Quote Of The Day

No fate but what we make.

from Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991).

We are morally responsible, collectively, for what happens in the world. There is no one else to blame. If we don't take action, the world we dream of probably won't happen.

What Is An Animal?

Biologists have one seemingly objective definition of an "animal" for a particular taxonomic purpose. But, for other purposes, a different definition (which I have come up with, whether or not someone else unknown to me has done the same thing) is appropriate:

An animal is any physical system too complex to be understood as a machine.

Note that this definition has a subjective component, so the classification of a thing is observer dependent. Your automobile, for example, may be a machine from the perspective of your automobile mechanic, but may be an animal, from your perspective. 

The computers I used when they were first available and you assembled them from kits and did a lot of the programming yourself, were machines. But, the computer upon which I am typing this blog post, and the Internet, through which this blog post reaches you, are animals from my perspective and from the perspective of most observers.

When something is a machine, one approach to interacting with it makes sense. When something is an animal, a different approach to interacting with it makes sense.

The way you interact with an animal in this sense is pretty much the same whether the animal would also be classified by a biologist as an animal or not.

Quote of the Day

What we see is beautiful; 

what we know more beautiful; 

what we cannot grasp, most beautiful.

- Nicolaus Steno a.k.a. Niels Stensen (17th century naturalist and physician).

Undead Marriage

You marry until "death do you part".

If one of you becomes undead - a vampire or a zombie or a mummy or a ghost, for example, is that a form of death that breaks the marriage bond? Is there a distinction between the impact those possibilities, respectively, could have on marriage? Perhaps "brain dead" and not "heart dead" is what matters. Perhaps you still need to be corporal?

Of course, if you are Mormon, you "marry for eternity" and presumably the transformation to undead status doesn't matter.

Could it be that Mormons were familiar with the undead and saw how immoral it was to end a marriage just because one of the parties was dead?

Probably not, but it is an interesting theory.

Quote of the Day

What's the speed of dark?

- Fortune Cookie

What Does It Take To Understand The Brain?

A provocative new think piece asks whether the experimental neuroscience program is on track by asking the question, "Could a neuroscientist understand a microprocessor?"

It finds that while our current neuroscience research agenda is broad enough, carried to its logical conclusion, to tell us a great deal, that it has serious blind spots that make it incapable of reaching key insights into the functioning of our brains with any amount of data collected in the current paradigm, no matter how much we gather. Therefore, neuroscience needs to supplement its research agenda with new approaches calculated to gain insight into qualitatively different kinds of knowledge about the brain.

There is a popular belief in neuroscience that we are primarily data limited, and that producing large, multimodal, and complex datasets will, with the help of advanced data analysis algorithms, lead to fundamental insights into the way the brain processes information. 

These datasets do not yet exist, and if they did we would have no way of evaluating whether or not the algorithmically-generated insights were sufficient or even correct. To address this, here we take a classical microprocessor as a model organism, and use our ability to perform arbitrary experiments on it to see if popular data analysis methods from neuroscience can elucidate the way it processes information. Microprocessors are among those artificial information processing systems that are both complex and that we understand at all levels, from the overall logical flow, via logical gates, to the dynamics of transistors. 

We show that the approaches reveal interesting structure in the data but do not meaningfully describe the hierarchy of information processing in the microprocessor. This suggests current analytic approaches in neuroscience may fall short of producing meaningful understanding of neural systems, regardless of the amount of data. Additionally, we argue for scientists using complex non-linear dynamical systems with known ground truth, such as the microprocessor as a validation platform for time-series and structure discovery methods. 

Eric Jons and Konrad Kording, "Could a neuroscientist understand a microprocessor?" (Pre-Print November 14, 2016). doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/055624

Scientific Proof of the Flying Spaghetti Monster's Existence

Pastafarians rejoice! Australian astronomers have validated your faith scientifically.

Invisible structures shaped like noodles, lasagne sheets or hazelnuts could be floating around in our Galaxy radically challenging our understanding of gas conditions in the Milky Way.

From here.

Could you tell the difference between hazelnuts and meatballs in a fuzzy telescope image?

The "hazelnuts" may really be meatballs that are being misdescribed.

The structures are known as "dark noodles", by analogy to dark matter and dark energy, because, obviously, matter, energy and noodles are the three fundamental states of the stuff that makes up the universe.

Co-Creating Post-Christian Culture

The United States is more secular now than it has been at any point the early 1800s before the Second Great Awakening (ca. 1790-1860 CE, flourishing from about 1820-1855 CE) that gave birth to the uniquely American variety of Evangelical Christianity.

The United States now has tens of millions of secular people, who more or less independently came to the same decision to leave Christianity (for the vast majority of secular Americans are former Christians), at about the same time, for similar reasons, on a grass roots basis.

But, they are collectively faced with an omnipresent question, "now what"?  How shall I live my life from day to day?  What traditions shall I honor?  What do I believe?  What is moral and what is not? Into what worldview to I frame my experiences?

We have models abroad for how to live in a more secular society.

Europe experienced a similar surge in secularism a generation or two before the United States did, and is now to a great extent a post-Christian society for whom the state religions of their ancestors are now shared cultural legacies, rather than faiths lived on a day to day basis.  Churches are empty, or filled with immigrants and the elderly who haven't experienced a similar transition.

Japan, while not precisely a secular society, has also never been dominated by Christianity or Islam. Individual Japanese individuals can transition from a state in which superstition was taken more seriously, to one in which superstition is taken less seriously, without as much of an abrupt change of worldview, like a child gradually outgrowing childhood superstitions, one by one.  Japan provides another model of how to have a society that does not live in the shadow of Christianity.

Communist countries that once made up much of the world also consciously and actively collectively disavowed religion, and now that Communism had become obsolete in Europe and much of the rest of the world, and become untethered from its intellectual foundations in places like China, religion is creeping back.  But, a multitude of former Communists have not returned to religion after abandoning the religion of Communism and now face a religious vacuum of their own in which they too must craft of new set of folkways.

The process of creating new folkways is democratic in the small "d" sense of the word.  No choices about how to live are neutral and so everyone must participate in formulating their own, whether or not they want to do so, both individually and in relation to larger, often grass roots, social movements.

This transitional period won't last forever.  Folkways, traditions and norms that are congealing into a new culture right now will solidify over time and may have become rigid for an indefinite future of many centuries within a few generations from now.

It will be natural to answer many questions, particularly as they pertain to metaphysics, with science: the evolution of all life from a common ancestor billions of years ago; an understanding of biodiversity and neurodiversity informed by genetics, the Big Bang and its associated cosmology, a universe where everything is governed by laws of nature exemplified by the Standard Model of particle physics and general relativity, or their successors, a blurring of the mind-body duality, an understanding of how much of what happens in the world is random or at least amoral.

Other questions aren't as amenable to consensus scientific answers.  Science can tell us a lot about gender and sexuality, but it can't tell us, by itself, what kind of personal and intimate relations to develop, even if it can inform our understanding of the choices we make.  It can't tell us how to govern ourselves or raise our children, even though its methods can inform those choices as well.  It can't tell us who to trust, or who to love, who to chose as allies, or what battles and wars we should wage.  It can't tell us when to forgive and when to bear a grudge.  Even if science and the scientific method can inform many of these aspects of our lives, it hasn't reached that point yet, and the questions we face in life must be answered, now, immediately, with the knowledge that we have and not the knowledge that we hope some day as a species to acquire.

Even if almost everyone becomes effectively non-religious, there is no reason to think that we will not have, as the Ancient Greeks and Romans did, competing philosophies of life that each claim large numbers of adherents and guide the lives of those who follow them.  It isn't obvious at the moment what the competing philosophies will be, but it seems to me a near certainty that they will emerge over some point that is unknowable in the present in some respect that does not decisively disadvantage one view over another.  I wouldn't even be surprised if the new competing philosophical schools track to a significant extent historical patterns of regional culture, religion and political identity.

