek out relatives, who are more likely to help you raise the child [4]. But pregnancy is a heck of a lot more complicated than the two hormones present in most pills, and post-facto evolutionary arguments can be as slippery as they are compelling.
One series of experiments I hadn’t heard of before reading this paper was those studying the HLA effects on perfume preference: it turns out that people tend to prefer similar perfumes when they have similar genes, and some researchers think that’s because we use perfumes to enhance and complement, rather than simply hide, our natural body smells.
Of course, preference is all well and good, but it doesn’t always wind up at the altar: there’s a body of evidence suggesting women like rugged he-men faces for one-night stands, but gentler faces for long-term relationships [5]. When our Euro Reviewers surveyed studies of actual mate choice, the picture got murkier, with two studies suggesting people choose dissimilar mates, one similar, and a whopping seven showing no statistically significant effect at all.
This isn’t particularly surprising, though: as I’ve said before, higher mammals don’t do anything for just one reason. It may well be that HLA-associated body odor plays an important role in mate selection, but that a number of other factors also enter into it, and they’ll tend to obscure the odor effect.
H & R raise a very interesting possibility along these lines, which comes from a study of facial preference: When you show women pictures of men’s faces, they tend to pick those more HLA-similar to them as potential long-term mates. The authors don’t mention whether this study controlled for pregnancy or birth-control use, but there’s more straightforward way in which this result can make sense: maybe we’re looking for a Goldilocks level of difference with our mates, rather than just maximizing difference.
Though we know that inbreeding can be very bad, we’ve never nailed down the idea that maximal outbreeding is necessarily good. In fact, our authors map out no fewer than four possible reasons that we may seek HLA differences, or general outbreeding, with our mates, any or all of which may be true — or not. They cite research that suggests an intermediate level of outbreeding may be best.
What emerges from the murk of insufficient data is that we may have battling preferences: our eyes tell us to seek similarity, our noses to seek difference. As in many other biological systems, the struggle between two opposed systems pushes us toward an equilibrium that maximizes benefit.
To be fair, though my account of the Affair of the Missing Handheld above is writ from a singular perspective, in retrospect I can see the friction between the contradictory set of tactics we were following may indeed have put us closer to the target than either one alone could have. I don’t think the two searchers on my left flank could have realistically retraced the newbie’s steps; but by the same token, if I’d simply tried to reproduce the bearing they were supposed to have walked I would have wound up far to the left of where we needed to be.
“All things in moderation, including moderation” — but even so, sometimes, despite what we want, what we need is a nice medium.
[1] As an interesting side note, there’s a common phenomenon of historical figures apparently, from our modern-day vantage, trying to rip off earlier writers, when in fact they were just making quotes that were so obvious to their listeners that an attribution wasn’t necessary. I’ve often wondered whether Roosevelt’s “my crowded hour” wasn’t such a quote, since it sounds very Shakespearian — but I don’t know where it appears in the Bard, if at all.
[2] Dick may have been a pratt, but Ben was the original Buckaroo Banzai — maybe not so much with the gun- and swordplay, but show me any scientist in history who was such a fucking dangerous enemy to make. He’s a hero of mine; so is Roosevelt, for that matter.
[3] I exaggerate — the effect is more subtle than that, but very real.
[4] Scary possibility: some studies suggest that women who met their mates while on birth control are more likely to be unfaithful than those who aren’t. One possibility is that the pill undermines natural mate choice, sticking you with a guy you’re less thrilled with in the long term. The other, formal mind you, possibility is that girls on the pill are tramps — not that there’s anything wrong with that, some of my best friends in grad school were tramps. God bless ’em.
[5] On the average, ladies; and I’m sure that many, many guys wouldn’t turn down a roll in the hay with, say, a Tara Reid — I’m just picking a name off the top of my head, mind you — but want a girl with more existential substance for the long haul.
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