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.

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“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.

 

Covid-19 - Origins Of An Outbreak

 The way that we are using the planet as opposed living with the planet. 

Modular Cognition, Pattern Completion Et Al., - A Hypothesis

This is intelligence in action: the ability to reach a particular goal or solve a problem by undertaking new steps in the face of changing circumstances. It’s evident not just in intelligent people and mammals and birds and cephalopods, but also cells and tissues, individual neurons and networks of neurons, viruses, ribosomes and RNA fragments, down to motor proteins and molecular networks. Across all these scales, living things solve problems and achieve goals by flexibly navigating different spaces – metabolic, physiological, genetic, cognitive, behavioural.

But how did intelligence emerge in biology? The question has preoccupied scientists since Charles Darwin, but it remains unanswered. The processes of intelligence are so intricate, so multilayered and baroque, no wonder some people might be tempted by stories about a top-down Creator. But we know evolution must have been able to come up with intelligence on its own, from the bottom up.

Darwin’s best shot at an explanation was that random mutations changed and rearranged genes, altered the structure and function of bodies, and so produced adaptations that allowed certain organisms to thrive and reproduce in their environment. (In technical terms, they are selected for by the environment.) In the end, somehow, intelligence was the result. But there’s plenty of natural and experimental evidence to suggest that evolution doesn’t just select hardwired solutions that are engineered for a specific setting. For example, lab studies have shown that perfectly normal frog skin cells, when liberated from the instructive influence of the rest of the embryo, can reboot their cooperative activity to produce a novel proto-organism, called a ‘xenobot’. Evolution, it seems, doesn’t come up with answers so much as generate flexible problem-solving agents that can rise to new challenges and figure things out on their own.

The urgency of understanding intelligence in biological terms has become more acute with the ‘omics’ revolution, where new techniques are amassing enormous amounts of fresh data on the genes, proteins and connections within each cell. Yet the deluge of information about cellular hardware isn’t yielding a better explanation of the intelligent flexibility we observe in living systems. Nor is it yielding sufficient practical insights, for example, in the realm of regenerative medicine. We think the real problem is not one of data, but of perspective. Intelligence is not something that happened at the tail end of evolution, but was discovered towards the beginning, long before brains came on the scene.

From the earliest metabolic cycles that kept microbes’ chemical parameters within the right ranges, biology has been capable of achieving aims. Yet generation after generation of biologists have been trained to avoid questions about the ultimate purpose of things. Biologists are told to focus on the ‘how’, not the ‘why’, or risk falling prey to theology.

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 Modularity provides stability and robustness, and is the first part of the answer to how intelligence arose. When changes occur to one part of the body, its evolutionary history as a nested doll of competent, problem-solving cells means subunits can step up and modify their activity to keep the organism alive. This isn’t a separate capacity that evolved from scratch in complex organisms, but instead an inevitable consequence of the ancient ability of cells to look after themselves and the networks of which they form a part. 

But just how are these modules controlled? The second step on the road to the emergence of intelligence lies in knowing how modules can be manipulated. Encoding information in networks requires the ability to catalyse complex outcomes with simple signals. This is known as pattern completion: the capacity of one particular element in the module to activate the entire module. That special element, which serves as a ‘trigger’, starts the activity, kicking the other members of the module into action and completing the pattern. In this way, instead of activating the entire module, evolution needs only to activate that trigger. 

Pattern completion is an essential aspect of modularity which we’re just beginning to understand, thanks to work in developmental biology and neuroscience. For example, an entire eye can be created in the gut of a frog embryo by briefly altering the bioelectric state of some cells. These cells are triggered to complete the eye pattern by recruiting nearby neighbours (which were not themselves bioelectrically altered) to fill in the rest of the eye. Similar outcomes can be achieved by genetic or chemical ‘master regulators’, such as the Hox genes that specify the body plan of most bilaterally symmetrical animals. In fact, one could relabel these regulator genes as pattern completion genes, since they enable the coordinated expression of a suite of other genes from a simple signal. The key is that modules, by continuing to work until certain conditions are met, can fill in a complex pattern when given only a small part of the pattern. In doing so, they translate a simple command – the activation of the trigger – and amplify it into an entire program. 

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We have sketched a set of approaches to biology that rely heavily on concepts from cybernetics, computer science, and engineering. But there’s still a lot of work to do in reconciling these approaches. Despite recent advances in molecular genetics, our understanding of the mapping between the genome on the one hand, and the (changeable) anatomy and physiology of the body on the other, is still at a very early stage. Much like computer science, which moved from rewiring hardware in the 1940s to a focus on algorithms and software that could control the device’s behaviour, biological sciences now need to change tack.

The impact of understanding nested intelligence across multiple scales cuts across numerous fields, from fundamental questions about our evolutionary origins to practical roadmaps for AI, regenerative medicine and biorobotics. Understanding the control systems implemented in living tissue could lead to major advances in biomedicine. If we truly grasp how to control the setpoints of bodies, we might be able to repair birth defects, induce regeneration of organs, and perhaps even defeat ageing (some cnidarians and planarian flatworms are essentially immortal, demonstrating that complex organisms without a lifespan limit are possible, using the same types of cells of which we are made). Perhaps cancer can also be addressed as a disease of modularity: the mechanisms by which body cells cooperate can occasionally break down, leading to a reversion of cells to their unicellular past – a more selfish mode in which they treat the rest of the body as an environment within which they reproduce maximally.

- More Here

The idea of modular cognition is beautiful and I almost fell head-over-heels for it. 

But... once again, people conveniently forget that we are dealing with complex systems. 

Just a cursory second reading of this piece will expose the "know" missing pieces. Microbiomes for starters and there is this thing called "exposome" which covers those "little" things namely the environmental factors. And of-course there are myriads of unknowns. 

Nevertheless, the "why" question they ask - "why biology acts this way" is extremely important. 

I am convinced our generation and many generations to come will fail to answer this question only because people are not used to asking the why question at the micro level. Maybe, someday this question will be answered and should be answered. The hypothesis of "Pattern Completion" is small step forward and kudos to those who are working on such hard problems.