Derek Parfit - What Is The Impact Of Thousands Of Small Environmental Or Personal Abuses Over Time?

One particular example I’ve always liked (especially since as a kid I had similar thoughts) provides a vivid illustration of the psychology underlying the dismissal of global warming. It shows that the consequences of our decisions need not occur in the distant future for us to discount them. They can occur out of sight or after so many steps as to seem distant. The example (embroidered a bit here) appears in Derek Parfit’s book “Reasons and Persons,” where he discusses the case of a man strapped to a hospital bed, say by a psychopath, in some indeterminate place with electrodes attached to his heart. Rotation of a dial on the other side of the world minusculely and imperceptibly increases the current in the electrodes and the stress on the man’s heart.

Perhaps a free piece of candy, a pleasant buzz, and a snapshot with the dial are on offer from a mysterious donor as an incentive to anyone in the distant location who twists the dial. Assuming it takes 10,000 people, each rotating the dial once to electrocute the victim, what degree of guilt, if any, do we assign to each individual dial-twister? After all, none of the dial-twisters know the poor man in question nor have they ever been in his part of the world. They might well doubt there is such a man if the situation isn’t clearly communicated to them or if it is ridiculed by a few influential people. Whatever their excuses, however, they are likely to be at least vaguely aware of rumors about the situation. How then do we deposit all these tiny bits of personal guilt into some moral bank account to save the victim. Or do we just shrug and dismiss the significant probability of ordinary indifferent people killing the distant stranger?

The real question of course is, What is the impact of thousands of small environmental or personal abuses over time? In the context of this rather morbid tale of a psychopath, most environmentalists would probably opt to stop rotating the dial or at least to rotate it very infrequently. 

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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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Urban Evolution

The water flea Daphnia magna — a freshwater crustacean up to a few millimeters in size — is one species busy evolving in cities in response to heat, pollution and even local predators. These zooplankton can prevent algal blooms that overload ponds with toxic cyanobacteria, so this adaptation may have a big effect on freshwater ecosystems, says Kristien Brans, an evolutionary ecologist at KU Leuven in Belgium, who studies the water fleas.

One basic challenge in such urban investigations is to distinguish between two modes of response to altered environments: evolution (genetic alterations that appear across generations) and phenotypic plasticity (the flexibility to alter physical and/or behavioral characteristics in an organism’s lifetime).

For water fleas, it turns out that both are at play. Fleas raised in lab experiments at temperatures matching urban ponds are smaller, and mature and reproduce more quickly, than fleas reared at rural pond temperatures that tend to be several degrees cooler. (That’s phenotypic plasticity — no genetic changes have occurred.) But over time, urban water fleas living generation after generation in warmer, urban pond waters have genetically changed to have those same kinds of alterations. (That’s evolution.)

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GLUE took white clover’s cyanide production as a model to study three questions. Do instances of urbanization in different cities lead to similar local environments? Do those similar environments lead the clover to evolve along the same lines — display parallel evolution — in a trait of interest (in this case, cyanide production)? And if so, what environmental factors are driving the pattern?

In a new Science paper, the collaborators showed that urban environments do indeed end up quite similar to each other, with less vegetation, more impervious surfaces and higher summer temperatures than their outlying rural areas. (In fact, downtowns of cities such as Beijing and Boston are more similar to each other in such factors than they are to their rural areas, Johnson comments.) Analyzing more than 110,000 clover plants from 160 cities in 26 countries, the GLUE investigators also demonstrated a strong link between urbanization and clover cyanide production. And after sequencing more than 2,000 clover genomes and analyzing the urban-rural differences, the researchers showed that natural selection truly is at work.

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Unfortunately, the genetic biodiversity that can fuel adaptation often dwindles in urban areas. A genetic survey by Chloé Schmidt working in Garroway’s lab, for example, found this to be the case, along with lower population sizes, for North American mammals living in more disturbed environments. That’s a concern during a period when so many populations of animals and plants are seeing their natural habitats degraded or simply destroyed.

Scientists don’t take urban environments as precise models for the impacts of climate change. But they say such studies will provide important clues to how creatures may respond to dwindling access to water and food, and exposure to pollution, heat, drought and other dangers.

“We’re in the Anthropocene, and we don’t understand how we’re changing the environment on every level, from greenhouse gas emissions to changing the evolution of life around us,” Johnson says. “People realize this research is part of the solution.”

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Frank Lloyd Wright As A Mirror Of The American Condition

The fixation on Wright’s paradoxes obscures a deeper contradiction embedded in the culture that produced him. Namely, that the United States has always been ambivalent about the individual: we valorise self-reliance but distrust those who stand too far apart; we celebrate democratic ideals but are uneasy with idiosyncrasy; we admire originality while punishing the disorder it brings. Wright lived squarely inside that tension. He took seriously the idea that one could make a life and a world from first principles – an act of courage in the best light. Hubris in the worst.

Seen through that lens, Wright becomes less an outlier than a mirror. His contradictions, less personal failings than reflections of the American condition. Our yearning for freedom is matched by our fear of its consequences; our desire for order by our suspicion of conformity; our reverence for the natural world by our relentless reshaping of it. Wright’s work endures because it speaks to these tensions with a force that resists resolution. If we judge him only by his wounds or only by his wonders, we see only half the man – and half the nation that shaped him. The truth, harder and more interesting, is that both are inseparable. His greatness is entangled with his flaws, his vision inseparable from his unruly humanity. To reduce him to saint or sinner is to miss what is most alive in his work: a belief that the individual, in all their contradictions, is still worth building for.

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What Was The Very First Plant In The World?

The story of plants begins in the water. The earliest plantlike organisms were simple, tiny green life-forms such as algae. You can still see algae today as seaweed along beaches or as green slime on rocks in ponds.