Perhaps, for example, secular people will fall into camps of optimists and pessimists, with pessimism gaining more steam in places like the former Communist states and the American South, and optimism finding more purchase in Western Europe, the Northeast Corridor and the Pacific Coast of the United States.  Science can certainly not tell us if optimism is preferable to pessimism, or visa versa, and each outlook offers certain advantages in life to its adherents. Ideas like the Gaia hypothesis might be embraced by optimists, for example, while pessimists may breath new life into the Medea hypothesis, since it better fits with their philosophy.

Or, perhaps instead, we will be split between communitarians and libertarians, or between humanists and nihilists, or between people committed to "traditional humanity" and transhumanists.

I don't believe that there is nothing new under the sun.  Cultural innovators among those of us cursed to live in this exciting time may, faced with the necessity of innovation, may come up with new kinds of relationships, new kinds of foods, new kinds of celebrations, and new kind of rituals and beliefs. The more untethered we become from our cultural legacies, the more room there is (and need there is) for cultural innovation.

Rivals of the Hebrew and Navajo language have required mass invention of new words to describe concepts absent from the historic versions of these languages, and a changing world will likewise require cultural innovation to deal with unprecedented realities and circumstances.

The difficult but worthwhile part of the venture it to image and guess what could emerge.  The results will seem obvious and elementary and inevitable in hindsight, but are anything but if we try to imagine the outcomes prospectively with any degree of confidence.

The Scientific Worldview And Its Impact Of Traditional Religion

Scientific understanding has advanced tremendously from its state in the Middle Ages, from classical Greek and Rome, and from the legendary and magical histories of the Bronze and Copper ages that was the source for, among other things, the ancient Mesopotamian and Semitic myths that came to be digested in the biblical Book of Genesis.

Paleontology, biology, physics, geology, astronomy and genetics have revealed that the true story of the origins of man, of life of this planet, and of our planet, solar system and universe bear no resemblance to the creation and global flood stories of Genesis.

These stories are no more true than the belief that we live on a flat earth, or that the Sun revolves around the Earth.  There may have been something akin to a creation event in the Big Bang, more than 13 billion years ago and about 7 billion years before the Earth formed.

But, we can explain the way that the modern universe came into being from at least as far back as Big Bang Nucleosynthesis, during which light atoms like helium and lithium were formed in a period approximation 10 seconds until 20 minutes after the Big Bang using a Standard Model of cosmology, while resorting to just one feature of the universe that cannot currently be well understood with the Standard Model of Particle Physics and General Relativity with a cosmological constant.  Apart from the precise nature of the dark matter that was involved in that process, we can tell a complete, more or less consensus story of the history of the universe from then on.

There is more scientific uncertainty in the first ten seconds of the Big Bang, with the most difficult questions being answers to the nature of cosmological inflation, and to the baryon number of the universe and lepton number of the universe, which are conserved constants in the Standard Model that relate to the number of particles of matter in the universe (e.g. how many quarks, electrons and neutrinos there are in the universe) net of the number of particles of antimatter in the universe.  We don't even know what contributions are made by neutrinos to this total since we don't know the relative number of neutrinos and antineutrinos in the universe.

Our universe's history is not quite that of Newton's clockwork God, because quantum mechanics turns out to be stochastic (i.e. probabilistic) rather than deterministic.  But, the randomness is so pure that it amounts to the same thing.  There is no room in modern cosmology for a God who did anything other than put in place the fundamental laws of physics and set the initial conditions of the universe in the Big Bang and perhaps the first few seconds that followed.

Historical linguistics buttressed by a fuller understanding of human prehistory generally, secured with archaeology, with modern population genetics and ancient DNA for both people and for plants and animals whose histories are intertwined with our own, and deeper understanding of linguistic processes from modern linguistic studies have all worked to displace the Tower of Babel.

While we can not cure every illness and remedy every condition, we understand much more deeply what causes all manner of diseases and psychiatric conditions.  None of them are caused by demons or spirits acting with moral purpose in the human world.  As a consequence of this, we know that the exorcism and faith healing that was one of the core ministries of Jesus, his disciples and many of the Saints whose lives are part of Catholic doctrine, didn't happen.

Historical and literary study of the Bible, informed by early collections of religious texts such as the Dead Sea scrolls, has made clear that the traditional Judeo-Christian accounts of their authorship are often incorrect, that stories like the Garden of Eden, Noah's flood, and the appearance of Baby Moses floating in a river to a Pharonic princess have direct antecedents in Sumerian myths, and that portions of the Gospels such as the stories of the childhood of Jesus and of his post-crucifixion exploits are late additions that are probably not authentic.  The Bible isn't even consistently monotheistic, acknowledging in its earlier portions YHWY as a the most powerful and righteous of many gods, rather than as the only existing God.

This isn't to say that legendary Biblical histories were entirely divorced from reality.  There really were non-Semitic Philistines in the Southern Levant in the early Iron Age.  There really was a Jewish kingdom in the Iron Age Levant that had conflicts with Mesopotamian sovereigns.  Many of the notable Roman political figures of the New Testament really existed.  Many of the places referred to in the Bible, like the City of Jericho and Solomon's Mines, correspond to places that really exist.  Indeed, the further you advance along the timeline of the Hebrew Bible, on average, the more it corresponds to some semblance of historical reality.  But, like the Bronze Age and early Iron Age myths of so many of the world's people, the Bible contains legendary elements intertwined with historical elements in a manner that does not delineate where hyperbole and fantasy end and historical accounts begin.  The Bible is a collection of short works of historical fantasy written by human beings, each with their own agendas, not an inspired, absolutely true historical account of man's dealings with God.

Studies of global religious variation and the history of religion sheds light on the origins of current religious belief systems, which are quite young compared, for example, to the time depth of our linguistic origins, and also make clear that there is no consistent, universal set of metaphysical religious beliefs.  Religious beliefs are so completely irreconcilable that certainly the vast majority of these beliefs must be completely wrong as a factual matter.

A scientific worldview, in short, is inconsistent with the metaphysical worldview of every one of the major world religious traditions in a manner that it increasingly obvious as our understanding of science and history grows ever more precise and gains ever more complete factual support.

Now, a scientific worldview does not deny that religions exist and that they have played a powerful role in the human story.  Archaeology supports the existence of human spiritual activity going back to the Upper Paleolithic period at the very least and quite possibly even to archaic homins predating modern humans such as the Neanderthals of West Eurasia.  Religious institutions and belief systems appear to have played pivotal roles in the emergence of the earliest farming and herding societies in the Neolithic revolution, and to the organization of the earliest cities and civilizations.

But, the essence of what makes religious belief systems religious, which is that there are non-human forces or beings that act with moral purpose in the human world with which humans can interact, benefit from or influence via religious practice, in the end is simply wrong.  The factually accurate history of religion is a story of people creating gods, spirits and religious practices and agreeing among themselves to at least act as if they believe them (and often sincerely actually believing them), in part to facilitate religious practices that taken as a whole provide some benefit to their societies.

Without a belief in the worldview in which religion is embedded, however, its force as anything more than an embodiment of philosophies and political views that can support themselves independent of their religious content (which is present in philosophies like Confucianism which are sometimes called religions), evaporates.  Perhaps some cultural philosophies and political views associated with religion can survive apart from the divine, but I very much doubt that this can hold in the case of some of the leading monotheistic religious beliefs such as Christianity and Islam.

In a world where the scientific worldview is increasingly acknowledged to be correct, religion must change or die.  It must either transform into philosophies (like humanism) and traditional practices (like Santa Claus) that initiated adults acknowledge have no divine basis or metaphysical truth, or it must be limited to people who reject to an ever greater degree a scientifically established reality that is ever more indisputably correct.  There are conditions where the benefits of religious belief may allow it to persist longer in the fact of these fatal intellectual and conceptual flaws.  But, no religious worldview is defensible any longer as an accurate description of how our world works.  And, as the world becomes ever more educated and gains ever more free access to accurate information, existing religious worldviews formulated for pre-scientific eras will be forever threatened by a consistent, global, universal scientific worldview.

