Happy Birthday Neo!

The little guy now is five! 

It feels like yesterday when he came home...

Happy Birthday my love; thank you for making me keep breathing within hours after Max.

Why Is the U.S. So Behind on Animal Welfare?

Why does the U.S. lag so far behind the U.K. and E.U. on animal welfare? One view is that Americans are still influenced by a Wild West mentality that tolerates the rough handling of animals. Supporters of that view point to the survival of the rodeo, which, like the bullfight, entertains spectators by mistreating animals. People who find it entertaining to watch a frightened young calf being lassoed by a rope that chokes them and then drags them to the ground are unlikely to be concerned about the suffering of pigs or chickens.

Yet when Americans can vote for laws that give farmed animals more space to move around, they do so. In 2002, 55% of Floridians voted to ban keeping pigs in stalls too narrow to allow them to turn around. In 2006, 62% of Arizonans voted to ban such stalls for both pigs and veal calves. In 2008, 63% of Californians voted to ban such stalls for pigs and veal calves, plus standard battery cages for hens. In 2016, 78% of Massachusettans voted to ban narrow stalls for pigs and veal and standard battery cages for hens, and to ban the sale of pork, veal, and eggs from out-of-state producers using these systems. In 2018, 63% of Californians voted to ban the sale of pork, veal, and eggs from out-of-state producers using systems that do not meet California’s standards. (A challenge by pork producers to the ban on in-state sales was dismissed last year by the U.S. Supreme Court.)

So I suggest that the U.S. is so far behind the E.U. on animal welfare, not because Americans care less about animals than Europeans, but because the U.S. political system is less democratic than Europe’s parliamentary system. In most parliamentary democracies, political parties are stronger and individual lawmakers do not need to raise large amounts of money to get re-elected. Money and lobbying have far greater influence in U.S. politics.

The U.S. congressional committee system also serves to disempower the electorate in a way that cannot happen in a parliamentary democracy, in which the Prime Minister and Cabinet are members of the legislature and have much influence on legislation. In the U.S., House and Senate Agriculture committees in both state and federal Congresses are usually made up of lawmakers representing predominantly agricultural districts, and they effectively have a veto on proposals to protect farmed animals. They often receive substantial donations from factory farm operators. In states without provision for citizen-initiated ballots, only tiny Rhode Island has farmed animal legislation that can compare with the E.U. or U.K. At the federal level, there is no legislation that even attempts to regulate the conditions in which farmed animals are kept.

Most Americans care about animals, and would like their country to be among the leading nations in protecting animals from unnecessary suffering. The reality is more disturbing, and I hope that people who learn the true situation seek to change it.

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Systems Thinking - Seven Thinking Skills

 

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Animals’ Understanding of Death Can Teach Us About Our Own

But this is precisely what understanding death essentially means: grasping that a dead individual can no longer do what they could when they were alive.

Some scientists who study animals’ relation to death might disagree with this conclusion. Understanding death, they might argue, implies comprehending the absolute finality of it, its inevitability, its unpredictability, and the fact that it will affect everyone, including oneself. These scientists would be in the grip of what I have termed intellectual anthropocentrism: the assumption that the only way of understanding death is the human way, that animals either have a concept of death equivalent to the average adult human’s—or none at all.

But that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Intellectual anthropocentrism is a bias that affects comparative thanatology, the study of how animals deal with and understand death. The way to extirpate this bias is by realizing that the concept of death is not an all-or-nothing matter, but rather a spectrum—something that comes in degrees. So when we study whether animals can understand death, we should not start from the hypercomplex human concept, but rather from what I call the minimal concept of death. Understanding death in minimal terms means grasping that dead individuals don’t do the sorts of things that living beings of their kind typically do, and that this is an irreversible state. And this is precisely what the chimpanzees’ behavior suggests that they had understood.

