Friday, March 31, 2023

Evolutionary Roots Of The Risk Of Hip Fracture In Humans

Abstract

The transition to bipedal locomotion was a fundamental milestone in human evolution. Consequently, the human skeleton underwent substantial morphological adaptations. These adaptations are responsible for many of today’s common physical impairments, including hip fractures. This study aims to reveal the morphological changes in the proximal femur, which increase the risk of intracapsular hip fractures in present-day populations. 

Our sample includes chimpanzees, early hominins, early Homo Neanderthals, as well as prehistoric and recent humans. Using Geometric Morphometric methods, we demonstrate differences in the proximal femur shape between hominids and populations that practiced different lifestyles. We show that the proximal femur morphology is a risk factor for intracapsular hip fracture independent of osteoporosis. Changes in the proximal femur, such as the shortening of the femoral neck and an increased anterolateral expansion of the greater trochanter, are associated with an increased risk for intracapsular hip fractures. 

We conclude that intracapsular hip fractures are a trade-off for efficient bipedal walking in humans, and their risk is exacerbated by reduced physical activity.

- Full paper here

In other words, we are born with bad hips since we evolved to walk on 2 legs unlike most mammals and our sedentary lifestyle makes it worse. 


Wednesday, March 29, 2023

Poop Redux!

When Max was a puppy, it took me a few months to train him to understand the difference between poop time vs walk time.  I wanted to make sure he knew this difference since in case of emergency or bad weather , we can skip the walk. 

He would have to poop in a particular area(s) without walking so that he doesn't take his sweet time to poop. Max understood the difference and for the rest of his life he followed this. 

Yes, Max would take his time to sniff but after he squats, he would poop within 10 to 30 seconds. Neo does the same now. And yes, same for me as long as I could remember. 

So it always baffles me when people sit in the toilet and read New Times for minutes if not hours. 

After years of living with Max and when he got prostate cancer, he started struggling to poop. It would happen to me very rarely when I had too much junk food or not feeling well mentally. 

I don't remember when I came up with this hypothesis but it was long before Max had cancer:  

Evolutionarily, if John squatted to poop in African Savanna's pondering about life for minutes, he would soon be an easy dinner for any predator.  We all are evolved to poop only for few seconds. 

If someone breaks this rule daily then their health and/or diet is not good. There is something fundamentally wrong with their microbiome which in turn also affects their thought process, outlook of life and god knows what else we don't know. 

Hence, we could cautiously come up with a heuristic that not only eyes but "time to poop" is also a window to someone's character (I am not sure what soul means so let's stick to observable, known and simple words here). 

In recent years, there has been a lot of research going on to support my simple hypothesis. Earlier post stating that around 12 seconds should be our optimal poop time!

A new paper is telling us, microbiome helps to extract energy effectively from what we eat and hence we poop within seconds. If someone is struggling to poop then the process of extracting energy from food is not optimized ad takes a long time because of lack of microbial diversity. 

Abstract

Background

It has been hypothesised that the gut microbiota causally affects obesity via its capacity to extract energy from the diet. Yet, evidence elucidating the role of particular human microbial community structures and determinants of microbiota-dependent energy harvest is lacking.

Results

Here, we investigated whether energy extraction from the diet in 85 overweight adults, estimated by dry stool energy density, was associated with intestinal transit time and variations in microbial community diversity and overall structure stratified as enterotypes. We hypothesised that a slower intestinal transit would allow for more energy extraction. However, opposite of what we expected, the stool energy density was positively associated with intestinal transit time. Stratifications into enterotypes showed that individuals with a Bacteroides enterotype (B-type) had significantly lower stool energy density, shorter intestinal transit times, and lower alpha-diversity compared to individuals with a Ruminococcaceae enterotype (R-type). The Prevotella (P-type) individuals appeared in between the B- and R-type. The differences in stool energy density between enterotypes were not explained by differences in habitual diet, intake of dietary fibre or faecal bacterial cell counts. However, the R-type individuals showed higher urinary and faecal levels of microbial-derived proteolytic metabolites compared to the B-type, suggesting increased colonic proteolysis in the R-type individuals. This could imply a less effective colonic energy extraction in the R-type individuals compared to the B-type individuals. Notably, the R-type had significantly lower body weight compared to the B-type.