Algae have lived in Earth’s oceans and lakes for over 1 billion years. They can make their own food, using sunlight, water and carbon dioxide to create sugars. This process is called photosynthesis; it releases oxygen – the gas we need to breathe – as a byproduct.

At first, Earth’s atmosphere had very little oxygen. Over millions of years, photosynthesizing organisms like algae and some bacteria slowly released oxygen into the air. This change, sometimes called the Great Oxygenation Event, made it possible for larger and more complex life to evolve. Without oxygen-producing organisms, animals, including humans, could never have existed.

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Moving onto land was not easy. Water plants are supported by water and can absorb nutrients easily, but land plants faced new challenges. How would they avoid drying out? How could they stand upright without floating? How would they get water and nutrients from dry ground?

To survive, early plants evolved important new features. One key adaptation was a waxy coating, called a cuticle, which helped keep water inside the plant. Plants also developed stronger cell walls that allowed them to stand upright against gravity. Simple rootlike structures, called rhizoids, helped anchor plants to the ground and absorb water and minerals from the soil.

The earliest land plants were very small and simple. They looked similar to modern mosses, liverworts and hornworts, which still grow today in damp places like forest floors and stream edges. These plants did not have true roots or stems, and they stayed close to the ground. Fossils of early land plants, such as Cooksonia, date back to about 430 million years ago and show small branching stems only an inch or two tall.

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No-Technological-Solution Problem

Bingo! What an insight!

We sapiens fucked things up, are still fucking things up, and promise, to continue fucking things up in future. 

Changing their mind and behavior is not in the equation but my species is planning to  innovate the fuck of technologies to clean up the mess they created while they continue to fuck things up. 

Hmm, god bless my species. 

Wonderful, wonderful interview with Dan Brooks about his new book A Darwinian Survival Guide: Hope for the Twenty-First Century:

Well, the primary thing that we have to understand or internalize is that what we’re dealing with is what is called a no-technological-solution problem. In other words, technology is not going to save us, real or imaginary. We have to change our behavior. If we change our behavior, we have sufficient technology to save ourselves. If we don’t change our behavior, we are unlikely to come up with a magical technological fix to compensate for our bad behavior. 

This is why Sal and I have adopted a position that we should not be talking about sustainability, but about survival, in terms of humanity’s future. Sustainability has come to mean, what kind of technological fixes can we come up with that will allow us to continue to do business as usual without paying a penalty for it? As evolutionary biologists, we understand that all actions carry biological consequences. We know that relying on indefinite growth or uncontrolled growth is unsustainable in the long term, but that’s the behavior we’re seeing now.

Stepping back a bit. Darwin told us in 1859 that what we had been doing for the last 10,000 or so years was not going to work. But people didn’t want to hear that message. So along came a sociologist who said, “It’s OK; I can fix Darwinism.” This guy’s name was Herbert Spencer, and he said, “I can fix Darwinism. We’ll just call it natural selection, but instead of survival of what’s-good-enough-to-survive-in-the-future, we’re going to call it survival of the fittest, and it’s whatever is best now.” Herbert Spencer was instrumental in convincing most biologists to change their perspective from “evolution is long-term survival” to “evolution is short-term adaptation.” And that was consistent with the notion of maximizing short term profits economically, maximizing your chances of being reelected, maximizing the collection plate every Sunday in the churches, and people were quite happy with this.

Well, fast-forward and how’s that working out? Not very well. And it turns out that Spencer’s ideas were not, in fact, consistent with Darwin’s ideas. They represented a major change in perspective. What Sal and I suggest is that if we go back to Darwin’s original message, we not only find an explanation for why we’re in this problem, but, interestingly enough, it also gives us some insights into the kinds of behavioral changes we might want to undertake if we want to survive.

To clarify, when we talk about survival in the book, we talk about two different things. One is the survival of our species, Homo sapiens. We actually don’t think that’s in jeopardy. Now, Homo sapiens of some form or another is going to survive no matter what we do, short of blowing up the planet with nuclear weapons. What’s really important is trying to decide what we would need to do if we wanted what we call “technological humanity,” or better said “technologically-dependent humanity,” to survive.

Put it this way: If you take a couple of typical undergraduates from the University of Toronto and you drop them in the middle of Beijing with their cell phones, they’re going to be fine. You take them up to Algonquin Park, a few hours’ drive north of Toronto, and you drop them in the park, and they’re dead within 48 hours. So we have to understand that we’ve produced a lot of human beings on this planet who can’t survive outside of this technologically dependent existence. 

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That’s actually a really good analogy to use, because of course, as you probably know, the temperatures around the Norwegian Seed Bank are so high now that the Seed Bank itself is in some jeopardy of survival. The place where it is was chosen because it was thought that it was going to be cold forever, and everything would be fine, and you could store all these seeds now. And now all the area around it is melting, and this whole thing is in jeopardy. This is a really good example of letting engineers and physicists be in charge of the construction process, rather than biologists. Biologists understand that conditions never stay the same; engineers engineer things for, this is the way things are, this is the way things are always going to be. Physicists are always looking for some sort of general law of in perpetuity, and biologists are never under any illusions about this. Biologists understand that things are always going to change.

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One of the things that’s really important for us to focus on is to understand why it is that human beings are so susceptible to adopting behaviors that seem like a good idea, and are not. Sal and I say, here are some things that seem to be common to human misbehavior, with respect to their survival. One is that human beings really like drama. Human beings really like magic. And human beings don’t like to hear bad news, especially if it means that they’re personally responsible for the bad news. And that’s a very gross, very superficial thing, but beneath that is a whole bunch of really sophisticated stuff about how human brains work, and the relationship between human beings’ ability to conceptualize the future, but living and experiencing the present.