There is another bias that also affects comparative thanatology: what I have termed emotional anthropocentrism. This is the idea that animals’ reactions to death are only worthy of our attention when they appear human-like. Afflicted by this bias, comparative thanatologists have been looking for manifestations of grief in animals, exemplified by the story of Tahlequah, the orca who carried her dead baby for 17 days and over 1000 miles, or Segasira, the gorilla who attempted to suckle from his dead mother’s breast despite already having been weaned. Don’t get me wrong: animal grief is a real and an important phenomenon that we should absolutely be paying attention to. However, if we’re only looking for mourning behavior in animals, we may be missing most of the picture.

Think back to the chimps. They clearly weren’t mourning the albino baby’s death. Instead, their behavior seemed dominated by an attitude of curiosity. But this did not detract from their understanding of what had happened. Grief does not signal a special or deep understanding of death. What it signals instead is the existence of a strong social bond between the mourner and the deceased.

But there are many ways of emotionally reacting to the realization that someone died that don’t involve grieving. You might react with joy, if, for instance, it means you’re inheriting a large sum of money. You might instead react with anger, if the deceased owed you money that you’re now never going to get back. You might react with excitement or hunger, if, say, your flight crashed in the Andes and there was no more food around. Or you might be totally indifferent, if you didn’t know the person or they meant nothing to you. Of course, all of these reactions are taboo in our societies, and we wouldn’t publicly admit to having them. But this doesn’t mean that they’re not possible. And crucially: they wouldn’t mean that you haven’t properly understood what happened. The polar bear who finally manages to catch a seal might understand death just as well as the heartbroken monkey mother who hangs on to her baby’s corpse, even though the former thinks of it as a gain rather than a loss.

The biases of emotional anthropocentrism and intellectual anthropocentrism have prevented us from seeing that there are many more ways of reacting to death than what is considered politically correct in our societies. In fact, the concept of death, instead of being a complex intellectual achievement within the sole reach of the most cognitively sophisticated species, is actually quite easy to acquire and linked to abilities that are crucial for survival. If we manage to extirpate these two biases, we will see that the concept of death, far from being a uniquely human trait, is widespread in the animal kingdom and more diverse than we will ever know.

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My Beloved Monster by Caleb Carr

What a beautiful life is this one we have? Now, imagine that beauty is amplified in multitudes plus in multitude of dimensions when we share this bond with another non-human animal. 

Bloody, I am so damn lucky to have this in this lifetime with Max. I am so damn lucky! 

Now that Max is not present and my time is ticking, he left with Neo, Fluffy, Garph and now this year Saroo and Blue. 

Well, I am not the only one who is lucky; Caleb Carr's final book before he passed away is about his relationship with his cat Masha, My Beloved Monster: Masha, the Half-wild Rescue Cat Who Rescued Me (review here).

The beauty of Carr's relationship is - for the first time someone writes this in an inverse way. He is not anthropomorphizing Masha but he thinks Masha was reverse anthropomorphizing. 

In this exquisite book novelist Caleb Carr tells the story of the “shared existence” he enjoyed for 17 years with his beloved cat, Masha. At the time of writing she is gone, he is going, and all that remains is to explain how they made each other’s difficult lives bearable. The result is not just a lyrical double biography of man and cat but a wider philosophical inquiry into our moral failures towards a species which, cute internet memes notwithstanding, continues to get a raw deal.

Carr explains how Masha picked him as her person when he first visited the animal rescue centre nearly 20 years ago. She was a Siberian forest cat – huge, nearer to her wild self than most domestic moggies, and utterly delightful, a long-bodied streak of red-gold whose forward-facing eyes gave her the look of a delighted baby. The rescue centre staff are desperate that Carr take her, and equally anxious that he should understand what he is getting into. This cat, apparently, fights, bites and is unbothered about seeming grateful. But then, why should she be? Abandoned by her previous owners, she was locked in an apartment and left to die. It is an obscenity, says Carr, that goes on more often than we can bear to imagine.

Once Carr gets Masha – a name he hopes sounds vaguely Siberian – home to his farmhouse on Misery Mountain in upstate New York, she starts to show her true “wilding” nature. Mice and voles are taken down with industrial efficiency. She even sees off a bear, dispatching it with a bloody nose. The only creature that gets the better of her is a wicked kind of weasel native to the area called a “fisher” which bites off her luscious tail and leaves her less nimble for the closing part of her life.

