The Neo-Paleo Gourmet

Paley's Watchmaker Unwound: The Genealogy of a Tool

Back in the 18th century, William Paley came up with one of the oldest arguments for Intelligent Design.  The argument is now called Paley's Watchmaker.  In a nutshell: A man finds a watch on the ground.  Its purpose (to tell time) is one that only an intelligent creature would appreciate.  If any of many watch parts were removed, it would not be able to fulfill that purpose.

Here's why Paley's own analogy is wrong.

How did the watchmaker (presumably Swiss) make the watch?  With highly precise tools.  How were those highly precise tools made?  Well, his grandfather made them with slightly less precise tools.  And if you follow the lineage of the Swiss watchmaker's tools back over the course of centuries, you will find cruder and cruder tools, to the point where man isn't even capable of making watches.  A sundial will have to do.

On this trip, let's call it "The Genealogy of Tools", your penultimate will be here.  Your last stop will be here.

So Paley has tunnel vision when he says "There must be a watch-maker" and leaves it at that.  Broaden your time horizon!  That watchmaker was simply the last step in a epoch-long watch-making process.  The watch on your hand took a 10,000 years to make!  And it was made possible by bootstrapping...small incremental improvements, with no hocus pocus involved.

This forces us to ask, is the human mind the last stop?  The human brain is the ultimate tool, but where did it come from?  The answer is "Less amazing, earlier versions of itself."

Despite the banality of the statement, I find this to be a far more profound, beautiful, and uplifting idea than a white-bearded magician in the sky swishing his wand and saying Abracadabra.

The Lactose Revolution

"The first direct evidence that early Europeans were unable to digest milk has been found by scientists at UCL (University College London) and Mainz University.  In a study, published in the journal 'PNAS', the  team shows that the gene that controls our ability to digest milk was missing from Neolithic skeletons dating to between 5840 and 5000 BC. However, through exposure to milk, lactose tolerance evolved extremely rapidly, in evolutionary terms. Today, it is present in over ninety per cent of the population of northern  Europe and is also found in some African and Middle Eastern populations but is missing from the majority of the adult population globally."

The researchers make the point that for lactose tolerance to evolve so rapidly (7,000 years), it had to be hugely adaptive in terms of survival.  This is true, but I'd offer some counterpoints:

1.  For us to evolve the capability to digest lactose doesn't require as many positive mutations as, say, color vision -- so let's not immediately hail a very recent adaptation as an improvement.  Evolution is very short-sighted, so an adaptation that provides short-term benefits and long-term costs will be selected for...and it's only modern human beings who live long-term who face the costs.   

2. Dairy no longer offers the benefits to us that it did to our recent ancestors, but the long term costs may remain.  The researchers describe some of the probable benefits:

 

"Although the benefits of milk tolerance are not fully understood yet, they probably include: the continuous supply of milk compared to the boom and bust of seasonal crops; its nourishing qualities; and the fact that it's uncontaminated by parasites, unlike stream water, making it a safer drink."

The only benefit listed above that may still be a benefit today is milk's "nourishing qualities".

First, humans didn't have a particular vitamin or mineral deficiency for millions of years, and suddenly, poof, "Got Milk?"  solved it.  We produce Vitamin D from exposure to the sun.  Calcium you get from darky leafy vegetables (and wouldn't need nearly so much if your diets is less acidic).

Second, benefits in the short-run often hide longer-term costs.  Because proteins in non-mother's milk are similar (but sufficiently different) to proteins the body is used to dealing with, milk is implicated in the host of autoimmune diseases that old people have to deal with. (The relevant process is molecular mimicry).

Third, the way most people eat dairy, it's just an excuse for processed food: bad fats and added salts and sugars. Cheeses, cream, ice cream, butter.  (Oh yeah, and milk.)

So the jury might be out on some of the long-term costs of eating dairy, but the short-term benefits just don't exist like they did 7,000 years ago.

Hat tip to C. Jonathan Gattman for the article.

Evolution is smarter than you: Chain Letter Edition

Chain letters behave a lot like real viruses.  A successful chain letter usually morphs into several variants over time, picking up new helpful traits along the way.

I recently received an old chain letter, included below.  It seemed so old that I googled it, and found that the original letter circulated at least eight years ago...in 1999.  See here, variant #2.

The two versions are extremely similar but the more recent one is much more sophisticated.

1. The Subject Line

The subject line now claims that "It was on Good Morning America", instead of the dull AOL/Microsoft merger.  Good Morning America must research their topics, right?  And the subject line is now timeless -- not pinned to a specific event that could show it to be outdated. 

2. The "No Downside" Gambit

The new version asks, "What have you got to lose?"  This reminds the reader that there is a very low cost to sending email.

3. The Source

The source is now a NAMED expert (an attorney who knows the law) instead up just an anonymous friend with a good reputation.  The impact of "the good friend" drops off pretty quickly as the letter moves, but everybody knows that attorney's are experts at the law.

4. The Specific Anecdote: Baylor/UT

Not sure why, but the Baylor/UT anecdote is so random that it seems true.