I have no doubt that competing philosophies, culturally maintained traditional practices which may have roots in religious practice, and institutions serving purposes similar to those historically served by religious institutions, in some form or another that it is too early to be able to predict with any certainty, quite possibly in different bundles of functionality than traditional religious institutions, will emerge.  We are probably not entering an era of global moral consensus or one that is truly culturally homogeneous.  But, we are living in the middle of a historic era during which our collective religious inheritance will ever more swiftly lose its force in favor of a shared scientific worldview which will be a foundation upon which new worldviews will emerge afresh with little direct descent from single predecessor belief systems.  Belief systems and worldviews before the scientific worldview becomes predominant, and belief systems and worldviews after this point in our intellectual history, will be largely disconnected from each other.

Defining God

Sean Carroll at Cosmic Variance, in an essay entitled "Does the Universe Need God?", highlights a definition of God and picks at it:

[T]he God hypothesis seems simple and precise – an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent being. (There are other definitions, but they are usually comparably terse.)

In the comments, I suggest an alternative definition, and restate (with edits and some expansion) here:

Definitionally, a definition of God as "an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent being" while traditional (was it Aquinas that made it a standard?), isn't a very good operational definition of how we separate religious and non-religious thinking. It is a poor fit to polythesism, animism, or many Eastern religious concepts like Tao and Kharma.

More useful as an operational definition of that which is divine would be "some being or power that acts with moral purpose or an agenda for human events, in the lives of humans, that is not human, a human creation, or an ordinary animal." One can worry the "ordinary" part of animal a bit, but the notion is to exclude the moral acts of gorillas and dolphins and dogs and cats and the like, without necessarily ruling out the like of angels, demons, jinn, ghosts, Gaia, and so on. Charlotte of Charlotte's Web is perhaps a gray area in this definition -- she being no ordinary spider.

Under this operational definition, the deist conception of a Newtonian clockmaker God, reimagined as something setting the Big Bang in motion and fixing the laws of nature, without more, would not constitute God, even if it were done by some gray haired titan surrounded by an Army of angels. This operational definition also excludes a truly pure version of a scorekeeper God, one who rewards and punishes us solely in the afterlife, but unlike the Abrahamic Gods, does not tell anyone what the rules by which God keeps score happen to be.

On the other hand, it would include the Star Wars saga's mitcholorians, or some supernatural ancient astronauts who brought humanity to a next stage of consciousness and influenced our evolution, even if these being themselves have an evolutionary history of their own (a la Arthus C. Clark's "2001"). It also permits gods of less than infinite power who are not "omnipotent" or "omniscient" (such as the Greek pantheon, and even the Judeo-Christian God in Genesis who sometimes lacks knowledge of what the humans are up to until he pays attention and discovers their acts), cruel gods who are not "omnibenevolent" (e.g. Satan or the Zoroastrian force of evil), or divine forces who seek balance rather than good (e.g. Taoist conceptions of the divine), or minor divinities like fairies, who may be neither actively good nor bad, but simply like to screw with us to see what happens (a bit like the relationship of scientists and lab rats from the rat's persecptive).

Gods that people care about, fear, love and worship, the kind that act with moral purpose or an agenda for human events of their own, might very well be entirely separate and unrelated to gods that establish laws of the universe. They also give a very real meaning to the notion of playing God, either by changing the ammoral course of nature, or by intervening in human affairs of people in general from some position of power with some sort of agenda in ways that change their lives.

Under this conception of God, we can reason directly that none of the known inviolate laws of nature have any apparent moral purpose or agenda for human events, at least on their face. They may, as an anthropomorphic principle does, include a purpose that makes it possible for human beings to exist, but the have no preference for good or evil or anything else we do in human affairs; they are nihilist.

Thus, for this conception of the divine, we must assume that God is a "god of the gaps" who is very shy and acts only through an exquisitely balanced manipulation of random quantum events, and that such a god would be particularly invisible in quantum events measured in laboratories or observations of distant stars, because in such events outcomes have no moral purpose or agenda for human events for God to implement. This kind of divinity looks more like a morally purposive fate ("cruel fate"), like kharma, like a luck in a sense that has favorites rather than being truly random.

Cosmological Numerology

A study released late in 2010, revealed that the estimate of the share of matter in the universe that is ordinary matter, as opposed to dark matter, was low by a factor of three, because the proportion of ordinary matter relative to dark matter in ellipical galaxies was underestimated. The estimated total amount of matter in the universe is unchanged, because that comes from mass measurements based on the lensing effect of entire galaxies on light that measures total mass rather than from estimates of the total number of individual stars and planets in galaxies multiplied by the estimated mass of each one.

The old estimate was that the universe was 4.6% ordinary matter, 23% dark matter, and the remainder "dark energy." Those are pretty weird numbers and no one has ventured a credible guess about how that came to be.

The new estimate comes up with some numbers that are quite different: 13.8% ordinary matter and 13.8% dark matter. Thus, the amount of ordinary matter and dark matter are almost exactly equal - a remarkable coincidence that wouldn't be hard to infer from a scenario in which energy from the big bang condenses into matter (called baryogenesis and leptogenesis) by a process by which half of matter created is in the ordinary sector, and half is in the "dark" sector, for example, from particles predicted to exist by supersymmetry. We already know, for example, that to the extent permitted by available mass-energy, the weak forces W boson has an equal chance of transforming into any available possible output fermions.

Another of the great unanswered questions of physics is "why is ordinary matter almost entirely made up of matter, rather than anti-matter?" A potential answer could be that almost all of the anti-matter, which we would otherwise expect to make up 50% of the mass in the universe, somehow turned into dark matter.

The fact that the weak force interacts with particles that have left partity, but not right parity, ignoring half of all the particles of matter in the universe, provides another 50-50 division of the matter in the universe that might drive a process that creates 50% ordinary matter and 50% dark matter in the universe.

The ratio of the total amount of matter in the universe to the total amount of dark energy in the universe is also an interesting number. Within the margin of accuracy of the measurement that ratio is "e", the exponential constant, which is often rounded to 2.78. I'm not aware of any specific theory in physics that predicts that ratio, but the equations of physics are awash with dimensionless fundamental constants like "e" and the expansion of the universe with which dark energy is associated is an exponential expansion process, so the ratio wouldn't be a terribly surprising one to fall out of the relevant equations.

Is this scientific proof? No. It is pure speculation of a basically numerological nature about the way that a theory that does have real meaning could produce numbers like these. But, it is an interesting observation, nonetheless, about a question, "why do we have the percentages of matter, dark matter and dark energy in the universe that we observe?", which could be relevant to answering those questions. In the ordinary case, science looks for relationships in emperical data first, and then comes up with hypothetical theories that could explain what could be causing those relationships. This kinds of observations advance that cause.

Fungi Are Gender Benders

One of the most fascinating discoveries that I made as a 9th grader sitting in the high school greenhouse taking biology at Talawanda High School was that there are some kinds of living things that have reproductive cycles far more complicated than that of simply dividing cloning cells, two gender system vertebrates, and multi-stage life cycle creatures like frogs (who early on look like fish called tadpoles) and butterflies (if you mother didn't tell you about the butterfly life cycle, you must have been an exceptionally beautiful and graceful child).

A received an echo of that moment again reading "The Host" by Stephenie Meyer, a little while ago, that has a story within a story sketch about an alien life form with a more complicated than two gender reproductive system.

Among the only reproductive concepts that have rivalled this revelation since then, most of which I have encountered first in science fiction, are the notion that viruses can change genomes, the discovery that some kinds of vertebrates can have virgin births in certain circumstances, the discovery that one can have mixed paternity twins (or even more amazingly mixed DNA individuals), the discovery that we are probably part Neanderthal, and the notion that ancient DNA might be used to create living versions of extinct creatures a la Jurassic Park: Japan has set out to resurrect the Mammoth by 2015.

