Rhinocrisy

I’ve been blogging pretty steadily for about a year, now. I think I’m really bad at it. I treat ideas like precious jewels, to be hoarded and kept to myself and not shared with everyone else. On rare occasions I might want to show one off, to provoke a reaction from someone, to learn from the glint in their eyes. But that doesn’t really happen on blogs (or in real life, either) – we’re all relucant to open our mouths. I think maybe we’re all worried about revealing what we have hidden there, under our tongues. Is it really a jewel, or were we mistaken? Is it just a hardened piece of clay? Why make that test? It’s a jewel as long as I know it is, and no one tells me otherwise.

All of which is to say: forgive my intermittences. I am indulging my ego. I am relishing my opals.

Abu Aardvark points out this story about Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak cracking down on the Muslim Brotherhood when they started holding demos and forming an opposition party, arresting some 70 activists. Do you think George Bush will step forward and speak up for the democratic rights of Islamists? Considering it’s longstanding U.S. policy to smile and nod benignly while Egypt beats the shit out of the Ikhwan, my guess is: no.

Kodos would say: “Democracy for some, brutal detention for others.”

A frequent (perhaps the most frequent, if such things can be metered) plot of dreams is that one’s teeth, usually the canines, are falling out. This is rather an alarming thing to dream, since teeth are precious but rather unappreciated things, and losing those sorts of treasures is always doubly shocking (one for the loss, and one for the discovery that you give a shit). Like most dreams, this one has been turned every which way, interpreted, and “understood” a hundred times over. You can satisfy yourself as to the enormous variety of explication. The origin is not quite so esoteric as most of these explanations, but still quite satisfying: the dream is a result of the loosening of certain maxillary tendons around the canines, usually as a result of impending or current illness. Thus, the dream may serve as an augur, which I think rather neatly restores some of the magic taken away by its mundane physiological basis.

When I first began to drift up out of my sub-basement of sleep (I just got some new bedsheets, crimson, and had quite a comfortable night), I thought that this was my dream; I had, after all, just recovered from illness. But then I was fully awake, and my tongue was still tracing out the unfamiliar space where my incisor should have been, and I was clutching something small and hard in the fingers of my right hand.

This isn’t as alarming as it sounds at first; I’ve had a fake crown on my right incisor since the fourth grade (when I cracked the lower half off by whacking it against the floor). I’m not really sure how my tooth ended up in my hand; maybe I plucked it out of my mouth in my sleep, and knew enough to hold on to it. Lucky that I did. After my initial exclamation (“Oh, shit!“) and vague panic, I put it on the bedstand and went back to sleep. I had been meaning to see the dentist anyway.

In the morning I called Harvard University Health Services to find out what sort of dental coverage I actually had. Turns out my Blue Cross coverage only extends to certain kinds of dental care. Specifically, emergencies. Well, this was an emergency, I thought. But only emergencies relating to previously undamaged and unmodified teeth. So my crown falling off didn’t count. Neither would someone’s filling coming out, I assume. Ouch.

What kind of evil, rat-fucking, fanged, pointy-bearded sadist writes such a dental plan? I’d like to give him (or her) a dental emergency relating to previously undamaged and unmodified teeth.

So I sucked it up and paid for it. It wasn’t so bad, actually. Because I had miraculously held on to my crown in my sleep, my dentist (Dr. Peter Goldstone) was able to reattach it relatively cheap.*

This is a rather small and harmless anecdote, and I’m blessed that my emergency was a comparatively minor dental one, rather than a serious medical one. But still I’m annoyed by the fact that the ostensible “greatest country in the world” is one in which medical care is so constrained by the finance. I’m sure thousands of other people in this town could tell a similar story without the light and fanciful ending.

---

* My dentist, incidentally, is some kind of virtuoso. I sat down, he stuck a mirror in my mouth briefly, peered at the crown, asked some off-hand questions, tapped some things, then began to rough up my tooth to reattach it. “I’m just creating a bevel, here,” he explained, making deft little motions against my tooth/stump with his thingummy. Then, whack, some cement, some UV radiation to set it, a little sanding, some fine-tuning, and I was done. Less than ten minutes, all told, that I spent in that chair. Competence is really quite gorgeous.

