Evolution News

Mammals Evolved Diversity Before The Dinosaurs Died Off

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Another debate over the end of the age of dinosaurs and how quickly mammalian evolution branched out into all ecosystems. The latest theory is that all the major mammalian branches existed before the K-T boundary. I have always asserted that this is so simply because of the fact that before the collapse of the dinosaurs, Africa and South America had split yet we see the same basic lineages on both continents.

From the New York Times:

The mass extinction that wiped out dinosaurs and other life 65 million years ago apparently did not, contrary to conventional wisdom, immediately clear the way for the rise of today’s mammals.

In fact, the ancestral branches of most mammals, including primates, rodents and hoofed animals, emerged long before the global extinction and survived it more or less intact. But it was not until at least 10 million to 15 million years afterward that the lineages of living mammals began to flourish in number and diversity.

I am puzzled as to why this is news. During the long reign of the dinosaurs, South America and Africa were united but had two main features: the longest rift valley on earth which was very active and two lesser valleys, the Amazon and the Congo. The planet is split all the way from the North Pole to the Antactica by this giant rift which became the Atlantic Ocean.

At the end of the Cretaceous, in our own family, the early monkeys, we had already split from the lemurs. There are no lemurs in South America but there are in Africa, especially on the east coast. Madaggascar is home to a wide variety of these animals and this is due to its splitting off from Africa at the end of the Cretaceous.

We know that all big creatures perished quickly at the end of the Cretaceous. We also know that the climate was rapidly changing and the oceans were dropping which seems to me to mean it was getting colder. The earliest modern flowering trees appeared along with their cultivators, the bees.

The earliest mammals, I believe, mostly lived in the exotic rift valley that was opening up between Africa and South America. The thick mists on steep hillsides probably was their climate zone. It probably rained a lot. We see this sort of environment in jungles today. One characteristic of jungles is the abundance of feathers and fur both of which shed water while keeping the host animal warm.

There was this belief, I think based on wishful thinking, that dinosaurs were warm blooded and moved rapidly even in the cold. If this were so, when the earth cooled off during the run down to the K-T boundry, dinosaurs would have been just fine. But they were not.

Or rather, only the ancestors of birds did fine. We know they evolved in jungles and climbed about in trees. Most likely they were, like a number of bird species today, ominvores. Many people forget how many birds like to eat meat. I used to hate the roadrunner cartoons when I was a kid because I had roadrunner friends and they are ferocious hunters who love to eat meat. The cartoon stupidly shows this amusing desert survivor eating seeds.

I used to clean out the swimming pool filter and into it would fall the reptilian class of animals, namely lizards and snakes. I would hold them in the air and the roadrunners would hop up and down, croaking with joy, begging for goodies.

Heck, turkeys are omnivores. They love nothing better than snakes and frogs. They swallow them whole, betraying their dinosaurian roots.

From the NYT:

They said their analysis of more than 40 lineages of existing mammals showed that diversification rates “barely changed” in the aftermath of the extinctions at the boundary of the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods. The transforming changes started 10 million years later and lasted until about 35 million years ago.

Other scientists said the so-called “long-fuse model” opened a door to a better understanding of the evolutionary history of mammals and will force a re-examination of the ecological and other causes underlying the more recent proliferation of mammals.

Several things about mass extinctions: recovery takes a long time. The worse the extinction, the longer the recovery time. Complex animals like mammals can't occupy ecological niches is there are few or no plants, for example. There are not all that many animals above 12,000 feet, for example. On top of Mt. Everest, there are no mammals at all except foolish humans going there to yodel.

When great extinctions happen, the oxygen level evidently drops and there is lots and lots of muddy water because plants no longer cover much of the earth. This means river dwellers suffer, shallow seas get buried and the zone of life becomes very narrow, usually concentrated in these rift valleys.

From MNH Anthropology department:

In addition to primates, species in many other new orders were evolving. The first carnivores evolved in the Paleocene, though the order Carnivora did not thrive until the Oligocene. The forests supported a great variety of insects, resulting in a great deal of insectivores from this time period. Browsing animals (leaf-eaters) were also prevalent in the Paleocene, many of which have descendants that can be found in modern tropical and subtropical environments.

Before the disaster that killed of half of all living things and certainly, all large land creatures, there were plenty of insectivores. Insects were amoung the first animals to crawl out of the oceans and colonize dry land. When the population of most insect eaters collapsed, there was a short period when insects reigned. Sort of like it would be if we stupidly have WWIII. Cockroaches would be supreme.

Our distant ancestors were tree dwellers who were and still are, omnivores. When the world's ecosystems collapsed, our fur saved us from the deadly downpours that followed in the wake of the massive numbers of comets that crashed into the earth, one after the other. Being insect eaters, we could snatch a meal on the fly and with all the dead and rotting things around, the insects were in heaven and plentiful.

From the above story:

The Paleocene carnivorous mammals of Laurasia had to share their world with giant flightless birds of prey like Diatryma and it's cousins (order Diatrymiformes), which appear suddenly during the late Paleocene and continue through to the Middle Eocene. Standing 2 meters or more in height and weighing in at around 200 kg, these large-beaked birds were the biggest and fiercest animals on land for some five or ten million years. In South America similar giant predatory birds, the Phorusrhacids, are known from the Eocene but most probably likewise evolved during the Paleocene. These great birds were the last successors of the mighty theropod dinosaurs of the Mesozoic.

Birds also survived the foul weather because they sit on their eggs, indeed, perhaps this is why all birds sit on their eggs: the only ones to survive the massive die-off were the subspecies of birds that had this habit. Enough birds survived that they swiftly evolved into Kings of Creation. Not as large as the great predators of the dinosaurian age, they still were swift and voracious.

Anyone who has ever tangled with an angry rooster or goose knows that birds can be very quarrelsome. Eagles hunted our ancestors who feared them---and snakes---a lot. Indeed, all modern reptiles evolved from the few cold blooded scaled creatures we call 'reptiles': they probably were tree-dwellers or lived in burrows and only the ones living in the same rift valleys that was home to the mammals, survived.

From Wikipedia:

But subsequent research found what many thought was "the smoking gun" - the Chicxulub Crater buried under Chicxulub on the coast of Yucatan. This crater is oval, with an average diameter of about 180km, about the size calculated by the Alvarez team. Its shape and location indicate further causes of devastation in addition to the dust cloud:

The asteroid landed right on the coast and would have caused gigantic tsunamis, for which evidence has been found all round the coast of the Caribbean and eastern USA - marine sand in locations which were then inland, and vegetation debris and terrestrial rocks in marine sediments dated to the time of the impact.

The asteroid landed in a bed of gypsum (calcium sulphate), which would have produced a vast sulphur dioxide aerosol. This would have further reduced the sunlight reaching the earth's surface and then precipitated as acid rain, killing vegetation, plankton and organisms which build shells from calcium carbonate (notably some plankton species and many species of mollusk).

The crater's shape suggests that the asteroid landed at an angle of 20° to 30° from horizontal and travelling north-west. This would have directed most of the blast and solid debris into the central part of what is now the United States.

Most paleontologists now agree that an asteroid did hit the Earth about 65 million years ago, but many dispute whether the impact was the sole cause of the extinctions.

One thing we know is that all living things pass through these series of eyes of needles: extinctions on mass scales. The more we look, the more craters caused by celestial objects are found. Since we know Mars was peppered by these things, there being not much recent geological activity to cover this up, since we know the moon is coated with meteorite strikes, it is obvious, our planet has been hit more than once. I'm betting most of the minor extinctions were ushered in by things falling from the heavens.

From Wikipedia:

Several other craters also appear to have been formed at the K-T boundary. This suggests the possibility of near simultaneous multiple impacts, perhaps from a fragmented asteroidal object, similar to the Shoemaker-Levy 9 cometary impact with Jupiter.
Boltysh crater (24 km diam., 65.17 ± 0.64 Ma old) in Ukraine
Silverpit crater (20 km diam., 60-65 Ma old) in the North Sea
Eagle Butte crater (10 km diam., < 65 Ma old) in Alberta, Canada
Vista Alegre crater (9.5 km diam., < 65 Ma old) in Paraná State, Brazil

As our sun passes by other star systems, things can change rapidly. We move in this cloud of cosmic dirt, sort of like a fringe of boulders that can suddenly change orbit and fall towards the sun. On top of this, our planet is very active. During the K-T extinction, India was sailing rapidly into Asia and the Deccan Traps, a rift zone that disgorged a huge amount of lava, this probably changed the chemistry of the atmosphere. And if a dozen comets or meteorites hit too, this would really change the atmosphere and this, in turn, changes the climate.

