Evolution News

Ug99 Spreads Across Planet While US Government Fiddles

April 26, 2008

Elaine Meinel Supkis

The Four Horsemen are war, famine, pestilence and religious/political chaos. Mother Nature, at all times, is trying to rebalance the relationships of all living things. This ecological balance often resets due to climatic changes or geological forces. Nature likes to have a status quo that sees interlocking species living in harmony with each other. But humans like to have their own way with Nature and this means constantly unbalancing the various interlocking species in favor of living things that we want for various reasons. The Ug99 wheat rust infection is yet another chapter in a long, long story about human domestication of Nature and her retaliatory counter attacks.

Wheat Crop Failures Could be Total, Experts Warn

On top of record-breaking rice prices and corn through the roof on ethanol demand, wheat is now rusting in the fields across Africa.
Officials fear near total crop losses, and the fungus, known as Ug99, is spreading.

Wheat prices have been soaring this week on top of already high prices, and futures contracts spiked, too, on panic buying.

Experts fear the cost of bread could soon follow the path of rice, the price of which has triggered riots in some countries and prompted countries to cut off exports.

Throughout history, every time there is economic over expansion, there is a crop failure. Usually, when there are good times, the human population increases greatly. More marginal lands are settled or used for grazing or growing plants. When the human population and the domestic plants and animals reach a critical saturation stage, the Four Horsemen are unleashed and the population declines. If humans prevent any one of these forces from happening, the environmental stresses increase until the Four Horsemen do their dirty work for Mother Nature.

Right now, we are seeing global hysteria over the price and availability of food. As always, this comes on the heels of record crops and record population growth. Throughout history, there have been huge fluxuations in population levels. For example, in the 13th century, the Mongols came pouring out of the Steppes and reduced the teeming farming population of China by nearly 2/3rds and would have eradicated them except a Chinese official explained how labor can lead to endless financial riches via taxation. They swept across Asia to Europe and destroyed farming populations all the way to the Holy Land. And after this disaster, 100 years later, plagues swept Eurasia and killed off a very significant number of people.

Population stresses were controlled after 1349 by the usual methods again which is mostly warfare and overworking the populace. Then the conquest of the rest of the planet relieved stresses on the European sector. They used disease to wipe out the natives of North and South America and the survivors were either hunted or worked to death. But this didn't work in Africa. Since Africa is the birthmother of not only all humans but many other organisms that evolved with humans, Africa is also the home of many diseases. Because of this, European invaders often died of disease long before they could conquer the continent. Only after modern medicine inoculated the invaders, could the Europeans dominate the continent.

Since then, the numbers of humans have mostly increased. Two world wars, the second of which featured a cruel attempt at ethnic cleansing by the Japanese and Germans, failed to slow down the explosion in the numbers of humans. The invention of birth controls has had a strong effect but only on industrialized nations. The numbers of humans still increases to this day. Especially in the Cradle of Humanity, Africa as well as the Middle East.

A constantly increasing population means farming marginal lands and overexploiting the planetary resources to feed more people and their livestock. This is always a problem and it ebbs and flows. But into this process the heavy energy-consuming nations have decided to pursue the worst possible thing: biofuels.

There is a global obesity epidemic caused by ever-weaker nutrition from over-engineered food systems as well as surplus food relative to the value of money. This system is now breaking down under its own weight. Nothing runs to infinity! Foods are nutritious only if the land is good. Both China and India have been heavy buyers in the phosphorus markets. The recent epic ice storms that hit China have directly increased rice prices globally. The earth is always one bad storm away from hyper-inflation in any particular food source.

The biofuels business has created a gold rush mentality in farming and all marginal lands as well as prime land will be put into production in order to feed this insatiable desire. Unlike many other systems, the desire for energy can reach near-infinity. There are so many ways to play with energy! Instead of driving smaller, slower cars, everyone wants faster and bigger cars, for example. When global prices for oil dropped dramatically, the world saw an explosion in the number and size of cars. To keep this going, we are now turning around and burning calories from crops. This is a system that is utterly unsustainable. And Mother Nature deals with this outrage by simply letting her littlest creatures evolve rapidly.

This is a harsh rule of reality: Nature hates voids and loves ecological niches. So if humans plow through the dense biological web of a region and plants monocrops, the larger plants and animals vanish but NOT the smallest! They proliferate in the new niche. They love to do this, they can't help but do this. Monocrops, for example, is like building sky scrapers for single celled organisms.

Stem Rust Never Sleeps

If publicly financed international researchers move together aggressively and systematically, high-yielding replacement wheat varieties can be developed and made available to farmers before stem rust disease becomes a global epidemic.

The Bush administration was initially quick to grasp Ug99’s threat to American wheat production. In 2005, Mike Johanns, then secretary of agriculture, instructed the federal agriculture research service to take the lead in developing an international strategy to deal with stem rust. In 2006, the Agency for International Development mobilized emergency financing to help African and Asian countries accelerate needed wheat research.

But more recently, the administration has begun reversing direction. The State Department is recommending ending American support for the international agricultural research centers that helped start the Green Revolution, including all money for wheat research. And significant financial cuts have been proposed for important research centers, including the Department of Agriculture’s essential rust research laboratory in St. Paul.

Years ago, I warned people that Bush wanted to play Apocalyptic politics. He hasn't met any of the Four Horsemen without flashing them the devil's horns sign with his hands and yelling, 'Booha, go team!' The US is going bankrupt. Our entire government spends tremendous efforts in assuring us this is not happening. Delusional thinking isn't smart, of course. Not that this has ever stopped anyone. The US is cutting spending to nearly everything that isn't war related. On top of this, the US is rushing forwards the latest fake 'give back' in taxes. The US public is to go out and spend this on things such as...filling the gas tanks of all those grossly oversized cars. In other words, the US public will now have to pay off, via more government debt. So, instead of cutting back on spending on gas which weakens our bottom line, we are making our public bottom line much worse in order to transfer this future wealth to oil producers. A very bad choice.

Right now, thanks to wild government overspending, wars and planned future transfers of wealth to oil producers, the government is cutting back on all other systems we need to have a better civilization. Here is an example from today's news:

Plans Wilt at National Arboretum

Proposed Funding Cut Exacerbates Deterioration

Next year's proposed budget for the federally funded institution has been cut by $2 million, targeted at the arboretum's public face. The amount is small in the scheme of things, but it would reduce funding by 60 percent for the arboretum's public programming and the care of its rich garden displays and pioneering plant collections.

This comes after almost a decade of funding erosion: The operating budget has shrunk 20 percent in five years. A master plan to fix crumbling infrastructure and forge a future has remained essentially unfunded for eight years. Even if next year's money is restored, the arboretum will continue to suffer from years of chronic underfunding and the absence of capital investment.

The US government will hand out many billions to boost the bottom lines of the oil producers but won't spend several million to keep our agricultural systems going. Born Again Christians not only want the 4 Horsemen to ride over us and kill most of us humans off, they are very, very hostile towards any science that talks about evolution. And no one can do any research in life forms of any sort unless they understand evolution. Indeed, at the roots of our inability to 'tame' Nature lies evolutionary forces. Under Ronnie Reagan, the people who were in charge of funding research were born agains who were very uninterested in research. 'We will all be dead and the winners will go to Heaven' was their belief.

The US government pays for most university research and the reduction of resources has been slowly restricting these fields. Now that our own government has unleashed wild, out of control farming in the name of biofuels, we will see our crops ravaged by waves of fungi, viral and unicellular life forms seeking this new allotment of niches. Let's go back to the Ug99, the latest Mother Nature bio-warfare device:

Wikipedia article:

Ug99, which has the designation of TTKS, is a race of black stem rust (Puccinia graminis tritici).[1] It is virulent to the great majority of wheat varieties.[2] The blight was first noted in Uganda in 1999 and has spread throughout the highlands of East Africa. In January of 2007, spores blew across to Yemen, and north into Sudan. In March 2007, FAO announced its concern regarding the spread through Iran based on Iranian authorities report.[3]
*snip*
Like other Puccinia species, P. graminis has a complex life cycle featuring alternation of generations, the fungus is also heteroecious which means that its various life cycle stages require alternate host species. The complete life cycle of P. graminis requires barberry as well as a cereal species.

In the spring and summer, stem rust infections on wheat plants produce dikaryotic urediniospores, which are spread by the wind to nearby wheat plants, where they germinate, rapidly spreading the infection over a wide area. Towards the end of the growing season, the rust converts to producing teliospores, which have contain two haploid nuclei of opposite mating type. Before the winter, the nucleii fuse to form a diploid cell, which remains dormant until the next spring when it undergoes meiosis to produce four haploid cells known as basidiospores. The basidiospores then undergo a mitotic nuclear division to produce the mature basidiospore which contains two haploid nuclei of the same mating type. Basidiospores cannot infect cereal plants. Instead, they infect young leaves of common barberry (Berberis vulgaris) or other susceptible Berberis, Mahonia, or Mahoberberis species or cultivars. On barberry, the resulting infections produce specialized infection structures called pycnia, which play an essential role in the sexual stage of the fungus.

It was in the Middle East and Africa where wheat was first domesticated thousands of years ago. One of the earliest bread baskets on earth was Iraq. Which is now mostly hostile desert. The other was the Nile valley which is nearly totally overwhelmed by many millions of people. I notice online how there is the usual rumors being spread that Ug99 is actually biowarfare from US labs. This is really stupid. Yes, the irresponsible idiots working for the Pentagon do produce toxic plant and human diseases. This is because they are working for the annihilation of all humans [except themselves, of course]. But this doesn't mean they create all the diseases and difficulties assailing humanity. Mother Nature runs the best labs on earth. She can remold all life forms using her sharp edged tools: survival of the fittest and filling ecological niches.

The human desire to see conspiracies behind absolutely everything is not healthy. It shows a disregard to historical forces or natural forces. It is hubris to imagine that humans order things so that x-y-z happens due entirely to people controlling things. The people trying to rule Nature and humanity would dearly love to be able to do this but they are incapable. As the human biomass grows around this planet, we are, as far as Nature is concerned, we are one big, fat ecological niche aching to be colonized by other life forms. As we thwart this and increase our biomass, the sophistication of the micro organisms that are trying to colonize us grows greater.