Conclusions

Our findings suggest that gut microbial energy harvest is diversified among individuals by intestinal transit time and associated gut microbiome ecosystem variations. A better understanding of these associations could support the development of personalised nutrition and improved weight-loss strategies.

 

Saturday, March 25, 2023

Pescetarians Kill More Animals

For one thing, scientists have amassed evidence over the past 20 years that fish are sentient — that they feel pain, experience emotions, and engage in complex social behavior that we once thought was limited to humans and land animals — upending decades of received wisdom that they don’t matter morally because they can’t really suffer.

Then there’s the question of numbers. Even if you’re less confident that fish can suffer like as pigs or cows, or you just have less empathy for them, keep in mind that you typically have to eat many more individual fish to get an equivalent serving of food. An average farmed salmon yields just under four-and-a-half pounds of meat. That’s over 30 times less meat than a single pig and over 100 times less than a cow. Salmon and chickens produce a similar amount of meat per animal, and both experience intense suffering on industrial farms, but farmed salmon live roughly 26 times longer than chickens before reaching slaughter weight, which means 26-fold more time spent in pain. And unlike farmed land animals, lots of the fish we eat are carnivorous, so they eat a huge number of bait fish before they make it to your plate, which only adds to the pescetarian’s moral bill.

When I went pescetarian, I started eating around two pounds of salmon a week, the equivalent of one to two entire Atlantic salmon every month. The typical farmed salmon is fed 147 fish over the course of their short lives — which meant that I was responsible for somewhere between 1,700 and 3,500 fish deaths per year from eating salmon alone. By comparison, the typical American eats around 25 land animals in total per year (based on data from a decade ago, but current figures are similar).

So it’s little surprise that, according to one estimate, humans catch or farm at least 840 billion to 2.5 trillion fish each year — at least 11 times the combined number of cows, chickens, and pigs slaughtered globally, even though seafood makes up just 17 percent of the world’s animal protein intake. 

[---]

Given the overwhelming evidence for fish sentience, the ethically motivated eater can rely on neither. And the distinction between farmed and wild-caught begins to break down when you consider the close relationship between commercial fishing and aquaculture, also known as fish factory farming. Over 90 percent of all fish humans slaughter are wild-caught, but about half of those are eaten not by humans but processed into fishmeal (mostly eaten by farmed fish and crustaceans) to accommodate the rapidly growing fish farming industry. A recent study estimated that the number of fish farmed globally grew ninefold in the last three decades, up to 124 billion in 2019.

Raising fish in confined conditions far different from their natural environments presents severe ethical problems, to say the least. Farmed fish suffer from overcrowding, disease, and the pain of being forced to grow rapidly. They experience significantly higher mortality rates than those of farmed land animals, while diseases that spread in dense fish farms also threaten wild marine populations.

- More Here

Human taste buds have no limits!


Tuesday, March 21, 2023

Happy Birthday Max!

 


Beautiful picture from his last birthday in 2019. 

Ephemeral life of his and mine became an eternal imprint for a simple reason - life is rare and precious' a reason by itself to celebrate without unleashing pain and suffering on other beings. 

How do you live without the one you lived for? Answer is I don't know. 

What I know is I don't search for meaning, dwell in miracles and magic, nor empty rhetoric.  

I do live a peaceful and playful life like Max while celebrating life with actions. What else can one ask for? 

After all, I got Max in my life when I didn't even know he was an option to "ask" for and that becomes a reason to live. And I do. 

I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches. If suffering alone taught, all the world would be wise, since everyone suffers. To suffering must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness, and the willingness to remain vulnerable. All these and other factors combined, if the circumstances are right, can teach and can lead to rebirth.

- Anne Morrow Lindbergh





Saturday, March 18, 2023

What Plants Are Saying About Us

I cannot for love of god understand why humans are so insecure to admit non-human animals and plants are "intelligent" and "sentient"?

I mean how bloody boring the world will be for me and others, If I keep talking about myself and nothing else? That's exactly what most of the so-called philosophers (from the beginning of humanity) to current day scientists to common folks  - do - talk about the glory of humanity while unable to sniff a scent which came naturally to Max. 