And celestial objects disturb the sun and if our passage through the Orion Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy caused a distruption that sent a whole series of objects slamming into the earth, it probably caused the sun to flare up for the following age, the Eocene, was very warm. Deep oceans and lots of jungles for our monkey selves to swing around, eating bananas and bugs. To this day, the preferred home for monkeys and primates are the jungles.

Another thing about evolution: when populations are nearly destroyed, getting enough numbers to spread out and have different enough ecosystems to make former relations too distant to breed takes a long time. And as with the first sign of life on dry land, the plants have to come first. And they take their time. If there are no birds or animals to spread the seeds, there is only wind and water and we can see from the evolution of plants, they take great pains to attract insects, animals and birds. This is the best way to spread their own seeds.

Without this, it takes longer and isn't nearly as efficient. Once the plants finally created enough food for insects and other animals to survive, then evolution of varieties takes off.

And even then, evolution varies greatly. Monkeys on both sides of the ancient African/South American rift valley started out the same but in South America, they never evolved out of having tails while in the rift valleys of Africa, a small, very small group of monkeys were tail-less and from them sprang the Great Apes and humanoids.

When Africa banged into Europe and Asia, the many mammals that evolved on that continent headed north. Especially waves of Great Apes. Some of whom are now drastically altering the chemistry of the atmosphere.

Culture of Life News Main Page

Spring Is Here...BRRRR!

Elaine Meinel Supkis

It is officially spring! Not only is the day and night the same length, the star clusters that make up Pisces still rises in the East but better for me, this night is clear as a bell and at sunrise, the Great Square of Pegasus will reappear and begin His summer travels across the Heavens! Alas, Spring herself did not come: it is below zero tonight .

Akamaru is the red dog at the top, here is our English Shepherd, Colleen. She used to have her own flock of woolie lambies who normally would be having cute babies right now but I had to sell them off, alas. But she remains with us and herds wild deer and the cats.

Note all the flowers and lovely grasses....oops. Sorry. Everything is deep in snow, the snow banks tower everywhere and ice covered everything else. So much for global warming. Heh.

Time for a chickadee article!

WASHINGTON - Nuthatches appear to have learned to understand a foreign language — chickadee. It's not unusual for one animal to react to the alarm call of another, but nuthatches seem to go beyond that — interpreting the type of alarm and what sort of predator poses a threat. When a chickadee sees a predator, it issues warning call — a soft "seet" for a flying hawk, owl or falcon, or a loud "chick-a-dee-dee-dee" for a perched predator.

The "chick-a-dee" call can have 10 to 15 "dees" at the end and varies in sound to encode information on the type of predator. It also calls in other small birds to mob the predator, Christopher Templeton of the University of Washington said in a telephone interview.

"In this case the nuthatch is able to discriminate the information in this call," said Templeton, a doctoral candidate.

Silly scientists. All creatures understand the Chickadee language! After all, these tiny birds with their even tinier black caps rule the world. I pay them tribute in the form of sunflower seeds. This costs a lot of money. They eat many seeds and if the feeder runs low, a bunch of them come to the office window which is where the apricot tree is. They then begin to scold me until I come outside and feed them.

Thank goodness for my husband, he can defy these little upstarts and still feed them. They will complain about his height and weight. Chickadee, dee, dee, they yell. They want us to know they are bigger than us.

The cats know them, too. So do nuthatches. These cute little guys can walk up the sides of houses and hang upside down like bats. They are climbers. They love the Chickdees because these little guys hate the cats and attack them whenever Fluff tries to climb the tree. They will sit on the highest twigs and yell, 'Chick-a-dee-dee-dee-dee-deeeeeeeee' with tremendous volume and power.

The mighty eagle cannot endure this. But Fluff doesn't listen. He tries to pretend he is part of the trunk of the tree and hopes if he is very, very still, the Chickadees will get weary of deeing him and a Nuthatch will then try to climb him instead of the trunk.

At this point, one of us humans come outside and yell, 'Bad cat! Get down from there!' From both the Nuthatch and the Chickadee, the racket the Chickadees made caused me to come outside! Their language works!

When the hummingbirds arrive, they contest with the Chickadees, who rules the roost. Instead of yelling, they buzz people. Bzzzzzzz. Like an angry bee. Flicking the tongue. This is almost as scary as a Chickadee's dees.

Here is an article that misunderstands cooperation while mating.

By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 19, 2007; Page A06

When Emory University primatologist Frans de Waal read a news story that said Microsoft's chief executive, Steve Ballmer, had hurled a chair across the room on hearing an employee was going to work for rival Google, the scientist immediately made a connection with his own research: "When I see such behavior, I think of a chimpanzee."

Chimpanzees and gorillas are more civilized than humans. We eat them and they don't eat us.

Furthermore, humans make up all sorts of investment schemes that cheat people out of their bananas. Few apes can do that. And none make political speeches full of lies and false promises. We do lose our temper like them but then seldom do the apes draw guns and shoot back.

The idea that human behavior -- not just our physical bodies -- may have long evolutionary antecedents raises complicated questions about human agency and about how much of what we do and think is hard-wired. It is one thing to say we have eyes because our ancestors had eyes, but should we also credit our evolutionary predecessors for our highly complex social and political arrangements?

Scientists such as de Waal argue the research suggests that, much as people believe in the originality of their thoughts, a lot of human cognition probably takes place at an automatic level, guided by inborn tendencies. About the woman with the possessive boss, for example, de Waal said: "I am sure her boss is not consciously doing that. It just bothers him if she has a chat with a rival."

Anyone who thinks we didn't evolve our many mannerisms is nuts. Few actions are 'thought out'---mostly we react on the lowest possible level, namely we do stuff without much thought at all. If we did think, we would be like Hamlet and we know what happened to him! Everyone died! Violently!

Here is the gist of the article:

In a study of 457 lance-tailed manakins in Panama, DuVal found repeated instances of two males performing a skilled dance for the benefit of a female bird who was watching. The group performance, however, helped only one of the birds -- the alpha male. If only one lance-tailed manakin got to mate, why did the other bird, the beta male, cooperate in the dancing ritual when he had nothing to gain?

In a paper she published in the April issue of the American Naturalist, DuVal found there was evidence that good "wingbirds" were more likely than other birds to become alpha males themselves. What makes the behavior especially interesting is that one lance-tailed manakin might be helping another because some other bird will help the helper down the road. Such behavior suggests an intricate social system where investments pay off in the distant future.

It is the beginning of mating season for the Chickadees here. All afternoon, males were chasing each other all over the place, back and forth. They would zoom all around the bare trees and up onto the deck and then pause, pick out a seed, peck it open and then chase each other again. The pine siskins that are as silent as the nuthatches, watch this, bemused. The males of their species get really pretty golden feathers which shine in the snow. So they pose and primp. While the Chickadees fight furiously, making a tremendous racket. DEEEEEEDEEEE.

The birds in this story are aping each other but not using bananas. The younger one 'helps' the older one by copying his poses. So if they hang out with the Old Man, they learn how to pick up chicks. It is pretty simple. And it doesn't involve chasing each other all over the place, yelling, either. For some reason, Chickadee females don't care for pretty colors and cool poses.

They want a man who is loud and obnoxious. The louder, the better.

Culture of Life News Main Page

Various Hubbert Peaks Illustrate Human Nature

Elaine Meinel Supkis

The other day I had some thoughts about the graphs for the Hubbert Oil Peak. Namely, it is very much like a typical boom/bust stock market graph. Then I thought of other things that fit into that model and it leads one to wonder if this is a basic human artifact that is hardwired into our brains?

Doing something with rising hysteria and obsession and then suddenly collapsing is common to many human ventures.

All bubble/peak profiles look similar because the psychology coupled with the technology/inventions that feul bubbles create not a smooth bell curve but an over-hyped/panic/recovery/failure four-stage profile. In the stock market, these eruptions and collapses are first triggered by new technologies.

*snip*

The chart at the top of the page shows the typical boom/bust cycle of not just the stock markets but it is the real shape of the Hubbert Oil Peak as well as the industrial manufacturing cycle, house building/selling cycles and indeed, the empire-building, empire collapsing cycles. The reason all these cycles are nearly identical if one subscribes numbers to describe events is because it is really a graph showing basic human nature.