Then, I came across a post at Replicated Typo today that recalled that moment for me. You see, some of the most complex reproductive systems of any living things are fungi.

Their reproductive mechanisms is rather unexpectedly complex, in that the normal conventions of sex do not apply. Not all fungi reproduce sexually, and many are isogamous, meaning that their gametes look the same and differ only in certain alleles in certain areas called mating-type regions. Some fungi only have two mating types, which would give the illusion of being like animal genders. However, others, like Schizophyllum commune, have over ten thousand (although these interact in an odd way, such that they’re only productive if the mating regions are highly compatible (Uyenoyama 2005)).

Some fungi are homothallic, meaning that self-mating and reproduction is possible. This means that a spore has within it two dissimilar nuclei, ready to mate – the button mushroom apparently does this (yes, the kind you buy in a supermarket.) Heterothallic fungi, on the other hand, merely needs to find another fungi that isn’t the same mating type – which is pretty easy, if there are hundreds of options. Other types of fungi can’t reproduce together, but can vegetatively blend together to share resources, interestingly enough. Think of mind-melding, like Spock. Alternatively, think of mycelia fusing together to share resources.

In short, the system is ridiculously confusing, and not at all like the simple bipolar genders of, say, humans (if we take the canonical view of human gender, meaning only two.) I’m still trying to find adequate research on the origins of this sort of system. Understandably, it’s difficult. Mycologists agree:

“The molecular genetical studies of the past ten years have revealed a genetic fluidity in fungi that could never have been imagined. Transposons and other mobile elements can switch the mating types of fungi and cause chromosonal rearrangements. Deletions of mitochondrial genes can accumulate as either symptomless plasmids or as disruptive elements leading to cellular senescence…[in summary,] many aspects of the genetic fluidity of fungi remain to be resolved, and probably many more remain to be discovered.” (Deacon, 1997: pg. 157)

There is a linguistic angle in the original post on gender agreement in language, but quite frankly, it doesn't interest me. But, amazing complex versions of sex do. What benefit do mushrooms receive from their more elaborate forms of reproduction? Are there downsides to it? How does it work? What are the general patterns of the diversity in reproductive arrangement in fungi?

I'm already familiar to some extent with fungi weirdness. In some ways they are more like animals (e.g. they don't generally produce their own food through photosynthesis). In other ways they are more like plants (e.g. they are generally sessile). Some fungi produces remarkable neurological responses. Fungi colonies have also proven to be far more elaborate multi-species ecosystems than most people had realized with lots of undiscovered complexity. But, complex reproductive mechanisms adds a whole new dimension to the brew. And, in an age where we may be nearing the "end of science" in physics and inorganic chemistry, seriously unexplored territory in biology is the place to learn new things whose utility was not previously recognized. Also, because researching fungi involves far less expensive laboratory equipment and conditions and staffing requirements than many other areas of science, while having an unusually large share of unanswered questions, it presents that possibility of pretty small scale scientific pioneers out of anywhere discovering cool new things.

More deeply, and more to the point of the linguistics post cited, how does being forced to look at issues of gender in a far more generalized and complex way than we are now aware that human neurodiversity involves in sometimes rare permutations (male, female; gay, bi, straight; butch-femme; cis and trans gender; dimensions of gender; archaic human-modern human hybrids, etc.) enlighten our thinking about the combinations and interactions encountered by humans.

The details of how fungi do it in interesting systems will have to wait for future posts. But, I wanted to note some access points to start looking into again before the thought left me.

Tevatron will shut down in September

Now that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a bigger particle accelerator in Europe, has come online, the justification for existence of Fermilab's Tevatron, which has been operating since 1983, is gone. This is a very long run for a scientific experiment in quantum physics, whose Standard Model was just starting to reach its current form at the time.

Tevatron has been instrumental in pinning down empirically the properties of the heavier particles in the Standard Model, in validating the Standard Model's accuracy, in ruling out a huge swath of beyond the Standard Model physics, and establishing the unexpected new physics of charge-parity violation in quantum physics. It has failed, however, for want of sufficient power, to locate or rule out with great scientific confidence, the existence of a Higgs boson (although it has provided suggestive hints), to locate or rule out the existence of new particles beyond the Standard Model, and has not established definitively (perhaps because there is nothing to find) any non-CP violation beyond the Standard Model physics or evidence establishing or ruling out Supersymmetry which is the core prediction of String Theory. The creativity of theoretical physicists has, alas, considerably outrun the capacity of experimental physicists to constrain their speculations.

The scientists at Tevatron have been pushing the limits of what can be discovered with an experiment that sized (cleverly and valiantly, it should be noted) for years. LHC should be able to easily examine high energy physics conditions that Tevatron has been using long data runs and brilliant experimental designs to probe for a decade or more, with sheer brute force, in a year or two.

Experimental high energy physics is mostly about probing very low frequency random events whose frequency is a function of the total amount of energy devoted to the experiment, and the more power you have, the easier it is to get data samples large enough to reach statistically significant conclusions about these very low frequency random events and formulate them as physical laws and scientific constants. There are some minor feature of Tevatron that make it more suited than LHC to explore certain kinds of phenomena, but we've already tried out all of Tevatron's best tricks, so the universe of science that Tevatron can do that LHC can't do passably well that hasn't been done already is pretty trivial. It is the moral equivalent of a strong telescope that has scoured the skies for everything there is to be seen when a much bigger one comes along.

The knives are out for federal budget cuts, and Tevatron isn't cheap, even to run once you've built the thing. The September shutdown date coincides with the federal government fiscal year. This means fewer jobs for a lot of exquisitely but narrowly qualified U.S. scientists and technicians, but since LHC publishes its results for free or something close to free, the American public will still get the benefit of its discoveries in almost real time, and of course, many American scientists do work at LHC.

Tevatron may be the penultimate high energy physics experiment. If LHC fails to discover any new beyond the Standard Model physics, or if its results lead to the formulation of a "Grand Unified Theory" that seems to provide a complete explanation of everything but gravity (something the LHC is ill suited to provide data upon) or at least provides strong empirical support for a theory that implies that there is no good reason to expect no discoveries at higher energies, then there is a very good chance that nobody will have the will to spend enough money to make a bigger successor to the LHC. Unless LHC has left us with some real tantilizing reason to think that there are more discoveries to be made with just a little more power by 2030 or 2040, we may lose the will to continue this brute force approach to experimental physics and the era of high energy physics will end.

This isn't just going to happen decades in the future either. Before either of my kids takes their first physics course in high school or college, the LHC will have pretty definitively determined that there is a Higgs boson where the Standard Model predicts it should be, or there isn't. If it finds one, and then finds no new physics after that, the inclination to call the Standard Model a done deal that can't be fit into some more grand plan as theoretical physics have dreamed of is going to be quite intense.

If the LHC doesn't find a Higgs boson in the next few years, the theoretical physicists across the world are going to have scratch their heads, throw out 90% of the theoretical papers that have been written in the last thirty years, and figure out what they've been doing wrong all of this time. This may call for new experiments, but may lead to the conclusion that we've been doing the wrong kind of experiments to find what we are really looking for with them, making LHC style big science less attractive.

Of course, if the LHC finds a Higgs boson, and then a dark matter candidate particle, and then indications of large numbers of new supersymmetric particles, or finds that a growing body of evidence shows that one of the Standard Model's lesser known component laws is incorrect (all the best known well as well established in a very wide range of circumstances), then the LHC may be swiftly followed by something bigger and better. We will learn that it is not the end of history, at least as far as fundamental physics goes, scientists everywhere will rejoice, and science fiction writers will imagine discoveries of currently impossible things without the least bit of guilt.

But, while we don't know which of these scenarios will come to pass, the laws of nature are already in place, so this outcome is largely a matter of destiny and fate at this point.

From here.

Benoît Mandelbrot R.I.P.

Benoît Mandelbrot died October 14, 2010.

He is the father of the fractals and the mathematics of chaos. He offered us these memorable words:

Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line.