5. The Virus Protection Alert

The new email includes a few paragraphs pretending that a virus scan had been run on the email.  Phew!  No virus, must be real!

Beyond computer/business unsavvy people in general, this letter would seems to spread best among women -- judging from the fact the original sources are women and the Good Morning America reference.  (I'm sure there are versions of this letter, or others, that spread better among men.)

Here is a fascinating site that covers the history of chain letters, including early apocryphal letters going back hundreds of years, and the first modern money ones (in the 1930's U.S.).  Hours of reading.  Here is the beginning of an article on paper chain letters mutating over time.  Here are the letters behind it.

Start Letter
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Fwd: PLEEEEEEASE REEEEEAD! IT WAS ON GOOD MORNING

AMERICA

...

To all of my friends, I do not usually forward messages, But this is from my friend Pearlas Sandborn and she really is an attorney. If she says that this will work it will work. After all, what have you got to lose?

READ BELOW.

SORRY EVERYBODY.. JUST HAD TO TAKE THE CHANCE!!! I'm an attorney, and I know the law. This thing is for real. Rest assured AOL and Intel will follow through with their promises for fear of facing a multimillion-dollar class action suit similar to the one filed by PepsiCo against General Electric not too long ago.


Dear Friends:

Please do not take this for a junk letter. Bill Gates sharing his fortune. If you ignore this, You will repent later. Microsoft and AOL are now the largest Internet companies and in an effort to make sure that Internet Explorer remains the most widely used program, Microsoft and AOL are running an e-mail beta test. When you forward this e-mail to friends, Microsoft can and will track it (if you are a Microsoft Windows user) for a two-week time period.


For every person that you forward this e-mail to, Microsoft will pay you $245.00 For every person that you sent it to that forwards it on, Microsoft will pay you $243.00 and for every third person that receives it, you will be paid $241.00. Within two weeks, Microsoft will contact you for your address and then send you a check.

I thought this was a scam myself, But two weeks after receiving this e-mail and forwarding it on. Microsoft contacted me for my address and within days, I received a check for $24,800.00. You need to respond before the beta testing is over. If anyone can afford this, Bill gates is the man.

It's all marketing expense to him. Please forward this to as many people as
possible. You are bound to get at least $10, 000.00 We're not going to help them
out with their e-mail beta test without getting a little something for our time.
My brother's girlfriend got in on this a few months ago. When Iwent to visit
him for the Baylor/UT game. She showed me her check. It was for the sum of
$4,324.44 and was stamped "Paid in full" Like I said before, I know
the law, and this is for real. 

------ End of Forwarded Message 

=

 --

No virus found in this incoming message.
Checked by AVG Free Edition.
Version: 7.1.409 / Virus Database: 268.14.4/532 - Release Date: 11/13/2006

 

--
No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Free Edition.
Version: 7.1.409 / Virus Database: 268.14.4 /532 - Release Date: 11/13/2006

Evolution is smarter than you: Genetic Diversity edition

The founder of the Doomsday Vault has died.  The Doomsday Vault is a seedbank built in the side of a mountain on a remote Norwegian island in the Arctic.

"The vault was only part of Dr. Skovmand’s crusade to save and propagate the best of the best strains of valuable food plants. His mission, he often said, was ending hunger.

He searched the world to discover and preserve lost strains of wheat and other crops and helped breed them into stronger, more disease-resistant strains. He helped assemble more than 150,000 varieties of wheat seed and more than 20,000 kinds of corn."

There will be security:

"[The vault] will include fences, motion detectors, steel airlock doors and three-foot-thick concrete walls ensconced in mountain rock. Artificial refrigeration will supplement permafrost in keeping fresh the seeds, which will be wrapped in aluminum foil."

But if a Doomsday comes, how the hell are the survivors supposed to make their way to the Norwegian arctic?  More in the NYTimes article.

Homo Economicus, indeed

Some anthropologists are arguing that the division of labor by gender is the reason why modern humans displaced Neanderthals (who had come out of Africa at an earlier point in time).  Evidence suggests that everyone in Neanderthal bands would hunt big game, but among homo sapiens, men would hunt big game and women would specialize in gathering seeds, plants, and fruits.

"The competitive advantage enjoyed by modern humans came not just from new weapons and devices but from the ways in which their economic lives were organized around the advantages of cooperation and complementary subsistence roles for men, women, and children," write Steven L. Kuhn and Mary C. Stiner (University of Arizona)."

...

"Earlier hominins pursued more narrowly focused economies, with women's activities more closely aligned with those of men with respect to schedule and ranging patterns," write the authors. "It is impossible to argue that [Neanderthal] females and juveniles were fulfilling the same roles--or even an equally diverse suite of economic roles--as females and juveniles in recent hunter-gatherer groups," they add."

Bottom Line: The gains from specialization and trade are huge, and they existed long before Adam Smith pointed them out.  The first time a unicellular organism engulfed energy-producing bacteria and adopted them as its own (we now call them mitochondria)...chalk it up to division of labor and trade.

Here is the article.

Here is Robert Wright's excellent book, Non-Zero: The Logic of Human Destiny, in which he discusses the power of division of labor and trade, from cells to cities, and why we see increasing complexity in life forms and human culture.