Our brains are hard-wired to work on this scale! We collectively think the same way and react the same way. This is why cutting off this cycle always fails. The desire to milk opportunity to the nth degree leads to a lemming-like rush to the edge of a cliff and then oops! Over we go!

The peak isn't smooth sailing, there are usually at least two braking events on the way up, sort of like shots across the prow or hesitations and worry if whatever it is one is doing, is good or bad. If it has something to do with the body, reformers might demand a stop to whatever it is one is doing. Or moralists will rage about it and pass laws forbidding whatever it is the subject mania.

After ignoring, say health warnings and ignoring moral warnings, the mania goes full-blast to the furthest possible limits when one can't go any further, it crashes. And not slowly but swiftly. There are usually two main attempts at restoring the mania but they fade fast.

Future people look at whatever the mania was and laugh. We can pick from many manias, many examples. Off the top of my head, I drew several charts. At the top of the page is the head dress and shoe manias of the Middle Ages. When the Crusades started, fashion had been very conservative and rather simple since the barbarian invasions of the Roman Empire. Changes moved glacially if at all.

Then the Crusaders filtered through Byzantia and into the exotic Middle East and they looted the Muslims. The Muslims were just past their imperial apex and had lots of nice stuff. Two items of looting interest was the lovely veils the Muslim ladies used to cover their faces and mens' turned-up toe shoes.

The returning knights and kings showered these things on the ladies who took up the fashionable, light, see-through veils with a vengence. Over the next 200 years, these veils were covetted and artful ways of combining them with the basic head dressing and head bands took off as one lady tried to outshine the other.

Head gear grew increasingly elaborate and unwieldy until it was very dangerous to move about the chambers and though doors. At first, people worried about the health effects. Then moralists in the Church raged about the sexual messages these daring head dresses inspired. Cartoonists (mostly clerks of the Church) made fun of these creative, bizarre things. Then one day, women tired of it and ruthlessly reduced these veils down to nearly nothing.

With shoes, it was even funnier. Men made them longer and longer until they were over twice as long as the foot! Even the armor was made this way. Knights tried to fight battles encumbered with these flexible steel shoes. Walking was greatly interfered with by this fashion. But even though people worried about the health effects and then moralists raged about this, screaming it was the art of devils, the fashion ran its set course until the most impossible shoes were made and then they faded with tremendous speed.

With hoop dresses, this cycle is repeated over and over again starting with the invention of the Spanish farthingale at the height of the Spanish Empire. Each time hoop skirts are fashionable, they run through this cycle of increasing girth and weight, the health issues rise up and reformers introduce simpler hoop mechanisms that reduce the pressure on the hips and waists and then thanks to the reforms, skirts billow in size rapidly and moralists delare them the devil's temptation as it lures men into sexual thoughts (um, that's the whole point!) and then in defiance of the nay-sayers and cartoonists mocking them, skirts become tremendously wide and doors and furniture no longer work with these gowns and they are nearly impossible to wear.

Then it collapses. These cycles never end in the middle. They always, at the last minute, shoot to the heavens, they become literally impossible to wear before collapsing with sometimes comical suddeness.

I could select any item of feminine dress and draw this graph. Over and over again, whatever the body shape or decorative detail, the same cycle happens. In the case above, the size and shape of ladies' skirts

Or not so comical. Namely, wars and revolutions often accompany the collapse of some fashion. It is interesting to see how armor followed the same course running from simple chainmail to the heavy, elaborate, full armor at the very end of the Era of Chivalry. Henry the VIII of England commissioned a German-style armor suit to fight in only he got too fat too fast and never wore it and he used a modified half-armor instead.

And that was the end of it all. After 1600, armor rapidly fell in size and weight until it became only a cap on the head by WWI. Today, soldiers in America wear more and more armor and their ability to fight natives wearing zero armor, not even a metal cap, is collapsing and they are losing nearly any battle that requires foot soldiers.

And that takes me to the Hubbert Imperial Peak:

All empires have the exact same shape if one creates a graph. Namely, unification of local areas such as the Greek city/states under Athens and then under Alexander the Great. Then a sudden surge of conquest usually after destroying the previous major empire such as Alexander did to the Persian Empire, for example. Then spreading out, some significant defeats due to inter-familial battles as heirs squabble over the loot, for example, and then a rush to world domination.

For example, the Mongols under Ghengis Khan, conquered many lands. But when he died, there were squabbles. Then a second rush that enlarged the empire further and another squabble, a run to world domination with Kublai Khan ending in two significant defeats: the Egyptians winning in the Middle East and the destruction of the invasion fleet attacking Japan.

From then on, the empire rotted away.

As we can see, our own empire, after first being checked in Indochina, is now being dismantled in the Middle East nearly exactly as the Mongol empire.

By BEN FELLER, Associated Press Writer 28 minutes ago

WASHINGTON - With Democrats pushing for an end to the Iraq war now entering its fifth year, President Bush pleaded for more patience Monday, saying success is possible but "will take months, not days or weeks."

The war has stretched longer, with higher costs, than the White House ever predicted. On the fourth anniversary of the day Bush directed the invasion to begin, the president made a televised statement from the White House Roosevelt Room to defend continued U.S. involvement.

I include the point of bankruptcy of several empires here: this inevitably happens at the apex. Nearly always due to wars. The keynote war, even when it is won by the empire, dooms it to destruction due to high costs not being balanced by enough loot.

A great empire that rules the world can't defeat another world-ruling empire because there isn't any. So all wars are net losses. When Spain took over Portugual, it basically ruled the earth. But this didn't make Spain strong, it bankrupted Spain as all others fought Spain on every possible front and this meant all over the world, sometimes all at once, Spain was on the defensive.

On top of this, the health/moral issues rear their ugly heads. Empires are unhealthy and amoral. Even when the moralists and doctors rage about these things, the internal rot runs its merry way because it is what empires do. No matter what the basis of an empire, they all rot the same way. This is why Gibbon thought he could prevent this from happening to the British Empire. If they learn the lessons, the bad rot won't happen!

But the British Empire followed the exact same path all previous empires trod. Step by step to the bitter end, totally reduced to a bare bones stub living in the shadow of the upstart empire of the USA.

Americans get fed lots of propaganda telling us we are a great military empire and by spending trillions of dollars, we will sail from victory to victory and will be tremendously wealthy.

Mon Mar 19, 1:00 AM ET

Four years after the launch of the U.S.-led invasion on March 19, 2003, public opinion about the war in Iraq has turned decidedly negative with only 40% of Americans calling the decision to use military force there the right decision, majorities saying the war is not going well, and most saying that the United States should bring its troops home as soon as possible. In contrast, when the war began in March 2003 and for quite some time thereafter, the U.S.-led invasion had strong backing from most Americans, and was seen as succeeding quite well. A Pew survey in mid-February found a growing number of political independents are turning against the war and, overall, a 53% majority of Americans believe the U.S. should bring its troops home as soon as possible -- up five points in the past month and the highest percentage favoring a troop pullout since the war began nearly four years ago.

Slowly, the idea is dimly dawning that we are being driven to bankruptcy. We barely won the Cold War and really, if you look at the IMF figures, we lost to Russia and China. Both have gigantic FOREX reserves that dwarf our own. Japan, which we claim falsely, that we 'defeated' in WWII, is totally ascendant over the USA, even Germany is standing on top of our prone Gulliver body, pinned to the earth by a million financial obligations we can't pay off.

Ergo: we are in the Red Zone where I wrote the words 'Bankruptcy'. We can't escape our fates because we decided, despite the health warnings and the moralists yelling about how gambling is bad for our finances and debts are bad for our futures, first Carter tried to slow down the climb on this mountain of woe then Reagan had it shoot higher and higher, rapidly, ditto Bush Sr. and then Clinton was the second plateau where he tried desperately to balance the budget and reduce obligations but then Bush Jr made it shoot straight upwards and we are now at our imperial peak and in the Bankrupt red zone.

There must be a very deep organic reason for all this. I do know that every empire since the Egyptian Old Kingdom that struggled with this. All empires build their finest palaces a few decades before they are totally overrun and collapse. The first pyramids, they got bigger and bigger and then the Old Kingdom collapsed.

Rome's biggest public bath house was completed right before the Vandals vandalized it. The Brandenburger Tor in Berlin was erected right before Germany sailed from defeat to destruction.