One man - Rene Descrates without an iota of humanity nor without evidence unleashed an idea and that stupid idea refuses to die till date. Mind, Body, Consciousness - if you have heard those terms then blame that dude.  

Thank goodness for so many good humans who are working hard to subside those bullshit philosophies which caused (and still causing) immense pain and suffering on all living beings. 

This is probably one of the most important essays you will read in your life that has the power to change your mind from the horrible idea instilled for centuries about consciousness, mind, intelligence et al.

Congrats on reading my rant so far. 

Are plants clever? Maybe. Adaptive? Sure. But sentient? Aware? Conscious? Listen closely and you can hear the scoffing.

For one thing, they can sense their surroundings. Plants have photoreceptors that respond to different wavelengths of light, allowing them to differentiate not only brightness but color. Tiny grains of starch in organelles called amyloplasts shift around in response to gravity, so the plants know which way is up. Chemical receptors detect odor molecules; mechanoreceptors respond to touch; the stress and strain of specific cells track the plant’s own ever-changing shape, while the deformation of others monitors outside forces, like wind. Plants can sense humidity, nutrients, competition, predators, microorganisms, magnetic fields, salt, and temperature, and can track how all of those things are changing over time. They watch for meaningful trends—Is the soil depleting? Is the salt content rising?—then alter their growth and behavior through gene expression to compensate.

Plants’ abilities to sense and respond to their surroundings lead to what seems like intelligent behavior. Their roots can avoid obstacles. They can distinguish self from non-self, stranger from kin. If a plant finds itself in a crowd, it will invest resources in vertical growth to remain in light; if nutrients are on the decline, it will opt for root expansion instead. Leaves munched on by insects send electrochemical signals to warn the rest of the foliage, and they’re quicker to react to threats if they’ve encountered them in the past. Plants chat among themselves and with other species. They release volatile organic compounds with a lexicon, Calvo says, of more than 1,700 “words”—allowing them to shout things that a human might translate as “caterpillar incoming” or “*$@#, lawn mower!”

Their behavior isn’t merely reactive—plants anticipate, too. They can turn their leaves in the direction of the sun before it rises, and accurately trace its location in the sky even when they’re kept in the dark. They can predict, based on prior experience, when pollinators are most likely to show up and time their pollen production accordingly. A plant’s form is a record of its history. Its cells—shaped by experience—remember.

Chat? Anticipate? Remember? It’s tempting to tame all those words with scare quotes, as if they can’t mean for plants what they mean for us. For plants, we say, it’s biochemistry, just physiology and brute mechanics—as if that’s not true for us, too.

Besides, Calvo says, plant behavior can’t be reduced to mere reflexes. Plants don’t react to stimuli in predetermined ways—they’d never have made it this far, evolutionarily speaking, if they did. Having to deal with a changing environment while being rooted to one spot means having to set priorities, strike compromises, change course on the fly.

[---]

To feel alive, to have a subjective experience of your surroundings, to be an organism whose lights are on and someone’s home—that’s reserved for creatures with brains, or so says traditional cognitive science. Only brains, the theory goes, can encode mental representations, models of the world that brains experience as the world. As Jon Mallatt, a biologist at the University of Washington, and colleagues put it in their 2021 critique of Calvo’s work, “Debunking a Myth: Plant Consciousness,” to be conscious requires “experiencing a mental image or representation of the sensed world,” which brainless plants have no means of doing.4

But for Calvo, that’s exactly the point. If the representational theory of the mind says that plants can’t perform intelligent, cognitive behaviors, and the evidence shows that plants do perform intelligent, cognitive behaviors, maybe it’s time to rethink the theory. “We have plants doing amazing things and they have no neurons,” he says. “So maybe we should question the very premise that neurons are needed for cognition at all.” 