I was rather taken by this essay in the London Review of Books by Sean Wilsey (of the McSweeney’s crowd), about rats, and so I thought I would recommend it.

Because I have the flu, I have been thinking about the immune system, and what an under-appreciated system it is. By which I do not mean that we should throw it a party with cake to thank it for all the hard work it’s been doing. I mean, rather, that we are profoundly ignorant of what that work is and how we can facilitate it.

Most people go their entire lives without realizing the existence of the lymphatic system, and few people have any sort of detailed knowledge about it. Even I, well on my way to a PhD in biology, have only a cursory understanding of how it operates. The spleen is a completely baffling organ; almost no one can tell you what it does. Compare this to the circulatory system, where the names of individual veins and arteries are relatively common knowledge. And there’s very little understanding of what governs the health of the immune system. We all know what sorts of foods are bad for our heart and will clog our arteries; we know what will make us fat, what will be bad for our liver, what makes our colon happy. What’s good for the immune system?

I suppose this is understandable in a society that has basically eviscerated disease – things that were killer plagues in previous centuries are unknown today, and almost no one is really worried about dying of infectious disease the way they are worried about cancer and the like. Even for the obvious exceptions (e.g. AIDS), the immune system is not the protagonist. We’re looking out for efficient molecular weapons to deliver a precise and artificial cure; no one ever imagines their own bodies will protect them.

This ignorance is unfortunate for something we depend so vitally on, the more so because it is such a fragile guardian, so easily turned against us. I’m somewhat haunted by the idea that we’re bathing ourselves in a chemical soup – detergents, preservatives, lubricants, pigments, deodorants, varnishes, insecticides, etc., etc. – with no idea of what it is doing to our immune systems. Every time I hear that increasingly common story about how someone’s kid has some strange new allergy, I have to wonder whether we’re not screwing ourselves up in unimagined ways.

People always make a big hoop-la over carcinogens. But carcinogenicity is well-studied. It’s well-understood. It’s one of the few things that actually gets tested for. No one has any clue about auto-immune disease, or immunodeficiency. It’s not even on the map.

I’ve ended on rather a more somber note than I intended, unfortunately. But on the other hand, I seem to be convalescing, and I can take some comfort in the fact that MY immune system is performing quite well. So even though I don’t have any idea what it is, I’m evidently doing something right.

Narendra Modi, the CM of Gujarat, just had his travel visa revoked by the U.S., in belated reaction for his role in the “riots” that resulted in the deaths of thousands of Muslims a few years back. I fail to understand the timing, the reason for the decision, and why, if “religious freedoms” are so important, Saudi diplomats (et alia) are regularly invited to the U.S.

But anyway: the response by Hindu nationalists (specifically the baboons in the Bajrang Dal, which, if you don’t know, is basically a Brute Squad) was to raid a PepsiCo warehouse, smash bottles and set fires, in a show of anti-U.S. fervor. Way to go, guys. That’ll teach ‘em how reasonable you are. Now they’ll definitely let your boss back in.

I saw “Kinsey” last night, which, if you don’t know, is a biopic about the life of Alfred Kinsey, who conducted the first major survey of human sexual activity in the United States. As a coda this morning I read this study in the Wash Post, on the high STD rate amongst teens who commit to maintaining their virginity, which often leads them to greater experimentation and riskier behavior.

One of my abortive posts this week was on a New Scientist article discussing the evolution of human altruism, which I thought would segue into a lament on the apparent lack of understanding of human behavior amongst people studying its evolution. People are a really startling evolutionary puzzle in many respects. We’re first of all far too intelligent for the task at hand (mere survival), and much of our rich, complex social behavior makes very little sense from the dumb standpoint of selective advantage and fitness.