Pandora and the Music Genome Project

Last night I went to a Town Hall Meeting hosted by Tim Westergren, the Founder of Pandora.   (For those who haven't tried it, Pandora is a great online music service that allows you to listen to and discover great new music that matches your taste.)

Unlike most web 2.0 music sites, Pandora isn't driven off of popularity, but rather off of The Music Genome Project:

Together we set out to capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level. We ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or "genes" into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song - everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It's not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records - it's about what each individual song sounds like.

Tim said they had nearly 400 "genes" for each song.  They assign a default weighting to the genes (tempo has the highest weighting initially), and ratings of the new songs change the content and the weightings of the genes.

Lots of new innovations on the way from this service.

Spontaneous Order: Economies and Fruits edition

Slate's Daniel Engber criticizes Michael Pollan's recent article on nutrition for being too dismissive of scientific achievements in nutrition, and resorting to "the misleading, great-great-grandma-knew-best philosophy."

The distinction needed to resolve their dispute is that between understanding a phenomenon and engineering it, the difference between an economist and a central planner.

By analogy, an economy isn't just so much labor, capital, and natural resources.  The Soviets learned this the hard way.  A healthy, growing economy is a network that grows and evolves over time in a decentralized way based on a predictable infrastructure (of laws and roads and language).  Economists have gained a better and better understanding of what makes for a good economy, and one of the key attributes is that we need to restrain ourselves from tinkering too much with it.

So too with food.  Food isn't just so much carbs (land), protein (labor), and fat (natural resources).  The Americans learned this the hard way.  The infrastructure of a healthy food are the constants of physics over time, the decentralized growth is the process of evolution, and the final product is a grapefruit that is more than the sum of its parts.  Scientists have gained a better understanding of what makes for a healthy diet, and one of the key attributes is that we need to restrain ourselves from tinkering too much with our natural one.

What is our natural diet?  Is it great-great-great grandma's accumulated cultural wisdom, DNA's accumulated genetic wisdom, or both?  Let's leave that to other posts.

DNA Art

Commission art based on your own DNA. 

"Much more than a plain old photo of you and the kids, Salamunovic contends, DNA art has “a real intelligence.” It’s true that those who display their own DNA portraits walk an interesting line between self and stealth: You have to wait for someone to praise an apparent abstraction before you can announce, “It’s based on a sample of my DNA!” You might imagine this information being met with a long, awkward pause, but Salamunovic says it’s actually “the ultimate conversation piece.” You’re not really talking about yourself — you’re talking science and art and process, all hot topics at a time when forensic detectives fill prime time and businesses use DNA samples to trace your genetic roots."

Article from the New York Times Magazine a few months ago.

You are smarter than Evolution: HIV Edition

Viruses evolve.  The viruses we see today have gotten pretty good at developing methods of transmission, otherwise they wouldn't be around.  For example, the common cold often causes its host to sneeze, spreading germs to others.  (A strain of the cold that didn't cause people to sneeze wouldn't spread as quickly...and might eventually peter out relative to strains that did.)  Another strategy for transmission is NOT BEING DEBILITATING, which means people still go to work, socialize, go out to eat, spreading the virus in the process. 

Other viruses, like HIV/AIDS, are much more virulent than the common cold.  Virulent viruses also have transmission as their implicit goal, but they can undercut themselves by killing their hosts too quickly.  Kill all your hosts, kill yourself.  For this reason, debilitating viruses often have a latency period where they are benign -- in this case, the HIV part of HIV/AIDS.   The lack of symptoms gives the host time to unwittingly spread the virus to others.

How should this inform policy on HIV/AIDS?   By slowing or stopping transmission, the most virulent forms of the virus kill their hosts, and die out.  The least virulent forms take longer to kill their hosts, and thus increase their liklihood of spreading.  Slow transmission, and the average strain of HIV will become more benign.

The Bottom Line: Understanding evolution is critical to making good policy.  If you have one dollar to spend on HIV/AIDS, spend it on preventing transmission, not on  treatment.

Marijuana, slings and arrows, childbirth

THC (Delta-9-tetra-hydro-cannabinol) is the active ingredient in marijuana, and one of its effects is short-term memory loss.  The only reason why this particular molecule has any effect at all is because it fits into pre-existing cannabinoid receptors in the brain.  Cannabinoids are produced naturally by the body...why?  The current concensus is to help us forget the slings, arrows, and irrelevant information of day-to-day life.

Michael Pollan writes:

"Forgetting is vastly underrated as a mental operation - indeed, that it is a mental operation, rather than, as I'd always assumed, strictly the breakdown of one.  Yes, forgetting can be a curse, especially as we age.  But forgetting is also one of the more important things healthy brains do, almost as imporant as remembering.  Think how quickly the sheer volume and multiplicity of sensory information we receive every waking minute would overwhelm our conciousness if we couldn't quickly forget a great deal more of it than we remember."

Research suggests that natural cannabinoids play a role in dulling the pain of childbirth, and helping women forget it afterwards.