Giganticism is running riot in American design. And right at the crest of our empire, the two biggest--square foot-wise, dwarfing all buildings in the world---the World Trade Center Towers---were recently destroyed in an act of war which now rages out of control and is bankrupting us.

The treadmill of history is marked by these graphs that seem to be anchored in something very deep within our brains. Perhaps this is what it means to be human. Animals that follow this path, say by growing bigger and bigger horns, often go extinct. This is possibly why we see a parade of new species starting off generalized, then through sexual selection, growing ever more bizarre or elaborate until, like the peacock, it is nearly impossible to go through doors or sit down in chairs, and then any slight change wipes them out.

Human breeding does this. We breed bigger and bigger animals or tinier and tinier pets. Or maybe more and more fur or more and more naked. Whatever the direction we go, we always take it to the logical extreme where it can't go any further. This fascination of ours is what we are. This is why rich people want more and more money and are unhappy if they must share a penny with anyone else. Or powerful dictators want total, absolute power over every detail of every human they can grab.

And all these efforts collapse quite suddenly. The sudden drop is part and parcel of the increasing pressure to push the limits. And the desire to push the limits is very hard-wired in our souls.

Culture of Life News Main Page

The Hippocampus, Memory and Sex

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Understanding the role of hippocampus in our brains leads to interesting insights into how evolution and sex works. Also, lots of exercise affects the hypothalmus. It is also the home base of the ability to remember the past and navigate in the present.

I remember my emotional flip flops from back then, this is why I became a hippie chick, I suppose.

A new US study has revealed that teenage mood swings may be explained by biological changes in the adolescent brain.

Mood swings and anxiety, often caused by stress, are well known characteristics of puberty.

A physiologist at the State University of New York, Sheryl Smith, and her research colleagues experimented on female adolescent mice and showed that their brains respond to stress in a different way to adults and pre-pubescent individuals.

Anxiety is regulated by the brains's principal inhibitory neurotransmitter, GABA (gamma-amino-butyric-acid) which counteracts the effect of glutamate, an excitatory neurotransmitter in the brain's limbic system.

Stress causes the release of a steroid known as THP (allopregnanolone) which in adult and pre-pubescent individuals increases the "calming" effect of GABA in the limbic system. However, Smith and her team found that THP had the opposite effect in adolescent mice.

One might say, youth is drunk on the pressed wines of evolution. Namely, the need, the urge to emotionally interact with others is at its height when the sexual urges begin to hammer their way into an organism's life. Namely, when very young, the little ones whether they be lambs or fawns or cubs, they focus on relationships with the immediate family. This means sticking to home, listening to mother and avoiding strangers.

Then the harmones for sex enter the bloodstream. Suddenly, the deep urge to be careful, avoid strangers, stay at home, obey mom, vanishes in a tsunami of harmones screaming, 'Go outside, ignore your stupid mother and find as many strangers as possible and have sex with them!' In other words, the fledgling birds fly from the nests, the young rams sniff the fall air and go looking for strange ewes, the young humans slip out of the house and go to war or the local pub and look for loose females.

Of course, humans try to control this dangerous urge via marriage and passing lots of rules and laws about rape, how women dress and other details designed to curb the urge to go out and have sex no matter what. Keeping teenagers out of trouble is very difficult because of these organic urges that are shared by nearly all living creatures that have sex. As brains evolved, deep inside, the home of sexual urges was carefully embedded and the ancient urges are not to be denied.

Here is the actual study in question.

Hui Shen1, Qi Hua Gong1, Chiye Aoki2, Maoli Yuan1, Yevgeniy Ruderman1, Michael Dattilo1, Keith Williams1 & Sheryl S Smith1

Puberty is characterized by mood swings and anxiety, which are often produced by stress. Here we show that THP (allopregnanolone), a steroid that is released as a result of stress, increases anxiety in pubertal female mice, in contrast to its anxiety-reducing effect in adults. Anxiety is regulated by GABAergic inhibition in limbic circuits. Although this inhibition is increased by THP administration before puberty and in adults, during puberty THP reduces the tonic inhibition of pyramidal cells in hippocampal region CA1, leading to increased excitability. This paradoxical effect of THP results from inhibition of 4 GABAA receptors. These receptors are normally expressed at very low levels, but at puberty, their expression is increased in hippocampal area CA1, where they generate outward currents. THP also decreases the outward current at recombinant 42 receptors, and this effect depends on arginine 353 in the 4 subunit, a putative site for modulation by Cl-. Therefore, inhibition of 42 GABAA receptors by THP provides a mechanism for the generation of anxiety at puberty.

We know that sex doesn't happen without some excitement and Mother Nature devised a devious system for the mobile organisms: battles for sex. On top of that, females formulated a second front in this fight for sex: picking pretty males (the 'Favio' factor) and selecting only those males who build them a nice house and demonstrate baby-feeding skills.

The red in tooth and claw mating that evolved with many mammalian predators stands in contrast with a number of bird's strategies which focus on domestic abilities or vanity. It is interesting that birds are the main descendants of dinosaurs and we nearly universally view dinosaurs as bloody, vicious sex-fiends. I would not be the least bit surprised, if I were a time traveler, to find dinosaurs to be very colorful and beautiful to behold with the males strutting about, chests out like giant turkeys, booming their armorous songs while the females eyeball them.

For example, snakes don't fight when they mate, they simply mob the female snakes. Ditto amphibians. Their hippocampi tells them to wander as far as possible, seeking these lovely, shiny, slippery delightful girl snakes and they follow their noses. The interaction of the nose, memory and sex is extremely strong in all living organisms that have sex which requires hunting down a female and getting her to open up.

A complex bouquet of harmones and phermones interact with more than one part of the brain and these are all tangled up with the ability to find one's way about the place and remembering stuff that is important and all those other survival/sex skills.

These forces can, when unbalanced or the environment is bad, cause death and destruction. The human impulse to kill and rape is very highly developed and is easily triggered by these organic processes because we evolved as a very nasty, violent branch of the monkey family. We also have the biggest brains which can easily go haywire if the harmones and such are even slightly out of whack.

Our evolution as stone-throwing, wandering primates is deeply intertwined with our hippocampus.

The hippocampus is a part of the brain located under the temporal lobe (humans and other mammals have two hippocampi, one in each side of the brain). It forms a part of the limbic system and plays a part in memory and spatial navigation. The name derives from its curved shape in coronal sections of the brain, which resembles a seahorse (Greek: hippos = horse, kampi = curve).

In Alzheimer's disease, the hippocampus becomes one of the first regions of the brain to suffer damage; memory problems and disorientation appear among the first symptoms. Damage to the hippocampus can also result from oxygen starvation (anoxia) and encephalitis.

In the anatomy of animals, the hippocampus is phylogenetically among the oldest parts of the brain. The hippocampal emergence from the archipallium is most pronounced in primates and cetacean sea mammals. Nonetheless, in primates the hippocampus occupies less of the cerebrum in proportion to cerebral cortex among the youngest species, especially humans. The significant development of hippocampal volume in primates correlates more with overall increase of brain mass than with neocortical development.

It is interesting that the main mental diseases that are age-related hit the sex/memory headquarters first. This is because most species die long before they become senile. Namely, they have as many babies as possible and this kills them eventually. They don't have menopause, for example. Humans, being very social animals, have evolved things called 'cultures and societies' which vary greatly in quality and style but all have one effect (unless suicidal): they protect the breeders sufficiently that they can become old.

Even when going senile, the elderly had several major functions: to inhibit wild changes and behaviors in the young due to a natural desire for continuity and of course, they baby sat the very young and fed the all-important Goddess of the Hearth: the fires. Since the elderly get more easily chilled, they happily undertook this tedious chore which was, for them, not tedious at all but a welcome rest. And in the Ice Ages, the infants could cuddle in grandpa's or grandma's lap while he or she fed the holy fire and since little children insist on hearing the same story 1,000 times over and gramps and granny couldn't remember too many stories anyway, both were happy as can be, repeating the same stories over and over again, patiently and even with intense happiness.

So humans extended their life spans even while losing the hippocampus responses. Indeed, those that lost it were the most useful to the Ice Age people. When the Ices melted, the newly opened lands led to a tremendous amount of nomadism and nomads leave the very elderly behind to die. But at this same time, cities were invented and in these new social set-ups, humans could happily age in peace and the all-important fire was of course, even of higher importance.