He brought mathematical rigor to the messiness of reality without the oversimplification that his predecessors had been forced to resort to and showed us how seeming randomness and immense detail can emerge from simple, deterministic mathematical formulas. The impact of this insight on how we understand the very nature of the universe rivals the insights of Newton (the a small number of natural laws explain most of what we observe in the world), Einstein (that time and space dimensions are themselve malleable in accordance with certain physical laws) and the collective discoverers of quantum mechanics (that the laws of physics are effectively laws of probability rather than being apparently deterministic).

Mandelbrot's insights, for example, explain how slight randomness at an infinitessimal scale can limit the extent to which even massive phenomena like weather can be predicted.

The alternative definition he provided for a "dimension" as he used the concept in the context of "fractal dimensions" continues to motivate theoretical physics in areas like loop quantum gravity, where that definitional strategy can show how a four dimensional world can emergently arise from a system of nodes and connections where no coordinate system is initially defined that could help to explain at a deep level some of the oddest apparent properties of quantum mechanics, like its apparent non-locality, a possibility quickly ruled out by mere simplifyinig assumptions in the real analysis that undergirds conventional mathematical physics.

Disordered Locality

One of the most interesting ideas of loop quantum gravity is that the structure of space-time may be disordered and lack the same kind of locality found in macroscopic classical physics. A paper exploring the concept from September 2009 by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein and Lee Smolin is found here.

The basic idea is that fundamentally, space-time may be made up of a bunch of points that are connected to some other points. Points may be two, three, four, or, for example, five hundred points away from each other by the shortest route. But, it might be possible that two points that are by hundreds of other routes, no less than several hundred hops apart from each other are also connected to each other directly.

If macroscopic distance is defined to be the average number of hops that it takes to get from point A to point B by all possible routes, then non-local links are those that involve many fewer links than average. Prescod-Weinstein and Smolin's paper defines the concept in terms of volume rather than length, but the differing expressions express the same basic concept.

In this kind of world, macroscopic distance is only an emergent property of fundamental quantum distance.

A non-local connection in this theory is a bit like the science fiction concept of a wormhole, a direct connection between two macroscopically non-adjacent points. Only unlike the science fiction idea of a wormhole, each one is only big enough to fit a single quantum particle. There can be (and indeed should be) gillions of them, but if they tend to become more rare with macroscopic distance relative to local connections, then they become almost invisible in classical physics.

By analogy, in classical thermodynamics there is some probability that all of the oxygen molecules in a room will end up entirely on the North side of the room turning the South side of the room into a vacuum for a moment. But, the longer the period of time involved, and the more oxygen molecules there are involved, the less likely this is to happen. And when the probability of this happening is less than say 50% in 15 billion years (the age of the Universe) it becomes effectively impossible.

One way to interpret the probability that a photon will travel at above or below the speed of light which is a product of 1/I (in which I is the space-time distance between two points), is that it is a measure of the extent to which space-time is non-local over a distance I (we would expect non-locality to average out over greater distances in any disordered space-time model that appears to be local at the macroscopic level).

This could also help to explain a fundamental cause of the uncertainty principle. Perhaps it is impossible to know location and momentum with more than a certain degree of specificity because the concept of distance becomes increasingly ill defined as one looks closer and closer. Indeed, folks like Stephen Hawkings have used this notion of disorder to explain why one could have a "Big Bang" without having any particular moment that would clearly be the beginning of everything.

This sounds crazy and weird. And it is weird, sort of. But, not that weird.

Have you every heard of the concept "six degrees of separation"? It is a social networking idea. You might know somebody personally, and that is one degree of separation. If you know somebody who knows somebody, you are separated by two degrees of separation from that other person. The theory goes that almost no two people are separated by more than six degrees of separation.

People who are close to each other physically, for example, in the same small town or neighborhood, or who go to the same school or work at the same business, are likely to have few degrees of separation between them. People who live in worlds that are very different geographically and culturally, for example, someone on a Wisconsin farm and someone in a Papua New Guinea village with few ties to the outside world, are likely to have many degrees of separation between them.

You could probably draw a map ordered by degrees of social separation that would look very much like a map of degrees of physical separation. The linkage between social separation and physical separation would have been even stronger in pre-modern times, when travel and long distance communication were much more rare.

By analogy, fundamental distance might be analogous to our degrees of social separation based map, while apparent distance might be analogous to our physical separation map.

So, if locality is disordered, then the fundamental nature of space-time is that if you look really closely, at a point by point level, you can't line the points up neatly on a number line in any dimension of space or in time.

It gets worse. In this kind of disordered locality scenario, it may be that the number of dimensions in space-time itself is not well defined. There may be several different paths you can take to get from point A to point B, but the choices in those paths may not be clearly identified with up and down, left and right, forward and back, future and past. Four directions may eventually provide a pretty good approximation of the network, but you may need a fairly sizeable network of points for those directions to become well defined.

Thus, rather than the idea from string theory that we may have four macroscopic dimensions and six really tiny curled up dimensions, in loop quantum gravity, at small scales, the concept of the number of space-time dimensions may simply become ill defined. Both approaches are pretty weird, but the loop quantum gravity approach is "natural" by comparison; one goes from a very simple notion of space-time as points connected by lines, to a very familiar one (the four dimensional universe), without having to find a way to make six clearly predicted dimensions of space-time become invisible.

This also sounds weird, but the idea of non-integer dimensions which are emergent actually has solid mathematical precedent. It is the fundamental idea behind the concept of a "fractal dimension." The definition of a fractal dimension takes a relationship between two quantities that happen to be "1" on a line, "2" in a flat space, "3" in a three dimensionally flat space, and so on, and finds a way to generalize it so that a form that is squiggly in a certain kind of way at all scales (e.g. a shoreline) can be assigned a fractional dimension that is not an integer. It also happens that fractal dimensions are quite important in explaining a non-obviously related concept called "chaos" which is a kind of ordered near randomness that can arise when a deterministic equation is very sensitive to initial conditions. Chaotic functions tend to produce fractal shapes when plotted.

The definitions of distance and volume in a disordered locality model are quite similar in concept to the definition of dimension used in the mathematics of fractals. So, it turns out that there is already a mathematics well crafted to describing how a network could become emergently four dimensional in a mathematically consistent way.

A system that has disordered locality at a small scale is interestingly mathematically even if it isn't an accurate description of the universe. In the advanced calculus classes called "real analysis" and "complex analysis", one learned that "continuity" of a number line made up of points is a central and key assumption upon which most of advanced mathematics relies. Even discrete mathematicians, who deal with number lines where there are gaps, normally deal with far simpler systems than that approximately continuous at large scales quantum space-time that loop quantum gravity is considering.

And, there are important macroscale differences between the two approaches. For example, one of the major conclusions of the theory of social networks is that a very small number of non-local links dramatically reduce the number of degrees of separation between very large groups of people. Similarly, it doesn't take many wormholes to dramatically reduce the shortest distance between two points in space. Even a small number of non-local links can have a great effect on the behavior of the entire system.

In the paper linked above, for example, it is demonstrated that it would take only one non-local link in every box of 100km on each side to produce the dark energy effect observed in the universe, even though the effect is equivalent to about 70% of the mass-energy in the universe. A few wormholes can have immense effects.

Correlations Have Causes

The classic expression of skepticism about statistical evidence is that "correlation is not causation."

But, people often forget the converse of this observation which is that "correlations have causes."

Data can show that two things are related, which leaves the researcher with the next step of merely show why that is the case. There is a cause out there to find, and additional research need only discern which of the possible causes it could be.

The Physics of Fashion

Are the laws of physics universal? Maybe not.

When I go to the store to buy clothes, I have a certain size. If I get slacks with a 40 inch waist when I need a 38, I get slacks around my ankles. If I get slacks with a 36 inch waist when I need a 38, they never get above my thighs. If I get a large when I need an extra large sweatshirt, I virtually bust it. If I get a sweatshirt a size too big, I swim in it.

