Plants Can Hear The Sound Of Falling Rain

Deep inside the inner ear are tiny calcium carbonate crystals called otoliths that swish around in fluid-filled sacs when we move, helping our brains detect acceleration. Plants have similarly situated calcium carbonate crystals called “statoliths” in their root cells. Instead of detecting acceleration, however, the crystals tell the plants which way is down so the roots can grow in that direction. While the otoliths in our ears don’t help us hear, the statoliths in plant roots could help plants hear, according to a new study published in Scientific Reports. 

Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology wanted to find out if sound waves from natural phenomena like rain could be energetic enough to jostle the stratoliths in plants and facilitate germination. To test their theory, they used rice seeds, which typically grow in shallow water, an environment that can transmit sound waves more efficiently.

“Water is denser than air, so the same drop makes larger pressure waves underwater,” study author Nicholas Makris said in a statement. “So if you’re a seed that’s within a few centimeters of a raindrop’s impact, the kind of sound pressures that you would experience in water or in the ground are equivalent to what you’d be subject to within a few meters of a jet engine in the air.”

- More Here

How Not To Save The Planet

Wendell Berry, one of the few remaining writers in the older topophilic tradition, understands this better than anyone. In 1991, he wrote an essay for the Atlantic—a magazine for which Thoreau had written—in response to the then-common slogan “Think globally, act locally”:

Properly speaking, global thinking is not possible. Those who have “thought globally” (and among them the most successful have been imperial governments and multinational corporations) have done so by means of simplifications too extreme and oppressive to merit the name of thought. Global thinkers have been, and will be, dangerous people.

Global thinking is, for Berry, intrinsically and necessarily destructive of actual places:

Unless one is willing to be destructive on a very large scale, one cannot do something except locally, in a small place…. If we want to put local life in proper relation to the globe, we must do so by imagination, charity, and forbearance, and by making local life as independent and self-sufficient as we can—not by the presumptuous abstractions of “global thought.”

I would add to this that when global thought is not actively destructive it nevertheless tends to encourage depression in those who attempt it—which accounts, I think, for the gloomy and finger-wagging tone to which we have become accustomed.

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This, I think, is an object lesson for those who wish to save the planet. If you would save the planet, forget The Planet; if you would sustain and repair nature, forget Nature. Remember the example of Gilbert White. Think only of the sensual properties of one dear place. If you learn to love a pond or a creek or a valley, then what you love others will love—and will perhaps also come to find some element of their own local environment dear to them, dear enough to conserve and protect. Our obligations arise from our deepest affections. You just have to show them how.

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"Surprisingly Popular" Algorithm - Better Wisdom From Crowds

The new method is simple. For a given question, people are asked two things: What they think the right answer is, and what they think popular opinion will be. The variation between the two aggregate responses indicates the correct answer.

“In situations where there is enough information in the crowd to determine the correct answer to a question, that answer will be the one [that] most outperforms expectations,” says paper co-author Drazen Prelec, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management as well as the Department of Economics and the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.

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Across all these areas, the researchers found that the “surprisingly popular” algorithm reduced errors by 21.3 percent compared to simple majority votes, and by 24.2 percent compared to basic confidence-weighted votes (where people express how confident they are in their answers). And it reduced errors by 22.2 percent compared to another kind of confidence-weighted votes, those taking the answers with the highest average confidence levels.

The paper, “A solution to the single-question crowd wisdom problem,” is being published today in Nature. The authors are Prelec; John McCoy, a doctoral student in the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences; and H. Sebastian Seung, a professor of neuroscience and computer science at Princeton University and a former MIT faculty member. Prelec and McCoy are also researchers in the MIT Neuroeconomics Laboratory, where Prelec is the principal investigator.

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In this sense, the “surprisingly popular” principle is not simply derived from the wisdom of crowds. Instead, it uses the knowledge of a well-informed subgroup of people within the larger crowd as a diagnostically powerful tool that points to the right answer.

“A lot of crowd wisdom weights people equally,” McCoy explains. “But some people have more specialized knowledge.” And those people — if they have both correct information and a correct sense of public perception — make a big difference.

- More Here

Is A Revolution Brewing In Evolutionary Theory? - Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES).

This is one of the most important pieces you will read this year. Period. 

Full of insights to act on your everyday life (there are tips, it's up-to you to connect the dots). 

When researchers at Emory University in Atlanta trained mice to fear the smell of almonds (by pairing it with electric shocks), they found, to their consternation, that both the children and grandchildren of these mice were spontaneously afraid of the same smell. That is not supposed to happen. Generations of schoolchildren have been taught that the inheritance of acquired characteristics is impossible. A mouse should not be born with something its parents have learned during their lifetimes, any more than a mouse that loses its tail in an accident should give birth to tailless mice.

If you are not a biologist, you’d be forgiven for being confused about the state of evolutionary science. Modern evolutionary biology dates back to a synthesis that emerged around the 1940s-60s, which married Charles Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection with Gregor Mendel’s discoveries of how genes are inherited. The traditional, and still dominant, view is that adaptations – from the human brain to the peacock’s tail – are fully and satisfactorily explained by natural selection (and subsequent inheritance). Yet as novel ideas flood in from genomics, epigenetics and developmental biology, most evolutionists agree that their field is in flux. Much of the data implies that evolution is more complex than we once assumed.

Some evolutionary biologists, myself included, are calling for a broader characterisation of evolutionary theory, known as the extended evolutionary synthesis (EES). A central issue is whether what happens to organisms during their lifetime – their development – can play important and previously unanticipated roles in evolution. The orthodox view has been that developmental processes are largely irrelevant to evolution, but the EES views them as pivotal. Protagonists with authoritative credentials square up on both sides of this debate, with big-shot professors at Ivy League universities and members of national academies going head-to-head over the mechanisms of evolution. Some people are even starting to wonder if a revolution is on the cards.

In his book On Human Nature (1978), the evolutionary biologist Edward O Wilson claimed that human culture is held on a genetic leash. The metaphor was contentious for two reasons. First, as we’ll see, it’s no less true that culture holds genes on a leash. Second, while there must be a genetic propensity for cultural learning, few cultural differences can be explained by underlying genetic differences.