I’m often amazed that people studying this have such little appreciation for how much of what we do is there as social grease: we laugh, we fuck, we glower, we cry. Can you imagine such a thing? A fitness advantage that results from leaking salt water from the eyes and making strange howling noises. What does that imply? That communication of our emotional states to other humans is so important for us that even subtle signals become very meaningful. That a great part of our humanity lies in our expressivity, in revealing our inner selves to others. Think about that next time you’re weeping.

As obvious is sex. Human beings are highly sexually abnormal creatures. They’re better-equipped for it – a 500 pound gorilla has a 2 or 3 inch long penis, half the length of the average human male, who, for his body size, is one of the best-endowed creatures in the world. Human females are orgasmic, a completely unnecessary response for reproduction and almost unheard of amongst animals (if you’ve ever seen cats having sex, you know what I mean). Human females can be aroused at any time, not just during ovulation, even at the most paradoxical times (i.e. menstruation). Sex lasts much longer – most male animals only need to deposit some sperm, and the average mammalian encounter lasts no more than a minute; most humans would think they were being cheated if that were the case.

Our nearest living relative, the bonobo chimpanzee, has a similar problem. Bonobo society is built on sex. They have sex constantly, and they have varied, kinky sex. Oral sex, anal sex, homosexual sex, whatever. But they probably don’t hold a candle to human sexual imaginations.

I’ve never understood why this doesn’t scream out to people studying the evolution of human behavior. Why is sex so important to us, the ones who weep? The most intimate of acts, the conjoining of human flesh, isn’t it obvious that it means more to us than simple fertilization? When we can laugh without marveling that we do so, can it really surprise us that we might take pleasure in each other simply for the sake of closeness, for comfort?

This is the way I’ve come to understand homosexuality in my mind. That particular sex act is described as deviant and unnatural because it clearly lacks procreative purpose. But human sex is NOT just about procreation; it’s about social intimacy, a potent weapon in our arsenal of representation. Why not within sexes as well as between them? What then becomes “unnatural” is attempting to suppress that bit of us, that way of speaking. As well say we should not cry.

The first paper I published in my current lab (and also the first paper ever published by the lab) came out in January in the small-but-feisty journal Trends in Genetics. It’s called “A limited role for balancing selection.” (If you’re really interested I have a PDF of it).

Anyway: it got picked up by Faculty of 1000, a kind of metafilter for scientific journals which cherry-picks out articles of significance. It only got a score of 3.0, but still feels cool. F1000 is subscriber-only, so here’s what the commenter said:

This nicely written short paper gives evidence that there are very few shared SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms) in coding regions between humans and chimpanzees, suggesting that balancing selection has not had a major impact in preserving variation over the time scale of the human-chimp divergence. It will be interesting to see the results of similar analyses for Drosophila melanogaster and D. simulans and other closely-related species pairs.

Via Juan Cole, here‘s a Times bit about Arab/Kurd tensions in Kirkuk, which led to a collapse of the patched-together Shia-Kurd agreement to form an Iraqi government. Includes this mournful lament:

“We wish we didn’t have oil in Kirkuk,” he said. “If the oil wasn’t here, we’d have a comfortable life now. All our problems are because of this damned oil.”

I bet no one has ever said that before.

Via Crooked Timber, a nice piece from the Sunday New York Times about government-produced news broadcasts. Before this sets off your BDS (Bush Derangement Syndrome, coined by Charles Krauthammer), you will note that the practice actually began under Clinton (or “the Clenis” as Ann Coulter would have it…). I’ll take this opportunity to introduce this fascinating paragraph:

The practice, which also occurred in the Clinton administration, is continuing despite President Bush’s recent call for a clearer demarcation between journalism and government publicity efforts. “There needs to be a nice independent relationship between the White House and the press,” Mr. Bush told reporters in January, explaining why his administration would no longer pay pundits to support his policies.

Wonderful that the rules of journalism demand feigned ignorance of what is obvious to everybody (viz., Bush is engaging in some CYA). Seems to me there ought to be some happy middle ground between that and the manic, insult-peppered rantings of the likes of Greg Palast.