[---]

The idea that the mind is in the brain comes to us from Descartes. The 17th-century philosopher invented our modern notion of consciousness and confined it to the interior of the skull. He saw the mind and brain as separate substances, but with no direct access to the world. The mind was reliant on the brain to encode and represent the world or conjure up its best guess as to what the world might be, based on ambiguous clues trickling in through unreliable senses. What Descartes called “cerebral impressions” are today’s “mental representations.” As cognitive scientist Ezequiel Di Paolo writes, “Western philosophical tradition since Descartes has been haunted by a pervasive mediational epistemology: the widespread assumption that one cannot have knowledge of what is outside oneself except through the ideas one has inside oneself.”5

Modern cognitive science traded Descartes’ mind-body dualism for brain-body dualism: The body is necessary for breathing, eating, and staying alive, but it’s the brain alone, in its dark, silent sanctuary, that perceives, feels, and thinks. The idea that consciousness is in the brain is so ingrained in our science, in our everyday speech, even in popular culture that it seems almost beyond question. “We just don’t even notice that we are adopting a view that is still a hypothesis,” says Louise Barrett, a biologist at the University of Lethbridge in Canada who studies cognition in humans and other primates.

And best description of consciousness I have ever heard: 

When I first encountered the 4E theories, I couldn’t help thinking of consciousness. If the mind is embodied, extended, embedded, etcetera, does consciousness—that magical, misty stuff—seep out of the confines of the skull, permeate the body, pour like smoke from the ears, and leak out into the world? But then I realized that way of thinking was a hangover from the traditional view, where consciousness was treated as a noun, as something that could be located in a particular place.

“Cognition is not something that plants—or indeed animals—can possibly have,” Calvo writes in his new book, Planta Sapiens. “It is rather something created by the interaction between an organism and its environment. Don’t think of what’s going on inside the organism, but rather how the organism couples to its surroundings, for that is where experience is created.”

The mind, in that sense, is better understood as a verb. As the philosopher Alva NoĆ«, who works in embodied cognition, puts it, “Consciousness isn’t something that happens inside us: It is something we do.”

And we do it in order to keep on living. The need to stay alive, to tread in far-from-equilibrium water—that is what separates us from machines. “Wild cognition,” as Barrett puts it, is more akin to a candle flame than to a computer. “We are ongoing processes resisting the second law of thermodynamics,” she says. We are candles desperately working to re-light ourselves, while entropy does its damnedest to blow us out. Machines are made—one and done—but living things make themselves, and they have to remake themselves so long as they want to keep living.

[---]

“The brain fundamentally is a life regulation organ,” Thompson says. “In that sense, it’s like the heart or the kidney. When you have animal life, it’s crucially dependent for the regulation of the body, its maintenance, and all its behavioral capacities. The brain is facilitating what the organism does. Words like cognition, memory, attention, or consciousness—those words for me are properly applied to the whole organism. It’s the whole organism that’s conscious, not the brain that’s conscious. It’s the whole organism that attends or remembers. The brain makes animal cognition possible, it facilitates and enables it, but it’s not the location of it.”

A bird needs wings to fly, Thompson says, but the flight is not in the wings. Disembodied wings in a vat could never fly—it’s the whole bird, in interaction with the air currents shaped by its own movements, that takes to the sky. 

[---]

“Clearly,” Thompson says, “plants are self-organizing, self-maintaining, self-regulating, highly adaptive, they engage in complex signaling among each other, within species and across species, and they do that within a framework of multicellularity that’s different from animal life but exhibits all the same things: autonomy, intelligence, adaptivity, sense-making.” From a 4E perspective, Thompson says, “there’s no problem in talking about plant cognition.”

In the end, Calvo’s critics are right: Plants aren’t using brains to form internal representations. They have no private, conscious worlds locked up inside them. But according to 4E cognitive science, neither do we.

“The mistake was to think that cognition was in the head,” Calvo says. “It belongs to the relationship between the organism and its environment.” 


Wednesday, March 15, 2023

Best Definition Of AI!

There is a very uncontroversial way of defining it: 

AI is a discipline of computer science that seeks to generate computer programs and algorithms to solve complex problems for which we thought human intelligence was required. Period. 

Some people, I think without much reason, think of AI as a discipline that seeks to manufacture minds and conscious entities. This may or may not happen, but such an outcome is neither its objective nor the best way to define it, in my opinion. It is like saying that medical science is the discipline that seeks to make us immortal. This may or may not happen, but in reality what medical science aims is to prevent us from dying of diseases, accidents, etc.