Nonetheless, the phrase has explanatory potential. Imagine a dog-walker (the genes) struggling to retain control of a brawny mastiff (human culture). The pair’s trajectory (the pathway of evolution) reflects the outcome of the struggle. Now imagine the same dog-walker struggling with multiple dogs, on leashes of varied lengths, with each dog tugging in different directions. All these tugs represent the influence of developmental factors, including epigenetics, antibodies and hormones passed on by parents, as well as the ecological legacies and culture they bequeath.

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Take the idea that new features acquired by an organism during its life can be passed on to the next generation. This hypothesis was brought to prominence in the early 1800s by the French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who used it to explain how species evolved. However, it has long been regarded as discredited by experiment – to the point that the term ‘Lamarckian’ has a derogatory connotation in evolutionary circles, and any researchers expressing sympathy for the idea effectively brand themselves ‘eccentric’. The received wisdom is that parental experiences can’t affect the characters of their offspring.

Except they do. The way that genes are expressed to produce an organism’s phenotype – the actual characteristics it ends up with – is affected by chemicals that attach to them. Everything from diet to air pollution to parental behaviour can influence the addition or removal of these chemical marks, which switches genes on or off. Usually these so-called ‘epigenetic’ attachments are removed during the production of sperm and eggs cells, but it turns out that some escape the resetting process and are passed on to the next generation, along with the genes. This is known as ‘epigenetic inheritance’, and more and more studies are confirming that it really happens.

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Likewise, the diverse, culturally learned foraging traditions of orcas – where different groups specialise in particular types of fish, seals or dolphins – is thought to be driving them to split into several species. Of course, culture reaches its zenith in our own species, where it is now well-established that our cultural habits have been a major source of natural selection on our genes. Dairy farming and milk consumption generated selection for a genetic variant that increased lactase (the enzyme that metabolises dairy products), while starchy agricultural diets favoured increased amylase (the corresponding enzyme that breaks down starch).

All this complexity can’t be reconciled with a strictly genetic currency for adaptive evolution, as many biologists now acknowledge. Rather, it points to an evolutionary process in which genomes (over hundreds to thousands of generations), epigenetic modifications and inherited cultural factors (over several, perhaps tens or hundreds of generations), and parental effects (over single-generation timespans) collectively inform how organisms adapt. These extra-genetic kinds of inheritance give organisms the flexibility to make rapid adjustments to environmental challenges, dragging genetic change in their wake – much like a rowdy pack of dogs.

Despite the excitement of all the new data, it’s unlikely to trigger an evolution revolution for the simple reason that science doesn’t work that way – at least, not evolutionary science. Kuhnian paradigm shifts, like Popper’s critical experiments, are closer to myths than reality. Look back at the history of evolutionary biology, and you will see nothing that resembles a revolution. Even Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection took approximately 70 years to become widely accepted by the scientific community, and at the turn of the 20th century was viewed with considerable skepticism. Over the following decades, new ideas appeared, they were critically evaluated by the scientific community, and gradually became integrated with pre-existing knowledge. By and large, evolutionary biology was updated without experiencing great periods of ‘crisis’.

The same holds for the present. Epigenetic inheritance does not disprove genetic inheritance, but shows it to be just one of several mechanisms through which traits are inherited. I know of no biologist who wants to rip up the textbooks, or throw out natural selection. The debate in evolutionary biology concerns whether we want to extend our understanding of the causes of evolution, and whether that changes how we think about the process as a whole. In this respect, what is going on is ‘normal science’.

Richard Alley - Predicting Future Sea-Level Rise

Members of our broader research group are working extensively in the field. This especially involves the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration, the major project to learn what is going on in the most vulnerable part of the most vulnerable ice sheet in the Antarctic, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which includes the Thwaites Glacier. After seasons lost to Covid, a major expedition will be traversing down Thwaites, using radars, seismic sensors and more to characterize the ice and its bed.

Other groups are working farther downstream, extending work that has been done on the ice shelf and in the ocean beyond. Thwaites is vast, larger than the state of Florida. It is some 80 miles across, making it arguably the widest glacier on Earth. Since the 1990s, scientists have reported on the increased velocity of its movement and the doubling of its contribution to sea-level rise. Its collapse would trigger meters of sea-level rise in the decades and centuries to come, hence its popular nickname in the media, Doomsday Glacier.

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What are the challenges in predicting how much warming will ultimately cause the Thwaites Glacier to break apart?

Some of this is really difficult, especially where fractures are involved. Think about ceramic coffee cups dropped on hard floors. Sometimes the coffee cup just bounces, or the rim chips, or the handle breaks off, but sometimes the whole thing shatters. Scientists can accurately predict the average behavior of a lot of coffee cups dropped on a lot of floors, if you tell us the height of the drop, the type of floor, the type of cup and a few other things. But predicting the exact behavior of the next cup dropped is really difficult, in part because the behavior depends on whether there are small cracks buried deep in the material of the cup, among others. Predicting exactly how much warming is needed to break parts of Thwaites will be harder than predicting coffee cups.

Sounds like there’s still a lot of uncertainty here. How should policymakers cope with that?

First of all, the uncertainties are not our friend. There is basically no way that sea-level rise can be notably smaller than expected. When we make the climate warmer, the ocean warms up. That makes the water expand, which raises sea level. That’s relatively easy.

The glaciers in the mountains are doing what we projected decades ago: They really are melting. That takes water that was ice out of the mountains and puts it into the ocean, and that raises sea level. Those are fairly easy predictions. There are not large uncertainties in those. The uncertainties are: Will the ice shelves break off, will the flow of the big ice sheets change a lot, with the potential to drive these very large, rapid sea-level rises. So the uncertainties are on the bad side.

In other areas of our lives, we tend to invest a lot to avoid the possibility of a catastrophe, even if we are not sure it is going to happen. The example I like to use is highway safety. We have highway engineers, we have crumple zones in the car, we have airbags and antilock brakes and seatbelts and we have police out there trying to stop drunken drivers. We are not very likely to get killed by a drunken driver, but the catastrophe would be so bad if it happened that we invest a lot in heading that off.

What would make sense may be to think about sea-level rise and our response to it with the same sort of lens: There are things we can do to better understand why it happens and what the causes are. Next steps might be communities taking steps that reflect scientific findings, which of course have economic as well as social benefits.

