Rhinocrisy

Fortunately, more like 3.
- The Conservative Party in the U.K. is promoting an Al Gore-style carbon tax as a centrepiece (not centerpiece) of its bid to reclaim power, while the EU is calling for region-wide uniform carbon taxes.
- An article about NBC’s decision to call the Iraq civil war a “civil war” includes this line from the Bushites: “What you do have is sectarian violence that seems to be less aimed at gaining full control over an area than expressing differences, and also trying to destabilize a democracy — which is different than a civil war…” Now we know how we are supposed to “express differences.” Wasn’t the Nicaraguan civil war more about “destabilizing a democracy” than “gaining full control over an area”?
- Newt Gingrich, asshole, says the U.S. in Iraq should revive George Washington’s old slogan: “Victory or death.” It would seem that the decision has been made.

This is a typical conversation in my kitchen:

I’m currently watching the first season of Battlestar Galactica, usually while cooking dinner. The premise of the show is that an evil race of robots destroys almost the entire human race, leaving only a small population of 50,000 individuals alive.

This immediately prompted us to pause the movie and launch into a discussion of the population genetics implications of such a crash.

Now, contrary to conventional wisdom, there is a huge difference between the actual and apparent genetic size of a population. That is, even though there are 6 billion people on this planet, human beings are remarkably genetically uniform; in fact, they show the amount of variation one would expect from a much smaller ideal population. This discrepancy leads population geneticists to speak of a quantity called effective population size - in the case of humans, about 10,000 individuals. This is such a small number because, first, there is population structure that prevents truly random mating between all individuals in the population, and, second, the human population has undergone at least a few “bottlenecks” - instances of dramatic population collapses - and the ancestral population was probably considerably smaller than the modern population. Thus, the amount of actual variation in our population is low.

A bit of Googling around led us to a paper by Masatoshi Nei, wherein he describes simulations of population crashes and subsequent rapid expansion. The upshot is: even absurdly unrealistic population crashes (down to N=2 individuals) do not eliminate most of the variation. I think in that extreme instance, the reduction was only from 15% down to 8% - so long as your 2 individuals are randomly selected, of course. This is pretty remarkable, and it suggests that the immediate problem will not be fitness loss from low genetic variation - you’ll lose most rare, private variations (variation that only exists in you & your immediate relatives, e.g.), but most of this stuff is unimportant or even harmful. What WILL be retained is the bulk of frequent variation - stuff that is either beneficial or neutral, and so has not been eliminated by purifying selection. Of course, it takes on the order of 1/(mutation rate) generations (10⁸) to recover your initial level of variation, but never mind that. We’re merely concerned with survival, here.

The second problem is inbreeding depression. This is exactly what it sounds like: when you have babies with your parent or sibling, you’re much more likely to encounter severe recessive phenotypes that drastically reduce fitness. Note that this is a DIFFERENT problem from low genetic variation - I am genetically not all too distant from anyone on earth, but inbreeding depression results mostly from the expression of rare, private variation that no one else has - except my relatives.

So, after a bottleneck, inbreeding depression will surely be a problem. This possibly results in ‘purging’, that is, the speedy elimination of deleterious variation via selection in a highly homozygous/inbred population. This puts pressure on the population - inbreeding load - fewer individuals are surviving and the general fitness of the population is lower. Populations may founder at this stage, although purging is believed to result in a rapid recovery of fitness.

At any rate, 50,000 individuals is, in genetic terms, a great many, and I’m pretty certain that inbreeding depression would not be a severe problem in such a population (especially if they’re all free to mingle as the Galactica population would be).

Last night’s conversation included: group selection in chickens and its eugenics implications, a recitation of some Hindu mythology (mostly the Avatars of Vishnu), some tales of the Buddha and other Zen masters, the story of Kalidas, a discussion of the Inquisition as viewed by the book Demon Lovers, and Hitler’s vegetarianism. The evening culminated with us watching Triumph des Willens.^*

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^* Which prompted the observation on my part, “Americans will never be able to take the German language seriously.”

The above “Shazam!” is deceptive, actually. I fully intend to mosey back into blooging at a reasonable pace. I apologize for my laxity. The only reason I haven’t been bulging is –

Hey! Look! Over there! What’s that?

[ Points to rear of audience. Runs away. ]

Err. I’m back. Anyway, in this brief hiatus, I accomplished the following:
I started doing capoeira seriously again. I’ve been taking it easy the past few months, but that’s really quite dumb. There’s so much to learn, and I am now in my twenty-eighth year, so I had best get cracking. Also, there’s really no point in wasting time, since that time is, err, wasted.

I also turned twenty-seven, as you may have guessed. I didn’t really celebrate; I never do. My birthday methodology consists of (a) not telling anyone, (b) hoping they’ll somehow figure it out anyway, and (c) waiting around increasingly despondently for someone to call me up and surprise me with a “Happy Birthday, Saurabh!”, thus providing me with enough validation to exist for another year. Thanks to all of you who did wish me; my lack of appreciation was only apparent and not actual.

I took this opportunity to get totally hammered. Four shots of gin, Hendrick’s, straight up, did it for me, since I weigh less than insouciance and had eaten precisely nothing that day. I did reasonably well, despite that - I think my gaze was only slightly unfocused when I said good night to the attractive female server on leaving the bar.

Ah - I started a diet to cure my insouciance weightlessness. It more or less involves me eating a shitload more. I’m skeptical of this working. (See above note about capoeira, for example - I can burn through calories like Sherman in Georgia.)

I went to New Jersey for my cousin’s wedding. It was a Christian ceremony, which I’ve never attended before. In fact, I think I’ve only been to Hindu weddings to date.^* Somewhat instructive. It was an Episcopalian (Anglican) church, which means it’s exactly like a Catholic church, complete with no Bibles in the pews and the rite of the Eucharist, plus silly-looking gowns for the priest deacon. Ah - the major difference being that the deacon was a woman. Her sermon was interestingly constructed, in that it was coherent and engaging almost exactly in the inverse of when she was talking about God.^†

The highlight of that particular excursion was, of course, the reception, where I was officially designated as “guy who must light up the dance floor”, everyone else apparently being either (a) white or (b) Indian uncles/aunties, and therefore unable to dance. This turned out to be not quite true - my sister-in-law loves to dance and can hold her own, and many people were at least committed, if not able. But I’m proud to say I definitely knocked that one out of the park, at least for songs that had desi beats to them, when I could trot out a pretty substantial battery of bhangra moves. I was more or less useless on the seventies disco-esque stuff and the like. How do you dance to that, anyway?

Well, there it stands. What have y’all been up to?

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^* This is not as bad as my roommate, who is twenty-two-ish, and has not been to a SINGLE wedding, to date.

^† Plus Eddie Izzard has made it impossible to take any mention of the Holy Ghost seriously, per his bit:

GOD: What's the Holy Ghost doing these days?

JESUS: Oh, he’s useless, Dad. Goes around with a sheet over his head.

HOLY GHOST: [ spookily ] Holy Ghost! Holy Ghooost!

GOD: Holy Ghost, this is not an episode of Scooby Doo.