This makes perfect sense to me. A particular body size is appropriate for a particular piece of clothing. When I was a kid, back before the Internet was invented, we got the Sears Christmas catalog every year and it had a size chart. You measured different parts of your body with a tape measure, recorded them, consulted the chart, and you knew you size. Charts were available for boys, girls, men and women.

But, apparently, the laws of physics are now different for women. The same woman can go into one store a wear the same kind of clothing labeled extra small, small and medium. She can have an extended debate over whether she should wear the same dress from the same company in small or medium, discussing the intent of the manufacturer, her goals, and more, even after gathering empirical evidence in the fitting room by trying on both dresses, and still remain conflicted.

For men, length and size are objective. For women, they are subjective. They say that mystery is what makes women fascinate men. Maybe they're right.

Instinctual Human Fear

There are all sorts of dangers out there in the world. Most of them, we have to learn about from experience, either by being taught about them or "the hard way." We aren't born knowing that dark blue liquids are usually poisons, that gasoline is flammable, or that requests to deliver money to Nigeria are usually scams.

A few of our fears, however, are hardwired into our brains before we are even born.

Girls know as young as eleven months old associate snakes and spiders with fear (boys don't have that instinctual association at that age).

[T]hese findings support the idea that people have evolved a brain mechanism that primes them for learning to pair fear expressions with threats that would have repeatedly confronted prehistoric populations. . . . In [the study author's] view, bites from poisonous snakes and spiders presented a special danger to prehistoric women, whose children would have died or incurred great hardship without their mothers.

Surveys of adults and children find that 5.5 percent report snake phobias and 3.5 percent report spider phobias. These particular phobias affect roughly four times more women than men.

The study (a small one with just twenty subject) examined how infants response to pictures of different facial expressions in the presence of spiders and snakes.

"Males also develop fears and phobias about snakes and spiders" but the fears aren't manifest as early on and the phobias are less common.

Others reviewing the experimental results, offer an alternative explanation.

Another research notes that the gender differences seen in the study could also make sense if an inborn fear of spiders and snake was identical, "if 11- month-old girls generally recognize facial expressions better than their male peers." The infant study measured fear associations with spiders and snakes using pictures of faces with different expressions on them. This researcher found in her own work that 5-year-old girls recognize both threatening and non-threatening facial expressions more quickly than boys.

One of her recent studies also notes that some of the fear response may be to "snakes’ slithering motion" in particular. The study showed that "7- to 18-month-olds of both sexes look longer at movies of snakes while listening to frightened, versus happy, voices. But the same infants did not look longer at still images of snakes paired with a frightened voice, compared with snake images accompanied by a happy voice." In her view:

From an evolutionary perspective, it makes the most sense for both boys and girls to learn quickly to fear threatening stimuli such as snakes and spiders, but gender differences in fear learning warrant further investigation.

Either way, the most notable point to me is that the study confirms the widely known fact that we are born with and have access at a very early age, to a small set of instinctual fears that was evolutionarily relevant to our ancestors. While most of the knowledge we acquire during life is a matter of nurture, a small part of our memory is ancestral.

In every day life these days, some of those instinctual fears don't have a lot of evolutionary value. Dangerous snakes and spiders aren't a major threat to modern man. I suspect that some of the things we instinctually fear don't even exist anymore, in the wake of massive megafauna extinctions coincident with the rise of human and human ancestor populations on Earth. Instead, their main impacts these days seem to be phobias and the perennial popularity of certain horror movie cliches.

But, it is worth recalling that we have our instinct driven "animal" side, one which we share with all mammals. I've noted before that a disproportionate share of mental health issues seem to be associated with the part of our brain that all mammals share.

Even more intriguingly, much of what we commonly think of as especially "human" about us is also associated with this part of our brain, rather than the part that is actually unique to humans. For example, many people think of a capacity to love family members and experience fear, which are traits shared by most mammal species, as things that make us unique human. But, few people would consider species unique abilities like playing chess and translating never before seen text into language, to be quintessentially human. These days, that makes a certain amount of sense.

While in the "Age of Reason" the main question we faced in asking what it means to be human is the distinction between humans and animals, in the modern era, we ask the question mostly to distinguish between humans and computers.

The story of our struggle to understand what it means to be human these days is told more in classics like Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey, the 1983 movie War Games and Issac Asimov's I, Robot than it is by stories like Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde that were relevant to an earlier era.

Semantic Brain Organization Innate

Functional MRIs of the people show that people's brains are hard wired to store knowledge about ideas with certain meanings, such as knowledge living things and knowledge about non-living things, in particular parts of the brain. At any rate, this is at least true with respect to ideas that are identified by words or pictures.

These locations within the brain, previously associated with vision and assumed to be based upon shape, are the same for sighted people and people who have been blind all their lives. In other words, the human brain has a build in set of file cabinets into which to put ideas, even though the knowledge comes after birth and is different in detail between different people.

This is in accord with previous studies in developmental psychology and linguistics that have suggested that certain grammatical concepts and rudimentary math concepts to be hard wired in the brain. Even two year olds who cannot string grammatical sentences together themselves and know only a modest number of words, for example, notice when nouns and verbs are used in the wrong places.

The notion that there is a semantic core to all languages and inherent in the human mind, dates back to Plato and is more ambitious than mere grammatical hard wiring. Few semantic elements have been shown to be natural in humans (instinctive fear triggers that horror movies play upon are the exception that proves the rule), even though this kind of instinctive, ancestral memory is common in many species.

This information suggests that there may be a lot more to the humanity that unites us than a mere blank slate filled by experience and culture. We may be united by a common taxonomy of ideas.

This also suggests, however, that there may be inherent hard wired limitations on the sorts of thoughts that humans are capable of having.

In the same vein, people have innate intuitive assumptions about the laws of physics that do not include phenomena like those of quantum mechanics, general relativity and special relativity that are distinct only at scales that are beyond the realm of human experience in the absence of advanced laboratory instrumentation. We can learn the equations and teach ourselves these rules, but they don't come naturally.

Rare and Different II

More Examples Of Rare and Different Individuals And Their Classification

As I noted in my previous post, Rare and Different, a transgender identity is rare, frequently obvious from an early age to someone with that identity (although interpreting what transgender identity individuals feel is often far less obvious, especially to those around them), and probably hard-wired, if not from the time of conception from very early on in life.

Transgendered people are not the only people who share neurological traits which are rare, obvious and probably hard-wired to a significant extent.

Non-transgendered homosexuals, schitzophrenics and bipolar individuals, for example, also fit this pattern, and neuroscientists, psychiatrists and other behavioral scientists have studied all of these populations rather carefully, considering their rarity, because the distinctiveness of these populations has made studying them feasible far in advance of any biological hypotheses about the basis of these conditions. Indeed, there is an entire discipline, abnormal psychology, devoted to understanding those who are rare and different (many for reasons that current scientific studies suggest strong are hard-wired, and others for reasons that are ill understood or believed to be primarily cultural or sociological).

While the populations mentioned above are individually quite distinct from the rather ill-defined common sensical notion of "normal" and are relatively well defined, an enduring and core discussion in the field of psychiatry is how one draws the line between "normal" and "abnormal", and what normative content those distinctions should carry. In 2008, it is conventional and fashionable to consider transgender identities and homosexuality to be merely distinctive, while considering schitzophrenia and bipolar disorder to be illnesses.

People of good will can agree that all four of these traits are relatively rare and distinctive, that all four have strong biological components, and that all four tend to be fairly stable elements of an individual's brain, social functioning and identity throughout life. While schitzophrenia and bipolar disorder are both currently classified as "illnesses," both conditions are widely viewed as incurable but amenable to current and improved future treatment regimes as they are better understood.

The trend in addressing transgender identity, while not considered an illness per se, is to use medical treatments to "cure" not a person's distinctive mental characteristics relative to their apparent gender identity at birth, but to "cure" their physical manifestations of their apparent gender identity so that their bodies can be reconciled to a greater degree with their relatively immutable minds.