- More Here

Did Grief Give Him Parkinson’s?

Wow! Thats what I said out loud after I read first few lines. This is an unique and precious view into health which happens very rarely - unveiling the complexities of not just Parkinson's but life itself. 

I highly recommend reading this synopsis of Jack and Jeff's life: 

I had driven up to spend time with Jack, who has Parkinson’s disease, and his twin brother Jeff, who does not. Because they are identical twins with identical genomes, it may appear to be a mystery that only Jack is sick. Yet scientists have long known that genes alone cannot explain why some people get Parkinson’s and others don’t. While a handful of genetic mutations are linked to the disease, about 90 percent of cases of Parkinson’s are “sporadic,” meaning the disease does not run in the family. And twins, even identical twins, don’t usually get Parkinson’s in tandem. In one of the largest longitudinal twin studies of the disease, Swedish scientists reported in 2011 that of 542 pairs in which at least one twin had Parkinson’s, the majority were “discordant,” meaning that the second twin was unaffected. The discordance rate was higher for fraternal twins, who are no more alike genetically than any two siblings. But even identical twins had a discordance rate of 89 percent.

So if genes don’t explain most cases, how about the environment? Several environmental factors have been linked to Parkinson’s, which has been shown to occur at higher-than-expected rates in, for instance, people who were prisoners of war in World War II. There is also a higher rate in people who live on farms or who drink well water, probably because of exposure to certain pesticides.

But the environmental connection is precisely what makes Jack and Jeff so interesting. For almost all of their 68 years, they have lived no more than half a mile apart. They have been exposed to the same air, the same well water, the same dusty farm chores, the same pesticides. They built their homes a five-minute walk from each other, on two plots of their father’s 132-acre farm in eastern Pennsylvania. And since 1971 they have worked in the same office, their desks pushed together, at a graphic design firm they co-own. All this makes their particular discordancy tougher to explain.

The existence of a pair of twins with identical DNA and nearly identical environments in which only one is sick—that’s a researcher’s bonanza. Whatever difference can be untangled in the twins’ physiology probably relates directly to the disease and its origins. The genome can be held constant; environmental toxins and other exposures can be held constant; what remains, researchers are left to think, might be an odd shift in a particular neural pathway that has a relevant function all its own.

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It’s where those parallel lives diverge, though, that might provide a lasting new insight. Beginning on the day in 1968 when Jack was drafted and Jeff was not, Jack suffered a series of shifts and setbacks that his brother managed to avoid: two years serving stateside in the military, an early marriage, two children in quick succession, a difficult divorce, and finally, in the biggest blow of all, the sudden death of his teenage son.

After these key divergences in their lives, Jack went on to develop not only Parkinson’s but two other diseases that Jeff was spared, glaucoma and prostate cancer. The twins place great stock in these divergences, believing they might explain their medical trajectories ever since. Scientists are trying to figure out whether they could be right.

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Their lives diverged between the ages of 18 and 25, tilting their paths off course just enough to remain, forever after, the tiniest bit askew. First they chose different colleges: Jeff went to Moravian College in Bethlehem, about an hour from home; Jack went further away, to Syracuse University. They both reported to the draft board in 1968, but only Jack passed the physical. Jeff, who had had a childhood infection that left him nearly deaf in one ear, was classified 4-F.

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The beauty of stem cell cultures is that they behave in the dish similarly to how they would in the body. That’s what happened in this case. The mid-brain dopaminergic neurons grown from Jack’s cells produced abnormally low amounts of dopamine. The Jeff-derived culture produced normal amounts.

But here was the first surprise: Even though Jeff showed no clinical signs of Parkinson’s or any other neurological disease, the Jeff-derived culture was not exactly normal. Both twins, it turned out, had a mutation on a gene called GBA (a mutation already known to be associated with Parkinson’s disease), and as a result, both of their brain cell cultures produced just half the normal amount of an enzyme linked to that gene, beta-glucocerebrosidase. They also both produced three times the normal level of alpha-synuclein, a brain protein usually broken down by a process involving the GBA enzyme. Alpha-synuclein is thought to be related to Parkinson’s, possibly by leading to the formation of the toxic lesions known as Lewy bodies that are a hallmark of the disease.

So rather than answering questions about the twins’ discordance, these findings only raised more. Jeff had the same Parkinson’s mutation his brother had, and his brain cells in culture behaved just as abnormally in relation to the GBA enzyme and alpha-synuclein. Yet he apparently has been spared. It was a puzzle. The scientists hoped the answer existed somewhere in those two Petri dishes.

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To the twins, the “pressure cooker” way Jack dealt with stress, most grievously the loss of Gabe, helps explain Jack’s added health burden today: the Parkinson’s, the glaucoma, the prostate cancer. Jeff said those might be “physical manifestations” of the different ways they handled stress. “Jack internalizes more than I do,” he said.

The connection between stress and disease is a lively research topic, as scientists discover how life experiences alter gene expression and contribute to diseases ranging from diabetes to the common cold. But while statements about the “gene-environment interaction” have become a familiar trope, the twins’ story offers a different way to look at it. Traditionally, “environment” is defined as external events that occur over a lifetime, or the impact of those events at the molecular level, which is in the realm of epigenetics. According to Steve Cole, a professor of medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Medicine, the relevant aspect of “environment” in terms of the twins might be something more interior and personal. Cole is interested in “the environment we create in our heads”—not what literally happens, but how the individual experiences what happens. “That is the most interesting aspect of the story of the twins,” he told me recently. “Their experiential environments.”

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For now, when they try to explain their divergent medical histories, the twins return to the tyranny of small differences: Jack’s more introverted personality, rockier life, quieter grieving style. In this belief they tap into the suspicions of a small cadre of neuroscientists trying to pinpoint the connection between stress and neurodegeneration. Maybe the twins are on to something the scientists are on the verge of identifying. Or maybe the brothers who have been all but inseparable are trying to protect themselves from the cruel realization that fate can unspool in dissonant ways.

 

How To Live A Rich Life

I am not a fan of the word ... well I hate the word intellectual. 

