PRO SEPSIS GENE

//////////////////Interleukin-6 gene variants and the risk of sepsis development in children Michalek, J., et al. - A proinflamatory cytokine interleukin-6 (IL-6) plays an important role in the development, pathogenesis and outcome of SIRS, sepsis and septic shock. We have evaluated the role of the IL-6 gene polymorphisms in pediatric patients. A total of 421 consecutive pediatric patients admitted to the pediatric intensive care unit with fever, systemic inflammatory response syndrome (SIRS), sepsis, severe sepsis, septic shock, or multiple organ distress syndrome (MODS) were studied together with 644 healthy controls. DNA was isolated and two IL-6 gene polymorphisms (G-174>C and G-572>C) were analyzed [more...]
Human Immunology, 11/06/07



///////////////////////Role of Steroids on the Clinical Course and Outcome of Meconium Aspiration Syndrome Basu, S., et al. - The objective of the study was to determine whether systemic and inhalational steroid therapy can alter the clinical course of MAS and improve the outcome without causing any serious adverse effects...Conclusion: Steroids are effective in the management of MAS and route of administration does not have a bearing on the efficacy [more...]
Journal of Tropical Pediatrics, 11/06/07



///////////////////////Montelukast vs. Inhaled Low-Dose Budesonide as Monotherapy in the Treatment of Mild Persistent Asthma Kumar, V., et al. - To determine whether montelukast is as effective as budesonide in controlling mild persistent asthma as determined by FEV1...Conclusion: Montelukast is as effective as inhaled budesonide in the treatment of mild persistent asthma in children aged 5–15 years. Montelukast may be used as an alternative to low dose inhaled corticosteroids for management of mild persistent asthma [more...]
Journal of Tropical Pediatrics, 11/06/07



//////////////////////Hypoalbuminemia in Critically Ill Children Horowitz, I.N., et al. - To evaluate whether hypoalbuminemia on admission is a predictor of adverse outcome in critically ill children...Conclusion: Admission hypoalbuminemia is a significant marker of morbidity and mortality in critically ill children [more...]
Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, 11/06/07



//////////////////////Current role of vigabatrin in infantile spasms Parisi, P., et al. - Vigabatrin (VGB), a selective irreversible inhibitor of Gamma-aminobutyric acid transaminase, has proved to be effective against cryptogenic and symptomatic infantile spasms (IS). Unfortunately, reports of serious visual field defects have led to a drastic reduction in the use of the drug. This review is based on a systematic search in the literature for evidence regarding efficacy and safety of VGB in IS [more...]
European Journal of Paediatric Neurology, 11/06/07




//////////////////////*************************Big Chunk Of The Universe IsMissing -- AgainScience Daily Nov. 5, 2007*************************University of Alabama in Huntsville(UAH) researchers have found thatnew calculations might leave themass of the universe as much as tento 20 percent lighter thanpreviously calculated....http://www.kurzweilai.net/email/newsRedirect.html?newsID=7444&m=33138




//////////////////////Yoga boosts health in heart failure patients - studyReuters India - 19 hours agoBy Susan Kelly ORLANDO, Fla. (Reuters) - An eight-week regimen of yoga proved safe for patients with chronic heart failure and helped reduce signs of inflammation often linked with death, according to a study released on Monday


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////////////////////Bad cough? Check your iron levels...
October 24 2007 at 04:48AM
By Julie SteenhuysenChicago - Instead of cough drops, some women may need to reach for an iron supplement to treat that pesky cough, Italian researchers said on Tuesday.The study, presented at the scientific meeting of the American College of Chest Physicians in Chicago, suggests iron deficiency may help explain why some otherwise healthy, non-smoking women had persistent coughs.Tests on women with chronic coughs and iron deficiency showed that a simple iron supplement often cleared up the cough, said Dr Caterina Bucca of the University of Turin and colleagues.Bucca said women also are more likely than men to suffer from otherwise unexplained chronic coughs."We put the two together," Bucca said in a telephone interview. "Cough is much more frequent in women and iron deficiency is very frequent in women due to pregnancy and menses."In addition, immune function can be affected by iron deficiency, which is defined as having low iron levels, sometimes to the point of anaemia.Bucca and colleagues studied 16 women with chronic cough who were found to have normal lung function, with no signs of asthma or other respiratory disease and no evidence of acid stomach reflux that could explain their coughing.All had iron deficiencies.And they all had signs of swelling in the back of the mouth and red, inflamed mucous membranes. Their vocal cords were also very sensitive, making them cough and choke easily, such as after vigorous laughing.Bucca gave these women iron supplements to improve their iron stores. When these had normalised - after about two months - they were checked again.After iron supplementation, coughing and signs of inflammation in the mouth and vocal cords were improved or completely resolved."I found the hypersensitivity was nearly gone or vastly improved in all of the women," Bucca said.Because iron helps regulate the production of proteins in the immune system that control inflammation, an iron deficiency might make the upper airway more prone to inflammation, leading to this chronic cough, Bucca reasoned.She plans to study this association further, but she urges doctors who are stumped by women patients with chronic coughs to check for iron deficiency.