Essentially the entire respectible medical and behavioral health establishment has concluded that the appropriate response of their disciplines to homosexuality is help people who are homosexual find comfortable ways of living lives consistent with their sexual orientation, rather than engaging in any kind of medical or psychological intervention addressed at homosexuality itself.

General Boundary Issues

While these broad points of agreement exist, however, there are also difficult boundary issues excacerbated by the fact that our understanding of the biological, psychological, cultural and sociological basis of the diversity we observe in the world is ill understood.

For example, there are many neurodistinctive traits for which it is unclear if a trait is an all or nothing affair, a matter of degree in which notable populations are simply extremes of a continuous spectrum of some trait, or a combination of both.

For example, general intelligence is a trait that is widely studied and it is widely agreed by behavioral scientists that it represents a measurable trait that varies significantly in degree within the general population. Yet, we also know for a fact that some people end up deficient in that trait not out of general variation among people in this trait among people from less bright to very bright. Some people are retarded as a result of very specific genetic or environmental causes. Some of the better known genetic causes are genetically dominant single gene mutations or chromosomal defects. Some of the better known environmental causes are iodine deficencies during pregnancy and childhood lead exposure.

The jury is largely out on the question of whether any forms of high general intelligence or mental abilities have causes distinct from ordinary variation within the general population. The most notable exceptions to that rule seem to be the rather strong association between extremely high creativity and bipolar disorder on one hand, and some very rare savant phenomena on the other (one of Denver's daily's for example, reported earlier this year on the small community of people who possess the ability to recall almost everything that happened on a specific date in the past, the grain of truth behind science fiction ideas like the mentats who serve as human computers in the Dune novels by Frank Herbert). There are rather intangible qualitative differences that many educators who specialize in programs targeted at the highly gifted and talented tend to report compared, for example, to older students who have made similar academic progress. But, those observations aren't terribly systematic and I am aware of no research that has pinned down any basis other than practicality, intution and social comfort for distinguishing between those who are highly gifted and talented and those who are merely very bright.

In the area of homosexuality, there is growing partial consensus that for men, sexual orientation is more like an either/or question rather than the kind of continuum that Kinsey, et al, considered early on. There may indeed by a gray area, but those for whom there may be a gray area appear to be a small minority of all men, and of all men who are not unequivocally hetrosexual, rather than comprising a large share of the total homosexual male population. Indications at this time are that it appears that a large share of men who at any given moment identify as bisexual end up later on developing an identity either as a heterosexual man or a homosexual man. In contrast, female homosexuality, while reasonably similar to male homosexuality in prevalence and self-perception, seems to be a less stark either/or affair and seems less dramatically driven by sexual attraction alone.

Boundary Issues In Diagnosing Mental Illnesses

Boundary questions in the area of conditions predominantly considered to be mental illnesses are far more severe. On one hand, heritability studies and clinical experience have shown that even conditions as distinctive as schitzophrenia and autism tend to manifest in a range of extreme to less extreme ways.

The DSM-IV, the current diagnostic bible of the psychiatric profession, currently approaching its fifth revision, has currently reached the uncomfortable compromise position in a large share of all cases that a mental condition exists for clinical purposes only if it is proving to be a problem for the person who has it at the moment. From a practical perspective this is useful and probably appropriate when one considers that the DSM-IV is often used as a gatekeeper to mental health treatment. One gets mental health treatment only if one's condition can be diagnosed clinically with some condition described there, and the people whose lives are being screwed up by a condition are clearly the ones who should be first in line to receive this treatment. But, from a scientific and philosophical perspective, this arbitrary cutoff is vexing, as it has no strong biological basis.

For example, from a health care establishment perspective, it may make sense to diagnosis a 34 year old man who is trying to support a family with young children with an accounting career as suffering from attention deficit disorder, even if the symptoms are relatively mild as ADHD cases go, because those symptoms are wrecking havoc on his professional life, while not providing access to mental health treatment to the very same man if he is a bohemian visual artist with few material obligations whose primary repurcussions from his ADHD are that he drives gallery owners nuts by pulling all nighters before new installations and is perrenially late or a no show at coffee dates with colleagues which he has trouble recalling at the appropriate moments.

But, if one is trying to determine the biological basis of ADHD (if any), or determine what kind of hereditary basis the condition has, or measure the effectiveness of a new ADHD treatment, the DSM-IV definition which diagnosis one person, but not another, who has precisely the same underlying condition, because they have coped with their conditions differently, is maddening.

One issue that these boundary issues and non-biologically based diagnostic definitions leaves open is the extent of the overall prevalence of people who have mental (or other) traits which are rare and different when considered in isolation. What percentage of us have some biologically meaningful degree of a trait which is considered a mental illness when it is present to a degree that impairs the functioning of an individual who has not learned how to cope with it? 5%? 15%? 30%?

According to the Second Edition of the Mental Health Disorders Sourcebook, edited by Karen Bellenir (2000): "During any one-year period, up to 50 million Americans - more than 22 percent - suffer from a clearly diagnosible mental disorder involving a degree of incapacity that interferes with employment, attendance at school or daily life." Of course, the percentage of people who suffer from a clearly diagnosible mental disorder at some point is life is a fortiori higher. Also, a fortiori, more Americans suffer from subclinical expressions of mental disorders that have the same biological basis as those that are clearly diagnosible in any given year.

The Mental Health Disorders Sourcebook goes on to notes that:

20 percent of the ailments for which Americans seek a doctor's care are related to anxiety disorders, such as panic attacks . . .

Some 8 million to 14 million Americans suffer from depression each year. As many as one in five Americans will suffer at least one episode of major depression during their lifetimes.

About 12 million children under the age of 18 suffer from mental disorders such as autism, depression and hyperactivity.

Two million Americans suffer from schitzophrenic disorders and 300,000 new cases occur each year.

15.4 million American adults and 4.6 million adolescents experience serious alcohol related problems, and another 12.5 million suffer from drug abuse or dependence.

Nearly one-fourth of the elderly who are labeled as senile actually suffer from some form of mental illness that can be effectively treated.

Suicide is the third leading cause of death for persons between age 15 and 24.

The Sourcebook then goes on to argue that a very large percentage of these cases are suceptible to effective treatment, even though a very large percentage of cases suceptible to effective treatment are not in fact treated.

While some mental health conditions like a one-time episode of major depression, or one of the not uncommon types of post-traumatic stress syndrome that resolves on its own with time, or a drug addition in someone not particularly prone to addition in general, can be put behind someone once and for all, many mental health conditions are chronic and incurable because they are fundamentally aspects of who someone is, rather than curable illnesses in the conventional sense.

We don't have good data that is easily available to tell us, for example, what percentage of Americans will never suffer from a clearly diagnosible mental disorder, and what percentage of those who will suffer from a clearly diagnosible mental disorder at some point in life have chronic and incurable, but treatable mental disorders, let alone really solid details on the makeup of that population, although data and definitions are making progess. As a result, it is hard to describe with clarity the overall ecology of our society's neurodiversity with much accuracy.

In addition to struggling with the issue of whether particular mental conditions are either/or traits biologically mitigated only by the extent to which one copes well with them, or are fundamentally matters of degree, there is also the question of the extent to which mental conditions are actually distinct from each other.

The Meaning of Co-Mordidity

One of the best predictors of your likelihood of having a particular DSM-IV mental illness is the fact that you have some other DSM-IV mental illness. Co-morbidity is the rule rather than the exception for a wide range of mental illnesses under the current classification regime. But, the meaning of this well established fact is unclear.

Does this mean that there are far fewer mental illnesses than the DSM-IV suggests, and that a large share of all mental illness is really a manifestation of the same underlying phenomena?