There seems to be a mismatch within our brain — this is an ongoing sort of sloppy evolutionary phenomenon. So that’s why we spend so much time in the first half of the book talking about human evolution, and that’s why we adopt a nonjudgmental approach to understanding how human beings have gotten themselves into this situation.

 

Global Water Bankruptcy

Published on the occasion of UNU-INWEH’s 30th anniversary, and ahead of the 2026 UN Water Conference, this flagship report, Global Water Bankruptcy: Living Beyond Our Hydrological Means in the Post-Crisis Era, argues that the world has entered a new stage: more and more river basins and aquifers are losing the ability to return to their historical “normal.” Droughts, shortages, and pollution episodes that once looked like temporary shocks are becoming chronic in many places, signalling a post-crisis condition the report calls water bankruptcy.

The report makes the case for a fundamental shift in the global water agenda—from repeatedly reacting to emergencies to “bankruptcy management.” That means confronting overshoot with transparent water accounting, enforceable limits, and protection of the water-related natural capital that produces and stores water—aquifers, wetlands, soils, rivers, and glaciers—while ensuring transitions are explicitly equity-oriented and protect vulnerable communities and livelihoods.

Crucially, the report frames water not only as a growing source of risk, but also as a strategic opportunity in a fragmented world. It argues that serious investment in water can unlock progress across climate, biodiversity, land, food, and health, and serve as a practical platform for cooperation within and between societies. Acting early, before stress hardens into irreversible loss, can reduce shared risks, strengthen resilience, and rebuild trust through tangible results.

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Via 

What water bankruptcy looks like in real life

In financial bankruptcy, the first warning signs often feel manageable: late payments, borrowed money and selling things you hoped to keep. Then the spiral tightens.

Water bankruptcy has similar stages.

• At first, we pull a little more groundwater during dry years. We use bigger pumps and deeper wells. We transfer water from one basin to another. We drain wetlands and straighten rivers to make space for farms and cities.
• Then the hidden costs show up. Lakes shrink year after year. Wells need to go deeper. Rivers that once flowed year-round turn seasonal. Salty water creeps into aquifers near the coast. The ground itself starts to sink.
• That last one, subsidence, often surprises people. But it’s a signature of water bankruptcy. When groundwater is overpumped, the underground structure, which holds water almost like a sponge, can collapse. In Mexico City, land is sinking by about 10 inches (25 centimeters) per year. Once the pores become compacted, they can’t simply be refilled.

 

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.

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Guyana - The Only Country To Achieve Self Sufficient Food Supply!

The revelation comes from groundbreaking research published in the journal Nature Food, which analysed 186 countries to determine how well each could theoretically feed its population from domestic production alone.

The study’s results were stark: Guyana alone achieved self-sufficiency across all seven essential food groups – fruit; vegetables; dairy; fish; meat; legumes, nuts and seeds; and starchy staples.

Walk through any market in Georgetown, the nation’s capital, and the picture is clear: stalls stacked with local rice, root vegetables like cassava, fresh fish, fruit and other produce, much of it sourced from within Guyana’s borders.

Guyana hasn’t closed itself off from the world; it still trades like any modern nation. What sets it apart is that the country uniquely possesses the capacity to meet all its citizens’ nutritional needs from its own soil and waters.

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And what makes this accomplishment even more remarkable is Guyana’s approach to conservation. It has achieved food self-sufficiency not by destroying its natural heritage but by maximising its limited agricultural land. Whereas deforestation ravages much of South America as countries clear land for farming and cattle ranching, Guyana has preserved more than 85 per cent of its original forest.

“The climate in the coastal region of Guyana makes it highly suitable for crop production,” explains Nicola Cannon, professor of agriculture at the Royal Agricultural University in Gloucestershire, UK.

The numbers bear this out: the country sits between one to nine degrees north of the equator, blessed with year-round warmth, plentiful rainfall, high humidity, and, crucially, fertile clay soils deposited by the Amazon River system over millennia.

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While much of the world’s farmland is dominated by monoculture – single crops grown in vast, uniform fields – Guyanese farmers take a markedly different approach to cultivation. They intercrop – growing two or more crops together in the same field, with each occupying its own niche and drawing on resources at different times.

It’s a practice that most industrial agriculture abandoned centuries ago, but in Guyana it remains central to farming success. Coconut farmers plant pineapples or tomatoes between young trees as they mature. Corn and soya beans use the same soil: the beans ‘fix’ nitrogen naturally, while the corn draws on nutrients at a different point in the season.

When done right, the benefits can be substantial. Intercropping requires careful planning – pairing crops that naturally complement each other rather than compete – but when farmers get the balance correct, it can improve soil structure, enhance fertility, and help control pests without major chemical intervention. It also spreads risk across the growing season: if one crop struggles due to weather, pests, or market fluctuations, another can still thrive.

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Guyana seems to have avoided this trap through sophisticated practices now known as ‘regenerative agriculture’. Livestock is integrated into cropping systems, while erosion is kept at bay by ensuring living roots remain in the ground year-round. These methods actively rebuild soil health as well as prevent degradation.

“Living roots not only physically hold the soil together, they also secrete [carbohydrates] which encourage microorganisms,” explains Cannon. “This helps keep soils alive and aids residue decomposition.”

The result is a virtuous cycle where healthy soils support diverse crops, which in turn feed the soil biology that maintains fertility. It’s a system that could, theoretically, sustain itself indefinitely.

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Tracking Dogs Are Helping Wildlife & People Northern Tanzania

After a few minutes, one of the handlers leads a striking maroon-red Alsatian named Rosdaz, its nose to the ground, to the area between the tents and from there, to an open-air kitchen. Here, the handler directs five camp staff members and about 10 others, including me, to stand still as he presents the dog with one of the pieces of gauze. After a few sniffs, Rosdaz matches the scent to one of the staff members; the dog stands up on his hind legs and places his front paws firmly against the man’s waist. The man, dressed in a crisp, collared shirt, stands motionless and stares straight ahead, avoiding the gaze of his accuser.

