Proud to Pollute

We have a right to pollute the Earth.

We have a right to cut down trees, eat meat, have factories, use its resources, enjoy technology, hunt, and fish.

Let me tell you a story.  There is an organism that has put billions of metric tons of toxic gas into the air.  This pollution has caused a mass extinction of organisms across the entire globe and is changing the chemistry of the entire globe.  What organism am I talking about?  Maybe you’re already savvy to my trick here, but I’m talking about the single celled cyanobacteria of billions of years ago.  That gas?  Oxygen.

It’s a important fact to remember that all organisms produce pollution - big, small, simple and complex.  We all impact each other.  There was a time in evolutionary history that oxygen literally caused a mass extinction.  It was a toxin to anaerobes.  Everything poops, pees, farts, belches, exhales, respires and there’s some other organism, somewhere that’s impacted because of it.

Furthermore, all animals hurt some other organism to survive and that’s okay.  A cheetah has a right to eat an impala, a polar bear a seal, a rattlesnake a bunny wabbit and a bunny wabbit, alfalfa.


What's the 'essential' part in 'essential amino acids'?  Essential to all life?  No.  Essential to humans.   Cows have essentially no 'essential' amino acids since they synthesize them quite well themselves.  So, why are we different from other animals that make their own complete amino acids?  In our evolutionary history we had those amino acids in our diet so regularly that mutations could eliminate the ability to synthesize them and we'd still survive (something similar happened with our ability to make Vitamin C.  Boy that'd change the vitamin industry.).

We've evolved to eat meat.  It's why our gut is so small relative to our body weight.  If we were evolved for eating plants alone our gut would look like the other largely vegetarian primates like gorillas and proboscis monkeys - utterly, protrudingly huge pot bellies.  A small set of intestines shows we are made to eat a high energy diet that takes little processing to yield high quality results.  Also, it's pretty universally accepted that eating meat gave us the incentive and means to become as brainy as we are - we're hunters and a hunters diet gives enough fat to power our calorie zapping noggin.  Early stone tools weren't for cutting spinach; I can tell you that much.

You've seen these guilt trip photos showing the leveling of land and the emergence of buildings - the decimation of a habitat.  The message is that's awful.  Is it?  Is it really awful that humans exist?  Or, is it amazing that biology has produced an organism that is doing something amazing, building edifices, cities, nations, technology that have never existed before (to our knowledge).  Is it worth it to destroy some environment to make the Large Hadron Collider?  Yes.  Yes, it is.  If I had to choose between the extinction of the California Condor and the building of the LHC, I'd shoot the bird myself.  Thankfully we don't have to make that decision, but what does it take to make a LHC?  It takes a whole bunch of awful stuff like strip mining, fossil fuels, habitat destruction, and vast societies to pull great minds from.  It takes a lot, but it's worth it.

People like microbiologist Lynn Margulis have helped me see this.  She eloquently pointed out that life is tough, far tougher than we realize.  We couldn’t wipe out life even if we tried.  We could blow up all the nuclear bombs in the world and we still won’t be able to kill life, lives, yes, but not life.  Somewhere, deep within the recesses and bowels of the earth, life would reemerge, recolonize and start the evolutionary process of populating every niche and corner of the planet all over again.

With ‘rights’ come ‘responsibilities’.

During my seminary days, I remember being haunted by this Bible verse: “All things are permissible, but not all things are beneficial.”  What a scandalous verse.  “You can do anything you want, but you’ll have to live with the consequences,” is what it’s saying.  Questions concerning moral permission aren’t usually answered in ‘yes’ or ‘no’ but in ‘not in this way’ or ‘only with wisdom guiding.’

Please recognise that I write this as a reactionary.  I’m reacting to the over-exaggerating, fundamentalist environmentalists that try to scare the world with global warming hell fire and polar ice cap melting apocalypses.  I recognise that I need the planet in working order, as a healthy ecosystem to eat, breathe, flourish and even to enjoy the wonder of nature.

There’s two ways that the manner in which we pollute and destroy is fundamentally different from other organisms: our time scale and our scale of influence.

Time Scale

Life is exceptionally keen at turning water into wine, coal into diamonds, lemon into lemonade.  Any example of pollution that I can come up with produced by an organism has over an evolutionary time scale become a fertilizer, a gourmet dinner, or a breath of fresh air.  We, on the other hand, are presenting pollution in never before seen quantities and types that are posing new obstacles to life.  Can life overcome it? Of course.  Should we wantonly decimate the work of millions of years to test that out?  Well, listen, I love evolution.  I love it on many levels.  I love its pragmatic elegance.  I love the way it comes up with ingenious engineering inventions.  I love the baffling serendipity that it exists.  Life is miraculous.  So, know that it crushes me to lose any of it.  Please hear me say that.  It is a great, weighty, crushing loss.