Wheat stem rust has always been of interest to government and university investigators. Here is the official USDA webpage on this topic:

From the USDA: Wheat stem rust

ENVIRONMENTAL CONDITIONS:
Stem rust is favored by hot days 25-30 C, mild nights 15-20 C with adequate moisture for night time dews. Wind can effectively disperse urediniospores over great distances. Rain is necessary for effective deposition of uredinospore involved in regional spore transport.

INOCULUM SOURCE AND INFECTION:

Aeciospores from Berberis vulgaris are currently rare, but historically it was an important source of inoculum in northern North America and Europe. Mycelium or uredinia on volunteer wheat, are the most important source of inoculum in tropical and subtropical climates. Windblown urediniospores are usually from earlier maturing wheat from the south in the northern hemisphere, or from the north in the southern hemisphere.

Here is a paper written back in 1971:

Uganda is one of the most densely populated parts of Africa. When Britain invaded in the 19th and early 20th century, they imposed plantation cultivation which changed this pastoral land into a heavy agricultural society. So instead of mixed farming/herding/hunting, it become primarily agricultural. The population stresses have unleashed some of the ugliest ethnic cleansing episodes in human history. The population has long surpassed the breaking point of the previous ethnic cleansing and now is farming nearly all possible land. So it is no surprise to find that this is an ideal spot for evolution to create a truly destructive disease. Just like AIDs evolved in such a way that it attacks the immune systems directly and yet is transmitted by love and desire, in this case, the wheat rust attacks the first domesticated plants that allowed humans to colonize this entire planet.

The basis of all wealth is the ability to grow and store the energy of the sun and use it later to multiply humans. Here is an article from 2 years ago which mentions Ug99:

Plant Cell. 2006 January

Identification of Rust Fungi Avirulence Elicitors

Rust fungi (Basidiomycetes of the order Uredinales) are obligate biotrophs that grow and reproduce only in living plant tissue. There are on the order of 5000 or more species of rust fungi that collectively cause disease on most crops, ornamentals, and many other plants. For example, rusts caused by Puccinia species are some of the most important diseases of wheat and other small grain crops worldwide. A new wheat rust epidemic is currently building in East Africa with the appearance of a highly virulent strain of Puccinia graminis tritici called Ug99, which is perceived as a threat to global wheat production and has led to the establishment of a Global Rust Initiative (http://www.globalrust.org/index.html). Common maize rust caused by Puccinia sorghi is a major disease problem of maize, particularly in tropical and subtropical regions such as South Africa and India. The Asian soybean rust caused by Phakopsora pachyrhizi has recently spread to Africa and the western hemisphere, including the U.S., and is now a major concern in most of the soybean-growing regions of the world.

Rust fungi have extremely complex life cycles, involving up to five different spore-producing stages. Many rusts are heteroecious, requiring two phylogenetically distinct host plants to complete their life cycle. For example, the wheat rust Puccinia graminis alternates between wheat as the primary host and barberry as the alternate host, and Melampsora epitea willow-conifer rusts alternate between a coniferous primary host, such as hemlock or tamarack, and a willow alternate host. Some rusts, such as the flax rust Melampsora lini, are autoecious and complete their life cycle on a single host plant.

I suspect that these rust diseases have such complex lives is due to human interference. Since these things are attacking unnatural niches, this means that all our attempts at evading or preventing this life form has caused it to evolve faster. This is true of all organisms that try to colonize human systems. As we 'fight' them they win via simple evolution. The need to understand how evolution works is critical here. All our actions are holding actions. Whenever we come up with some trick or scheme that should increase our crops and populations of things we desire, the counter system resets itself and continues to try to colonize the niches we provide. It is very, very rare for humans to kill off the organisms seeking to destroy our domestic ecosystems! Humans are rapidly exterminating huge numbers of species on this planet. We are in the middle of one of earth's greater species die-offs. We have been busy looting or killing off most higher organisms such as fishes, amphibians, reptiles as well as mammals. But we are not only not succeeding in the micro-life forms annihilation, they are counterattacking quite successfully and may I add, with barely any efforts on their part.

The more we annihilate all other species and replace them with the very limited number of life forms which we concoct in our laboratories or breeding farms, the swifter it will be for the micro life forms to triumph. The more we create 'solutions' the micro creatures up the ante. They will win in the end, of course. This is due to Mother Nature's iron evolutionary rule. If we do succeed in manipulating genetic codes to the point that we can cover this entire planet with things that fuel only human life forms and which we can use for fuel so we can have lots and lots of energy, this only will hasten our elimination. Because such a system is unsustainable and nothing ever goes to infinity. It crashes. And if our biological systems have little room for evolutionary forces to recover from a crash, we could destroy all life on earth...except for the micro organisms!

Because they are everywhere and are key to our evolutionary survival. Deep inside of our innermost cells, we hold previous micro organisms. We use them to digest food! They are vital to enriching the soil, breaking down dead plants and animals, they are our staff of life as well as the sword of death. For Mother Nature loves balance. And she grants all living things this dual role! And the least of Her creations are also the greatest power in Nature. They are the foundation of all life, they feed all others from the biggest creatures, whales, down to the smallest seed that needs humus to grow. We should respect this power and work with it, not try to manipulate it so we can have global monocultures.

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Male Hummingbirds Respond to Tail Noise Triggers

January 30, 2008

Elaine Meinel Supkis

I have played with wild birds all my life. I have bred or trained or hosted many wild and domestic birds all my life. My godmother was one of the oldest bird banding scientists on earth, 100 years ago, she wrote one of the first scientific studies of the California Condors. She taught me a lot about birds as did my parents. I have figured out, many years ago, how to make male birds 'show their stuff' simply by imitating the sound of their feathers moving. The BBC reports that hummingbird males use their tail feathers in this way. No surprise to me.

Hummingbird 'uses tail to chirp'

A species of hummingbird makes a chirping noise with its tail feathers, not its throat, a study using high-speed video has suggested.
The exact source of the noise from male Anna's hummingbirds has been the subject of debate among researchers.

By using specialised footage, a team of US scientists were able to show that male hummingbirds' tail feathers vibrated during high-speed dives.

We have a hummingbird feeder here on the mountain as well as many hummingbird-friendly flowers which I put out on the deck in summer. It is fun, sitting on the deck, watching the hummingbirds. Like chickadees, they are brave little feathery denizens of the skies. They show no fear of human nor animal. Both chickadees and hummingbirds use their swift flight and small size for advantage. When the feeder runs out in the winter, the chickadees all let us know by loudly yelling at us when they spot us. They will perch within inches of us as we fill their feeder.

The hummingbirds let us know when they arrive in springtime. Around end of May, they come. If their feeder isn't out, they will hang around the deck until I come out for some reason and buzz close to my face. I then say, 'Oh my, time to feed the humming birds!' They then watch for me to come out a few minutes later with their red feeder. Then they patrol the feeder. The dominant males who tend to be the same ones that were dominant the year before or their offspring, will stay in the vicinity of my trumpet vines and sweet-water feeder. If strange hummingbirds come, they attack.

It is all rather amusing. Tiny birds will buzz their wings and tail feathers to make them as loud as possible. Instead of a soft bzzzzz sound, suddenly the male is making loud buzz saw noises and various clicks of the long bills and other noises. They have this ritual dance where the two disputing males will fly to and fro, facing each other, clacking their beaks and making a nasty racket with their wings. It is all very amusing if you step between them by accident. They will flick their wings right under your nose to get you to back off.

So this story amuses me. Dive bombing in order to make even more noise is well within the repertoire of the hummingbird.

"Many kinds of birds are reported to create aerodynamic sounds with their wings or tail, and this model may explain a wide diversity of non-vocal sounds produced by birds," they concluded.

This is certainly true not to mention, obvious. I used to amuse myself playing games with peacocks. Most people want to see the spectacular displays of the males but don't know how to get them to display their lovely feathers. It is quite simple, actually.

I have done this in Europe and America. I even wondered if I should turn this into a scam to make money like a magician with birds. When I squat on the ground next to a peacock male, I make this 'flllllffffttttt' sound as if I were spreading my own tail while fanning my fingers of both hands in front of the peacock. Instantly, it goes into full display. The trigger is the sound and the sight of my fingers are sufficient to make the 'show your sexual powers' part of the brain to go into action.

Trilling the tongue while making a 'boomph boomph boomph' noise will get turkey males to display including wild turkeys. Showing them a small piece of red cloth completes the deception. We once had a wild turkey attack our Sirocco VW in the woods because it had a red stripe. He came up to it, furious. I made the male turkey feather sounds and it went crazy. We certainly go a laugh out of that.

On the other hand, we had red lawn mower I had to repaint. Our bronze turkeys as well as the wild ones, when hearing it, saw the red paint and the noise was too close to the sound of their chests thrumming and their tails spreading. They would attack my son. He complained, it was hard to mow when huge turkeys were gobbling and snapping at his ankles. Or worse, flying down the mountain and crashing into the mower, knocking everyone down.

Thank goodness hummingbirds don't weigh 45 lbs.

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Japan's Robots

December 7, 2007

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Today is the anniversary of Pearl Harbor. It is common for the US military to ignore danger at the behest of the political/economic powers that need wars. No one would dare invade or attack us unless we first fall into a spell that puts our military to sleep. Today is a good day to focus on Japan and our queer relationship with that amazing island people and their despairing view of the future and how it is intertwined with robots and the loss of human contact. A nihilism that is quite unnatural even as the Japanese have a culture that enjoys contemplation of nature. A big paradox here, one that is explored by Japanese animators.

Credit concerns put carry trades on shaky ground

Tightening credit markets and rising asset volatility from the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis may drive aggressive dumping of carry trades in 2008, with investors instead favoring safe-haven yen.

Most investors expect the credit crisis to keep a lid on risk appetite next year, suggesting carry trades will be dethroned as the dominant strategy in the $2-trillion-a-day foreign exchange market for the first time in more than a decade.

"When you have carry trade liquidation it is very often triggered by asset volatility and what we are seeing in the financial markets does speak against carry trades," said Hans Redeker, head of currency strategy at BNP Paribas in London.

Yet another confirmation of what I said last July: the money flow in the world has changed. It no longer is moving from Japan outwards. Few articles mention that 'carry trade' is really DEBT CREATION. It is a huge component of the ballooning M3 numbers for the US, the British empire and its Common Wealth and Europe. The liquidity crisis stems from this change in flow. As the central banks in Europe, the US and UK frantically drop interest rates, this kills the status quo of the carry trade money flow more and more. Note how liquidity isn't appearing, the more they do this. It is part of the trap, the Horns of Dilemma in our present economic system.