Because Rosdaz is still young, the handlers decide they want a second opinion. Rocky is a more classic looking Alsatian with a sloping back and dusty grey coat. At 7 years old, he’s more experienced and bolder than Rosdaz. As one of Tanzania’s two original tracker dogs, Rocky has already made a name for himself. He and another dog, now based in the Serengeti National Park, once tracked a poachers’ trail for some 7 hours. Ultimately, the dogs led rangers to a hidden stash of ivory weighing 60 kilograms (130 pounds), representing tusks from at least a half dozen elephants (Loxodonta africana).

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This type of investigation, while not the team’s primary role, is an important demonstration of the dogs’ keen ability to track down individuals—from poachers to petty thieves—who have left even the slightest clue at the scene of their crime. The methods the dog team used here are the same as those used in the pursuit of some of Tanzania’s most lethal poachers. And in that high-stakes fight, there’s little time to lose.

Tanzania, which recently boasted the continent’s second largest elephant population after Botswana, lost more than 60 percent of its elephants to poaching between 2009 and 2014. Seeking effective low-tech solutions to the problem, rangers began considering using dogs to track down poachers in the bush.

The use of highly trained dogs like Rocky and Rosdaz was pioneered by the Tanzanian conservation organization Honeyguide. (The organization is named after a group of birds in the Indicatoridae family that are known to lead people to sources of wild honey.) Honeyguide first established a conservation tracker dog unit in 2011 in West Kilimanjaro and was one of only a few such programs in Africa.

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With the dogs’ ability to follow a scent—sometimes days-old—from crime scenes over many miles to poachers’ camps or villages, and to match scents collected at a scene to individual suspects, the dogs have proven their value to the rangers. According to Olekashe, this can be measured in the relative prices poachers charge to work in various areas. The higher the risk, the more compensation is required. “From intelligence, we know that a shooter’s charge can now be as much as 5 million Tanzanian Shillings ($2,200) in areas where we operate. Elsewhere, it may be 500,000 ($223) or as little as 200,000 ($89).”

Poaching incidents in Manyara Ranch have fallen as well. In 2014 and 2015, poachers killed 17 elephants inside the ranch. This number fell to zero in 2016, although three elephants were speared on the outskirts of the ranch in retaliation for feeding on farmers’ crops. Thus far, 2017 has been quiet, with no elephants poached or speared. “These days, not only does an elephant die naturally, its tusks are left intact,” Olekashe says. “This would have never happened before.”

In Tanzania’s Manyara Ranch, elephants were once the main targets of poaching.

Thanks to tracker dogs like Rocky and Rosdaz, elephant poaching at Manyara Ranch has since been greatly reduced.

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“I was fond of dogs before becoming a handler,” Isaack says. “Training improved my commitment to them. People were more accustomed to using dogs for hunting. Now we’re using dogs to stop hunting.”

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“In conservation, we have limited resources,” says Damian Bell, Honeyguide’s executive director. “While dogs are expensive to maintain, they have proven effective at helping government and community ranger teams curb poaching and crime.” Bell estimates that it costs at least $30 thousand per year to maintain an established dog unit. The rationale is that if dogs are helping to keep the region’s protected areas, campsites, and communities safe, they are not only fostering positive attitudes toward conservation, but also helping secure a vital sector of Tanzania’s economy. Tourism is a mainstay in the country where the northern circuit—together with the islands of Zanzibar—generate some 90 percent of the country’s $1.3 billion in tourism earnings annually. These funds help subsidize Tanzania’s lesser-known and more remote national parks.

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India’s Northeast Reveals A Path Beyond Factory Farming

India is a good example because it has states with human populations as big as some countries, and many of these have transitioned away from small-scale, extensive chicken production. While about 35% of chickens in India are still raised in small backyard flocks, most are now kept in indoor commercial systems. Large-scale free-range broiler farms and cage-free egg farms are very rare.

For their analysis, the authors looked at factors linked to intensive chicken farming, including the state’s wealth, human population density, level of urbanization, and local feed production like maize and soy. To spot the outliers, they checked for states whose actual intensification levels were far below predictions. Then they explored whether state policies could help explain this discrepancy.

The authors found that several states in Northeast India, especially Manipur, Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, and Sikkim, have much lower levels of chicken intensification than expected, given their income levels. For example, Sikkim has the second-highest income per person in India but less than 1% of its chickens are raised on commercial farms. In these states, chicken production remains reliant on smallholders, unlike most of India where commercial farming dominates.

One possible reason for these outliers is geography, as the mountainous, forested terrain of the Northeast makes large-scale farming difficult. Another reason could be the region’s lower human population densities, meaning that the market might not be large enough to encourage commercialization.

However, in the authors’ view, the most compelling reason is strong policy choices. Sikkim became the world’s first 100% organic state, banning hormones, growth regulators, feed additives, and antibiotics. Similar organic farming regulations exist in Mizoram, Arunachal Pradesh, and Meghalaya, with support from an organic agriculture program launched by the national government. These states also promote self-sufficiency in egg and chicken meat production through organic farming, and Sikkim has even invested in high-yield indigenous chicken breeds to improve productivity while keeping backyard systems.

The role of these organic policies is highlighted when considering Uttarakhand, a state with similar geography and population density to the Northeastern states but with high levels of chicken intensification. This suggests that the difference is less about physical conditions and more about policies shaping farming practices.

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How Iran Got To The Point Of Water Bankruptcy

I think we will hear more and more in every geography these two words "Water" & "Bankruptcy" in pairs. 

God bless my moronic species; it's a miracle how we got here. 

During Thanksgiving week,  there was a question about what are you thankful for. I said water and people were like ...  water? 