The central importance of a fairly modest number of chemicals that serve as neurotransmitters (such as serotonin, dopamine, monamine and norepinephrine) and their related receptor and reuptake systems, and a small number of related hormonal systems (such as the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis that governs the body's fight or flight system through a cascade of hormones that culminates in production of substances like cortisol by the adrenal glands) to the neurochemistry of mental illnesses that account for a large proportion of diagnosable mental illnesses, particularly the many related to mood, suggests big macrofactors that drive the entire class of chemical imbalance driven mental illnesses (which also happen to be the most treatable because drugs are well suited to treating chemical imbalances).

Also suggestive of the possible closely related causes of many commonly diagnosed mental conditions is the extent to which so many of them seem to involve the limbic system, a part of the brain common to essentially all mammals that plays a large part in instictive responses and human emotions, despite the fact that that the limbic system makes up a fairly modest part of the total volume of the brain. Disfunctions of the amygdala, a small but critical part of the brain associated, among other things with fear, and a part of the large limbic system, seems to be implicated in a great many DSM-IV disorders that impact a great many people.

Another possibility is that there are fewer mental illnesses than the DSM-IV suggests not because of one uber-illness behind all mental illnesses with high co-mordidity, but because the mentally ill have throughout human evolution been more willing to choose their neurodiverse fellow travelers as mates. In this view, neurodiversity has produced a human ecology with some indistinct but real subpopulations high incidences of multiple mental conditions with genetic roots, and other indistinct but real subpopulations with low incidences of almost all mental conditions with a genetic basis. In this view, not only is the apparent co-mordity truly a convergence of multiple separate mental conditions, but furthermore, there may be a number of mental conditions, that are actually multiple distinct co-mordid conditions with independent genetic and/or biological or other causes, that have been classified as a single DSM-IV disorder simply because they are more often co-mordid than are seen in isolation.

For example, perhaps ADHD hyperactive type, is really simply a condition in which an impulse control/hyperactivity condition is so often co-mordid with an entirely separate inattention condition, in diagnosible conditions (subject as noted above to the impact on the individual's life threshold) that the co-mordid syndrome has been diagnosed more often than either pure impulse control deficits and hyperactive conditions without inattention, or as pure inattention without hyperactivity or impulse control problems.

I don't claim to know if that particular example is or is not a scientificly accurate statement about that condition, but simply offer it as an illustration of the concept. It could be that many DSM-IV conditions are simply syndromes in which multiple independent traits manifest in particularly distinctive ways when they are present together. Indeed, Barbara Oakley, in her book Evil Genes, has suggested that emergenic psychological traits, like psychopathy, Machievellian personalities (which may be a key component of psychopathy) and leadership may all have this character, and explores those kinds of inheritence and neurobiological models in some depth.

If this is the case for a particular DSM-IV diagnosis one would expect fairly low heritability from parent to child, for example, despite a high genetic component shown by identical v. fraternal twin comparisons; lots of "background noise" of distinctive traits that don't quite match the emergent individual's traits in family histories; and the existence of many beneficial combinations of the independent source traits that are pathological when combined in the wrong permutations.

In contrast, if heritability data were very consistent across a wide range of genetic relationships, relatively to their degree of commonality of genes, for a DSM-IV condition, and the patterns of inheritance were fairly straightforward for a particular condition, one might expect a DSM-IV condition to be unlikely to maks multiple independent conditions that merely present as a new condition because of the way that they present when they interact.

Evolutionary Biology and Neurodiversity

One of the underlying scientific questions which motivates and animates this analysis is how evolutionary biology could bring about the neurodiverse ecology we see in humanity today, particularly in the case of those who are rare and different. (Incidentally, I should offer a belated acknowledgement of A Mind Apart: Traveler's In a Neurodiverse World by Susanne Antonetta, herself a bipolar individual, as my source for the term neurodiversity. Antonetta and Oakley, in particular, have been particularly seminal in framing my views in this post and a few earlier posts, as has been Armand Marie Leroi through the book Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body.)

Usually, traits become genetically frequent because they have an adaptive purpose. But, sometimes traits simply get carried along in the kludge that is the human genome, because most of the time they don't do any decisive harm and were lucky enough to end up in the same gene pool as genes that proved highly adaptive.

Also, some astronishingly sophisticated cascades of manifested traits can arise from a quite simple (and hence prone to recur independently) genetic mutations or pre-natal circumstances. As I explored at this blog a couple of years ago, the human genome appears to be heavy on subroutines for creating biochemicals, general tissue types and the like (call them collectively material and submaterial specifications), and relatively light on morophology and big picture design directions (call this the "blue prints" of the body). Thus, we have lots of genes telling the body how to make cells in general, quite a few genes telling the body how to make the specialized tissue types that appear in your eyes, a fair number of genes telling your body how to assemble those tissue types into an organ we call your eyes, and a very slim handful telling your body how many eyes to make and where to put them.

As a result, a very small number of strategically placed mutations can produce astonishingly great apparent change of the type that intelligent design/creationist people like to call "macroevolution" in a final culminating fell swoop, such as an extra set of eyes or ears.

The patterns of distinctiveness we see in human neurodiversity suggests that the most ancient parts of our brain (e.g. those that control respiration) are extremely fine tuned, or at least, result in miscarriages when any of their moving parts go awry, because they are so central to maintaining life itself from moment to moment.

The "middle brain" is less precipitous in punishing failure, and also has a particularly detailed architecture with many finely tuned moving parts, so it is particularly prone to non-immediately life threatening errors, even maladaptive ones that either don't survive and yet recur through new mutations, or remain in the gene pool despite their maladaptive natures at low frequencies, despite their maladaptive natures.

The higher brain functions associated with the cortex and distinct largely to primates, in contrast, don't appear to be nearly so fine tuned and hard wired. We know, from the signicant similarities between most people in how particular parts of the cortex are used for particular purposes, that there is some architectural plan for the cortex in our genes, but we also know, from sources like people who have regained functionality after suffering brain damage to the part of the brain usually responsible for a particular brain function, that this part of the brain is more malleable and less specifically pre-ordained than the evolutionarily older parts of our neuroanatomy. Fewer moving parts in a genetic architecture sense, means fewer kinds of things that can go wrong with it.

Thus, for example, we have far more people who suffer from panic attacks, something linked to the limbic system's fear management system, than we do people who see grossly distorted images of the world because the highly complex visual processing architecture in their cortex has a glitch.

This isn't to say that mental illness and other rare and different forms of neurodiversity are entirely concerned with neurochemistry and the limbic system, but the disproportionate share of problems associated with these parts of the system may have something to do with the number of not instantly fatal things that go can wrong with these aspects of our brains.

This analysis is particularly pertinent to the extent that many mental illnesses have genetic causes, and that their incidence is to a great extent a function of independently recurring mutations in parts of the genome particularly prone to mutation. In this view, co-morditity is a function of the fact that some people have more mutations in the genomes than others. In particular, this analysis is supported by the strong connection between advanced paternal age and many common mental conditions which is presumed to flow from sperm mutations either as a result of accumulated mutagenic compound loads due to environmental exposures over a longer life, or due to simple reduced quality control for sperm inherent in the aging process itself. This solved the problem of why a maladaptive mutation would persist despite the selective effects of evolution, because these mutations arise over and over and over again, only to be weeded out of the gene pool again, and again and again, much like other dominant single gene mutations that have devistating physical effects.

Most of these evolutionary biology explanations, while servicable, and perhaps even correct, however, are not nearly as uplifing as the notion that those who are rare and different may provide reserves of talent to the species that allow the species as a whole to survive in rare but pivotal moments in our evolutionary history past, current and future.

The notion would be that most of the time, the human race doesn't need an Einstein or a Joan of Arc, but that the traits that allow one to be born and rise to prominence are in our genome not by accident, but because, from time to time in our evolutionary history, these rare and unique individuals have allowed our species to survive by allowing it to do what would be impossible for those who are merely ordinary and typical to do, in a Gaia/Deep Ecology kind of way.

Such notions are, of course, damnably hard to prove, but are nevertheless profoundly inspiring, and are at the root of a whole subgenre of science fiction, like the TV series Heroes or the novel Darwin's Radio in which a next big step in human evolution occurs just in time to save the world.