Duke's Felipe De Brigard


Tuesday, March 14, 2023

Very Good Sentence On Cancer

Cancer continues to kill 10 million people around the world every year.  We need to acknowledge that we do not yet understand how cancer forms and why metastatic cancer continues to be incurable and lethal. Analogies, metaphors, and comparisons that anthropomorphize the disease take away from the serious fact that we still do not know how to cure metastatic cancer. There is much work to be done.   Let’s be uncomfortable.

- Cancer & Metaphor


Saturday, March 11, 2023

"Alpha" Male Is A Myth; Wolf Packs Are Simply Families

Everyone I know, I mean everyone uses the phrase "Alpha'' to address a human male, dog , wolf and even other animals. 

Little did I know that the roots of it evolved from a 1970 book, The Wolf: Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species.

This book because of biased research done with captive wolves (not wolves in wild) coined the prefix "alpha" for male dominance!! 

Thank goodness for L. David Mech this has now been removed from the latest edition of the book. 

But yet, can we remove the idea of "alpha" instilled in the human brain? I don't think so because of the curse of "locked in syndrome" (stuck with the wrong idea or choice) in a complex system. 

The lessons here are: 

  1. Never take anything at face value and dig a little to find the roots from where it started. I have been doing this a lot lately and its fun and enlightening - plus made me more humble, have more gratitude and be open minded. 
  2. Before you leash an idea into the world, be cautious of the unintended consequences  and understand complex systems. 
  3. Even if one was not successful in doing 1 and 2 through themselves and at some point new truth emerges then please change your mind.

This is a beautiful case of how science learns from past mistakes and corrects itself. 

If you’ve ever heard the term “alpha wolf,” you might imagine snapping fangs and fights to the death for dominance. The idea that wolf packs are led by a merciless dictator is pervasive, lending itself to a shorthand for a kind of dominant masculinity.

But it turns out that this is a myth, and in recent years wildlife biologists have largely dropped the term “alpha.” In the wild, researchers have found that most wolf packs are simply families, led by a breeding pair, and bloody duels for supremacy are rare.

“What would be the value of calling a human father the alpha male?” says L. David Mech, a senior research scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey, who has studied wolf packs in the wild for decades. “He’s just the father of the family. And that’s exactly the way it is with wolves.”

          [---] 

Mech, like many wildlife biologists, once used terms such as alpha and beta to describe the pecking order in wolf packs. But now they are decades out of date, he says. This terminology arose from research done on captive wolf packs in the mid-20th century—but captive packs are nothing like wild ones, Mech says. When keeping wolves in captivity, humans typically throw together adult animals with no shared kinship. In these cases, a dominance hierarchy arises, Mech adds, but it’s the animal equivalent of what might happen in a human prison, not the way wolves behave when they are left to their own devices.

In contrast, wild wolf packs are usually made up of a breeding male, a breeding female and their offspring from the past two or three years that have not yet set out on their own—perhaps six to 10 individuals. In the late 1980s and 1990s Mech observed a pack every year at Ellesmere Island in northeastern Canada. His study, published in 1999 in the Canadian Journal of Zoology, was among the first multiyear research on a single pack over time. It revealed that all members of the pack defer to the breeding male and that all other pack members, regardless of sex or age, defer to the breeding female. The youngest pups also submit to their older siblings, though when food is scarce, parents feed the young first, much as human parents might tend to a fragile infant.

The same is true across gray wolf packs: Infighting for dominance is basically unheard of in a typical pack. When offspring are two to three years old, they leave the pack in search of mates, aiming to start their own pack. The alpha wolf notion of challenging dad for dominance of the existing pack just isn’t in the wolf playbook.

Indeed, even general family conflict is rare, Mech says. “Let’s say that [a] pair has some yearling wolves that haven’t dispersed yet. The adults will kind of keep the yearlings away from the carcass while the adults feed and feed the pups,” he says. “Those are places where there can be at least competition and sometimes conflict, but it’s a snap or two.”