/////////////////////Public health
To avoid the Big C, stay small
Nov 1st 2007From The Economist print edition
The best ways to prevent cancer look remarkably like those needed to prevent obesity and heart disease as well
Illustration by Stephen Jeffrey
EVERY day there are new stories in the tabloids about the latest link, sometimes tenuous, sometimes contradictory, between cancer and some aspect of lifestyle. If this is a recipe for confusion, then the antidote is probably a weighty new tome from the World Cancer Research Fund (WCRF). It is the most rigorous study so far on the links between food, physical activity and cancer—and sets out the important sources of risk.
Individually (except for smoking) these risks are quite small. However, many a mickle makes a muckle, and in total they add up to something significant. Roughly speaking, smoking is responsible for a third of cancers (smoking 20 cigarettes a day increases your risk of lung cancer 20-fold), poor food and lack of exercise result in another third, and other causes account for the rest. Some of this last third are known: genetic predisposition, ultraviolet sunlight, pollutants such as pesticides, and other factors including cosmic radiation and a naturally occurring radioactive gas called radon. But the picture is undoubtedly incomplete.
The research has taken six years, involved nine research institutes, and examined more than half a million publications—which were whittled down to 7,000 relevant ones. From these, the new guidelines spring. Few come as news (see table), but the most surprising is the degree to which even being a bit overweight is a risk. One of the most important things a person can do to avoid cancer is to maintain a body mass index (BMI) of between 21 and 23. According to the WCRF's medical and scientific adviser, Martin Wiseman, each five BMI points above this range doubles the risk of post-menopausal breast cancer and colorectal cancer.


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For those unfamiliar with BMI, it is calculated by dividing a person's weight in kilograms by the square of his height in metres. Until now, a healthy BMI has been thought of as being between 18.5 and 24.9. The report implies that this range should be narrowed. It is not enough to avoid being clinically obese, or even just a bit overweight. To minimise your risk of cancer, you have to avoid getting fat at all.
Indeed, paying attention to what you eat and drink seems to be the report's watchword. The list is depressingly familiar from injunctions relating to what is coming to be known as metabolic syndrome (obesity, late-onset diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease and kidney failure, which are starting to look like symptoms of a single, underlying problem). Why cancer and metabolic syndrome might be connected is not yet clear. Cancer is caused by mutational damage to genes that otherwise hold a cell's reproductive cycle in check, and thus stop that cell proliferating. Metabolic syndrome, as its name suggests, seems to be related to the way cells process fats and sugars. There may be no direct link. But it may be that metabolic syndrome involves the production of growth-stimulating molecules that help cancers along.
On the matter of the miscellaneous final third, Devra Davis, an epidemiologist at the University of Pittsburgh and the author of a new book* on cancer, argues that more attention needs to be paid to pollutants and chemical hazards. Few Americans, she says, are aware that the roofs of 35m homes may be insulated with material containing asbestos (which is linked to a cancer called mesothelioma). She observes that a forthcoming report from America's Government Accountability Office will criticise the government for its lack of public warnings about such risks.
There is also concern in America about the overuse of medical X-rays, especially in emergency rooms. Not many people, for example, are aware that computerised tomography (CT) scanning uses large doses of X-rays. A scan of a baby's head is equivalent to between 200 and 600 chest X-rays. However, Dr Wiseman says these risks account for a trivial number of cancers and guesses the remainder are also something to do with nutrition.
Risky business
With hazards everywhere, plus the complications of genetic predisposition and age, it is hard for someone to work out his actual risk of developing either cancer or metabolic syndrome. If that is a recipe for inaction—as it often is—there may be a solution in the form of a personalised health check-up called the PreventionCompass.
This system has been developed by the Institute for Prevention and Early Diagnostics (NIPED), a firm based in Amsterdam. It requires the customer to answer a detailed questionnaire about his way of life and to undergo a series of tests. It draws its conclusions by running the results through a “knowledge system”—a database that pools expertise from many sources.
Coenraad van Kalken, NIPED's founder, says his scientists have programmed in risk factors for cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, kidney disease, lung disease, “burn-out”, depression and other psychological disturbances. The system can, for example, use family history and elevated levels of a particular protein in the blood to work out who should undergo a biopsy to look for prostate cancer. And because it looks at lifestyle as well as biochemistry, it could similarly suggest lower alcohol consumption and a colonoscopy to someone at risk of colorectal cancer.
In the case of this disease, and also breast cancer, such early diagnosis prevents a serious and incurable condition. Bob Pinedo, the director of the Free University medical centre in Amsterdam, told a symposium held by the European School of Oncology in Rome on October 26th that it costs €250,000 ($360,000) to treat (not cure) a patient with late-stage colorectal cancer for 20 months. In the Netherlands, that would pay for 1,000 colonoscopies.
Given the rising costs of dealing with cancer alone—in America this is more than $100 billion a year—prevention and early detection look set to take off. In trials of the PreventionCompass that NIPED conducted last year, more than 75% of the staff of four Dutch companies volunteered to join the scheme. Moreover, occupational-health officers in these companies claim that more than half their staff actually made changes to their way of life as a result. Not bad for a system that costs about €100 a year for each employee.
This year two large insurance companies, which provide corporate health-care, income and disability insurance to employees, are offering to lower the premiums of customers who sign up to the PreventionCompass. Next year, the plan is to extend the scheme more widely, by recruiting Dutch GPs to offer it to people from lower-income groups who do not have such private health insurance.
The message, then, is prevention, not cure. And it is a message that needs to be heeded across the world as poor countries grow wealthier and adopt the eating habits and sedentary lives of the rich. It is an irony that evolution has shaped people to enjoy fat, sugar and indolence—things in short supply to man's hunter-gatherer ancestors, and desirable in the quantities then available. Wealth allows them to be indulged in abundance. Unfortunately, human bodies have evolved neither to cope nor, easily, to resist.