I prefer more grounded in reality; phrases such as a good living being or not being dead while still physically alive or simply the word "life".

This is a well written beautiful piece (and I didn't know 95% of all Wikipedia articles led to philosophy):

Conway’s Game of Life is an example of emergence and self-organisation.

When we surround ourselves with abundant, diverse ideas, complex ideas emerge. These ideas are unique and do not resemble the ideas from which they emerged.

Even if the initial set of ideas seem simple and disconnected, spontaneous order can emerge, leading to brilliant ideas.

Emergence and self-organisation are all around us. In the sciences, society, art and in nature.

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Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem.

That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily; and why older persons, especially if vain or important, cannot learn at all. 

We all need to come down from our peaks. For us to truly learn something, we need to abandon our views about it. Because the act of coming down from the peak forces us to do three things

• Understand the limits of our thinking: As we come down, and shed our views, we start seeing our field of knowledge more objectively, and understand that there are limits to our thinking, even though we are experts.
• Open space for contemplation: Once we come down, and make our way to another peak, we start walking, which opens the space for contemplation.
• Isolate ourselves from our ego: Once we have stripped ourselves of our views, and contemplated, we isolate ourselves from our Ego. This act of isolation humbles us, makes us realise our follies and helps us see illusions we have lived under.

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Here is how you could do it

1. Define 1-2 areas you’d want to learn about. Something you have been genuinely curious about, ideally for a long time.
2. Ask EVERYONE you know - Hey, I am interested in learning about Y. Do you know someone who knows a lot about Y?
3. Once you find a connection, ask for a warm introduction. I can almost guarantee you, the expert will be happy to give you their time.
4. Ask thoughtful questions. Don’t expect them to explain things to you, but ask them to point you to resources, or craft a learning path with them.
5. Put in the hours, immerse yourself in the resources and update them about the progress you have made and the things you have learnt.
6. This in turn will start a conversation.
7. Repeat 1 - 6 for the rest of your life.

And what will happen?

You have kickstarted your own version of ‘The Game of Life’. Remember, the Game of Life has only one variable: The starting point. You now have not just ideas from your field, but ideas from fields you know nothing about. You will now see ‘emergence’ in action.

Debunking Simulation Hypothesis

Deepak Chopra style glib bullshit by self proclaimed "intelligent" sapiens are not different from other bullshit propagated by "unintelligent" sapiens (think fake moon landing, to seeing Jesus in Banana).

We need more common sense research like this one: 

The simulation hypothesis — the idea that our universe might be an artificial construct running on some advanced alien computer — has long captured the public imagination. Yet most arguments about it rest on intuition rather than clear definitions, and few attempts have been made to formally spell out what “simulation” even means.

A new paper by SFI Professor David Wolpert aims to change that. In Journal of Physics: Complexity, Wolpert introduces the first mathematically precise framework for what it would mean for one universe to simulate another — and shows that several longstanding claims about simulations break down once the concept is defined rigorously. His results point to a far stranger landscape than previous arguments suggest, including the possibility that a universe capable of simulating another could itself be perfectly reproduced inside that very simulation.

“This entire debate lacked basic mathematical scaffolding,” Wolpert says. “Once you build that scaffolding, the problem becomes clearer — and far more interesting.”

 

Risk, Uncertainty, & Democracy

This multiplicity of meanings would have likely vexed Frank Knight, whose 1921 book Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit argued that risk that differed from uncertainty or hazard on account of being calculable. ‘The essential fact is that “risk” means in some cases a quantity susceptible of measurement’, he wrote, drawing on the example of a champagne producer who knows that a certain percentage of bottles will break during production. Because the risk of breakage is predictable and quantifiable, its associated costs can be passed along to the consumer alongside other expenses, like labor (Knight Citation1921, 19–20). Uncertainty, on the other hand, involved that about which ‘the conception of an objectively measurable probability or chance is simply inapplicable’ (231). This was a distinction that John Maynard Keynes echoed both his Treatise on Probability (1921) and his comments on The General Theory: ‘About these matters [e.g. the price of copper in twenty years time] there is no scientific basis on which to form any calculable probability whatsoever. We simply do not know’ (Keynes Citation1937, 214).

A century later, it is evident that Knight’s narrow definition of risk has been largely overtaken by a more expansive, and ambiguous, alternative. On the one hand, advances in risk modeling such as the Monte Carlo method – and the securities and derivatives it helped popularize – have enabled financial services firms to commodify and price risk in novel ways. Yet, as the contribution by Andrea Saltelli underscores, there are good reasons to look critically at the increasingly complex and often opaque mathematical models used in estimations of risk. Infamous in this regard is the former CEO of Goldman Sachs, David Viniar, who claimed in 2007 that the bank had experienced ‘25 standard deviation events, several days in a row’. As John Kay and Mervyn King have argued in Radical Uncertainty (Citation2020), tools developed to understand risk cannot fully tame uncertainty. It is not just that models might not correspond with the underlying reality they purport to describe, but that the mere existence of a model projects an unwarranted sense of security.

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As this brief survey suggests, thinking about risk, uncertainty, and democracy in the twenty-first century is a practice that cuts across disciplines, subject matter, and time periods. Trying to craft a comprehensive volume would be a fool’s errand, and the contributions included here only begin to scratch the surface. In lieu of comprehension, we have aimed to model a different way of thinking and speaking about risk – one that moves away from technocratic approaches to center the workings of power, and that can be applied to a broad range of analyses. We trust readers will find something worthwhile in our efforts.

- Full Paper Here

Cormac McCarthy Was Part Of Santa Fe Institute!

McCarthy had moved to Santa Fe with his third wife, Jennifer Winkley, and their young son John in 2001. He found the town off-puttingly liberal, moneyed and artsy, and moved there for one reason only: His great friend Murray Gell-Mann, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, invited him to join the Santa Fe Institute, serving as a sort of in-house literary intellectual. This elite scientific think tank, co-founded by Gell-Mann, brings together some of the world’s most brilliant minds to research complex interconnected systems. McCarthy had long preferred the company of scientists to that of literary people, and he delighted in the high-flying conversations at the institute. He went there nearly every day to work on his writing and kept up with all the institute’s scientific research. 