Investors were not investing anything they saved, they were investing DEBTS. And buying US debts thanks to high interest rates of those awful Alt-A loans, for example. Or risky REITs. Anything attached to an interest rate that was higher than a US government bond. Now these riskier bonds are bad and even miserable rates of return with secure bonds are better than losing even the principal balance of a bond.

This profoundly changes the balance of finances with Japan which is why Japan is now announcing, they are dropping the pretense of being poor and are going to start using Sovereign Wealth Funds just like China, Russia and the Arab oil nations.

U.S. official senses beef trade progress

Japan indicated its intention to ease import curbs on American beef during a two-day bilateral economic dialogue in Tokyo, a senior U.S. official said Friday.

Japan currently only allows imported U.S. beef from cattle aged 20 months or younger, due to concerns over mad cow disease, and the United States is urging Japan to abolish the age limit

This is classic: we wrangle with them constantly over the pettiest of imports. Forget automobiles, we can't even bring in hamburgers! And this is deliberate. And complex. The US let China flood us with all sorts of things while our government gave up even testing anything for obvious poisons, etc. The budget for inspections has been ruthlessly cut by Bush and the GOP even a they claim they are negotiating with our trade partners and are being 'tough.' But anyone reading the news in Japan can see that they run rings around us and we get nearly nothing out of this. We are at the point now that both Japan and China are reducing the value of their currencies against the dollar while they shove us aside at every opportunity.

In this case, Japan has no intention of letting us bring in cheap food of any sort. They don't care if the Japanese consumer has no money if they are lower class. It seems to me that this group is slated for elimination, bit by ruthless bit, anyhow. Replaced by robots in the bitter end. But if the US wants to negotiate, we have to be much more serious about this. And concentrate on making the yen much stronger, while we are at it. But of course, none of this will happen. Our own negotiators are chickens with no heads. Maybe, if we replace them with well-programmed robots, we might make some headway.

"We have limited market access now . . . our hope is that (Japan) will listen to the international scientific body, which has determined that our products are in fact safe," Keenum said at a news conference at the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo after attending sub-Cabinet level talks that ended Friday.

The World Organization for Animal Health voted in May to give the U.S. its "controlled-risk" rating for mad cow disease. The rating means controls are effective and meat from U.S. cattle is safe regardless of its age.

"The reaction by our Japanese counterparts was that they're looking to 30 months of age restrictions on U.S. beef," Keenum said, adding it is his impression that Japan is trying to ease restrictions in a step-by-step approach.

Meanwhile, a Foreign Ministry official declined to elaborate on the talks between the two sides, but said the proposal for 30 months "is not correct."

Japan gives up bid to slash funding of U.S. military bases

Tokyo will not seek to substantially cut its burden-sharing of labor and other operational costs for U.S. bases in Japan from next April, reaching a tentative agreement with Washington to keep it at the fiscal 2007 level of about ¥140.9 billion, government sources from both sides said Friday.

The two sides, negotiating on revisions to the Special Measures Agreement on cost-sharing for a three-year renewal, are expected to reach a formal accord next week. Japan had hoped to curtail its "host-nation support" for U.S. bases amid a massive national debt and to reach such an accord with the United States before compiling the fiscal 2008 budget later this month.

This, like so many other important things, has nearly zero coverage in US press. Bloggers in the US are not talking about this. The push to war with Iran, the ongoing war in Iraq, the Middle East negotiations to push the Palestinians into the sea, the US scandals like the erasing of the torture tapes, etc. All this is very important but also, we are a global empire and we patrol the Seven Seas and our biggest trade partners and 'allies' are for the most part, desperate to have a free ride. They try to weasel out of even small support of the huge expenses of our naval protection.

In the case of Japan, this is particularly aggravating. The US is going rapidly bankrupt, patrolling the Seven Seas. Just yesterday, China decided they had embarrassed us enough over the issue of docking rights in Hong Kong and our navy will be allowed in again for the time being. But the US also finally forced Japan to cease trying to refuse to pay for all this free protection and to give at least a small token sum. The anniversary of their naval/air sneak attacks reminds us that the world isn't a friendly place. It aslo reminds is that we have a navy that is supposed to protect America, not the reset of the planet. Especially trade partners who are flooding us with either easy credit or manufactured goods that undermine our own economy.

These negotiations have dragged on for many months as I have detailed here. The loss of face due to this intransigence is considerable just like our inability to reign in the Jews in the Middle East is causing all and sundry to disrespect us. Our military obligations and expenses in both areas are also reducing our economic clout, not extending it. A double whammy. We left the Philippines. We can leave Japan. And we should leave, as soon as possible.

Japan had initially proposed to the U.S. to cut ¥30 billion in labor costs and ¥25 billion in utility costs over five years from fiscal 2008, which begins in April, the sources said.

However, Japan decided to give up on the request due to recent developments — strained relations with Washington since the withdrawal of Japan's refueling mission in the Indian Ocean when the legislation expired on Nov. 1, and Japan's hopes that the United States will not take North Korea off the list of states sponsoring terrorism.

Note how Japan wanted to use us as their cat's paw. They are slowly being forced, due to the increasing weakness of the US, to do their own diplomacy. Their ability to negotiate has atrophied under US protection. They only know how to say no in a a million ways. And get away with it. This closely resembles Israel's influence and dependencies.

Japan is undergoing a revolutionary change. The population is going through an amazing self-destruct phase. The fabled Japanese family is breaking apart faster than the US or even Europe. It isn't that people are getting divorced, they aren't getting married and having children anywhere near at the rate of replacing their population. On top of the crushing and cruel depression being imposed on millions of working Japanese, aside from the cramped circumstances of domestic life of the lower half of the population, there is this loss of faith in the future. A peculiar form of fatalism is taking over. One way this is expressed is in the development and use of robots.

The one person who saw the earliest and clearest, the dangers and allurement of robots is of course, the man who wrote, 'I, Robot' and the Empire series, Issac Asimov. He explored all the possible combinations of human/robot relations. Some of the stories ended up with robots attaining god-like powers. In the most despairing futuristic looks was the planet where nearly everything was done by robots and humans didn't interact virtually at all. On this planet, they barely had infrequent sex and farmed out the babies to the robots and each generation was less able to interact with humans and relied more and more on the services and mentality of the robot/human interface. Of course, they went extinct.

Robots, being machines, are not human so they are not willful. This gives humans the illusion of godly powers as we can order our affairs to please ourselves if we have robot slaves. Of course, the necessity of providing an environment and architecture that suits robots so they can move around and function means making things more and more alien to the animal side of human psychology and over time, the robotic needs will trump any natural human needs. The master becomes enmeshed in the world more suitable for the robot. The biggest change could be the entire breakdown of the human mind and emotions. A topic Japanese animators have explored quite intimately and often, brutally.

Here is just one episode in the amazing series, 'Hinotori'. It revolves around a divine phoenix bird and its magical feathers. In this episode, the human has been damaged by an explosion and no longer sees humans as a fellow species. When he interacts with his doctor, the character with the big nose, and he collegue, a criminal who tried to assassinate him earlier, he sees 'ugly monsters' who look like swiss cheese or blobs. But when he looks at a robot, he sees a woman that he falls in love with.

When she is destroyed by the assassin and saves her lover's life, he asks the doctor to turn him into a robot and the show ends with him going to Mars and living in a space colony there, as a robot, taking care of a human child who enjoys the company of his robot rather than that of other humans. A dark fantasy, any way one looks at it. And it must be examined.

The first true human/robot merging story was the great 'Metropolis' by Fritz Lang made in Germany 75 years ago. It set the stage for all future robot movies as well as launching the debate over what a robot is. The painful deterioration of the mentality and physical condition of our pop stars, when seen in light of this movie, provokes some cold thoughts that maybe our gyrating, sexually orchestrated divas and male icons should be robots like the one in Metropolis.

Toyota takes wraps off new robots

Toyota Motor Corp. showed off a violin-playing robot and a "mobility robot" Thursday, saying it will try to develop practical uses for human-helping partner robots in the early 2010s.

The automaker, which celebrated its 70th anniversary last month, is aiming to turn robots into one of its core businesses by 2020.

It is quite interesting that Toyota, instead of focusing on cars, is enraptured by the idea that the future is all about expanding the robot population. I tend to view robots as an extension of humans. They express all our virtues such as generosity, sacrifice, tender care, devotion and service. But being things created by humans, they will also strongly express our vicious side. We will have killer robots ruthlessly eliminating traditionalists, peasants who are in the way of the ruling class, restricting humans from doing things the robot's owners want forbidden, etc. The tendency will be for robots to replace humans once they are easy to reproduce without human intervention. Factories cranking out robots with minimal human supervision is of course, a total nightmare. They will rapidly displace humans and end up shoving us into increasingly depressing conditions rather than opening the door to the Garden of Eden.

Toddlers Bond With Robot, Study Shows

Will the robot revolution begin in nursery school?

Researchers introduced a state-of-the-art social robot into a classroom of 18- to 24-month-olds for five months as a way of studying human-robot interactions.

The children not only came to accept the robot but treated it as they would a human buddy—hugging it and helping it—a new study says.

"The results imply that current robot technology is surprisingly close to achieving autonomous bonding and socialization with human toddlers," said Fumihide Tanaka, a researcher at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD)

They found that children are attracted to robots in the same way the character in the first anime in this story here, responds: the children's minds animate the robot who is relatively 'neutral.' A child's brain is frantically trying to decode human facial expressions, this being a survival force. Children who can't do this would be destroyed in non-modern conditions. In ape communities, misreading or ignoring facial expressions can lead to death. But with a robot, a child can superimpose desired reactions upon the robot's unsophisticated face. So a child can imagine a robot is pleased even if a child acts irresponsibly. On the other hand, the robot won't respond to temper tantrums which oddly, reassures a child who tend to calm down when no one pays attention to demands. For example, if a robot asks a child to go to bed and then all the lights and entertainment systems suddenly shut down in tandem with the robot's request, the child might scream and cry but will, seeing no response, follow the machine and go to bed.