So even after reading about the Iranian situation nothing is going to change: 

Fall marks the start of Iran’s rainy season, but large parts of the country have barely seen a drop as the nation faces one of its worst droughts in decades. Several key reservoirs are nearly dry, and Tehran, the nation’s capital, is facing an impending “Day Zero” – when the city runs out of water.

The situation is so dire, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian has revived a long-debated plan to move the capital from this metro area of 15 million people.

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Iran’s escalating water and environmental problems are the predictable outcome of decades of treating the region’s finite water resources as if they were limitless.

Iran has relied heavily on water-intensive irrigation to grow food in dry landscapes and subsidized water and energy use, resulting in overpumping from aquifers and falling groundwater supplies. The concentration of economic activity and employment in major urban centers, particularly Tehran, has also catalyzed massive migration, further straining already overstretched water resources.

Those and other forces have driven Iran toward “water bankruptcy” – the point where water demand permanently exceeds the supply and nature can’t keep up.

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The country needs to start to decouple its economy from water consumption by investing in sectors that generate value and employment opportunities with minimal water use.

What I've Been Reading

London is Tacoma before Tacoma is even a gleam in a Guggenheim’s eye. 

We pay attention to the wrong things. We make a mystery of Jack the Ripper. 

It’s not a mystery. It’s history.

Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers by Caroline Fraser. 

Did anyone thought about asking this simple question of why there are less serial killers these days? Why?

Jessica Wolpaw Reyes was considering ideas for her PhD while worrying about lead paint since she was pregnant. She happened to listen to Steven D. Levitt's (of Freaknomics) talk. 

She narrowed down on the topic of "early childhood exposure and crime rate" in her dissertation (which was published in 2007). Her question became the seed for Fraser's brilliant book. 

This is yet another example of why it so important to meditate on why question to get at-least some of the causality behind a symptom. 

The most important question for us to ask now is - what is the x in 2025 compared to x = lead in 1950 to 1990 (almost 40 years time span)?

My answer is - consuming processed food, eating dead bodies from factory farming with horrible conditions and antibiotics, over eating sans fasting, plastic, cable news, talk radio, social media, cell phone, ecology collapse and living in concrete urban and sub-urban jungles, daily life sans biophilia and so on. 

Most reading this including myself will not be alive in 40 years if and when such a study comes out. 

One can wait for the next 4 decades or embrace precautionary principle now and avoid those potential mental and physical effects. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. 

Here's good excerpt from the book: 

According to Patterson, the average American during of age of leaded gasoline is so filthy when it comes to lead contamination that he's comparable to Pig Pen in the Peanuts comic strip. "Thats what people look like with respect to lead," he says. "Everyone. The lead from your hair, when you walk into a superclean laboratory like mine, will contaminate the whole damn laboratory. Just from your hair."

Not only that but Patterson calculates that the blood lead level of pre-industrial  humans would have have been 0.016 micrograms per deciliter, far lower than that of anyone living in the industrial age, American, he concludes, are suffering from "enough partial brain dysfunction, that their lives are being adversely affected by loss of mental acuity and irrationality. He devotes himself to campaigning against lead gasoline and to proving that everything Robert Kehoe ever said or upblished about "normal levels" of lead in blood is wrong.

The issue is currently its just not American's but the whole goddamn world is stuck in processed food, eating dead bodies from factory farming with horrible conditions and antibiotics, over eating sans fasting, plastic, cable news, talk radio, social media, cell phone, ecology collapse and living in concrete urban and sub-urban jungles, daily life sans biophilia and so on. 

Before even reading this book just last month I wrote: 

People who eat meat from factory farms pretending that nothing is going to happen to them is clearly a form of infallibilism.

I am not talking about the tragedy of commons in terms of moral and ecological consequences but their diet makes them live a parochial life, what thoughts they can think, how to live a good life, how to make better decisions for themselves and their families. 

In other words their diet makes their thinking and life stuck in a small rut of quagmire from which they cannot escape to realize the beauty of life right in front of their noses. Perhaps there are  thoughts we cannot think - in the spectrum of bandwidth of thoughts humans can think probably becomes even much smaller with their dietary choices which causes immense suffering. 

A much better payback happening here and now than some subjective future heaven and hell.

Take a moment and thank those men and women who fought so hard for decades to expose the effects of lead.  I bet "God" will appreciate that gulping dead bodies of Turkey.

Take a moment to identify the men and women are currently fighting to expose the cognitive and physical on human beings who are stuck in consuming processed food, eating dead bodies from factory farming with horrible conditions and antibiotics, over eating sans fasting, plastic, cable news, talk radio, social media, cell phone, ecology collapse and living in concrete urban and sub-urban jungles, daily life sans biophilia.

What I've Been Reading

I cannot remember the last time I laughed out so loud while reading a book :-) 

This is a master piece with around 10 minutes of reading time. 

The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity by Carlo M. Cipolla.

• Law 1: Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation. 

• Law 2: The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person. 

• Law 3: A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses. 

• Law 4: Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake. 

• Law 5: A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person. A stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit.

Jonathan Safran Foer on Eating Animals

Ever since Jonathan Safran Foer's book Eating Animals came out, while Max was alive, I have been posting Foer's talk every year during Thanksgiving. 

So much irony in this day... billions get slaughtered after their short and miserable life full of pain and suffering.

Did I mention I love Robert Trivers and his "self-deception" hypothesis? 

This day is one of those days where human self-deception reaches a pinnacle. 

I am sorry for my fellow family who lost their lives today. 

10 Misconceptions About Evolution

• Evolution is “only a theory”  - Nope. 