With Carr, though, Masha shows a different side. She is not a lap cat in any sense, but something better, an actively attentive partner. When Carr is racked with pain from his chronic neuropathy, Masha bores her broad Siberian forehead into his clenched body to release the agony. Or she sits by his head for hours at a time, looking anxiously for signs that the discomfort might be easing. “What will cynics call this,” Carr asks rhetorically, “if they will not call it love?” In return he makes her mixtapes of her favourite music, mostly Wagner. And, to help her through the August moon, a time when all cats in the American north-east long to stay outdoors all night, he sets up a halfway house for them on the porch with blankets, camping lights and a television, so that they can get through the high summer madness safely together.

There had been plenty of previous cats in Carr’s life, a succession of spirit animals who accompanied him as he grew up in a household that sounds frankly feral. His father was best friends with Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs. Lucien Carr, who was prodigiously clever, madly violent and free with his fists, battered his middle son into profound anti-sociability. Caleb explains how he has spent most of his adult life dealing with these accumulated wounds – a fractured body with a cats’ cradle of internal adhesions, and an inability to hang on to a romantic relationship for more than a few months. Masha is the salve for this lifetime of self-loathing: “how I lived, what I chose to do, my very nature – all were good enough for her.”

The question of anthropomorphism inevitably raises its head. Carr tetchily denies it, maintaining that everything wondrous about Masha – her emotional receptivity, careful social etiquette, even her tactical stealing of visitors’ socks – can be explained as intentional either by the growing academic literature on animal consciousness or the close observations of her clever vets. Altogether more plausible is his suggestion that it is Masha who is doing a kind of anthropomorphism in reverse, ascribing traits of her own species to Carr in order to make his behaviour comprehensible.

By the end, though, it barely matters. Carr has become so enmeshed with Masha that it is getting hard to tell them apart. When she is diagnosed with terminal lymphoma you know that it will not be long before he follows. And, indeed, in May this year Caleb Carr died of cancer at the age of 68. He has left behind a beautiful book, one of the finest meditations on animal companionship that I have ever read.

Practicing Deeper Gratitude via Geology

Yet most of us Anthropocene Earthlings are barely aware of the rich legacy of natural history that envelopes us. We are like squatters living amid the remains of earlier empires, worlds defined by different geographies, governed by alternate rules, inhabited by other residents. Consider the variety of ancient realms represented by a few North American cities: Milwaukee lies on a teeming coral reef; Minneapolis is perched on the edge of a vast volcanic rift; Montreal and New York City rise from the roots of great mountain belts; San Francisco sits, unsteadily, on rocks churned in an ancient subduction zone; Mexico City, also precarious, on the bed of a vanished lake. All vividly remember other versions of Earth.

We self-absorbed humans, meanwhile, mostly ignore the stories that lie just beneath our feet, believing them to be irrelevant, subordinate to our own reality, reducible to the convenient cubbyhole of “prehistory.” If we bothered to notice it, Earth’s crinkled crust would reveal how the past not only persists but in fact shapes the present. The rock record would show us that earlier iterations of the world are no less real for having occurred before we happened onto the scene. Rocks would remind us that we too live in geologic time, that our own moment will one day be long ago.

When we do pay attention to rocks, it is usually because of their utility, not their long memory. Although we humans like to think that we are in charge of our own destiny, the technological ages of humankind—Stone, Bronze, Iron, Fossil Fuel, Nuclear, and yes, even Digital—have always been dictated by rocks, and our own short-lived empires have risen and fallen in the pursuit of their riches. The science of geology has of course been entangled with all of this looting, but along the way, as geologists hammered at rocks, they began to understand that each gold vein and coal seam was part of a grand illuminated manuscript recording the history of the world. In an ironic twist, geology’s richest discovery is arguably an intellectual and philosophical one—an understanding of Deep Time.