This is why robots will take over. Humans get in fights with children living in modern environments where there are machines and things to interface with that are distractions and command the attention and loyalty of growing humans. Many parents give up, trying to control their chidren in these environments. When we moved into our tent complex in 1990 and had zero electricity, our son was outraged. But he quickly adapted to going to bed when I blew out the kerosene lamps. What used to cause tempers ended up pleasant and quiet. I seriously recommend raising children with no electricity the first 10 years.

Instead, we move steadily towards the robot solution.

LIFE WITH ROBOTS (1): Mechanical Receptionist Draws Curious Shoppers

The new receptionist at the Aeon Yono Shopping Center provides a glimpse into the future. For work, for play, for shopping and in all sorts of other settings, robots are just now beginning to become a part of daily life of Japan.

The receptionist at the entrance of the store in Saitama Prefecture is not a hired employee -- it is a machine. And more specifically, it is a model of the Enon service robot developed by the Fujitsu Ltd. (6702) group. The Enon stands 1.3 meters tall and weighs 50kg.

Since May, the robot has tickled the fancy and helped with the queries of shoppers of all ages at the store

This robot attracts children because it has games and lots of patience. Children are increasingly seen as obstructions, difficulties and unpleasant encounters. And they can feel the hostility in return. But robots have no emotions so there is no fear of provoking emotions in them. The Japanese have this conformist society so it doesn't surprise me to see them conforming with robots.

I suspect part of the reason why industrialists are working hard on the robot projects is due to them expecting Japan to depopulate. Hiring is expensive and robots, even when expensive, create no social obligations and this emotional detachment is easier to live with than dealing with humans who present many difficulties including changing jobs, not showing up for work, transit delays, etc.

LIFE WITH ROBOTS (5): Researchers Develop Friendly Robot For Housekeeping

A team of researchers at Waseda University has developed a humanoid robot to help those less able, such as the elderly, with household chores. The team aims to put the robot into use by around 2015.

The robot, called Twendy-One, is 1.5 meters tall, has a shoulder width of 0.7 meters, weighs 111 kilograms and can perform various tasks. In a demonstration, the robot helped a person move from a bed to a wheelchair, took out a bottle of ketchup from a refrigerator and handed it to a person, and took bread from a toaster and put it on a plate.

The robot can also make simple verbal exchanges, responding "To the table?" when asked "Please carry the tray" during the demonstration.

The popular TV cartoon show in my youth, 'The Jetsons' had a normal nuclear family that had interactions all TV cartoon families from 'The Flintstones' to 'The Simpsons'. 2 parents, 2 children and a dog. And in the case of the Jetsons, a robot maid. Just as it is ultimately distasteful, taking care of small children who are very demanding and vocal about their wishes as well as very messy, the same is true at the other end of the scale. For every elderly person who is able to think and fend for themselves and are not a burden, there are three who are. The temptation to simply hand this over to robots will be overwhelming.

If a robot is programmed to tell someone over and over again, information they want to hear due to loss of mental power due to Alzheimers, a robot can do this with infinite patience. A robot can repeat cautions or reminders of doctor visits over and over again until it is time to go. They can repeat children's games or requests an infinite number of times and not weary of it. They can change diapers or turn over the bedridden.

Of course, the danger is, people will consider this a waste of time and money. Emotional detachment means not caring in the end. There is a dark corridor here that should not be ignored. The utility of robots carry within their complex cyberworks, the seeds of loss of humanity.

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Monkeys Attack And Kill Deputy Mayor In India

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Our government was taken over by a bunch of wild, out control monkeys. They have launched wars, tore up our Constitution and in general, destroyed everything they could get their hands on! Today, the news in India is about a monkey troop that killed the deputy mayor of New Delhi. Seems that Bush's relatives are menacing governments across the planet. The evolution of monkeys versus humans is very interesting. We are supposed to be more clever than they. But in many ways, we aren't.

From the BBC:

The deputy mayor of the Indian capital Delhi died on Sunday after being attacked by a horde of wild monkeys.
SS Bajwa suffered serious head injuries when he fell from the first-floor terrace of his home on Saturday morning trying to fight off the monkeys.

The city has long struggled to counter its plague of monkeys, which invade government complexes and temples, snatch food and scare passers-by.

I once knew a monkey, Little Elmo. A friend's brother bought him via a comic book ad back in the early 1960's when it was still legal to sell wild animals to children via comic books. This was an Amazonian squirrel monkey. He had big ears, big, black eyes, tiny hands and feet, a prehensile tail and his fur was more green than yellow.

Little Elmo hated being in a cage and loved running wild. He was very good at opening his cage when the time was right. Because I can speak monkey language (a skill I have used many times over the years) he loved to chat with me. Back then, I could do the squeaky sounds really well. Little Elmo decided he was in love with me, he being very male and prone to show off his equipment when I was around.

One time, he flung his cage door open when I was eating spaghetti and landed on my dish and then began to swing it wildly about like whips. How can a girl resist such ardor? He loved swinging from the draperies and then flying to my arm where he would show his masculine joy with a lot of wetness. All I had to do was cluck to him and cheep. When I went to college, he thought I betrayed him. He escaped and went looking for me. The police were summoned. He jumped on a cop, tore off his hat and proceeded to bite him on the ear. They shot him dead.

So my great love was the victim of police brutality.

I no longer have monkeys in love with me, just my husband. I hope he doesn't bite a cop's ear. The news in India are interesting to me because monkeys are supposed to be stupider than humans. But they aren't all that stupid, they just think on a different track. The human species evolved to work together and to be so clever, we could figure out ways of hunting and killing monkeys or at least, put them in cages. The battle between humans and the rest of our relatives is nearly as bloody as the wars we wage against each other. Humans lost their fangs and prehensile tails but had bigger and bigger brains. We used these things to work together to terrorize all living things. We figured out how to use rocks and sticks in novel ways. We hunted using these things. Even ferocious group fighters like the baboons had to learn to fear tribes of humans.

But in modern times, humans are no longer seen as a tribal force by the monkeys. For example, in the battle between the deputy mayor and the monkeys, they knew he was alone so they ganged up on him. Monkeys can move with tremendous speed. The evolved this, running away from humanoids. They learned to be clever and to exploit opportunities whereby they could get food or other things from isolated humans. It is very odd, but if a human acts like a monkey in front of monkeys, they really are impressed and don't treat them as humans. Which is how sucessful humans hunted these creatures. Ever call wild turkeys? I can. They can't believe their eyes when the human making the, 'Weep*weep*weep', call is not shaped like a forelorn turkey hen.

Wild monkeys that no longer fear humans are very dangerous as we can see from this story. They can fly through the air, tear at things with their hands, steal stuff and rip things apart. They have very sharp teeth. But in India, no one can stop them due to the human mind: monkeys are viewed as humans in a previous life, most often, thieves and con artists, etc. I hope people making money while hiding on various tax haven islands figure this out: they are the monkey troops in India in the future.

From the BBC:

One approach has been to train bands of larger, more ferocious langur monkeys to go after the smaller groups of Rhesus macaques.

So, the weaker, smaller monkeys will be replaced by bigger, toothier, nastier monkeys? In Africa, the gorillas and chimps are being hunted down by humans with guns and eaten. Cannibalism is not far outside our genes, indeed, we have very strong cannibalistic tendencies which is why we need prohibitions on eating our own children or other family members. Gorillas lived for generations in the jungles without worry but the invention of guns meant their doom just as it did to the ferocious grizzlies in North America.

Anyway, replacing the present monkey population with ones that are even nastier would be a very bad idea. Also, there is this iron rule of nature: invasive populations always flourish and replace their rivals due to lack of competition from higher-ranked predators. Tigers could eat these monkeys but they also eat humans, for example. In American cities, for example, we got rid of the overwhelming pigeon populations by protecting hawks and eagles. I see hawks flying about the center of the biggest cities, swooping down on not only pigeons but rats. Hooray.

Eagles hunt monkeys. But they also hunt other things humans don't want them to hunt so I don't see them being brought into Delhi and more than tigers, lions and bears.

From the BBC, 2004:

Officials in the northern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh may have a solution to the problem of an over abundance of monkeys - export them to Central Asia.

Officials in the state see urban monkeys as little more than nuisances who pester passers-by and steal food.

Himachal Pradesh has one of the largest monkey populations in the country - nearly a quarter of a million, according to the latest count last year.

The problem with exporting them was, the competition for resources was lessened so the lower status mothers were able to reproduce. Any animal population, if you ship out large numbers, happily reproduce even faster. The niche must be filled! And humans don't occupy the exact same niche as monkeys. They are up high, we tend to be on the ground. The interface in the past was, we hunted and ate them. If this cease, they take over more area within their niche. And of course, they compete for food and the food they like are much the same as our own food.

We see this with sea gulls. If they live around tourists and if the tourists feed them or leave lots of food in trash baskets or on the ground, the gulls soon learn to not be afraid and will soon literally swoop down and snatch food right out of people's hands. On the internet was that funny video of a gull in England stealing bags of chips from a store, regularly. In Seattle, there were gulls that would hang out next to this pizza place. If anyone eating outside moved even slightly away from their slices, the gulls would swoop in and snatch the entire slice. I knew someone who saw the gulls try to make off with an entire pizza and its box this way.

I once rescued a baby crow. The parents dive bombed me every time they saw me. Eventually, the baby grew up in our kitchen and became very adept at doing things with kitchen tools. He even tried using the electric can opener to open cat food cans, his favorite. When wild animals interface with civilization, they become very bold, very fast.

From the BBC, 2001:

Thousands of monkeys are invading government buildings in Delhi, forcing employees to arm themselves with sticks and stones in case they are attacked.
At least 10,000 monkeys are creating havoc in the Indian capital by barging into government offices, stealing food, threatening bureaucrats and even ripping apart valuable documents.

Monkeys invading government offices in 2001. Seems that year was a key year for them. The Year of the Monkey King. In the US, a gang of baboons led by a howler monkey took over the White House and our government with disasterous results.

TUCKER *BUSH IS NOT SHREDDING THE CONSTITUTION!! HE'S NOT!!*

From Political Teen Tidbits:

Can we ship these monkeys to Central Asia? Would Putin and the Iranians allow this? No? And would Pakistan survive this? Or maybe we should bring in really big monkeys or apes to drive out the present ones occupying the White House?

Or just impeach these monkeys?