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Out came the entire canon of Western literature, from ancient Greece and Rome to the best novelists, poets and essayists of the 1970s, nearly all in cheap, worn, paperback editions. “These are the books that he read in his 20s and 30s and maybe into his 40s, and he was broke that whole time,” said Dennis. “Once he got money, Cormac bought all his books in hardback if possible, and for the last 40 years of his life he read almost no fiction at all.” 

- More Here

Scientists Are Tracking Worrying Declines in Insects—and the Birds That Feast on Them

In fact, 90 percent of the more than 10,700 known bird species rely on insects for food during at least part of their life cycle. Even the most dedicated seed-eating songbirds must eat insects and other arthropods, that many-legged group of creatures that includes spiders and millipedes, to produce eggs, to grow new feathers and to feed their young. Without insects, in other words, they wouldn’t survive. 

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People may not be motivated to save the insects for their own sake, but a world without insects is a world without birds. It’s a world where no college student will hear the fluty song of a white-throated sparrow across a mountain lake and have her life changed. It’s a world where nature offers no song to the rising sun. It’s a silent spring. 

In the long term, it would become something even worse. “Without insects, everything dies: all mammals, all reptiles, all birds and even humans,” Ware says. “If you want to conserve any of those other things, including us, you should want to conserve insects.”

- More Here

Personally, I learned about this couple of years ago and the change I made was to turn off the patio lights. Living in the woods, I used to leave the lights on all night but I learned that killed so many insects. 

Obviously, I never use any pesticides nor do I classify some random plants as "weeds" and destroy them.  

Crazy Ants Lead the Way for Swarm Intelligence, Helping Colonies Plan Complex Tasks

Anticipating future events is often considered a hallmark of higher cognition, seen in mammals, birds, and even in some insects. Ants have long demonstrated intelligent group behaviors, like farming, architecture, even social distancing, but whether they can engage in preplanning wasn’t known.

That changed when researchers spotted something unusual near their lab. Longhorn crazy ants (Paratrechina longicornis) were carrying food back to their nest, but a few were also picking up and removing gravel from the path ahead.

“When we first saw ants clearing small obstacles ahead of the moving load we were in awe,” said study co-author Ofer Feinerman in the news release. “It appeared as if these tiny creatures understand the difficulties that lie ahead and try to help their friends in advance.”

This stood out because most known trail-clearing happens over days and it wasn’t clear what triggered it.

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Crazy ants are known for their erratic movement and constant scent-marking. As they walk, they touch their abdomens to the ground every few steps, leaving pheromones that guide others.

In this case, those same trails turned out to be the cue for clearing behavior. Ants didn’t need to see the food or be part of the transport team to start moving beads — just one scent mark near an obstacle triggered the behavior and could put them into “clearing mode.” From there, they continued without further cues. As co-author Danielle Mersch explained, this behavior isn’t driven by individual understanding but emerges from simple interactions — showing how complex outcomes can arise from collective action.

- More Here

Touch, Our Most Complex Sense, Is a Landscape of Cellular Sensors

“David Ginty is the emperor of touch,” said Alexander Chesler, a sensory neuroscientist at the National Institutes of Health.

“You look at his publication list and you go, ‘Oh my God,’” said David Hughes, a neuroanatomist at the University of Glasgow. “He’s so massively productive, and all his papers are published in the very highest-impact journals.”

Beyond the technical breakthroughs and the discoveries fit for biology textbooks, it’s the images that stick in his colleagues’ minds. They’re otherworldly, like deep-sea creatures — not at all what you might imagine neurons could look like. These strangely shaped cells are the reason why the experience of touch is so rich and multifaceted — why a buzzing cell phone feels different from a warm breeze or a lover’s caress, from raindrops or a mother’s kiss. To realize that your body is covered in them — that they are a part of you — takes your breath away.

“Each one of these neurons tells a story,” Ginty said. “Each one has a structure that is unique and responds to different things. It’s all about form underlying function. That’s where the beauty is.”

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Of all the senses, the somatosensory system is the most complex, and therefore touch, some researchers argue, is the most difficult to study. Vision and hearing, for instance, are confined to the retina and the cochlea — parts the size of a postage stamp and a pea, respectively. Touch, however, is diffuse: The neurons that relay touch signals reside in clusters outside the spinal cord, from which they extend a vast web of axon fibers, like jellyfish tentacles, into the skin and internal organs. Each axon forms an ending just beneath the skin’s surface; the different types of endings are mechanisms for picking up and interpreting the variety of touch sensations.

While our eyes and ears each process information related to light or sound, touch concerns a smorgasbord of stimuli, including pokes, pulls, puffs, caresses and vibrations, as well as a range of temperatures and chemicals, such as capsaicin in chili peppers or menthol in mint. From these inputs arise perceptions of pressure, pain, itchiness, softness and hardness, warmth and cold, and the awareness of the body in space.

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Ginty will keep counting them. Today he’s asking the same fundamental questions he set out to answer more than a decade ago: Where do the various touch neurons go, what are their end structures, and how do they capture the richness of the physical realm? “We’ve gotten a pretty good handle on who’s who in the skin and what their response properties are,” Ginty said. But what about the heart, lungs, larynx, esophagus, stomach, intestines and kidneys? What are the neurons that make muscles ache and fatigue, or trigger migraines, or cause milk to flow in a mother’s breast when her baby suckles?

Ginty also wants to know how all these neurons connect to the brain to generate perceptions. How does pressure and vibration across millions of nerve endings become a hug? How do we feel wetness, slipperiness or elasticity? “Think about squeezing a balloon,” he said. “Presumably no one sensory neuron type is going to encode squeeziness.”

His work has transformed our understanding not only of individual touch sensors, but also of their connectivity. Until recently, the canonical view was that touch signals, like a telephone conversation, travel along fixed lines all the way to the somatosensory cortex, the part of the outer brain associated with sense information. “So any higher-order feature of the tactile world was seen as an emergent property of the cortex,” Ginty said. But his research and that of others has caused a paradigm shift. It’s now clear that a great deal of information carried by touch neurons converges in the spinal cord and brainstem before reaching the cognitive parts of the brain, suggesting that the touch signals are processed earlier in the neurobiological pathway than once believed.