Here is also an interesting tidbit: the hippocampus also changes how it stores memory depending on the age of the human.

Autobiographical memories can differ for special periods of life. People recall few personal events from the first years of their lives. The lost of these first events is called childhood or infantile amnesia. People tend to recall many personal events from adolescence and early adulthood. This effect is called the reminiscence bump. Finally, people recall many personal events from the last few years. This is called the recency effect. For adolescents and young adults the reminiscence bump and the recency effect coincide.

It is again, interesting how we evolved: the baby's brain works nearly nonstop, learning basic skills like moving about, picking up things, putting things together, talking, social interactions. Things happen to a young child but they are immaterial unless they are huge events. Even then, the brain strives to conceal or hide the actual memory to protect the young human's brain. I was hit by lightning when only five and had zero recall for it until I dug up the memory through detective work and self-analysis.

The need to remember 'stories' and 'events' rises rapidly when sex kicks in. The youth have to rapidly figure out this new social realm and there are many, many dangers there. Cannibalism, homicide, betrayal of trust, damaging the female so she can't successfully raise the babies, etc. This requires amassing lots of data rapidly and being able to compare events. Since plotting to hunt down females from other tribes is deeply embedded in this part of the mind, it is no surprise to see this in action within the brain as an ability to think like a diplomat. Namely, the best and safest way to get females and to gain their trust and cooperation is to negotiate with their elders including the more senile members.

If they are safely drawn into one's enterprise, the prize which is a female willing and able to have and raise young new humans, is easily gotten. So brute force didn't dominate at all, the most successful humans were the ones with bigger and bigger brains who could remember more and more subtle details and story-like information which is good for negotiating tribal relations when seeking mates.

The discovery of place cells led to the idea that the hippocampus might act as a cognitive map — a neural representation of the layout of the environment. Recent evidence has cast doubt on this perspective, indicating that the hippocampus might be crucial for more fundamental processes within navigation. Regardless, studies with animals have shown that an intact hippocampus is required for simple spatial memory tasks (for instance, finding the way back to a hidden goal).

Without a fully-functional hippocampus, humans may not successfully remember where they have been and how to get where they are going.

It is rather simple. The organisms setting out to hunt for sex partners go far afield. And since they are following their noses and looking for colorful signs of possible mates, they can get lost very quickly and the need to find one's way home after wild sex is of great importance because an unknown location equals danger. Note how a cat reacts when moved to a new home: it hides immediately and only very gingerly, explores the new place, a little at a time and with all whiskers a-tremble.

And a deteriorating mind often resorts to mindless activity to stimulate the hippocampus.

A. M. Huang1, C. J. Jen1, H. F. Chen1, L. Yu2, Y. M. Kuo3 and H. I. Chen1

Summary. This study was to examine the effects of treadmill exercise on the expression of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) in rat hippocampus. After 1-wk treadmill familiarization, animals in exercise groups received a 4-wk exercise training or an acute exercise. They were sacrificed 2 h or 2 d after exercise and their hippocampal BDNF mRNA and protein levels were determined. We demonstrated that 1) hippocampal BDNF mRNA and protein levels were both elevated in response to exercise training at 2 h after the last run but not after 2 d; 2) an acute moderate exercise (1 or 3 d) increased BDNF protein levels; 3) acute severe exercise increased BDNF protein and mRNA levels in animals under a familiarization regimen, while suppressed the BDNF mRNA level in rats without treadmill familiarization, paralleling the stress effect of immobilization/water exposure. We conclude that compulsive treadmill exercise with pre-familiarization acutely upregulates rat hippocampal BDNF gene expression.

For a long time I have asserted Bush is suffering from Alzheimers. His restlessness and need to exercise no matter what while running over people or falling down are classic signs. Many Alzheimer patients wander off and get hopelessly lost. Some die. They don't understand why they do this, they just start walking and can't stop. I remember my grandfather doing this at night. I would have to catch him and lead him back to his bedroom or back to the house.

Ronald Reagan had severe Alzheimers while in office. Wilson had a stroke and still ruled America disastrously. Today we have the ability to see if someone is suffering from these disorders. It should be a requirement for staying in office that the brain be functional. More than one Senator voted in his office while nearly brain dead (um, sometimes all of them, heh).

Bush should be removed for medical reasons. And he is a criminal. Heck, just arrest him.

Culture of Life News Main Page

Humans And Gorillas Had Same Sex-hair Lice

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Very interesting genetic code-news: humans have 3 different lice on our bodies and each evolved seperately from each other but we traded these lice with gorillas and chimpanzees at several key points in our evolution. It also shows when humans began wearing sheep-based clothing.

All living creatures evolved in tandem with their various hanger-ons: viruses, bacteria, parasites and insect free-loaders.

By NICHOLAS WADE
Published: March 8, 2007

Three kinds of louse call Homo sapiens their home, but each occupies a different niche on the human body. The head louse, Pediculus humanus, lives in the forest of fine hairs on the scalp. Its cousin, the body louse, lives not on the skin but in clothes. And the exclusive territory of the pubic louse, Phthirus pubis, is the coarser hairs of the crotch.

Lice are intimately adapted to their hosts and cannot long survive away from the body’s blood and warmth. If their host evolves into two species, the lice will do likewise. So biologists have long been puzzled over the fact that the human head louse is a sister species to the chimpanzee louse, but the pubic louse is closely related to the gorilla louse.

*snip*

The number of DNA differences between the gorilla louse and the pubic louse indicates that they diverged some 3.3 million years ago, Dr. Reed and colleagues report in today’s issue of the journal Biomed Central Biology. Among people, the pubic louse is usually spread by sexual contact, but the gorilla louse could have been contracted in some other way.

“We’ll never know if it was sex or something more tame,” Dr. Reed said.

Perish the thought! Humans having sex with other creatures? Um---earth to Dr. Reed: men, just for example, will have sex with a hole in a tree. Ask the tree nymphs. Men will have sex with cows, sheep, dogs, vacuum cleaners, rubber duckies, you name it, someone has had sex with it.

Wome are barely better. We giggle and blush but we will fill with a rush of hot blood if anything gets into our pubic places. Male and female humans are closer in attitude to the bonobos who like to have sex a lot. The idea that some early males in our species ran off and hopped onto the backs of gorilla females is not only not far-fetched but is nearly totally expectable!

Many scientists are scared of what they learn so they act all prudish. I thought, with the sexual revolution started by the Viennese artists and professionals 100 years ago had finally opened our eyes to our own lusts. This reminds me of white slave owners pretending they would never go off and have sex with their male and female slaves!

The ever-lighter skin color of each generation was mysterious. Thomas Jefferson's 'family' to this day are unable to embrace the offspring of the slaves he had sex with back then! Rule of thumb of humans: they will have sex if they can and they really don't give that much a hoot, with whom. Protecting the children is a different matter, though! This is where evolution works: it isn't who eats the most or who has the most sex, it is all about the babies.

The babies that are protected and have desirable traits survive and pass on the genes to the next baby. Thinking of all this as adults fogs the mind. Thinking about evolution as baby-production schemes is better.

I am assuming humanoids had sex with whoever they met if that other party was either willing or unable to fight back. Since gorillas are big and dangerous if irritated and since they are very, very strong and have huge, sharp teeth, I am assuming the sex was mutually desired. Since females are nervous about the dangers of a male killing her, I doubt it was female humanoids initiating sex.

I am also assuming the gorillas who had sex with human males were often females that were in obvious heat. And probably a group of humanoid males used their new-fangled ability to use rocks and sticks creatively to chase off gorilla males seeking sex and then had a fun, gang-bang encounter. Then these guys went back to home base and spread the fun.

Humans and gorillas also shared deadly diseases at this same time frame: such as eubola.

Reuters
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent

Social contact helped the Ebola virus virtually wipe out a population of gorillas in the Democratic Republic of Congo, French researchers reported on Monday.

A 2004 outbreak of the virus, which also kills people, killed 97 percent of gorillas who lived in groups and 77 percent of solitary males, Damien Caillaud and colleagues from the University of Montpellier and the University of Rennes in France reported.

Overall, it wiped out 95 percent of the gorilla population within a year, they reported in the journal Current Biology.

*snip*

It also may shed light on how early humans evolved, they suggested. The findings may show that pre-humans were slow to live in large social groups because disease outbreaks could wipe out those who did.