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Elaine Meinel Supkis

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Walking on two legs costs humans only one-quarter the energy expended by chimpanzees who knuckle-walk on four legs, according to a new research conducted by U.S. anthropologists.

This saving in energy may have been what originally drove our common ancestor to walk upright, anthropologists from University of Arizona and Washington University, St. Louis reported Monday on the latest issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The research team measured how much oxygen five chimpanzees and four human volunteers burned as they walked on a treadmill: the chimps on four legs or two legs, the humans just on two.

Filler, writing in the journal Neurosurgical Focus on Sunday, said one main clue was a bone feature called the transverse process, which sticks out from the side of the hollow, round vertebrae, Filler said in a telephone interview. This is where muscles attach to the spine.

"The vertebra is transformed in a way that literally reverses the mechanics of the spine," Filler said. "The bone lever of the vertebrae gets switched from bending the spine forward to bending the spine back."

Most vertebrates are oriented forward, to walk on all fours. The transverse process is at the front of each vertebra, facing the animal's belly. This is true of monkeys, too.

But in humans and in the 21 million-year-old fossil of a creature called Morotopithecus bishopi, a tree-dwelling, ape-like creature that lived in what is now Uganda, the transverse process has moved backward, behind the opening for the spinal cord.

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Bird As Big As Tyrannosaur Rex Discovered In China

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Xu Xing is a Chinese paleontologist who finds the most interesting things! This week's unveiling is the head and some bones from what is easily the biggest bird in all time---as big as a Tyrannosaur Rex! So I just had to draw my version of this bird. I assume it turned its head red when angry just like my turkeys like to do....

From USA Today:

The dinosaur world's latest star had a toothless beak, waved feathered arms incapable of flight and may have hunted only plants. But if you met Gigantoraptor erlianensis in a Mongolian forest 70 million years ago, best to have given it a wide berth. At more than 16 feet tall and roughly 3,000 pounds, the beast could stand eyeball-to-eyeball with a tyrannosaur, Chinese researchers say.
The bones of what its discoverers call the world's largest birdlike dinosaur were revealed Wednesday in Beijing. The announcement came two years after the remains were dug from a mud hill near the Inner Mongolian city of Erlian.

Most theories suggest carnivorous dinosaurs shrank as they grew more birdlike. This latest find is about 35 times heavier than other similar feathered dinosaurs, called oviraptors, which rarely exceeded a body mass of 88 pounds.

"This could be the largest ever species to have feathers," says Xu Xing, the lead scientist behind the discovery, reported in the journal Nature.

After the death and destruction of the whole world of dinosaurs, when creatures recolonized the planet, the biggest of them all for a while were the 'terror birds' which ran around North America for a while. There is one of these guys in the Natural History Museum in Boston. It is taller than a human but it is dwarfed by this critter! The interesting thing here is, why do all animals end up giants?

And in this case, a giant which was walking about the place at the same time as other giants and it has no teeth! The others had huge teeth. How did it survive? Was its econiche hostile to these other predators? If it was feathered, was the climate too cold for the other giants who prefered warmer climes? Or was it too dry and prone to sudden floods? In general, huge birds like this such as the moa or ostrich live in dry climates which have colder nights.

So, was central China a savanna? This wonderful discovery opens many doors to rooms we can't even imagine. The simple straight-line evolutionary trees we learn are actually very thorny bushes with many side branches and individual leaves. All I know is, we barely have found maybe about 1% of the variety and continuity of the creatures who populated this planet over the last 300 million years!

Here is a great web page for a course in Avian evolution by Prof. Richisong:

Avian genomes are small and streamlined compared with those of other amniotes by virtue of having fewer repetitive elements and less non-coding DNA (a typical bird genome consists of about 1.45 billion base pairs; human genomes are another billion base pairs longer). This condition has been suggested to represent a key adaptation for flight in birds, by reducing the metabolic costs associated with having large genome and cell sizes.

However, the evolution of genome architecture in birds, or any other lineage, is difficult to study because genomic information is often absent for long-extinct relatives. Organ et al. (2007) found that bone-cell size correlates well with genome size in extant vertebrates, and used that relationship to estimate the genome sizes of 31 species of extinct dinosaur, including several species of extinct birds.

Their results indicate that the small genomes typically associated with avian flight evolved in the saurischian dinosaur lineage between 230 and 250 million years ago, long before this lineage gave rise to the first birds.

By comparison, ornithischian dinosaurs were inferred to have had much larger genomes, probably typical of ancestral Dinosauria. Using comparative genomic data, Organ et al. (2007) estimated that genome-wide interspersed mobile elements, a class of repetitive DNA, comprised 5–12% of the total genome size in the saurischian dinosaur lineage, but was 7–19% of total genome size in ornithischian dinosaurs, suggesting that repetitive elements became less active in the saurischian lineage.

These genomic characteristics should be added to the list of attributes previously considered avian, but now thought to have arisen in non-avian dinosaurs, such as feathers, pulmonary innovations, and parental care and nesting.

If this is so and the new discovery is a bird-like creature living 70 million years ago, then birds took to the air and then some evolved back to ground-only life and there is enough evolutionary time between in this history, over 100 million years. We know that animals evolve various things and then lose them again depending on what is needed for survival and the rearing of young.

This latest find fills us with wonder. Did the bone structure look like dinosaurs or birds? How dense were they? And did the creature have a wishbone? I do know that many birds with no teeth are quite capable of ripping up other animals. My turkeys used to tear apart mice and snakes, for example. And of course, the raptor birds can rip apart small animals and vultures tear up the carcasses of humans and elephants! I bet this latest creature that was discovered this week probably dined on carcasses. With all the giant dinosaurs roaming the planet, I'm sure there was plenty to eat.

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South American Araucana Chickens Came Over Before Europeans

Elaine Meinel Supkis

I have these Chilean chickens who lay blue eggs. Now we have genetic proof the native chickens of Peru which are the only ones to lay eggs that aren't white or brown, are unique in many ways! I love these Araucanas chickens because they are very friendly and easy to handle. Many of my hens will squat down for me to pick them up. I wonder about their genetic history now that we know that chickens came over to South America from across the Pacific rather than from Europe.

From the Independent:

A chicken bone has provided anthropologists with the strongest evidence yet to suggest that Polynesians sailed to South America before the discovery of the New World by Europeans.

The possibility that Polynesians had direct contact with the indigenous people of South America has long intrigued experts on ancient human migrations, but hard evidence has been difficult to come by. However, a study by scientists from New Zealand and Chile has now shown that chickens may have been introduced into South America by Polynesians sailing from the west rather than Europeans coming from the east.

Chicken bones excavated from an archaeological site in central Chile have been analysed by carbon dating and by DNA profiling. One of the bones was dated to more than 100 years before the first Europeans arrived in South America and its DNA shows a strong correlation with the DNA of present-day chickens living on the inhabited islands of the Pacific Ocean.

I suspect many of the natives of California and Baja also came across the Pacific Ocean via boats. After all, these superb navigators and sailors colonized every possible island in the Pacific! If they could reach Hawaii and Easter Island then they could also reach North and South America. A recent story about the possibility that a major comet blast over North America killed off much of the larger animals as well as most of the humans hunting them shows clearly that we still know virtually nothing about the long process of colonization of the New World.

When I saw the news about these ancient chicken bones I sat up and exclaimed, 'That explains everything about my chickens!' Namely, they are the sweetest of all chicken breeds. They never peck at any humans, they are extremely tame and allow me to pick them up off the ground when they are running free, for example. Their eggs are totally different from other domestic chickens which means they probably are a mutation that was genetically isolated for a long time.

From Murray McMurry Hatchery:

The "Easter Egg Chicken", This unusual breed gets its name from the Indian tribe of Chile where they were first discovered. Araucanas lay beautiful colored eggs of blue-green shades from turquoise to deep olive. These natural Easter Eggs will amaze your friends and make a great "show and tell" project for school. Adults are of medium size with pea combs and our breeding stock is selected for their ability to produce colored eggs. They exhibit a wonderful combination of colors and color patterns and 10 or 20 of these birds make an absolutely beautiful laying flock that is extremely hardy and will be the talk of the town.

If you click on the McMurray web page, do read the comments of happy hen owners. They all exclaim how friendly these chickens are. Rhode Island Reds, for example, have nasty tempers and will attack anyone collecting their eggs so you have to bribe them to leave the nest or be fast with the egg removal process. But with the Araucanas, even a small child can reach right under the hen who will even move over to make it easier, collecting their marvelous blue and green eggs.

I used to have Jungle Fowls from Asia which were throwbacks to 5,000 years ago and they look very much like these Chilean chickens. The golden/brown/buff feathers, tuffs of feathers on the cheeks and small combs are very similar. The chicks look like fluffy, tiny chipmunks with their stripes and fat little cheeks.

The news that these marvelous, singular birds, came over on canoes all the way over from Sumatra to South America makes me wonder: did this vast journey in tiny boats shape the genes of these birds? Namely, did the unfriendly ones or uncooperative ones die or were eaten? So only the most serene, friendly birds survived?

I once had a fire in the incubator of a hatching of Araucanas and only one chick survived. I put her in my pocket and carried her around while I took care of things. As this hen grew up, she had a lopsided hunched back due to injuries from that fire. So I kept her with me, she being rather helpless.

Well, she was super-friendly as her breed always is! And she rode on my shoulder even when I was driving the truck around the property. I would take her to schools to meet children who she let pet her and play with her. When Mo Udall was running for President many years ago, he had her ride on his shoulder when giving a speech in Tucson.

I had a long fight with the city over tearing down my house and gardens and paving them over for a parking lot. At one point, an officer tried to ticket me, claiming my Araucanas were 'noisy.' Trucks were roaring by and military jets were screaming overhead. I said, 'See you in court'. And we recorded the noises and took this to court. Along with Hunchback Hen. Who sat in on the proceedings.

She won her case, of course.

These chickens obviously evolved in such a fashion, due to their long journey across the world's mightiest ocean, that they make ideal pets and a source of good, healthy, colorful eggs. They are good in cities as well as in the country and are my favorite breed of chicken. And I must thank the Polynesians who created this sweet bird.

Thank you!