Mech used the alpha wolf nomenclature in a classic book of wolf biology, The Wolf: Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species, which was published in 1970. But he has made a point of pushing back against the term as new research has come to light. After a years-long effort, he finally got The Wolf taken out of print in 2022, he says. The 2003 book Wolves: Behavior, Ecology, and Conservation, which he co-edited with zoologist Luigi Boitani, is now far more accurate and up-to-date, he says.
There were many people who used to address Max and I as an Alpha - Beta relationship. I used to repel at that phrase. 

What Max and I have is a simple and ordinary bond between two living beings.  What a beautiful and wonderful life it has been because of it. 

And that's what wolf families have too. Nothing less nor more. 

Tuesday, March 7, 2023

Lichens Can Help Indicate Change In Sea Level

It takes more than just salt sensitivity to make a lichen a good indicator of whether a site has experienced the first effects of sea level rise. The lichen’s own life history also comes into play.

Species like the powdery medallion lichen (left photo) can be killed if subjected to too much salt water by a storm or flood. But this lichen’s quick reproduction lets it swiftly recolonize after the sea recedes. Larger species with slower growth and reproduction, and also low salt tolerance, like the ruffled blue jellyskin (right photo), can better tell the saltwater history of a site. These salt-intolerant lichens could not have survived and grown if a saltwater event like storm spray or flooding had occurred at any point during their life. Since some lichen species can live for decades or longer, the record they provide can be both hyperlocal in space and extensive in time.

Of the 48 different lichen species Rosentreter and DeBolt found at their two Florida survey sites, 11 are reliable indicators of salt water’s presence. Seven of the species only like to grow in places with very low saltwater impact, while four are salt tolerant, so finding them growing suggests the site has a moderate history of salt and a higher risk of being affected by rising seas.

In general, they found that the species that best indicate if a site will be relatively safe from sea level rise and saltwater inundation are lichens that are larger and leafier and often light green or blue in color. But lichens can be tricky to identify, and some promising indicator species look quite similar to less useful ones. “You’ve got to be at least an intermediate plant person to figure it out,” says Rosentreter.

- More Here

I have been learning more and more about Lichens this year!



Sunday, March 5, 2023

Another Example Why Books,Talks et al., On Consciousness Is Bullshit

Here's an interview with Alan Lightman on his new book (I am not linking on purpose). 

Alan probably is a decent and nice human but yet with all his "brilliance" he seems doesn't gauge his own biases and cognitive dissonance. 

I am not making shit up and judging him; for the same question he starts out stating that human level of consciousness is of a “higher” level than other animals and without skipping a beat he says consciousness is a subjective experience which is very difficult to understand and no one has answers!! 

How the hell did he infer that human consciousness is at a “higher” level than other animals? 

I rest my case and hence, I throw away most books on consciousness to recycle (to avoid danger of corrupting other minds). 

The other angle you take to explore the boundaries of science is through experiences of “transcendence.” In The Transcendent Brain, you ask, “How can a thing made of atoms feel emotion, wonder, any sensation?” When did you start questioning science’s ability to offer an explanation for these experiences?

About 10 years ago, I became interested in the question of consciousness and how consciousness arises from the human brain. Consciousness is the fundamental human experience. It is probably a graded phenomenon. Crows and dolphins have some level of consciousness, although not as advanced as what humans have. It’s a name that we give to this sensation caused by the electrical and chemical flows of neurons, a certain sensation of being a separate being in the world. Of having an “I.” Of being able to remember things. Of being able to plan for the future. That sensation we call consciousness.

I think most scientists would agree that consciousness is produced by the chemical and electrical activity of neurons, even though we don’t yet know how that sensation arises from material neurons. And it may take a long, long time for science to be able to fill in all the steps to get from the material neurons to the subjective sensation of consciousness. The fundamental obstacle here is that it’s a subjective experience. The brain is three pounds of stuff. You can lay it on a table and probe it. But this sensation of consciousness is a subjective experience. There is a gap between the objective and subjective that makes it very difficult to understand how consciousness emerges from the material brain. I don’t have any answers, and I think philosophers and neuroscientists don’t yet have answers either. It’s really one of the most interesting fundamental questions in science.