Ebola hemorrhagic fever is one of the most virulent viruses ever seen, killing between 50 percent and 90 percent of victims. The World Health Organization says about 1,850 people have been infected and 1,200 have died since the Ebola virus was discovered in 1976.

WHO and other experts say people probably start outbreaks when they hunt and butcher chimpanzees. The virus is transmitted in blood, tissue and other fluids.

Some of us, cynical as we are, believe that the thing that set humans off from other primates is our tendency towards cannibalism. Chimpanzees are also cannibals as well as eating monkeys. All over the world, where humans live in jungles, they eat monkeys, too. We know that humans and the other primates were nearly wiped out by disease long ago and we all evolved since then with some of the same antibodies even when we were different species.

If people first became nudists 3.3 million years ago, when did they start to wear clothes? Surprisingly, lice once again furnish the answer. Though humans may long have worn loose garments like animal skin cloaks, the first tailored clothing would have been close-fitting enough to tempt the head louse to expand its territory. It evolved a new variety, the body louse, with claws adapted for clinging to fabric, not hairs.

In 2003, Mark Stoneking, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany, estimated from DNA differences that the body louse evolved from the head louse about 107,000 years ago.

We really don't know when humans 'went naked.' We have many assumptions about that change. No one can give a sane evolutionary explanation for our lack of long hairs on our bodies. Actually, we do get long hair: when we go into sex mode. The underarm hairs and hairs around the sex organs suddenly becomes quite luxurious and long. On women, it is the underarms but on men, the face itself.

Sexual desire is triggered mostly by the nose. All mammals like to sniff to see if it is time for sex. Large mammals like horses and cows sniff the female's rump to see if she smells ready for sex. If she isn't, she lashes out with vicious kicks.

Actually, far from being the 'naked ape', we homonids have many more hair folicles than all the other great ape family groups!

We do not know when our ancestors began to change the pattern of body-hair cover from its original ape-like form to the modern one. Apes have a lower density of body hair than humans, and their hair is longer than ours. If you look at an orang-utan, you will see that the hair is really quite sparse, but very long and orange – brown in colour. The hair of gorillas and chimpanzees is black, intermediate in density, and intermediate also in length. In man, hair colour varies from pale to dark, and it varies from one part of the body to another. It is characterised by very high density, especially on the head, and is of course extremely short over most of the body, although this varies from place to place, the Ainu of Japan being well known for their long body hair, and the well covered Europeans coming, in many cares, a close second, Africans and of her Asians are the least hairy of humans today.

There is another characteristic of human body fat, which is the sex difference in tat deposition. Women have, at least since the Willendorf Venus and doubtless well before that, accumulated fat around the buttocks and thighs, and on the breasts, to an extent matched neither by other primate species nor by male humans. This fat is of’ the same kind as other body fat. What is responsible for the extra deposits in particular peripheral locations in women? Caroline Pond suggests that sexual selection may be responsible, as well as natural selection. In other words, selection would favour not only fatter women at times of pregnancy and lactation, but also selective mating by males with women with these extra reserves. The buttocks, thighs and breasts may have been the most convenient or least costly places for such storage to occur.

We are the short-haired apes, not the naked apes. And our head hair is much longer than any of the other great apes. We can only guess why this is so. I really wonder if our cannibalistic past has caused some very odd mutations? Few animals are cannibals! Most seek food elsewhere.

I really wonder, going back to the story above about early humans and gorillas sharing the same ticks: humanoids, after they move back into the edges of the jungles, find gorillas. And they figure out, the females will have sex with them when in heat. And a very easy way to get food and sex is to have sex with her and then murder her and eat her! So there is no genetic mixing because there are no babies but the lice end up with the early humanoids!

To this day, men will have sex with women and then kill them. Rape/murder is all too common to be an
aberration. Just the other day, a man murdered the mother of his own children and then he dismembered her body. The cannibal past is so strong, human mothers can and have murdered their own children.

So let's understand that humanoids 3 million years ago were probably barely different from gorillas and chimpanzees in appearance but were radically different in gait and hands that were increasingly dexterious.

Humanity's early ancestors did not walk fully upright, but probably scooted along on their knuckles, much like chimpanzees and gorillas do today.

That is the conclusion drawn by two scientists who studied the wrist bones of Lucy, a hominid known as Australopithecus afarensis, and found that she had stiff wrists.

Probably humanoids and the great apes moved the exact same way until both sides began to evolve differently: humanoid hands, increasingly limber and dexterous and apes, their hands used as crutches to scuffle along the ground at a high speed while the babies (the all-important babies!) rode on mommy's back.

Humanoids sacrificed this easy way of carrying the precious little ones and used their arms instead. One wonders how this happened! Carrying babies is very tricky, they are slippery. So I am assuming the humanoid babies had very dexterous hands for hanging onto mommy's fur which was, at this time, fairly long, not short. I bet, since we have more hairs than any ape, we were the FURRIEST apes, not the naked ape at all!

And the fact that lice love us is proof of this. Small harmonal changes due to mutations can cause super-hairy humans even today. The division between the long hair-genes for the hair versus the short-haired genes in the other places should be explored more intensely.

Perhaps our ability to survive the many hazards of the age of transition was due to being very, very hairy. Not because of the heat but because of the COLD. We evolved in places where the land lies lower than sea level, we are Rift animals. Several times, we spread across the whole of Asia, Africa, Europe. And each time, went nearly extinct!

The eruption of Mt. Toba nearly wiped us out 72,000 years ago. This corresponds with the evolution of the clothing lice: the very few survivors were the ones who could make clothes. These survivors went on to ruthlessly kill any other survivors who were members of the great apes. Only the ones hidden deep in the jungles escaped.

On a side note, here is an article with a movie, showing how bonobos walk erect only when in water:

They very rarely stepped into the moat that surrounded their enclosure, only ever doing so if the food which children threw to them fell short. This amounted to only 28 seconds in two hours of focal study (where an individual is tracked non-stop.) But when they did go in it was almost always on two feet, even if the water was shallow enough to go in on all fours. One of the workers there, who had tracked the bonobos every day for two months told me that my observations were no fluke. He had seen individuals go into the water every day and always bipedally. These findings are exactly what the model for a wading origin for bipedalism would predict. Only once were they seen to go in on all fours.

Probably we lost our lengthy hair when the tiny tribe we descended from lived in these rift valley environments in Africa. Namely, it being in the hottest areas, the need for fur at night was no longer a necessity. And fur gets in the way of moving around in water. Long fur on the head would not so it remained.

This is probably when we evolved sweat glands. One might suggest, humanoids are swampy/shoreline animals. Who eat each other. Which explains why our species had to move out of the rift zones and start colonizing all other areas.

There has been a very big broo-ha-ha in Britain over this genetic study:

IAN JOHNSTONSCIENCE CORRESPONDENT

A MAJOR genetic study of the population of Britain appears to have put an end to the idea of the "Celtic fringe" of Scotland, Ireland and Wales.

Instead, a research team at Oxford University has found the majority of Britons are Celts descended from Spanish tribes who began arriving about 7,000 years ago.

Even in England, about 64 per cent of people are descended from these Celts, outnumbering the descendants of Anglo- Saxons by about three to one.

The proportion of Celts is only slightly higher in Scotland, at 73 per cent. Wales is the most Celtic part of mainland Britain, with 83 per cent.

Previously it was thought that ancient Britons were Celts who came from central Europe, but the genetic connection to populations in Spain provides a scientific basis for part of the ancient Scots' origin myth.

The Declaration of Arbroath of 1320, following the War of Independence against England, tells how the Scots arrived in Scotland after they had "dwelt for a long course of time in Spain among the most savage tribes".

HAHAHA. I come from there, and Germany. My family tree has a number of rather violent, ill-tempered, lusty invaders in it. They lived by the sword and swore at meals and raped women. Do note that part of the deal.

The first British people came from Spain, they ate/killed all the Neanderthals. Being irritable humans, they had to go to great lengths to avoid each other so a large group walked over to the British Isles which just then, finally was melting and the ice was going rapidly in the New Springtime.

Later, other groups thought to come there, too. Each one killed a fair number of the natives and then proceeded to do what all invaders do: have sex with the native women, the cattle, the sheep and anything else including holes in trees. Being drunk helps.