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The Perfect Storm Of Celestial And Earth Events Exterminates NA Mammals

Elaine Meinel Supkis

It is hard for people to accept that sudden climate changes and extinctions can have multiple causes, these periodic 'Perfect Storms' can lead to mass exterminations. This week, some scientists suggest that the US and parts of Europe were affected by a meteorite with a high carbon content exploding and causing vast fires that lead to the extermination of 40% of the large and some smaller species 12,900 years ago. They hypothosize this also caused the sudden Younger Dryas cold phase event. I look at other geological and celestial events from that same time frame.

From Raw Story:

Scientists will outline dramatic evidence this week that suggests a comet exploded over the Earth nearly 13,000 years ago, creating a hail of fireballs that set fire to most of the northern hemisphere.

Primitive Stone Age cultures were destroyed and populations of mammoths and other large land animals, such as the mastodon, were wiped out. The blast also caused a major bout of climatic cooling that lasted 1,000 years and seriously disrupted the development of the early human civilisations that were emerging in Europe and Asia.

For many years, scientists have wondered why the vast majority---but certainly not all---megafauna of the Pleistocene in North America suddenly vanished. The Clovis point people also ceased to be, mainly, the stone tools they chipped abruptly ended and the stone tools found in more recent time frames were not nearly so sophisticated. Anthropologists wonder if the makers of these tools were killed off or were so disrupted, they couldn't keep their culture. We know very little about all this and scientists are always looking for some clues, what could have happened?

We know that the fauna of Africa changed relatively little during this same time frame. But then, Africa didn't have huge ice sheets cover half the continent and then suddenly, disappear. Siberia's climate changed relatively little, it was never covered with glaciers, but North America and Europe did go through some very violent cyclic changes.

The sudden collapse of the large mammals in North America in particular can't be pin pointed to one cause, easily. There were several changes that were sudden and unique. One was, the sudden appearance of the Clovis hunters who seemed to be very good at this art. Unlike the game living in Africa, the large mammals in the Americas were naive about humans. Humans evolved alongside African animals so they were aquainted with our tendency to kill everything in sight. This is why animals, when they spot humans, run away.

One would suppose, when the larger animals in the Americas first met humans and their dogs, they thought nothing of it until it was too late. And humans had a hunting tool we keep forgetting: fire. In Africa, humans have been using fire for many generations, at least 200,000 years. The landscape of Africa has been reshaped by fires lit by humans. We see today how, in America, humans love to set fires and dry seasons are very dangerous in many places because we are pyromaniacs.

Many of the fires we set today are snuffed out. But in the past, when they burned wildly, they were explosive and destructive such as the Great Peshtigo Fire in 10/8/1871 which killed the most people in American fire fighting history. This took place in Wisconsin and the trigger was a mere cold front encountering a forest dried out by a long summer heat wave and drought. This fire jumped lakes and rivers. It doesn't take much to start a raging fire.

From the news story above:

'This comet set off a shock wave that changed Earth profoundly,' said Arizona geophysicist Allen West. 'It was about 2km-3km in diameter and broke up just before impact, setting off a series of explosions, each the equivalent of an atomic bomb blast. The result would have been hell on Earth. Most of the northern hemisphere would have been left on fire.'

The theory is to be outlined at the American Geophysical Union meeting in Acapulco, Mexico. A group of US scientists that include West will report that they have found a layer of microscopic diamonds at 26 different sites in Europe, Canada and America. These are the remains of a giant carbon-rich comet that crashed in pieces on our planet 12,900 years ago, they say. The huge pressures and heat triggered by the fragments crashing to Earth turned the comet's carbon into diamond dust. 'The shock waves and the heat would have been tremendous,' said West. 'It would have set fire to animals' fur and to the clothing worn by men and women. The searing heat would have also set fire to the grasslands of the northern hemisphere. Great grazing animals like the mammoth that had survived the original blast would later have died in their thousands from starvation. Only animals, including humans, that had a wide range of food would have survived the aftermath.'

Even if there were really big fires, this wouldn't change the climate for more than a few years. This is because burning forests and fields can't send their particulate matter above the Jet Stream. The only things that can do this trick are volcanoes. And full-impact metoerite strikes. I would seriously doubt this hypothesis was the sole cause of the Younger Dryas and the extinctions. But then, if we look at all the odd geological events that happened within the 12,000-11,000 years ago time frame, we see some interesting things that could have created the Perfect Fire and Dust Storm: a comet possibly hitting the Carolinas and some very violent volcanic events in Europe and Indonesia.

From Wikipedia:

Laacher See is a crater lake in the Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany, situated close to the cities of Koblenz and Mayen. It fills a volcanic caldera in the Eifel mountain range, the only caldera in Central Europe. It is part of the area of the "east Eifel volcanic field".

The lake lies 850 ft (259 m) above sea level, 5 mi (8 km) in circumference, and surrounded by a ring of high hills. The water has a blue color, very cold and bitter to the taste. The lake has no natural outlet and so the water level changes considerably due to evaporation and rainfall conditions. On the western side lies the Benedictine monastery of Maria Laach Abbey (Abbatia Lacensis), founded in 1093 by Henry II, count palatine of the Rhine.

The caldera was formed after the Laacher volcano erupted, between 12900 and 11200 years ago. The remaining crust collapsed into the empty magma-chamber below, only two or three days after the eruption.[1] This eruption was 50 times bigger than the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980. Remains of this eruption can be found all over Europe and is often used for dating of sediments. A number of unique minerals can be found in the region,[2] and quaries to mine the stone as a building material.

Many, many big extinction events happen to coincide with massive caldera events. Unlike simple eruptions, when a volcano becomes a caldera, they usually blow up in a matter of hours or days and eject their entire mass into the high stratosphere. Unlike normal volcanic events that send their dust lower and don't penetrate the Jet Stream, these major eruptions can and do jump that barrier. And once the gases and dust get lodged up high, it takes many years to descend. This causes several things, one is, much lower temperatures. Unlike the explosion of the possible meteorite over North America, one that threw no gases or dust above the Jet Stream, caldera events are very, very dirty in all ways and the gases they release are particularily potent.

The meteorite didn't impact the earth so nothing terrestrial was released, only carbon entered the atmosphere. No sulfur. But if a meteorite blows up and a caldera does the same in the same geological time frame, then we see a one-two punch. The caldera in Europe is the only 'hot spot' in Europe outside of Sicily and Naples, Italy. We see now that a major volcanic event affected Europe's flora and fauna even as North America burned from the explosion of this meteorite. But there was more!

Here is a list of supervolcano events.

From Harvard:

Campi Flegrei, in Southern Italy, is an active caldera that has shown signs of unrest since 1969. Because the caldera has a population of 400,000 people, it is especially important to understand the mechanisms driving the unrest and their implication for the probability of a future eruption. Since its last ignimbrite eruption 12,000 years ago (which produced the Neapolitan Yellow Tuff), volcanic activity in Campi Flegrei has consisted of numerous eruptions (volumes ~0.1 km3 or less) surrounding the inferred caldera rim. For at least the last 3,700 years, the caldera has been subsiding at mean rates of 14-17 mm per year, punctuated by two known periods of mean uplift (1430-1538 and 1969-Present). The first period produced a net uplift of about 30 m at the port of Pozzuoli and was followed in 1538 by the eruption of Monte Nuovo (20 million m3) some 4 km to the west. The second period has to date consisted of two episodes of uplift (in 1969-72 and 1982-84), each raising Pozzuoli by about 2 m. Studies of the second period have attributed uplift either to magmatic intrusion or to the expansion of water in heated aquifers. These interpretations assumed a stationary reference condition. It is here proposed that the reference condition in fact corresponds to subsidence at about 17 mm per year. Slower subsidence then reflects the difference between background subsidence and actual intrusion of magma. The revised interpretation suggests a two-component source for the recent episodes of uplift: (1) intrusion of two batches of magma of ~0.1 km3 that have produced a permanent uplift of about 2.8 m, and (2) the expansion and later dissipation of heated water, which produced a temporary uplift of about 0.7 m that has since disappear

So, there was not just one but two major caldera events in this same time frame! Since both of these happened in the Northern Hemisphere, if we couple these with the meteorite event in the Americas, this would definitely cause a catastrophic drop in temperatures in the North. Africa straddles the equator and probably was not as affected.

From the US Geological Survey:

Glacier Peak (3,213 meters) is a small Cascade Range stratovolcano. Although its summit reaches greater then 3,000 meters above the surrounding valleys, the main cone of Glacier Peak is perched on a high ridge, and the volcanic pile is no more than 500-1,000 meters thick. More than a dozen glaciers occur on the flanks of the volcano, and unconsolidated pyroclastic deposits over 12,000 years old have been largely removed by glaciation. Lava flows locally cap ridges to the northeast of the volcano, indicating a topographic reversal, and glacial and fluvial downcutting of more than 2,000 meters has occurred since the earliest cone-building eruptions. While small basaltic flows and cones are found at several points around the flanks of Glacier Peak, the main edifice is largely dacite and andesite. Lava flows extend no more than a few kilometers from the summit.

This wasn't the only major eruption in the Americas. There were others. All we have to do is look to Alaska where the subduction zone has launched a whole host of powerful volcanoes.

From Volcano world:

Kizimen is an isolated, conical stratovolcano that is morphologically similar to Mount St. Helens prior to its 1980 eruption. The summit of Kizimen consists of overlapping lava domes, and blocky lava flows descend the flanks of the volcano, which is the westernmost of a volcanic chain north of Kronotsky volcano. The 2376-m-high Kizimen was formed during four eruptive cycles beginning about 12,000 years ago and lasting 2000-3500 years.

The Younger Dryas lasted for over 1,000 years. During that time, this volcano was pumping dirt and gases into the higher atmospheres right at the top of the planet.

Another major volcanic event that started in 12,000. The earth doesn't have regular volcanic episodes, they are periodic. Some, like the great Deccan Traps of India or the even greater Siberian Traps, probably caused major extinctions. The Siberian Traps occured exactly when the biggest extinction happened: the Permian collapse. Meteorite strikes can trigger such events. The confluence of forces that create great extinctions happen only rarely but they do happen.

It is interesting that extinctions connected with volcanic eruptions happened all over the planet 12,000-11,000 years ago. Australia had a major extinction event back then, too. There are not volcanoes there but a vast drought occured. So I looked for a nearby volcanic event/extinction and found it:

From Kirsten Weir:

The newfound bones may hold more clues about the Flores people. Researchers plan to try to extract DNA from the bones, hoping to clarify the relationship between H. floresiensis and other human species.