/////////////////////Colossal Winds of Change
By Phil BerardelliScienceNOW Daily News2 November 2007For the first time, astronomers have observed titanic tornadoes emerging from a supermassive black hole. The intense winds--theoretical until now--blow with such force that they influence the shape of the surrounding galaxy. The find could contribute new insights to theories about the evolution of the early universe.
To make the observation, a team of astronomers from the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York state, along with colleagues at the University of Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom, studied polarized light emanating from the known active center of galaxy PG 1700+158, located about 3 billion light-years away. Black holes whip out superheated gas from their accretion disks--pulled together from material in surrounding space by their massive gravity--at such temperatures that the resulting light can outshine entire galaxies. Just as a good pair of sunglasses eliminates glare, interstellar dust can polarize the light. This allowed the astronomers to break down the light into its constituent colors, which revealed subtle shifts in its wavelengths. The team interpreted those shifts as the effect of cyclonic winds moving above and below the black hole at speeds of about 4000 kilometers per second, tens of thousands of times stronger than the most intense cyclones on Earth.
The influence of such winds extends well beyond the galaxy, says astronomer and lead author Stuart Young, who along with colleagues reports the findings in the 1 November issue of Nature. The winds may heat the surrounding intergalactic medium enough to prevent it from condensing, which halts the growth of the galaxy, he says. If so, then winds from black holes could have restricted the size of galaxies in the early universe. But astronomers will need to spot more such cyclones in order to be sure that they were common back then, Young says.
"This critical observation is the first time astronomers have been able to 'zoom in' on a black hole and watch the actual source of such power," says astronomer Kimberly Weaver of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "It's amazing new proof that the technique of simply splitting white light into different colors can be used like puzzle pieces to reconstruct speeds, directions, and shapes of material surrounding black holes--places we still cannot photograph with our telescopes."