The Vikings did this. The Normans, who were half-viking, half-french, did this. Everyone does this. Slave owners did this. Each group mixed it up with the natives. The language and culture changed much more than the genetic drift of the population. The Romans had sex a lot but their culture also was very attractive and spread until the Empire fell. Then is ceased spreading and disappeared while the tribes reverted to previous lifestyles including human sacrifices, etc.

Then the Christians changed the culture. Without killing many people. Nor even having any sex at all.

Each wave did this: the culture proving to be much more maleable than the genetics. And this is what sets the Irish and Scots as well as the Welsh apart from other Brits.

On another related topic, germs fueled our evolution.

Brian Handwerk
for National Geographic News
March 5, 2007

Viruses and bacteria have sped up the process of evolution by rapidly transferring DNA from one species to another, a new study suggests.

Gene-mapping projects over the past decade have already shown that genes can move between species via tiny microorganisms.

Now a team of scientists at Texas' Rice University believes that microbes are accelerating evolution by constantly transporting whole chunks of DNA that may represent new and beneficial functions—like resistance to disease.

This process—called horizontal gene transfer (HGT)—may allow life-forms to evolve more quickly than they would by occasional, random mutations alone, the scientists say.

"We know that the majority of the DNA in the genomes of some animal and plant species—including humans, mice, wheat and corn—came from HGT insertions," said Michael Deem, a genetic engineer at Rice, in a press statement.

All life forms on earth owe their complexity to the humbler forces of nature. As scientists gleefully play with genetic alterations, we have to be aware that germs and other organisms will return the favor and things will rapidly get out of control. They are splicing human genes into all sorts of plants and animals. This inter-mixing is more dangerous than sex with tree holes. We will see in the wretched end, just how dangerous this alchemy really is.

Evolution, as most scientists understand the process, has been getting faster and more complex over time.

Fossil records indicate that single-celled organisms appeared on Earth some 3.5 billion years ago. It took a further 2.5 billion years for the first multicellular life-forms to evolve.

The two wheels of Evolutions' chariot are genetic change and environmental change and we are driving Her chariot forwards at breakneck speed now.

Culture of Life News Main Page

Dangerous New Medicines For Enslaved Cows That Are Dying From Abuse

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Industrial farming is a disaster. The 'green' revolution is now undergoing a reactionary surge brought on by Mother Nature who uses her handy tool, 'natural selection.' Corporations think they have outwitted Her Majesty but instead, they play the Fool. Today's news is about a super-powerful anti-bacterial medicine for cows. This will make things much, much worse.

Modern dairy farms are rapidly turning into concentration camps for cows.

By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 4, 2007; Page A01

The government is on track to approve a new antibiotic to treat a pneumonia-like disease in cattle, despite warnings from health groups and a majority of the agency's own expert advisers that the decision will be dangerous for people.

The drug, called cefquinome, belongs to a class of highly potent antibiotics that are among medicine's last defenses against several serious human infections. No drug from that class has been approved in the United States for use in animals.

The American Medical Association and about a dozen other health groups warned the Food and Drug Administration that giving cefquinome to animals would probably speed the emergence of microbes resistant to that important class of antibiotics, as has happened with other drugs. Those super-microbes could then spread to people.

Army camps and concentration camps both foster epidemics. Many people crammed into small spaces, sleeping in bunks, under tremendous stress, this breeds diseases. Slums breed diseases for the same reasons which is why we don't see epidemics so often anymore until recently: sanitary living coupled with access to good air, sunshine and security inhibits plagues.

Farming is now beset by an urgent need to make a profit while prices collapse. Indeed, the dynamics of industrialization of farming drives itself forwards: the more you do it the more you have to continue doing it. In other words, to keep taxes low, to concentrate wealth and to cut down on labor, animals and plants must be collected into smaller and smaller area units or monocultural mass units of total uniformity.

From the earliest times, the man with the most cows was considered 'rich' and so humans strove to always have as many cows as possible. This always leads to overgrazing unless one moves one's own cow herd around a lot. To do this, humans tamed horses instead of eating them and figured out how to ride these beasts and then would move the herds around with the horses and dogs assisting. Humans on the great Steppes of Asia invented the wheel so they could move their entire clan about as they foraged with their cattle.

Mother Nature evolved cattle like all her herd animals, with this very strong impulse to keep moving. Restlessly, herds of grazing animals who evolved alongside the grasses they eat, move from place to place.

I know from my own herd animals, when they are fenced in, horses will go to a corner to defecate because they can't graze where they leave manure. Even if the grass is greener and taller than non-defecated areas, the grazers will refuse to touch it unless they are starving to death. I suppose that grazers who didn't check for smells or tastes that indicate putridness, died. Picky grazers lived.

The early domesticators of the cow in Africa and Asia created a culture that took into account the need to keep cows moving along. This clashes with farmers who grow grass-based foods. The battle between these two forces continues today. The fights going on in Darfur, for example, are classic cow-herders vs farmers. Since wealth is number of cows, the need to make a bigger herd presses against the inability of controlling a super-sized herd. The Mongols, for example, fixed this by killing all farmers they met at all times. Only by corrupting them with the joys of civilization's lusts and pretentions, could the farmers save themselves by being taxable.

The restless herders who invaded the Roman Empire, when they ran out of herding ranges, became a complex sort of farmer/herder entity. This is true of many great civilizations: the herder and the farmer become one. They raise horses and cows but only a few each. The sheep still must be herded because they graze all the way down to the roots whereas cattle like to crop only the top of the grass, the horses, in between sheep and cows. Having all three animals myself, I can attest to this. The sheep grazed the fields while the larger animals ate hay.

If one grazes only horses or cows, the fields rapidly turn to weeds because both are very picky eaters. So to maintain a stable grazing field, it pays to move a herd of sheep over it twice a year. They eat all the weeds and after they pass through, the grass grows better. So all communities allow shepherding.

The other thing is milking herds: the early people of Europe can't digest milk too well because they were hunter/gatherers and then became farmers while the herders of the Steppes lived off of the milk and blood of their beasts so they evolved the ability to digest milk. Children who couldn't digest it were smaller and weaker than the ones who could.

Milking sheep, goats, cows and horses is simple yet difficult: no mother animal will give milk unless she is happy. If she is angry or upset, she won't lactate. To milk an animal, you pretend to be a baby. The hand should 'butt' the breast every couple of pulls. The fingers squeeze the udder's teats and using two hands, the milkmaid pretends she is really twin calves or lambs. I learned at a young age, if you sing to the mothers, they give you milk.

All milking cultures figured this out. Thus, soothing lullabys join the mothers and babies of several species into one family. Because of this, the herd listens to the humans herding them. Once, a scientist was visiting me. I told him I could get all the sheep to come to me. He didn't believe me. So I began to sing the 'Lambies, come to me' song. All head in the fields shot up at once. Baaing happily, the herd began to pull together and then, in a mob, ran towards me. They then millled around me, baaaing for attention.

So it is with cows: once, a herd of milk cows were chased out of their pastures by coyotes. They ran along the mountain's ridge to my farm where they found my cattle. Lowing happily, they gathered around Chip and Dale who were huge beasts.

When the herd's owners came, they sang to the cows about milking and the cows all lined up and began their trek home, anxious to get milked as evening was darkening the East.

Industrialized farming kills all natural forces. All the naturalist dairy farms out here are gone. There are virtually none left at all! Only huge industrialized farms that feed their captives chemicals and harmones to force them to milk. And instead of the gentle hand caressing the teats, machines ruthlessly suction it out and this causes diseases for the cows are in pain. They produce much more milk and this sucks the life out of them!

Bred increasingly for producing only gigantic amounts of milk, they are genetically weaker and weaker. This impossible situation can't go on forever. No longer do we see contented cows chewing cuds while resting in sweet flower-filled fields, the pastures now lie empty. Many were degraded the last 50 years anyway because shepherds disappeared and no longer kept the weeds down twice a year. And farmers, who for 3 thousand years, put sheep and cows into harvested fields to eat the weeds and clean up the remains of the stalks of wheat or barely, now use chemicals instead.

In medieval times, the herd animals were penned into gardens to fertilize them. I did this too. My sheep had a winter house in the middle of the gardens. They left so much fertilizer from their urine, it was amazing how green the summer was! Giant vegetables!

The complex farm that has a pond, ducks, sheep, two horses, an ox team, three milk cows, a garden and some fields that are rotated...remember rotating crops? Does that happen at all anymore? This ecologically-sound method of using sustainable resources is dying a terrible death and we are too. This creation of a stable farming system has sprung into being repeatedly throughout history. Places that figure out how to do this combination of grazing/farming leads to great civilizations: Egypt and China being the prime examples.