Whether or not the attempt is successful, one thing is certain: The tiny Flores people continued to thrive for thousands of years after other early human species disappeared around the globe.

Then, about 12,000 years ago, a volcanic eruption on Flores wiped out many of the island's unusual species, including the pygmy elephants. The Flores people, too, seem to have perished in the blast.

The last survivors of our ancestors, our nearer relatives, they all died at this same time. The Neanderthals, the Hobbits, anyone living in China, whoever. This was another terrible key-hole event in evolutionary history. The one-time event of a meteorite explosion couldn't cause such tremendous changes but what if its passage through the earth's atmoshpere and its demise triggered a series of violent earthquakes which woke up a host of nasty volcanoes and thus, caused considerable geological havoc leading to destabilizing the climate?

From the Quaternary Times:

Meanwhile, in North America the debate on megafaunal mammal extinction is about to get a much-needed injection of reliable data. Paleontologists Holmes Semken (University of Iowa) and Russell Graham (Denver Museum of Natural History), and radiocarbon dating expert Tom Stafford (Stafford Research Laboratory, Boulder, Colorado) have obtained 140 new AMS dates on proteins extracted from fossil bones of megafaunal mammals that died near the end of the last glaciation. The bones come mainly from North American sites, from Alaska to Mexico. The results of this new study are quite startling. It now appears that the major megafaunal exinction event took place at 11,400 14C yr B.P. This event included the extinction of camels, horses, giant sloths, Pleistocene bison, and all other genera of megafaunal mammals that did not survive beyond 11,400 14C yr B.P. , with the exception of the proboscideans. Mammoths and mastodons persisted beyond 11,400 yr B.P. Stafford et al. have dated the extinction of North American mammoth and mastodon to 10,900-10,850 yr B.P. So it now appears that there were two distinct extinction episodes. Each event took less than 100 years.

The older event may have taken place before, during, or just after the first appearance of Clovis artifacts in the archaeological record. The most recent evaluation of the age of Clovis sites in North America (Taylor et al., 1996) places the beginning of this culture at 11,500 yr B.P. If the people who used Clovis tools arrived in North America at that time, then they have never seen most of the Pleistocene megafaunal mammal species, much less have been responsible for their demise. There is good evidence that Clovis hunters killed and butchered mammoth and mastodon, the megafaunal species that died out a few centuries later. Whether human predation was responsible for the proboscidean extinction remains an open question.

In other words, the extinction didn't happen in one year! It was gradual but geologically speaking, sudden. The climate change was sudden, in less than five years. But that probably was due to the Laacher Sea caldera explosion. Just like the end of the dinosaurs was pushed by the meteorite strike 65 million years ago but the climate was already changing rapidly at that point because even as the fauna and plants were affected harshly by that event, the evolution of flora and the bees and other modern plants had already begun prior to the meteorite impact.

Which brings back the idea of a 'Perfect Storm'. There has to be fertile ground for change if an event is going to cause a cascade effect. This includes the sun's activities. How much energy or x-rays it is producing.

From UGA Library:

If Carolina Bays represent residual scars of a truly singular extraterrestrial event, the bays must be young--an attribute accepted by many terrestrial theorists as well. For example, Price (1968) indicated one or more periods of late Pleistocene bay development, whereas Thom (1970) indicated either a Farmdalian (28,000 - 22,000 B.P.) or a Woodfordian (22,000 - 12,500 B.P.) age. Age is a more critical factor when an extraterrestrial mechanism is invoked. Bays formed virtually instantaneously by explosions of cometary fragments are residual features. Subsequent modifications of such scars by normal terrestrial processes would rapidly obliterate all traces in unconsolidated sediments such as the Coastal Plain. Study of bays in Figure 2 suggests that bays remain quite distinct, essentially unaltered except for infilling; thus, the bays must be quite young--either late Wisconsinan or early Holocene.

Very few samples of buried peat in the bays have been dated. Thom (1970) had a 6600 B.P. radiocarbon date from the basal peat in one South Carolina bay although he cited a greater than 38,000 B.P. date from the basal peat in a North Carolina bay. It is difficult to equate the two results. The bays may be Wisconsinan in age. On the other hand, anomalous dates do occur, so little reliance can be placed on the few dates which have been acquired. Sequential samples along a vertical profile in several bays need to be dated and at least one date from the basal organic fill in a large sample of bays should be taken. Such a dating program will permit the Carolina Bays to be more precisely defined in time, and, more particularly, may indicate the possibility of simultaneous origin.

Here is yet another possible cosmic event from the exact same time frame! There is a lot of debate about what caused these strange pock-marks all over parts of the Carolinas and a few other places. Some geologists think this could be hot water popping out. Or it could be a comet exploding and pounding the landscape. Or perhaps the water did heat up and explode outwards...due to the meteorite blowing up further north? There are so many mysteries here.

The fact that these things formed suddenly and I presume, violently, during this whole time frame leads one to think that perhaps the planet was very disturbed for a while.

From George Howard's Carolina Bay site:

Two large and respected scientific conferences in Spring 2007 are sponsoring sessions with presentations regarding new research into the long debated origin of Carolina Bays. May 22-25 in Acapulco, Mexico, the American Geophysical Union Joint Assembly will have a session presenting first-time evidence of the "YD Extraterrestrial Impact," with two related Carolina Bay presentations proposed (one from your's truly if accepted). And on March 29 in Savannah, Georgia, the Southeastern Section of the American Geological Society is sponsoring a Carolina Bay-only session. The Georgia GSA presentations will present evidence largely in support of the prevailing view that Carolina Bays are formed solely by terrestrial mechanisms, while the Acapulco AGU presentations will claim bays are related to the newly described YD impact that began the end of the Ice Age.

This very topic is being addressed in two weeks. I will try to get more information when they release it. Certainly, figuring out all these many geological events is a great enterprise and as we know, watching that comet disintegrate and slam into Jupiter, to this day, things in the Oort Belt can and will come here and cause havoc.

From Physics:

Firestone, who conducted this research with Arizona geologist Allen West, will unveil this theory at the 2nd International Conference "The World of Elephants" in Hot Springs, SD. Their theory joins the list of possible culprits responsible for the demise of mammoths, which last roamed North America roughly 13,000 years ago. Scientists have long eyed climate change, disease, or intensive hunting by humans as likely suspects.

Now, a supernova may join the lineup. Firestone and West believe that debris from a supernova explosion coalesced into low-density, comet-like objects that wreaked havoc on the solar system long ago. One such comet may have hit North America 13,000 years ago, unleashing a cataclysmic event that killed off the vast majority of mammoths and many other large North American mammals. They found evidence of this impact layer at several archaeological sites throughout North America where Clovis hunting artifacts and human-butchered mammoths have been unearthed. It has long been established that human activity ceased at these sites about 13,000 years ago, which is roughly the same time that mammoths disappeared.

And here is the possible Key Event: a supernova disturbs the entire solar system! This causes the Oort Belt's various objects and thingies to cease circling the sun from far away and bits and pieces come roaring inwards, striking the moon, the earth and all the gas giants as well as slamming into the sun. This tremendous disturbance would also trigger earthquakes and volcanoes here on earth! Not to mention, disturbing the sun.

And so we see, all things affect each other and if one significant even, even if it is far away, outside our solar system, can trigger the Perfect Storm and exterminate many living things here on earth.

Other stories I have done on this topic:

A Sudden Freeze 8,000 Years Ago

Neanderthals Didn't Disappear Because Of Weather

Culture of Life News Main Page

Neanderthals Didn't Disappear Because Of Weather

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Every few months, some scientist proclaims that something else killed off every single Neanderthal as well as all our nearest relations. Yes, we are not to blame! Right. Of course, we are murdering the last of the Great Apes all over the planet. Not to mention killing off most species of nearly every class of animal on land, sea and air! But we need to blame someone else. Mother Nature! Yup, it all Her fault.

From Live Science:

Neanderthals disappeared from Earth more than 20,000 years ago, but figuring out why continues to challenge anthropologists. One team of scientists, however, now says they have evidence to back climate change as the main culprit.

The Iberian Peninsula, better known as present-day Spain and Portugal, was one of the last Neanderthal refuges. Many scientists have thought that out-hunting by Homo sapiens and interbreeding with them brought Neanderthals to their demise, but climate change has also been proposed.

Francisco Jiménez-Espejo, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Granada in Spain, says a lack of evidence has left climate change weakly supported—until now. “We put data behind the theory,” he said, filling in a large gap in European climate records when Neanderthals faded out of existence.

Hell's Bells: we can barely restrain ourselves from killing our loved ones not to mention, butchering our neighbors and anyone in distant lands! If there was ever a species more prone to murder, humans win that laurel! Even as the record for the 20th Century is soaked in blood, as various leaders talked about enslaving and annihilating millions of people, and these guys all were 'civilized'---the desire to murder runs very deep in our genes.

My own parents told me they would never talk to me again and they disowned me because I wrote about humans being ill-tempered and hating even their own children and spouses. Proved me wrong! Heh. Well, any alien who would stumble by this planet in order to make crop circles and flash lights over cities would notice pretty fast that humans are very irritable and like to kill anyone or anything that irritates themselves.

Actually, we kill for fun, too. We kill for sexual pleasure. Mothers kill their babies if they are too annoying. Indeed, humans, unlike animals, need lots of rules, laws and commandments ordering them to not do this too often or to the wrong creatures. For example, in many places today, it is illegal to kill the wife if she overcooks the pasta! Wow. Progress!

Or killing roomates or classmates: verboten. Doesn't stop it much but at least we recognize the need to forbid doing this just in case anyone gets an idea and thinks it is time to butcher one's associates. But then, this is pretty obvious humans need many exterior restraints to prevent non-stop murder. So why do I see, week after week, studies 'proving' that all our many relatives in the human branch of the Great Ape family, died 'natural' deaths?

Are these people all Lady Macbeths, wiping the invisible blood off the hands? 'Out, out, damn spot!' they all shout as they publish their goofy papers.

At this point, it utterly pisses me off. Neanderthals didn't die in Spain, they once lived all over the place, all over Eurasia and probably northern Africa! And every last one of them was KILLED. And not over 100 years but over thousands and thousands of years. Half to the time, when they met our ancestors, things were OK. But then every few years, our ancestors would kill every Neanderthal they met. And since things were going 'badly' according to the scientists in this latest article, guess what?