If you ask Ginty what all this knowledge is good for, he’ll list the predictable applications: better pain drugs, improved treatments for sensory processing disorders  such as autism, more lifelike prosthetics. But what really motivates him is something less tangible: awe. His work, he’ll tell you, has given him a deeper appreciation of this sense we so often take for granted — how nuanced and multidimensional it is, and how much it can still surprise him.

Not long ago, he said, he attended a performance of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. “I put my fingers on the chair, and I closed my eyes and just felt the music.”

- More Here

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.

 

The Phageome - A Hidden Kingdom Within Your Gut

You’ve probably heard of the microbiome — the hordes of bacteria and other tiny life forms that live in our guts. Well, it turns out those bacteria have viruses that exist in and around them — with important consequences for both them and us.

Meet the phageome.

There are billions, perhaps even trillions of these viruses, known as bacteriophages (“bacteria eaters” in Greek) or just “phages” to their friends, inside the human digestive system. Phageome science has skyrocketed recently, says Breck Duerkop, a bacteriologist at the University of Colorado Anschutz School of Medicine, and researchers are struggling to come to grips with their enormous diversity. Researchers suspect that if physicians could harness or target the right phages, they might be able to improve human health.

“There will turn out to be good phages as well as bad phages,” says Paul Bollyky, an infectious disease physician and researcher at Stanford Medicine. But for now, it’s still not clear how many phages occupy the gut — perhaps one for each bacterial cell, or even fewer. There are also bacteria that contain phage genes but aren’t actively producing viruses; the bacteria are just living their lives with phage DNA tagging along in their genomes.

And there are lots of phages still unidentified; scientists call them the “dark matter” of the phageome. A big part of current phage research is to identify these viruses and their host bacteria. The Gut Phage Database contains more than 140,000 phages, but that’s surely an underestimate. “Their variety is just extraordinary,” says Colin Hill, a microbiologist at University College Cork in Ireland.

Scientists find phages by sifting through genetic sequences culled from human fecal samples. That’s where researchers found the most common gut phage group, called crAssphage. (Get your mind out of the gutter — they were named for the “cross-assembly” technique that plucked their genes out of the genetic mishmash.) In a recent study, Hill and colleagues detailed a light-bulb shape for crAssphages, with a 20-sided body and a stalk to inject DNA into host bacteria.

It’s not clear whether crAssphages make a difference to human health, but given that they infect one of the most common groups of gut bacteria, Bacteroides, Hill wouldn’t be surprised if they did. Other common groups, which also infect Bacteroides, include the Gubaphage (gut bacteroidales phage) and the LoVEphage (lots of viral genetic elements).

Phageomes vary widely from person to person. They also change depending on age, sex, diet and lifestyle, as Hill and colleagues described in the 2023 Annual Review of Microbiology.

Though phages infect bacteria and sometimes kill them, the relationship is more complicated than that. “We used to think that phage and bacteria are fighting,” says Hill, “but now we know that they’re actually dancing; they’re partners.”

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Phages also keep bacterial populations from getting out of hand. The gut is an ecosystem, like the woods, and phages are bacteria predators, like wolves are deer predators. The gut needs phages like the woods needs wolves. When those predator-prey relationships are altered, disease can result. Researchers have observed phageome changes in inflammatory bowel syndrome (IBS), irritable bowel disease and colorectal cancer — the viral ecosystem of someone with IBS is often low in diversity, for example.

People try to re-balance the gut microbiome with diets or, in extreme medical cases, fecal transplants. Tackling phages might provide a more fine-tuned approach, Hill says. As a case in point, scientists are seeking phages that could be used therapeutically to infect the bacteria that cause ulcers.

Be grateful for the trillions of phages managing your gut’s ecosystem. Without them, Hill suggests, a few kinds of bacteria might quickly come to dominate — potentially leaving you unable to digest some foods and subject to gas and bloating.

The wild and wondrous phageome is a dance partner for bacteria and humans alike.

- More Here

Grow Up - Enough With the Fireworks Already

Growing up in India, I enjoyed celebrating Diwali because I could play with fire and be macho. 

As time passed, I grew the fuck up. I grew the fuck up. I learned how much fireworks harm animals, ecosystems and the environment. 

So grow the fuck up and stop using fireworks in name of god knows what. Fireworks has nothing to do with you political ideology. 

Margaret Renkl reminds us that same but more politely than I do: 

For 15 straight years, our old dog Clark — a hound-shepherd-retriever mix who was born in the woods and loved the outdoors ever after — spent the Fourth of July in our walk-in shower. He seemed to believe a windowless shower in a windowless bathroom offered his best chance of surviving the shrieking terror that was raining down from the night sky outside.

Did he think the fireworks, with their window-rattling booms, were the work of some cosmic predator big enough to eat him whole? Did he think they were gunshots or claps of thunder spreading out from inexplicable lightning bolts tearing open the sky above our house?

There’s no way to know what he was thinking, but every single year that rangy, 75-pound, country-born yard dog spent the Fourth of July in our shower, trembling, drooling and whimpering in terror.

Clark was lucky. We have friends whose terrified dog spent one Fourth of July fruitlessly trying to outrun the explosions. The next day a good Samaritan found him lying on a hot sidewalk miles away, close to death. Other friends came home from watching the fireworks to discover that their dog had bolted in terror from their fenced backyard and been killed by a car.

And those were all companion animals, the ones whose terror is clear to us. We have no real way of knowing how many wild animals suffer because the patterns of their lives are disrupted with no warning every year on a night in early July. People shooting bottle rockets in the backyard might not see the sleeping songbirds, startled from their safe roosts, exploding into a darkness they did not evolve to navigate — crashing into buildings or depleting crucial energy reserves. People firing Roman candles into the sky above the ocean may have no idea that the explosions can cause seabirds to abandon their nests or frighten nesting shorebirds to death.

Then there’s the wildlife driven into roads — deer and foxes, opossums and skunks, coyotes and raccoons. Any nocturnal creature in a blind panic can find itself staring into oncoming headlights, unsure whether the greater danger lies in the road or in the sky or in the neighborhood yards surrounding them.

And all that’s on top of the dangers posed by fireworks debris, which can be toxic if ingested, or the risk of setting off a wildfire in parched summertime vegetation. Little wonder, then, that fireworks are banned in all national wildlife refuges, national forests and national parks.