Like all creatures on Earth, we need to use the planetary materials at hand to make a living, and our species has been exceptionally clever at appropriating those materials for our own purposes. As our technological prowess has grown, however, our respect for these works of time has declined. We rarely pause to consider that rocks and minerals have their own life stories—that they are emissaries bearing messages from across eons.

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It occurred to me later that that house on a Croatian hillside embodies the way we in the modern world thoughtlessly scavenge the monuments of the geologic past. Our cities are just scaled-up versions. Every asphalt roadway and concrete structure contains fragments, often still readable, from the chronicles of prior geologic regimes, irreverently blended and reconstituted. The metals in our cars, phones, and computers, having been separated from their source rocks, are more akin to individual letters in a shredded manuscript, but still whisper of their deep geologic origins. All the coal, oil, and natural gas we’ve burned—the photosynthetic memories of earlier ecosystems—hovers now in the air, the ghosts of combustion that haunt us in the Anthropocene.

Does it matter whether or not we acknowledge the histories of nonliving components of nature? Not every rock in Earth’s time-wrinkled crust can be treated as a precious artefact, and we Earthlings have no option other than to use what the planet provides. But simply developing an awareness of the deep history that enfolds us—and the immense amount of time embodied in the planet’s generous gifts—can foster a perceptual shift with radical psychological and practical implications.

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Becoming familiar with Earth’s monumental autobiography, and getting to know the characters and plots that fill the vast expanses of geologic time, forces one to abandon the notion that the only stories that matter are those with human protagonists. Once free from that deep-seated prejudice, one begins to see even the nonliving components of the Earth, including rocks and rivers, atmosphere and ocean, not as dumb matter but rather as part of a dynamic, animate, evolving—and self-documenting—collective.

Although there is a tendency to think of biological evolution as a steady march of progress, with primitive organisms being systematically replaced by more sophisticated ones, the fact is that when new lineages of organisms have emerged, they have simply joined the other branches on the Tree of Life. Bacteria and archaea, the progenitors of all subsequent life-forms, are still very much with us, as are myriad other microorganisms and invertebrates, as well as fish, amphibians, and reptiles, all living together in the wide crown of the tree with Johnny-come-lately species like us.

Similarly, old rocks are not merely relics of the distant past but active participants in current events and ecosystems, thanks to the way that Earth has crumpled rocks of all ages into the crust. Rocks young and old take part with equal vigor in present-day earthquakes. Strata that formed as desert dunes a hundred million years ago lap up today’s rain, having found new careers in middle age as aquifers. Schists that remember the dawn of Life carry on intimate discourse with modern microbes and root systems, on their way to becoming soils of the future. Basalts that were erupted as lavas eons before Homo sapiens appeared now attempt valiantly to absorb our carbon emissions.3 In other words, even the oldest rocks are responsive to new conditions, taking note of changes in the air, interacting in real time with the present.

This view of Earth’s rocky crust as dynamic and reactive—an ancient archive with comments to make about the current state of the world—suggests that we need a radical reappraisal of the way we live, farm, and build infrastructure on it. Even over human timescales, rocks and landscapes are not static but instead inherently mutable, and their capacity for shape-shifting will only increase in the face of anthropogenic changes in the surface environment. Yet most training for designers and engineers is still predicated on the view of rocky matter as timeless and inert. This reflects certain aesthetic preferences that were adopted early on in the history of Western science.

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There is a new and powerful generation of engineers and entrepreneurs who believe that humans can simply opt out of time—not appreciating the irony that their worldview is in fact an antiquated misconception from a bygone era. These are the moguls who think that “colonizing” Mars is not only possible but in fact right and inevitable, who advocate for stratospheric sulfate injection as an instant solution to the long-brewing climate crisis, and who actually seem convinced that they personally will be exempted from dying.5 At the same time, in another irony, obsolescence is a constant threat in their world, where someone who has been in the business for two decades is regarded as an ancient sage.6 All of these delusions are symptoms of temporal dysmorphia, or more bluntly, time illiteracy.