WE ATE THEM. For we have strong tendencies towards cannibalism! All apes have this. We have this in spades. This is why so many religions and societies have to have RULES about cannibalism: you can't eat your baby or your clan's babies. You can't eat your brother or your wife. Not even your damned mother-in-law. Verboten. But there were no rules concerning eating Neanderthals! They were not of the clan nor were they wives or babies! Yummy. McNeanderthals!

From Xinhua:

Chinese archaeologists say they have uncovered strong evidence that Stone Age people in southern East Asia were at least as technologically advanced as their European cousins -- challenging the long-standing theory of "two cultures".

  Excavations at the Dahe Stone Age site, in southwest China's Yunnan Province, had revealed elaborate stone tools and instruments that rivaled those of the Mousterian culture that existed at that time in Europe, said Ji Xueping, chief archaeologist at the site.

Dated as 36,000 to 44,000 years old, the Dahe site has since 1998 yielded cores -- stones or flints from which flakes had been removed -- including Levalloisian tortoiseshell-shaped and cylindrical blade cores, semicircular scrapers, end scrapers, denticulations (evenly spaced rectangular blocks set in a row), Mousterian-type points and beak-shaped stones.

Technologically they were very similar to European Mousterian cultures, which were characterized by flint flake tools dating from 70,000 to 32,000 BC and named after archaeological finds in the cave of Le Moustier, Dordogne, France. The Levalloisian technique describes the flaking method and is named after the French town of Levallois-Perret where it was identified.

Um, the same people who killed and probably ate, the Neanderthals were restless. Not only did they spread all over Africa and Eurasia during the last Ice Age, they crossed into North and then South America, killing everything in their path. Kill, kill, kill. Blood everywhere.

There were no Neanderthals in the New World so they ate monkeys. Humans still eat monkeys today. In Africa, Asia and the Americas. Since we still like to kill and eat them, this means we killed and ate everyone in our path.

And the humans who settled in China are ancestors to the Inuit and Indians of the New World. And over them rolled many later tribes pouring out of the agricultural revolutions. And all humans are 'smart' when it comes to killing things and making stuff to kill things. This is our heritage.

From PBS:

It started a few years back with a letter from a friend in Peru who built power plants. He heard this story of a chicken-eating spider. I love those kinds of stories, they are irresistible. So I had to go to Peru and see if it was true.

The spider cam allowed you to see some remarkable behavior, including some young tarantulas in the same burrow with what appeared to be a parent. ...

Yes, there were some real surprises. Seeing the big mama tarantula with the young was remarkable. Most tarantulas are in no way gregarious. In fact, they often cannibalize their own young. So seeing that was very unusual. But it may make sense. It looks like when they go out at night as a group, they can catch and kill larger prey by working together. We also discovered that those spiders appeared to be keeping a pet. There was a little frog that lived down in the hole with the spiders. It may offer some sort of service to spiders, like sweeping up ants that might bother the spiders.

Humans eat tarantulas. It is amusing to see tarantulas evolving a social lifestyle. I have captured more than one in the past. When the desert floods, they come pouring out of their holes and go to high ground like up the screen of my bedroom window in Tucson. I would then run outside, and slide them into a jar and take them inside to my aquarium. A great way to keep snoopy people out of the bedroom is to keep tarantulas and lizards around.

But none of mine were very sociable. So this news is most interesting. Nasty spiders that can be friendly with each other! And not only that, keeping a frog in the home! Almost human.

Culture of Life News Main Page

Humans Discuss Chimpanzees At Conference

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Chimpanzees are our closest relatives since homosapiens killed off any of the other hominids in the past. The discovery that chimpanzees can think like humans and socialize like humans has amazed researchers for years. I think the most interesting things about chimpanzees is how they are more similar to us when young but after seven years of age, they are quite different. Why is this?

From the New York Times:

The new consensus framed discussions in March at a symposium, “The Mind of the Chimpanzee,” at the Lincoln Park Zoo here. More than 300 primatologists and other scientists reviewed accumulating knowledge of chimps’ cognitive abilities.

After one session, Frans de Waal of Emory University said that as recently as a decade ago there was still no firm consensus on many of the social relationships of chimps. “You don’t hear any debate now,” he said.

In his own studies at the Yerkes Primate Research Center at Emory, Dr. de Waal found that chimps as social animals have had to constrain and alter their behavior in various ways, as have humans. It is a part of ape inheritance, he said, and in the case of humans, the basis for morality. The provocative interpretation was advanced in his recent book, “Primates and Philosophers.”

All animals are smarter than we think they are. Try outwitting a chipmunk, for example. Rats are notorious for being able to figure out ways of getting into our food, for example. Heck, cockroaches are relentless in their quests for what they want! Try thwarting them!

Rat traps work only for a while and if a rat observes another rat getting caught in a trap, it will not only avoid it but communicate the danger to its young in one way or another. Migrating birds or butterflies have fabulous abilities and memories and bees can not only judge their navigation by the sun and landmarks, they can tell other bees in their colony where things are outside using the sun's position as a guide!

I have known monkeys and they are curious creatures and will watch whatever I did with greatest care. For example, Little Elmo, an infamous spider monkey, saw a lady apply fingernail polish to her fingernails. Fascinated by the bright red color which is like fruits, he waited until she was gone, opened the door to his locked cage, went to where she put the polish, unscrewed the top and dabbed it all over his hands.

Poor creature! It was sticky and when he tried to lick it off, it tasted bad, so he got really mad and ran around the bedroom, screaming, climbing the curtains which he used as a towel only it didn't work so he slapped his hands on the ceiling and then tore up a pillow.

His tiny hand prints decorated everything. Chimpanzees which people try to socialize end up the same way: like out of control teenagers, they can't resist wrecking everything. They start of friendly and curious and if you say, 'No touch,' they understand and won't touch until you leave the room. Then a thousand devils won't stop them from prying open things, poking at things and tearing things apart.

Which leads me to suspect there is a strong primate/monkey gene at work within humans which is why we are so destructive. Unlike all other creatures in our family tree, we don't make temporary beds at night, we build elaborate living structures more like bees or termites or meerkats and prarie dogs.

The dark paths in our own minds are echoed in other primates. Researchers have keep chimpanzees in tiny cages and tortured them hideously at the Yale Primate labs to the point that when I was studying psychology, I got in a huge fight with the department at the University of Arizona back in 1968 (I fight all the time) when I had to sit through these hideous, Nazi movies made there showing how they studied ape mental processes by...unmentionable experiments.

Finally, when Jane Goodall decided to save all these poor chimps and gorillas, she went to that den of evil and begged the torturers to please stop it and finally, slowly, after 30 years, they changed their behavior enough to spare our nearest relatives the horrors inflicted on earlier victims.

Tetsuro Matsuzawa, a Kyoto primatologist, described a young chimp watching as numbers 1 through 9 flashed on the computer screen at random positions. Then the numbers disappeared in no more than a second. White squares remained where the numbers had been. The chimp casually but swiftly pressed the squares, calling back the numbers in ascending order — 1, 2, 3, etc.

The test was repeated several times, with the numbers and squares in different places. The chimp, which had months of training accompanied by promised food rewards, almost never failed to remember where the numbers had been. The video included scenes of a human failing the test, seldom recalling more than one or two numbers, if any.

This little tidbit was included in this article in order to amuse humans. We are so dumb. Actually, a horse or a pigeon or a bumble bee would have done just as well because this was simply an example of the sort of operant training. If a human was trained the same method for the same length of time, the human would be just as good as a pigeon or chimpanzee.

Animals of all sorts have amazing learning abilities. This is due to Mother Nature's iron rules of survival. But unlike some of the lower species of animals with smaller brains, humans and apes as well as some other large-brain, top of the feeding scale creatures like elephants and whales, there is a point where the ability to learn collapses.

“What we’ve learned is that manipulation of objects begins around 1 year of age,” Dr. Biro said. “If it involves two or three objects, as in cracking nuts, that happens at 3 ½ to 5 years. If it is not learned by 6 or 7, it will never be acquired.”

The amazing thing about humans is not only that we have extended childhoods, we mature later than chimps by quite a few years, but we also have much longer learning curves. Some humans can learn all their lives. Others stop much earlier. But this seems to be a major mutation in our species. The gene that turns on and off various other genes connected with the capacity and desire to learn in the brain now obviously never shuts down in many humans.

Unlike our nearest relatives who learn everything they seemingly need to know by the time they can reproduce, humans who could keep on learning new things killed off or overwhelmed (most likely, eaten or used as bait) other human types that couldn't keep up with the technological arms race. The ones who figured out how to put a chipped rock onto a stick did better than ones who were content to use any old stick. The ones who could teach their young how to take a stick, attach a twisted intestine to it and bend it so it was very taut and then use another stick with a stone tied to the tip and three feathers on the back---they were our ancestors.

The ability to constantly fiddle with details of various items and to talk about these alterations and to fine-tune things over and over again is the path humans took. Apes took the easier road whereby they had to get some simple skills with temporary tools, a rock, a stick, to be used only for a short while or if it were a rock used over and over again, once the user died, the rock was forgotten.

Remembering how to do many things, where many things are and how to explain new things is what set us apart. Prying apart boxes is easy. Manufacturing a box is somewhat harder. Some birds build very elaborate nests and in the monkey/ape lines, none of them could build anything nearly as good as a simple weaver-bird's nest until humans came along.

I used to raise and sell weaver birds. Delighful creatures! They carefully examine the nesting material I provided. They were like little carpenters: each string or straw had to be looked over carefully. Then it was carefully woven into the growing nests which hung like sacks from the limbs of the tree inside their aviary. They put a lot of thought into their nest building. Yet all looked nearly identical for the work was programmed into their brains and it evolved very slowly thanks to predators eating the eggs and babies of unsuccessful nests.

The human art of weaving grew slowly and became more and more elaborate over the eons. Thanks to industrialization, it is rapidly dying. As a former sheep owner who knows weavers, the process of raising sheep, shearing their wool, carding it, spinning it into threads, building a loom and then using the shuttles and other components. And various looms are of varying levels of complication. Each evolved over thousands of years! All disappearing like snow in a heat-wave.

If civilization were to collapse, this could possibly totally disappear. Ditto many other ancient skills such as how to find good rocks and chip them into tools and weapons. I used to do this for fun. It is very difficult!

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