[---]

“All flourishing is mutual,” writes Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, in her best-selling book, “Braiding Sweetgrass.” This is one of the most repeated lines in contemporary environmental literature, and for good reason. It reminds us that all creation, human and other than human, is interconnected. At a time when life on this planet is faltering in every possible way, Dr. Kimmerer gently points out that our own flourishing depends on the flourishing of planetary systems that we are barely beginning to understand.

Addressing climate change and biodiversity loss on a planet with eight billion human residents won’t be simple. How to grow affordable food without using petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides that poison pollinators, for example, is a challenge. How to build enough housing for human beings without also disrupting natural ecosystems is a challenge. Such things are doable, though they won’t be easy.

But there are easy things we can do at no real cost to ourselves. We can eat more vegetables and less animal protein. We can cultivate native plants. We can seek out products that aren’t packaged in plastic, spend less time in cars and airplanes, raise the thermostat in the summer and lower it in the winter. As Dr. Kimmerer points out in “The Serviceberry,” her forthcoming book, “We live in a time when every choice matters.”

In that context, surely, we can give up fireworks. Of all the little pleasures that give life meaning and joy, surely fireworks don’t come close to the top of the list, and it costs us nothing to give them up. This is one case in which doing the right thing requires no significant sacrifice, one case in which doing the right thing has an immediate, noticeable, undeniably positive effect on a suffering world.

The conflation of selfishness with patriotism is the thing I have the hardest time accepting about our political era. Maybe we have the right to eat a hamburger or drive the biggest truck on the market or fire off bottle rockets deep into the night on the Fourth of July, but it doesn’t make us good Americans to do such things. How can it possibly be American to look at the damage that fireworks can cause — to the atmosphere, to forests, to wildlife, to our own beloved pets, to ourselves — and shrug?

The truly American thing would be to join together to make every change we can reasonably make to alleviate the suffering of our fellow creatures, human and other than human alike. The truly American thing would be to plant a victory garden large enough to encompass the entire natural world.

 

The Moloch Trap of Environmental Problems

A Moloch Trap is, in simple terms, a zero-sum game. It explains a situation where participants compete for object or outcome X but make something else worse in the process. Everyone competes for X, but in doing so, everyone ends up worse off.

It explains the situations with externalities or the preference for short-term gains at the sacrifice of the long-term future.

The problem is that it’s incredibly hard for any “player” to break the trap. If they do, they will lose out in the short term (and they might still be exposed to the downsides in the long term). Everyone is stuck in a “game” or “race” that they don’t want to be in, but it’s impossible to stop.

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The Moloch Trap explains almost every one of the world’s environmental problems. I struggled to think of one that doesn’t fall into this camp.

Environmental problems are caused by a fight for scarce resources, activities that push externalities and negative impacts onto others, and the sacrifice of long-term sustainability for short-term gains.

People overfish because they know that other fishermen are doing the same. If they don’t maximise their catch now, they’ll be left with none. This is not optimal for anyone in the medium to long term because the fish stocks will be depleted.

We cut down forests because there are economic gains – from using that land for something else, such as farming – to be made in the short term. If we don’t cut it down, then someone else probably will.

We burn fossil fuels because it offers us huge immediate benefits (energy) but at the expense of a stable climate in the medium-term. It’s in no single country’s interest to stop doing so because they will miss out on the short-term energy gains and will still have to deal with climate change if other countries keep polluting.

We deplete groundwater resources to irrigate our farms despite knowing that it will soon run out. If we don’t do it, someone else will, so we might as well make some money from what’s left while it’s still available.

Each of these is a classic “tragedy of the commons” situation.

The key question is how we can break the Moloch Trap and solve them?

[---]

What’s key to breaking the Moloch Trap is turning zero-sum games into positive-sum ones. I think this is underrated in environmental discussions. I often see people pushing for solutions that are, inevitably, zero-sum. That won’t win widespread public support and definitely won’t allow it to be sustained for decades.

The good news is that I think we’re in a unique position today to generate more positive sum games than ever before. In the past, energy and agriculture were zero-sum games. There really was no way to increase agricultural productivity: yields were low and constant for thousands of years. There was really no way to make energy without burning stuff: either wood or fossil fuels. Technological innovation is what allows us to break out of these win-lose games. That’s the opportunity we have, and it’s up to us to use these innovations responsibly.

Technology won’t do it on its own: it relies on a social, political and economic ecosystem around it to guide it towards the outcomes we want. 

When focusing on environmental solutions, be on the lookout for win-wins. Switching from one win-lose to another is not going to get us there.

- More Here

The Tiny Ant and the Mighty Lion

Talk about complex systems and inter-connectedness of all living beings in this beautiful planet! 

Read this and train your organs to be humble and not hurt any living being.

This real-life fable begins with the iconic umbrella-shaped acacia tree, also known as the whistling thorn tree. Graceful and resilient, the acacia tree dominates the savannah landscape and often provides most of the tree cover for thousands of square miles. Hidden in the branches of this tree are great numbers of tiny acacia ants, which make their home there and act as protectors. With their painful stings and bites, the ants ward off large herbivores such as elephants and giraffes, and allow the trees to thrive.

But lately, the trees have come under the growing influence of a globe-trotting intruder: the big-headed ant. Named for its large heart-shaped head and thought to have originated on the island nation of Mauritius, this aggressive ant has quickly spread across the savannah over the past 20 years, outnumbering and, in some places, eradicating the acacia ant. 

Here’s where the lion comes in. As an ambush predator, the lion is heavily reliant on the cover provided by the acacia trees. The trees’ branches and foliage serve as a hiding place from which the lion can sneak up on its favored prey, the zebra. Without the acacia ant, the acacia trees are susceptible to hungry passersby. When elephants extract the nutrients in the bark and roots with their trunks, the acacia trees are stripped and often left broken. As more and more of these trees are consumed, the landscape has radically changed, becoming open and bare.

Conservationists, noticing the change in tree cover, have worried lions might struggle to capture their prey and feed themselves and begin to die. With nowhere to hide, how would they get their dinner?