This condition is harmful to any human but particularly pathological when it afflicts the rich and influential. Spewing sulfate into the upper atmosphere to correct for a century’s worth of fossil fuel burning is considered by geoscientists to be madness, sure to have a torrent of unintended consequences not only for global weather patterns but also geopolitical stability.7 Time illiteracy seduces otherwise intelligent people into believing a planet with no soil, oceans, or active tectonics could become an Earthlike Eden in a matter of decades—somehow overlooking the fact that even if we could homestead on a new planet, we would still be us: the same flawed creatures expelled from the first Eden.

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The spiritual solace we crave may lie in the records of deep time that are our common heritage as Earthlings. The rocky archives have been patiently awaiting our notice. In them, we may find reassurance in the persistence of earlier worlds all around us; a sense of wonder at how extraordinary their preservation is; gratitude for the way they permeate the present with mystery, gravitas, and the promise of continuity. A spirit of evolutionary camaraderie may come from the knowledge that we have shared the arduous journey to the present with so many other long-lived lineages and have kin everywhere in nature. Accepting that we too live in geologic time can free us from narcissism. Letting go of the illusion that only the present is real, allowing the undulations of time to wash over us, may carry us with less fear into the future.

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How Learning Can Guide Evolution

Well, this paper gave me lot of boost! An old paper from 1987 but a gem! 

Abstract. 

The assumption that acquired characteristics are not inherited is often taken to imply that the adaptations that an organism learns during its lifetime cannot guide the course of evolution. This inference is incorrect (Baldwin, 1896). Learning alters the shape of the search space in which evolution operates and thereby provides good evolutionary paths towards sets of co-adapted alleles. We demonstrate that this effect allows learning organisms to evolve much faster than their nonlearning equivalents, even though the characteristics acquired by the phenotype are not communicated to the genotype.

Discussion

The most common argument in favor of learning is that some aspects of the environment are unpredictable, so it is positively advantageous to leave some decisions to learning rather than specifying them genetically (e.g. Harley, 1981). This argument is clearly correct and is one good reason for having a learning mechanism, but it is different from the Baldwin effect which applies to complex co-adaptations to predictable aspects of the environment.

To keep the argument simple, we started by assuming that learning was simply a random search through possible switch settings. When there is a single good combination and all other combinations are equally bad a random search is a reasonable strategy, but for most learning tasks there is more structure than this and the learning process should make use of the structure to home in on good switch configurations. More sophisticated learning procedures could be used in these cases (e.g. Rumelhart, Hinton, and Williams, 1986). Indeed, using a hillclimbing procedure as an inner loop to guide a genetic search can be very effective (Brady, 1985). As Holland (1975) has shown, genetic search is particularly good at obtaining evidence about what confers fitness from widely separated points in the search space. Hillclimbing, on the other hand, is good at local, myopic optimization. When the two techniques are combined, they often perform much better than either technique alone (Ackley, 1987). Thus, using a more sophisticated learning procedure only strengthens the argument for the importance of the Baldwin effect.

For simplicity, we assumed that the learning operates on exactly the same variables as the genetic search. This is not necessary for the argument. Each gene could influence the probabilities of large numbers of potential connections and the learning would still improve the evolutionary path for the genetic search. In this more general case, any Lamarckian attempt to inherit acquired characteristics would run into a severe computational difficulty: To know how to change the genotype in order to generate the acquired characteristics of the phenotype it is necessary to invert the forward function that maps from genotypes, via the processes of development and learning, to adapted phenotypes. This is generally a very complicated, non-linear, stochastic function and so it is very hard to compute how to change the genes to achieve desired changes in the phenotypes even when these desired changes are known.