• “Survival of the fittest” means that evolution favors those who are “strongest”  - “Evolutionary fitness” refers to reproductive success; more precisely, it’s a measure of the success of genes in getting themselves projected into the future and is achieved in many ways—including the ability to obtain food, to avoid becoming food for someone else, to overcome diseases, to adjust to local weather and climate, attract mates, and so forth. In a pioneering research report, male European red deer who were smaller and who bore less impressively developed antlers were often more “fit” than the hulking males, because these “sneaky fuckers” (don’t blame me: This descriptive phrase is part of the technical literature) copulated with the females while the more massive bulls were busy fighting antlero-a-antlero with other more physically developed specimens.  

• Evolution explains the origin of life (or it’s supposed to) - Nope. That is primarily a job for biophysics, biochemistry, and geology. 

• Evolution acts for the good of the species - It is estimated that something like 99 percent of species that have existed are now extinct, so if evolution is working for the good of species, it has done a terrible job! What really argues against “good of the species,” however, is the actual way natural selection operates. Although it is possible that species sometimes compete, and, as a result, better adapted ones replace their poorly adapted alternatives, evolutionary competition takes place almost entirely within species, not between them. 

• Evolutionary theory says that living things are the result of chance - No, it doesn’t. There’s a half-truth hidden here; actually, less than half. Natural selection’s power comes from differential reproduction, the logical, unavoidable process whereby some genetic variants are more successful—more fit—than others. As such, its raw material comes from genetic diversity, which is produced by mutations and, in the case of sexually reproducing species, the reshuffling of genes via meiosis and sexual recombination. These processes are essentially random. But that’s just the source of the building blocks employed by natural selection. Natural selection definitely isn’t random—it does the heavy lifting and fitting together, by picking and choosing among various options, with some genes being projected into the future more than their alternatives—i.e., our old friend differential reproduction once again. Then the process happens over and over, repeatedly retaining those that are more fit and abandoning those that are less so. 

• Because we rely more and more on brain power and less and less on our muscles, human beings in the future will have big heads and small bodies - It is similarly easy to get hung up on the Lamarckian assumption that insects, crustaceans, fish, and amphibians that inhabit pitch dark caves are often blind because they stopped using their eyes, which therefore disappeared. Not so. These evolutionary changes, which are entirely compatible with Darwinian natural selection, occur because eyes are useless in the dark—hence, they lose the selective advantage that they convey in lighted environments—and, moreover, they take energy to produce while also being vulnerable to injury and infection. So, go ahead and exercise, use your brains, and hang out in dark places if you wish … but your offspring won’t have larger biceps, bigger heads, or smaller eyes as a result. 

• Gaps in the fossil record argue against evolution - Of course there are gaps in the fossil record! It’s remarkable that we have any such records at all, given how unlikely it is that any given dead critter will be fossilized and preserved, to which we must add an additional low probability that these remains will be discovered and recognized as such, perhaps hundreds of millions of years later. As for “missing links,” picture a line between two taxonomic groups, with as yet unidentified species connecting them; now, identify something between (linking) them: Now you have two new missing links! So, any time we find intermediate forms, there will necessarily be “missing links,” because every time a linking specimen is found (such as the discovery of Australopithecines linking nonhuman primates and Homo sapiens), new missing links are produced. In short, the more fossils, the more “missing links.” 

• Human beings aren’t evolving any more - We are. It’s just that evolution is typically a very slow process, limited by selective pressures (differences in the reproductive success of different traits and the genes that underlie them), along with generation times. It is possible that human beings in the future will have evolved the ability to function and reproduce readily with microplastics and “forever chemicals” in their blood, not to mention Strontium-90 in their bones and DDT in their fat, or maybe enhanced ability to manipulate computer screens, if such individuals have more kids. Each person’s genotype is fixed, so as individuals, we don’t evolve biologically. But Homo sapiens does, and will continue to do so, unless all people and their genes reproduce identically. 

• Because of evolution, living things are always getting “better” - Not necessarily. Early in the Earth’s history, a few billion years ago, life was very simple. Since then, it has evolved increasing complexity and enhanced ability to flourish in a variety of environments. In that sense, living things have gotten “better.” But any notion of improvement is subject to human-centered bias.  

• Evolutionary biology isn’t a science because it’s a historical phenomenon and can’t be tested - Many sciences, notably astronomy and geology, engage uniquely with historical phenomena (we can’t experimentally manipulate stars or continents), and yet they generate impressive empirical testing, often based on detailed observational regimes along with falsifiable predictions. And there is no question of their status as bona fide sciences. Evolutionary biology is no different.  

- More Here

Can the “Flow State” Save Us From Distraction?

Reading this beautiful piece reminded me of something I never consciously thought about. 

I always took for granted that the "flow" state is just for my deep work but yet, there are so many little things I do which brings me to the flow state.

Cleaning my house, cooking, walking, working out, gardening, writing, and reading are some of those activities.

And looking at Max’s pictures. 

Csikszentmihalyi moved to the United States — and dedicated his life to the study of positive psychology, which might be described as the scientific exploration of what makes life worth living. The Hungarian American’s legendary work orbited questions of happiness, purpose and creativity. What are the conditions that help people thrive? What happens when our attention is fully aligned with our actions? What sort of life unfolds when effort becomes its own reward?

If Csikszentmihalyi’s work offers an official definition of flow, it is this: “A state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.”

It’s the sort of line you start highlighting before you’ve finished reading it. I remember where I was when I read it: in a coffee shop in the East Village, sitting amongst glowing laptops and somniferous surf rock, sipping a beer before grabbing dinner with a friend.

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As freewheeling as flow feels, as mythical as it sometimes seems, the state does adhere to a qualifiable superstructure. Csikszentmihalyi spent decades studying people who regularly entered flow — from artists to surgeons and climbers to chess masters — and eventually identified nine “component states”: challenge-skills balance, action-awareness meaning, clear goals, unambiguous feedback, concentration on the task at hand, paradox of control, loss of self-consciousness, transformation of time, and autotelic experience.