The ancient Egyptians worshipped the milk-giving cow as their top goddess. The Golden Calf. Locking Her Majesty into a fetid barn flushed hourly with water, unable to lay down comfortably in the warm sun, Ra, unable to swim in the stream, roll in the dust to protect from pests, standing tail to head to keep off flies from the face...my oxen loved to stand shoulder to rump for hours, doing this.

Cows are like cats: they wash each other with spikey, huge pillowy tongues. When they wash each other, their fur becomes curly and shiny. This mutual grooming is eliminated in modern slave farms. I know that cattle get great pleasure out of doing this. In medieval times, to get a cow to release her milk, the dairymaid would set the calf before her and as she washes it with her tongue, the milk would flow.

Greed is driving us to destroy all this wonder. Dehumanizing cows, we dehumanize ourselves. We owe them a joyous life in return for their life-giving sustainance. Instead of worshipping angry, invisible gods calling for war, we should be worshipping cows, cats, vultures and crocodiles. This might make us better humans.

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Abusive Beekeepers Are Destroying ALL Bees!

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Abusive, nasty industrial beekeepers are rapidly destroying not just their own captive colonies but wild colonies and even my own blessed, beloved bee hives. My wild queen bee says, 'Enough! How dare such peasants destroy my kingdom!' I agree.

Abusive beekeeping practices are now endangering all bees, wild and domestic.

By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO
Published: February 27, 2007

VISALIA, Calif., Feb. 23 — David Bradshaw has endured countless stings during his life as a beekeeper, but he got the shock of his career when he opened his boxes last month and found half of his 100 million bees missing.

In 24 states throughout the country, beekeepers have gone through similar shocks as their bees have been disappearing inexplicably at an alarming rate, threatening not only their livelihoods but also the production of numerous crops, including California almonds, one of the nation’s most profitable.

Right away my hackles rise, reading this. All over the news are stories about the collapse of bee populations. I have been beekeeping for years. I used to have domestic queens purchased from Georgia. Thanks to the destructive beekeeping practices guys like Bradshaw uses, all my commercial bee hives died terrible deaths due to disease.

I was so depressed, I didn't keep bees for two years. Then one day, a wild queen and her consorts found the old, empty beehives in the garage and moved in. Since then, they have flourished and I leave them alone except to protect their hive from bears and bad weather. They pollinate my fruit trees and garden vegetables and they give me honey.

From the NYT article:

To give bees energy while they are pollinating, beekeepers now feed them protein supplements and a liquid mix of sucrose and corn syrup carried in tanker-sized trucks costing $12,000 per load. Over all, Mr. Bradshaw figures, in recent years he has spent $145 a hive annually to keep his bees alive, for a profit of about $11 a hive, not including labor expenses. The last three years his net income has averaged $30,000 a year from his 4,200 bee colonies, he said.

“A couple of farmers have asked me, ‘Why are you doing this?’ ” Mr. Bradshaw said. “I ask myself the same thing. But it is a job I like. It is a lifestyle. I work with my dad every day. And now my son is starting to work with us.”

Well. I learn something new every day. This article has a photograph of a beekeeper using a gasoline nozzle hose (!!!!!) to pump gooey, messy corn syrup directly into the hives? What the hell?

This sort of stupid, hair-brained activity is exactly why we are seeing an unfolding farm disaster! Be it inhuman treatment of egg-laying hens, over-crowded turkeys, geese being force-fed with hoses, pigs in tiny cages on cement floors, cows never let out to graze: many modern practices are wickedly evil and destructive for the animals, the humans and the entire planet earth.

The poor bees in this story are being viciously abused by greedy humans who want money no matter what. First, storing millions of bees right on top of each other is bad: it spreads diseases, creates great anxiety since bees hate living too close to each other's hives, and it allows parasites easy access to new hosts. Traditionally, beekeeping was a side enterprise. Like egg laying hens: you use them at home and sell the excess and no one had too many. The danger of any farming enterprise is overpopulation, not underpopulation.

Over-grazing fields, too much manure from pigs and cows, chickens attacking each other when overcrowded: these are many stress points in farming. One had to expand the farm if one wanted to increase the number of animals. Thanks to modern technology like cutting off the top beaks of all domestic birds so they can't fight each other, farmers can happily overpopulate farms.

Disastrously! In the case of the beekeepers pumping corn syrup into hives: bees are the cleanest insects. They clean each other, the queen is constantly attended. They clean their hives carefully. They happily steal honey or sugar water, during difficult times, I put out goodies for them, the best way is to soak sugar on an old hive frame that has a wax comb. Corn syrup isn't the same as cane sugar. The human obesity epidemic is partially fueled by the huge increase in the use of corn syrup in nearly everything we eat that is manufactured. I wonder if it is not good for bees, too.

I wonder if the bees are fleeing these contaminated hives that had syrup poured all over their clean homes? After desperately licking their hives clean again, they are over-satiated, 'fat' even, and possibly drunk. Namely, that much sugar is a toxin at that point.

On top of this, the monoculture farming is bad for bees who love variety and color. There would be no flowers or sweet smells if there were no bees! And all flowers compete for the attention of the bees, they evolved many designs and colors, the bees are very capricious and picky. Some prefer one style of flower over another. I love watching them in summer.

The bees will hover in front of a bunch of wild flowers growing along the fence line. Up and down they bob, examining the pretty flowers, approaching first one, than another. After a good, long examination, they select the lucky flower and buzz into it and go to work. Laden with pollen and nectar, they bounce back home and excitedly tell the others all about the lovely purple or yellow flowers they found.

We know bees communicate their enthusiasms. When trapped in a place where all things are alike, this happiness is reduced and stress rises because they can't be picky! I know that wild birds love to be very picky about nest materials selections.

Hens are intensely happy if we give them several different nest boxes, some high, some low. Each hen has 'her' favorite box! Because they choose these nests, they are content and let me even pick them up off their nests while they are laying eggs. Not so much as a murmur or peck.

The NYT followed up the bee story with an 'expert.'

May R. Berenbaum, head of the department of entomology at the University of Illinois, is the author of “Buzzwords: A Scientist Muses on Sex, Bugs and Rock ’n’ Roll.”

Theories abound as to potential causes of what is being called colony collapse disorder. As a social species living in close quarters at high densities — the average hive contains upwards of 30,000 insects — honeybees are prone to a staggering diversity of fungal, bacterial and viral diseases. In the 1980s, honeybee numbers plummeted when two species of parasitic mites appeared, wiping out most populations of wild bees and placing more pressure on managed colonies. This latest drop in numbers may be the consequence of a new infection, or of several diseases simultaneously, leading to a fatally compromised immune system.

It is also possible that severe stress brought on by crowding, inadequate nutrition or even the combined effects of prophylactic antibiotics and miticides sprayed by beekeepers to ward off infections may be a factor. Another, particularly sad, possibility is that accidental exposure to a new pesticide may cause non-lethal behavioral changes that interfere with the ability of honeybees to orient and navigate; brain-damaged foraging bees may simply get lost on their way home and starve to death away from the hive.

All the causes are human. Bees have existed for longer than we have existed. They evolved right alongside the first flowers and deciduous trees. As the dinosaurs died, the bees redesigned the landscape so it bore little resemblance to the Jurassic and became 'modern'. We would be very depressed, walking around 100 million years ago. There were no flowers or bees.

Here we are, using chemicals and genetic engineering, destroying the beautiful, colorful world the birds and bees made for us! The insect expert even mentions using modern genetic engineering to make bees work for us as our prisoners if only we can alter them so they are no longer real bees!

This is criminal! The bee's collective needs for artistic expression, colorful environment, exciting interactions with the other members of the hive, defending their homelands from others including other bees, the fun of the queen flying forth to mate with male drones from other hives, an event that excites all the hives at once as they have basically an orgy. The hunt for a new home when a Princess emerges from her bed, the sleeping beauty awakening and then sending forth her maids of honor to find a new home!

I set up my new hives when this happens! I put one under the oak tree in the middle of the horse pasture, one near the forest's edge, or down by the garden. Of course, they love the oak tree or garden residences best. The scouts looking for a new hive will buzz in and out of various places before escorting Her Majesty to Her new palace.

Long Live the Queen! Long Live Her Majesty!

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