Recently, an international team of biologists set out to answer this question. They collected data about ant invasions; tree cover; zebra, elephant, and giraffe populations; and the behavior of lions and their prey across the 300-square-kilometer Ol Pejeta Conservancy in northern Kenya. What they found surprised them, says Douglas Kamaru, a University of Wyoming Ph.D. student and the lead author of a new paper about their study. 

Kamaru and his colleagues expected lions to starve and their populations to shrink, but that’s not what happened. “The lion population was stable,” says Kamaru. In areas invaded by big-headed ants, the lions simply changed their diets, swapping out zebras for African buffalo. The buffalo aren’t as skittish as the zebras, so the lions are less reliant on stealth and surprise.

In 2020, zebra kill occurrence was nearly three times lower in areas invaded by big-headed ants. Zebras also accounted for less than half of total prey kills that year, down from about two-thirds in 2003, while buffalo accounted for 42 percent of all prey kills, up from zero. These changes were unrelated to zebra or buffalo densities, which remained unchanged from 2014 to 2020.

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The ant and the lion offer a dramatic example of the ripple effect—how a seemingly diminutive change in a web of relationships can fundamentally alter an entire ecosystem. The tiniest creature can upset the mightiest beast on the land.

What I've Been Reading

Complex human societies need elites – rulers, administrators, thought leaders – to function well. We don’t want to get rid of them; the trick is to constrain them to act for the benefit of all.

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Americans today grossly underestimate the fragility of the complex society in which we live. But an important lesson from history is that people living in pervious pre-crisis eras similarly didn't imagine that their societies could suddenly crumble around them.  

End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration by Peter Turchin

I have been following Turchin for many years now and his work "predicted" the path that led to the 2020 election madness. And he coined the term Cliodynamics.

The book is based on models built using CrisisDB (work in-progress - global history database) that includes one hundred cases from European, Chinese, Russian and American history (no Indian or other countries yet) 

The core findings behind "End Times" faced by past societies: 

1. Popular Immiseration - The proportion of GDP consumed by the government has not changed much in the last four decades and it has grown for elites. The main loser has been the common American. 

2. Elite Overproduction - What determines whether we have a problem of elite overproduction is the balance of the supply of youth with advanced degrees and the demand for them - the number of jobs that require their skills. By the 2000s, unfortunately, as is well known, the number of degree holders were greatly outnumbering the position for them. 

Surprisingly, Turchin's research doesn't count ideology as the primary factor. 

Well.. humans are convenient creatures and ideology evolves over time. Lot of people today avoid mRNA vaccines but it's a matter of time as they get older they will embrace mRNA treatment with relish for cancer treatment.  On the other hand, "green" and "eco-savvy" people gluttonize a poor cow or worse baby cow using "veal" as a euphemism. 

I admire Turchin's rigor of applying data to find patterns in history. 

Yes, Turchin's models are not even close to perfect but if the same rigor continues for a few more years or decades (and we happen to survive) then Cliodynamics has a potential to become more robust. 

• Pundits and politicians often invoke "lessons of history". The problem is that the historical record is rich and each pundit an easily find cases in it to support whichever side of a policy debate they favor. Clearly, inference from such "cherry-picked" examples is not the way to go. 

• A relatively small set of mechanisms can generate exceedingly complex dynamics. This is the essence of complexity science; complex dynamics do not have to have complex causes. 

• What are the features of conspiracy theories that distinguish them from scientific theories? One, the conspiratorial theory is often vague about the motives of the behind-the-scenes leaders or assigns them implausible motivations. Two, it assumes that they are extremely clever and knowledgeable. Three, it places power in the hands of one strong leader or a tiny cabal. And, finally, it assumes that illegal plans can be kept secret for indefinitely long periods of time. A scientific theory, like the class-domination one, is very different. 

• First, let's avoid blaming the rich. The economic elites are not evil - or, at least, the proportion of evil people among them is not terribly different from that of the rest of the population. They are motivated by self-interest, but Mother Teresas, if absent among the ruling class, are quite rate in general population as well. 

Words Of Wisdom On Cancer

Remember, this is from a cancer research scientist! 

If it took so many years for a well trained person like her to get an "insight" that cancer is part of a complex system then there is no hope for common folks to understand ever. 

What you eat, where you live, how many chemicals you use in everyday life, outsourcing the food you eat, little choices you make every second - all matters plus zillion other things.The good news is you can control all this while you cannot control your race, your parents and such. 

But yet people prefer to believe "they" have "cure" for cancer, "war" on cancer and other stupid theories. 

I paid in the most painful way with Max's life with the choices I made and the beliefs of other people. 

So next time someone close to you is diagnosed with cancer - don't walk or run for cancer,  don't dwell in support groups to find closure (whatever that means) instead unpack their lifestyle - I mean everything, donate your data and  urge someone close to do so too. 

Let's get to the insights: 

One problem is the high level of variation, or heterogeneity, in tumours: variation between people, between tumours within the same person and even between regions within the same tumour.

By variation, I mean this: if you separated out the cancer cells within a tumour, they would not all be identical. You would find subpopulations of cells with diverse molecular characteristics. Some subpopulations will be larger than others, but this can change in time as the cancer progresses, and as it is challenged by different types of treatments.

This variation is not just the result of differences in the genetics of cells within a tumour. There are also differences in epigenetics (reversible changes to DNA that can impact how the genetic information is read), differences in the environment surrounding the tumour (e.g., oxygen levels, acidity levels), and differences in the interactions between the cancerous cells and other types of cells: cells that provide structure, cells that make up blood vessels, immune cells and even microbes.

Add to that the genetic and environmental differences between people, and differences in the ways cancer developed in each individual.

What you end up with is a highly complex picture in which tumours can exploit a potentially infinite pool of resources in order to continue to grow, spread and evade destruction.

[---]

We can view a tumour as a complex system, in which many components interact with and influence each other, with the purpose of keeping the tumour alive and thriving. Any changes within this system can impact, either positively, or negatively, the tumour’s ability to persist and thrive.

Therapeutic interventions aim to destabilise this complex system, in order to shrink and destroy the tumour. But as we saw earlier, these interventions are relatively homogenous, focusing on a small number of molecular alterations, whereas the tumour can leverage a much more diverse repertoire of changes.