That’s…a lot of words. What do they all mean?

Here’s a breakdown: In order to achieve flow, the performer must be well-matched to the activity at hand — not too expert, not too green. They should be challenged, not bored. Activated and engaged. The performer knows exactly what they’re trying to accomplish, including the many mini-steps along the way, and they have a clear sense of how they’re doing. But that’s about all they’re aware of. Time either slows to a crawl or flies by. Focus narrows to a pinpoint, shutting out would-be distractions. The performer forgets their ego (they neither consider nor care what they look like during flow), and abandons their needs (they don’t reach for snacks, or check the clock or wonder if they need a bathroom break). They simply float forward.

Once you’re in flow, it can feel bulletproof. As mental states go, it seems like a cheat code: temporary immunity to time, ego or distraction?! But reaching hyper-focus requires some entry-level focus. Unlocking flow is notoriously difficult; it demands a blend of creativity and curiosity, patience and practice. And the edge of flow is a tightrope. A phone notification, a self-conscious thought, one tiny shift in rhythm — they can all break your stride before you fully drop in.

[---]

In other words: flow was a commodity, which could run dry without discipline. He chose to cherish it, to never take it for granted: “As flow became a primary activity in my life, I was eventually able to turn it into a method. No hard conjuring necessary. It’s almost on speed-dial at this point.”

Descriptions vary, but this is a common refrain amongst the artists and athletes who regularly enter flow. It’s hard to say they’re “finding flow” or “unlocking” it — either image suggests someone reaching out in the dark, fumbling with their keys. When you hone your attentional faculty day after day, year after year, flow is no yeti. It’s your next-door neighbor. Ying said as much: “I think that I expect to get to flow now. It’s not a rare or mysterious thing. For me, it’s the result of good preparation and willful focus.”

[---]

In order to find true flow at work, though, the work has to matter to you. It has to feel meaningful, rooted in growth. You have to believe in it. And ideally, you’re already good at it — or at the very least, eager to get better. Whatever the task, there should be a clear sense of progression, and a sense that you’re fully present while doing it.

Tyranny Of Experts!

But the ethnographic record makes it amply evident that the large-scale adoption of shrimp farming has caused an ecological and social disaster in the Bengal delta, blighting once-fertile land and further impoverishing the poor and landless. This is largely because the species that was chosen for farming in Bengal is a saltwater variety preferred by Western consumers: tiger shrimp (Penaeus monodon, or ‘bagda chingri’); Bengalis generally prefer a variety of freshwater prawn called Macrobrachium rosenbergii, or ‘golda chingri’.

Saltwater ponds for tiger shrimp aquaculture are often dug on agricultural land that is otherwise used to grow rice, fruit and vegetables. Over time, water from these ponds seeps into nearby fields and aquifers, salinising the soil until it can no longer support rice or any other crop. Then fruit trees and orchards begin to wither, and even the grass disappears, making it difficult to keep livestock. Soon, once-fertile stretches of land dotted with trees, market gardens and rice fields do indeed become, to use Paprocki’s words, ‘threatening dystopias’.

Dewan quotes a woman who went back, after an absence of some years, to a village where shrimp farming had been introduced: “I returned to a lona desh [saline land] without vegetables,” she said. “The salt is even in the air, eroding the walls of the houses so they crumble. Everything is lona [saline]. Everything dies. There are no fruit trees; the few date and coconut trees here do not bear fruit. Goats and chickens are too expensive to buy, and they often die due to the saline water. We need to buy all [our] cooking fuel, there are no trees or cow dung for us to use. There is no grass for livestock, the ponds are too saline for bathing, clothes washed in saltwater do not get clean and ruin quicker. We need to buy everything and because of this we cannot afford to buy fruit, eggs, or meat… The canals are gone; we used to bathe in canals that are now no more… we must bathe in the saline river. Our eyes sting, our skin itches and becomes dark. Our ponds are now saline. We used to drink pond water filtered with fitkeri [alum stone], now we must drink tube well water that we collect from far away. We suffer now, but the rich do not care.”

The social consequences of shrimp farming are no less ruinous than its environmental impacts, because it requires only a fraction of the labour needed to cultivate rice. So when rice fields are converted into saltwater ponds, the poor and landless lose their main source of income, and are left with no recourse but to migrate to urban shanty-towns to eke out a precarious living. This outcome is actually welcomed by some development professionals, because they take a dim view of subsistence farming in general, and see proletarianisation as a step up on the ladder of ‘progress’. Similarly, experts who advocate managed retreat as the most practical response to sea-level rise also regard migration away from the coast in a generally favourable light.

Irony of ironies: people who are forced out of their villages because of shrimp farming are often classified as ‘climate migrants’ by aid agencies and bureaucrats, despite the fact that their displacement is the result not of global warming itself, but rather of climate solutions advocated by credentialed experts. In effect, this is a process, as Paprocki notes, of “anticipatory ruination”, intended to ward off the possible harms of the future by causing actual harm in the present day.

[---]

The shared assumption in all of this seems to be that the great majority of people eliminated by the apocalypse will be the underclasses of the poorer nations. But what is the likelihood that this will actually be the case? While there can be no doubt that vulnerable people in the Global South will indeed suffer greatly on an environmentally disrupted planet, the ethnographic record suggests that the future may have some surprises in store for complacent global elites. Bengali farmers, for instance, no matter how poor, are by no means willing to go quietly into the night. On the contrary, they are clearly determined to confront the future on their own terms, privileging the values that are most important to them. In this effort, it is possible that the skills inculcated by subsistence farming will be an important source of resilience: that is, after all, precisely the thinking behind the ‘prepper’ and survivalist movements in the West. Indeed, it seems to me that the people who will be most at risk if a planetary catastrophe were to occur are those who depend on complex industrial systems for their day-to-day survival. Those who know how to live off the land may well stand a better chance of getting by when conditions deteriorate.