We have focused on the interaction between evolution and learning, but the same combinatorial argument can be applied to the interaction between evolution and development. Instead of directly specifying the phenotype, the genes could specify the ingredients of an adaptive process and leave it to this process to achieve the required end result. An interesting model of this kind of adaptive process is described by Von der Malsburg and Willshaw (1977). Waddington (1942) suggested this type of mechanism to account for the inheritance of acquired characteristics within a Darwinian framework. There is selective pressure for genes which facilitate the development of certain useful characteristics in response to the environment. In the limit, the developmental process becomes canalized: The same characteristic will tend to develop regardless of the environmental factors that originally controlled it. Environmental control of the process is supplanted by internal genetic control. Thus, we have a mechanism which as evolution progresses allows some aspects of the phenotype that were initially specified indirectly via an adaptive process to become more directly specified.

Our simulation supports the arguments of Baldwin and Waddington, and demonstrates that adaptive processes within the organism can be very effective in guiding evolution. The main limitation of the Baldwin effect is that it is only effective in spaces that would be hard to search without an adaptive process to restructure the space. The example we used in which there is a single spike of added fitness is clearly an extreme case, and it is difficult to assess the shape that real evolutionary search spaces would have if there were no adaptive processes to restructure them. It may be possible to throw some light on this issue by using computer simulations to explore the shape of the evolutionary search space for simple neural networks that do not learn, but such simulations always contain so many simplifying assumptions that it is hard to assess their biological relevance. We therefore conclude with a disjunction: For biologists who believe that evolutionary search spaces contain nice hills (even without the restructuring caused by adaptive processes) the Baldwin effect is of little interest,[3] but for biologists who are suspicious of the assertion that the natural search spaces are so nicely structured, the Baldwin effect is an important mechanism that allows adaptive processes within the organism to greatly improve the space in which it evolves.

 

Ed Yong talks about his seven rules for being a public figure in a time of crisis

I have been reading Ed Yong since he started writing a blog on Discover; a long long time ago when I guess he was just out of college. 

I love his humility; a rare trait in this world.

The Hidden World of Electrostatic Ecology

The magic of animal electrostatics is all about size. Large animals don’t meaningfully experience nature’s static — we’re too big to feel it. “As humans, we are living mostly in a gravitational or fluid-dynamics world,” Ortega-Jiménez said. But for tiny beings, gravity is an afterthought. Insects can feel air’s viscosity. While the same laws of physics reign over Earth’s smallest and largest species, the balance of forces shifts with size. Intermolecular forces flex beneath the feet of water striders on a pond, capillary forces shoot water impossibly upward through a plant’s thin roots, and electrostatic forces can ensnare any oppositely charged flecks that lie in their path.

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If static charges aid pollination, they could shift plant evolution, too. “Maybe some fundamental features of flowers are actually just in service of generating the correct electrostatic field,” Dornhaus said, “and because we can’t see them, we’ve ignored that whole dimension of a flower’s life.” The idea isn’t so far-fetched: In 2021, Robert’s team observed petunias releasing more compounds that attract bugs (opens a new tab) around beelike electric fields. This suggests that flowers wait until a pollinator is nearby to actively lure them closer, Robert said.

“Humans are very visually oriented, so we tend to emphasize flowers that are showy and large,” Dornhaus said. But we already know that flowers transmit strong invisible signals, like scents or ultraviolet patterns. “It may well be that for some flowers, the electric field is actually a more prominent signal to bees than color is.”

However, evolutionary details surrounding electrostatic ecology remain murky at best. “It’s amazing, really, how little we know,” said Wainwright, the insect evolutionary ecologist. Even within better-understood visual and acoustic systems, ecologists are only beginning to connect evolutionary dots.

Because electrostatics has flown under the radar, England worries that humans unknowingly hinder the ability of animals to use these forces. “We’re spitting electrostatic stuff into the environment all the time,” he said. Electronic devices, appliances, power lines, fertilizers (opens a new tab) and even clothing bear static charges. “If [insects are] sensitive to the wingbeat of a wasp, they’re probably sensitive to a power line, and it might be messing up that entire system.”

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How To Compose A Successful Critical Commentary

• You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.”
• You should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement).
• You should mention anything you have learned from your target.
• Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.

- Daniel Dennett attributing to Anatol Rapoport (via here)