Scale of Influence

There’s never been another organism that has wielded so much power.  We’ve been to the effing moon for Pete sake.  We have the power not only to destroy other species, but whole ecosystems, and an entire biosphere.  AND we have the power to knowingly do it OR to not.  We are not separate from the system.  When we poison the Earth we are poisoning our drinking well and ourselves.  When we destroy millions of acres of habitat we are destroying the 'lungs', 'heart', and 'guts' of the living Earth.  That's dangerous.  That will have consequences.

Humans don’t do moderation well.  We like either/or scenarios, on/off, right/wrong.  It is vastly easier for us to completely condemn and guilt every act of normal living: being a carnivore, driving, using electricity, etc. than to ask and then answer the tough question of, how much is too much?  So, we condemn any use (See Romans 14 for an interesting Biblical commentary on this right/wrong vs responsibility topic).  We guilt people for existing - like the planet would be better off if humans didn’t live in it.  That’s wrong.  We have a right to be here.  We have a right to live.  It is good that evolution made us.  It is good that we are creating societies and technology that may have never existed before.  It's good that something new under the sun has come about.

It's also wrong to say that we just need to live like the Native Americans.  Let me remind you a little history: they wiped out almost all the mega-fauna in the Americas after they came over the Bering straights.  Not the greatest environmentalist examples if you ask me.  They were constrained in their exploitation by technology far more than their ideology.  All that to say, going back to the Stone Age isn’t the solution.  It’s asking the tough question of:

How much is too much?
How much is enough?
What are our rights?
What are our responsibilities?
What can I do with out?
What can I enjoy?
*What is sustainable?

And, those are tough, tough, gut wrenching questions.

Vid: Homer Evolves

Pictographic Age of the Earth

You can read a person’s life history on their face - every wrinkle, crow’s feet, frown line, forehead wrinkle, freckle peppering, tells a story of countless smiles, frowns, laughs, days at the beach, furrows and surprises.  In the same way, we can see the Earth’s story, crow’s feet, laughter lines, age and story from looking at her.

She's a beaut.

She's also quite old.

Welcome to Eniwetok atoll home of thickest and oldest known coral deposits.  Drills have gone down 4,610 feet of pure coral deposits.  Estimates of the amount of time that depth would take to produce go back as far as 40 million years.

Dendrochronology: the study of tree rings.  Using the above technique we can date logs as far back as 11,500 years before present.

Antiparos, Greece.  This cave system has some of the oldest know formations dating back to the Eocene, 45 million years ago.  Noteably, many formations there look like the world's biggest turds.  See above.

Antarctica's got ice cores going back 740,000 years.

Grand Canyon.  Rocks as old as 2 billion years.  Canyon formation took 1.2 million years.  Only a slow, steady rush of water could carve this meandering trench but leave the rest of the sediment surrounding it intact.  

Marine sediments go back 136 million years ago east of the Mariana's trench in the Pacific.

Old as dirt.  The next time you're at the beach, appreciate how old that sand may be.  Dirt near the Himalayas has been calculated at 55 million years old.

I hope you never fill up without realizing the age of what you put in your car.  I also hope you realize that the energy that powers your house (most likely fossil fuel related in America) is power stored from the sun eons ago.  Many fossil fuels were formed almost 300 million years ago during the Carboniferous period.  They could not have formed quickly.  They represent far, far, far, far too much biomass.  There are ten trillion metric tons of coal and about 10 trillion gallons of oil and natural gas in the world.

There are caves in the Grand Canyon that have piles of shasta ground sloth feces 30,000 years thick.  http://www.youtube.com/user/ThePrehistoricMaster?feature=watch

Above is an 11,000 year old glass sponge from the depths of the East China Sea.  http://www.mpg.de/5595233/climate_archive_deep-sea_sponge

All that and I didn't even mention radiometric dating and the fossil record.  Ok, I'll at least throw in a picture.  :)  Check out the beautiful, regular, ordered, specific, layering.  JBS Haldane, a biologist, said that he'd stop believing in evolution if you could find a rabbit in a Precambrian fossil layer.  He's still waiting (well, he's actually dead, but we're still waiting. hehe)

Why Women Date A%@holes - An Evolutionary Perspective

Redneck A&%hole Doorbell

According to some surveys, 51% of women fantasize about being raped.

If you're anything like me, that's shocking.  Utterly shocking.  Some women, on some level, seem to want to be hurt? That's seems crazy!  WHY?!

That's not the only shocking thing about women.  Think of your single female friends.  How often do you hear a woman say, "How do I always wind up with @$$holes?"  You know how it goes.  Nice guys always finish last.  Women seem to like bad boys, jerks, cocky womanizers, sleeze balls.  Why is that true of so many of our female friends?  

Why do women date a#%holes?!

Furthermore, as a heterosexual male who's interested in what women are attracted to, I find it strange that women are so magnetically attracted to men that are funny.  When you think about it, it really can be as shallow as men liking big boobed bimbo beauties - both are just forms of entertainment, one visual, one mental.  Why is it that a guy can be a shallow, two-faced, gutter louse, but if he can make a girl giggle he can have her?  And does evolutionary psychology have anything to say about this subject?  Of course!