There is perhaps one other factor that could work to the advantage of ordinary people in the Global South: the fact that they do not share the pessimism about the future that is increasingly prevalent in the West. Indeed, doomsaying has now become so widespread in Europe and America that it is hard to know whether it represents a rational appraisal of the relevant data, or is merely an offshoot of a more general sense of political dysfunction and historic decline.

In my experience, it is exceedingly rare to encounter apprehensions of impending doom in India, or Kenya, or Indonesia. The absence of this generalised anxiety is probably the reason why apocalyptic fiction hasn't really caught on in India or elsewhere in the Global South. But it is also possible that Asian and African writers have abjured end-of-the-worldism for other reasons. “When all is said and done, this obsession [with apocalypse] may well be specific to Western metaphysics,” the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe notes in Necropolitics (2019). “For many human cultures, the world, simply, does not end.”

- How visions of catastrophe shape the ‘climate solutions’ imposed by aid agencies , read the whole piece; its so grounded in reality. 

How To Be A Lichen

Contain multitudes without inner conflict. Linnaeus classified lichens as plants — a notion no one questioned until Peter Rabbit creator Beatrix Potter undertook her little-known scientific studies and made the revolutionary discovery that lichens are part algae and part fungus, with a sprinkling a bacteria — three kingdoms of life in a single organism, not warring for dominance but working together to make it one of the most resilient life-forms in nature and a keystone of many ecosystems. They are what that the German microbiologist and botanist Heinrich Anton de Bary was studying when he coined the word symbiosis, which is the technology evolution invented for unselfing.

[---]

Cultivate healthy attachment that doesn’t syphon the energy of the other. Contrary to the common misconception, lichens do not parasitize the organisms on which they grow but only use them as a substrate and often contribute to the overall health of the ecosystem.

Become a pioneer of possibility amid the ruins of before. Lichens are often the first organisms to grow on the denuded rock left in the wake of landslides and earthquakes. They are the life that goes on living over the tombstones of the dead.

When you can’t change your situation, change your attitude. When environmental conditions harshen, lichens can shut down their metabolism for months, years, even decades. They survive in radioactive environments by entering a dormant state and releasing protective chemicals that block radiation and neutralize free radicals. They survive simulations of Martian conditions and even the black severity of outer space. 

[---] 

Know that you don’t need a partner to fulfill your life. Many lichens reproduce asexually — by dispersing diaspores containing a handful of cells from each of their inner kingdoms or simply by breaking off pieces of themselves to grow into new organisms.

Leave the world better than you found it. Lichens enrich the soil of deserts, stabilize sand dunes, and create loam from stone across the long arc of their lives. They are part of how mountains become golden sand.

Have great patience with the arc of your life. Some of the oldest living things on Earth, lichens grow at the unhurried pace of less than a millimeter per year. The continent I now live on and the continent on which I was born are drifting apart more than 250 times as fast. The Moon is leaving us four hundred times faster.

- More Here

Evolution Under A Microscope

The longest-running and most celebrated of modern evolution experiments is the appropriately named Long-Term Evolution Experiment (LTEE). Started by Richard Lenski in 1988 at the University of California, Irvine, and continuing in the hands of Jeffrey Barrick at the University of Texas at Austin, the LTEE has been running nearly continuously for 80,000 generations of E. coli over nearly 40 years. This is equivalent to two million years of human evolution.

The experiment began when 12 genetically identical populations of E. coli were grown in liquid medium. Every day since then, one percent of the previous day’s culture has been transferred into fresh medium. The medium is a dilute sugary solution limited in glucose, which E. coli uses as its primary carbon source. After about seven generations the glucose runs out and the bacteria stop growing until the next day, when they are transferred into fresh medium. Like Dallinger’s warm water, glucose-limited media is a selective pressure on the microbes, spurring the evolution of adaptations that compensate for a lack of their preferred food source.

Every 75 days (about 500 generations), a portion of LTEE’s cloudy soup of bacteria is stored in a minus-80-degree-centigrade freezer. These remain as frozen fossil records that can be used for direct comparison to their descendants.

[---]

The LTEE has shed light on many unanswered questions about the dynamics of evolution, and experimentally validated long-running speculations. Do species improve indefinitely in a constant environment or will they stop at some maximum level? By comparing evolved E. coli with their ancestors, LTEE found that the rate of adaptation to the environment slows over time, but doesn’t plateau. Even after tens of thousands of generations in a stable laboratory environment, natural selection seems to be able to continuously eke out improvements.

Another major finding was that not all replicate populations follow the same evolutionary trajectory. In one replicate, named Ara-2, the population diverged into two coexisting lineages: one that rapidly consumes glucose and afnother that feeds on a byproduct of glucose metabolism called acetate. From a single population came a community of two.

But the most surprising finding was the observation that after about 31,000 generations, a different replicate, Ara-3, gained the ability to grow on citrate. Natural E. coli can’t metabolize citrate—in fact, it’s one of the defining features of the species—so the emergence of a strain which thrives on this carbon source could represent an entirely new species.

[---]

Today, labs around the world are running evolution experiments of all shapes and sizes, each using microbes to understand a specific facet of evolution. Some study predation by mixing predator and prey species, and observing how each adapts to the other. Other groups have studied starvation by growing bacteria for long periods of time without the addition of any nutrients, nor the removal of dead cells. And by selecting yeasts for increased size, others have directed the evolution of macroscopic multicellularity from single-celled ancestors.

Evolution by its nature takes time. With microbes we’ve been able to condense it down to more manageable timescales, but even 80,000 generations is a blip on the evolutionary clock. As these experiments continue to run, the more we’re sure to learn from them.

- More Here