Quick evolution review:  Living organisms want to do two things: survive and reproduce.  When picking a mate you want two things from their genes: that they'll help your offspring survive and reproduce.

Survive.

Reproduce.

Survival is easy to understand - pick a mate that shows signs of being healthy - ornate plumage, coloration, antlers, capable of physically demanding displays or competition, etc.

Picking a mate that will help your offspring reproduce is quite a bit more complicated.   It's a surprisingly farsighted way of thinking for some lowly animals.  You aren't just thinking about the next generation.  You're actually thinking ahead to your children's children (completely unbeknownst to them, of course).  At that point it isn't just picking out what you like. You have to think about what other females want, sometimes for seemingly arbitrary reasons.  This is called the Sexy Son Hypothesis.  You want to pick a father that isn't just healthy and has good genes, but you want to pick a male mate that will produce sons that other females will think is attractive so that they'll reproduce and your genes will continue on.

Enter trouble.

Think about how this can go sinisterly and utterly wrong.  Evolution can cause women to be attracted to something that's bad for them like rape or being with a manipulative jerk if it means that their male offspring are more likely to reproduce because of having that attribute.  The classic example of this is the one we've already referred to - rape.  Over countless generations women may be selected for that are attracted to aggressive, anti-social, risk-taking, domineering, power-hungry, abusive men if that increases their offspring's fecundity.  Say it ain't so, but it is.  Thankfully that isn't the only or even largest selective force, but it's there and explains a lot about women's choices.

Back to the humor question.  Why are women attracted to cocky quick-wits?

What attributes does humor demonstrate and what's their relevance?

• High IQ - the brain can serve as a 'peacock's tail' and demonstrate genetic superiority.  Half the human genome encodes for brain phenotypes.  If half the genes are good, the rest probably are, too.  Translation: if you can say a good pick up line and make a girl laugh you might have good enough genes to reproduce with.
• Socially savvy - you have to understand people if you're going to be able to work your way up the social hierarchy ladder and have a large harem or high quality monogamous relationships.  Humor flexes your social understanding muscles.
• Confidence/dominance - same basic idea.  Status is important.  It's how you get high quality mates or high quantity mates.  Being funny typically means you're confident, which means you can succeed social (or have), which means your sons may, too.

So, there's part of evolution's answer to a question I've had for a very long time.  Women want what other women want, who want what other women want, who want what other women want, who...ad infinitum.  In other words, women date a*%holes so their sons will also be a#%holes.

Sinuses - You Need Them Like a Hole in the Head

What's the point in having holes in your head?  


Ever had a sinus headache?  Ever have them clog up while trying to dive/free dive?  Ever wish you could drill a hole in your face to relieve the pressure?  Yes, yes and yes.  Why are they there?  I'll save you some time and the summary is that no one really knows, but here are some stabs that I was able to come across

• The 'Air-Conditioner' Face Hypothesis: 

• They filter and humidify the air. Passing through these caverns the air is slowed down and moistened like in a small, warm, gross cilia filled cave. It should be noted, though that it's been calculated that sinuses increase the humidity of the incoming air a paltry 1-1/2 percent.

• The Smell Pocket Hypothesis
• Being slowed down may give the olfactory receptors more time to sample the air and by being moistened we're able to smell more keenly. Some super sniffer mammal's sinuses have receptors in them, but this is not the case in humans.

• The Make-Your-Head-Not-So-Fat Hypothesis

• Apparently evolution is dying to make your noggin not so ridiculously heavy by putting holes in it. I'll quote Cecil Adams from Straight Dope,"Some researchers have estimated that if the sinus cavities were filled with porous bone instead of air, the head would be just 1 percent heavier. Also, many heavy-headed mammals have absent or rudimentary sinuses." It does grow quicker and less costly, though.

• The Crash Test Dummy Face hypothesis
• Cars are build with crumple zones to cushion an impact. This hypothesis says that evolutionary history had so many facial blows that organisms with holes in their face were selected for. Um...no.

• The Echoy Canyon Face Hypothesis

• In singing lingo, using your 'head voice' might not be so bad after all. They just might serve as resonance chambers that may actually be tuned to make your voice more nasally, shall we say? Cats don't have unfilled sinuses and have no difficulty being shrill and annoying, though. Giraffes, which have quite large sinuses, are nearly silent...

• The Hollow Chocolate Easter Bunny Face Hypothesis
• Remember when you were a kid and you'd bite into that massive chocolate Easter bunny and think, "Hey!  It's hollow!  Those cheap skates!"  Maybe sinus holes are just cheap ways to fill in gaps in between different necessary parts of your head.

Summary: nobody knows. Maybe they're just a weird evolution history hold over!

Here's what it'd look like to sniff the underwater mines from Mario

"Just take a little off the front."

This is awkward on many levels.

Here's a look at Dr. Manhattan's sinuses

Only 19.95!!!!...gives new application to the beloved little tea pot song...