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Our Ancestral Mind in the Modern World: An Interview with Satoshi Kanazawa
Category: Books, Science Our Ancestral Mind in the Modern World: An Interview with Satoshi Kanazawa
Posted on October 21st, 2007.
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Human behavior is notoriously complex, and there’s been no shortage of psychologists and psychological theories venturing to explain what makes us tick. Why do we get irrationally jealous? Or have midlife crises? Why do we overeat to our own detriment? Why do we find ourselves often strongly attracted to certain physical traits? Numerous theories abound, but few are perhaps as novel and thought-provoking as those suggested by a new book with a long title: Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters: From Dating, Shopping, and Praying to Going to War and Becoming a Billionaire — Two Evolutionary Psychologists Explain Why We Do What We Do. Written by Satoshi Kanazawa and Alan S. Miller, the book finds answers not in ids, egos and superegos, but in the evolution of the human brain. Written in snappy prose, their argument is essentially that our behavior — our wants, desires and impulses — are overwhelmingly shaped by the way our brain evolved 10,000+ years ago, and one consequence is that our ancestral brain is often responding to a world long ago disappeared, not the modern, fast-changing world in which we live. This disconnect can lead us to be out of sync, to act in ways that seem inexplicable or counter-productive, even to ourselves. These arguments belong to new field called “evolutionary psychology,” and we were fortunate to interview Satoshi Kanazawa (London School of Economics) and delve further into evolutionary psychology and the (sometimes dispiriting) issues it raises. Have a read, check out the book, and also see the related piece that the Freakonomics folks recently did on this book. Please note that the full interview continues after the jump.
DC: In a nutshell, what is “evolutionary psychology”? (e.g. when did the field emerge? what are the basic tenets/principles of this school of thinking?)
SK: Evolutionary psychology is the application of evolutionary biology to human cognition and behavior. For more than a century, zoologists have successfully used the unifying principles of evolution to explain the body and behavior of all animal species in nature, except for humans. Scientists held a special place for humans and made an exception for them.
In 1992, a group of psychologists and anthropologists simply asked, “Why not? Why can’t we use the principles of evolution to explain human behavior as well?” And the new science of evolutionary psychology was born. It is premised on two grand generalizations. First, all the laws of evolution by natural and sexual selection hold for humans as much as they do for all species in nature. Second, the contents of the human brain have been shaped by the forces of evolution just as much as every other part of human body. In other words, humans are animals, and as such they have been shaped by evolutionary forces just as other animals have been.
DC: Evolutionary psychology portrays us as having impulses that took form long ago, in a very pre-modern context (say, 10,000 years ago), and now these impulses are sometimes rather ill-adapted to our contemporary world. For example, in a food-scarce environment, we became programmed to eat whenever we can; now, with food abounding in many parts of the world, this impulse creates the conditions for an obesity epidemic. Given that our world will likely continue changing at a rapid pace, are we doomed to have our impulses constantly playing catch up with our environment, and does that potentially doom us as a species?
SK: In fact, we’re not playing catch up; we’re stuck. For any evolutionary change to take place, the environment has to remain more or less constant for many generations, so that evolution can select the traits that are adaptive and eliminate those that are not. When the environment undergoes rapid change within the space of a generation or two, as it has been for the last couple of millennia, if not more, then evolution can’t happen because nature can’t determine which traits to select and which to eliminate. So they remain at a standstill. Our brain (and the rest of our body) are essentially frozen in time — stuck in the Stone Age.
One example of this is that when we watch a scary movie, we get scared, and when we watch porn we get turned on. We cry when someone dies in a movie. Our brain cannot tell the difference between what’s simulated and what’s real, because this distinction didn’t exist in the Stone Age.
DC: One conclusion from your book is that we’re something of a prisoner to our hard-wiring. Yes, there is some room for us to maneuver. But, in the end, our evolved nature takes over. If all of this holds true, is there room in our world for utopian (or even mildly optimistic) political movements that look to refashion how humans behave and interact with one another? Or does this science suggest that Edmund Burke was on to something?
SK: Steven Pinker, in his 2002 book The Blank Slate, makes a very convincing argument that all Utopian visions, whether they be motivated by left-wing ideology or right-wing ideology, are doomed to failure, because they all assume that human nature is malleable. Evolutionary psychologists have discovered that the human mind is not a blank slate, a tabula rasa; humans have innate biological nature as much as any other species does, and it is not malleable. Paul H. Rubin’s 2002 book Darwinian Politics: The Evolutionary Origin of Freedom gives an evolutionary psychological account of why Burke and classical liberals (who are today called libertarians) may have been right.
As a scientist, I am not interested in Utopian visions (or any other visions for society). But it seems to me that, if you want to change the world successfully, you cannot start from false premises. Any such attempt is bound to fail. If you build a house on top of a lake on the assumption that water is solid, it will inevitably collapse and sink to the bottom of the lake, but if you recognize the fluid nature of water, you can build a successful houseboat. A houseboat may not be as good as a genuine house built on ground, but it’s better than a collapsed house on the bottom of the lake. A vision for society based on an evolutionary psychological understanding of human nature at least has a fighting chance, which is a much better than any Utopian vision based on the assumption that human nature is infinitely malleable.
DC: So give us a hint. Why do beautiful people actually have more daughters?
SK: The basic idea is this: Whenever parents have genetic traits they can pass on to their children that are more valuable for boys than for girls, then they have more sons than daughters. Conversely, whenever parents have genetic traits they can pass on to their children that are more valuable for girls than for boys, then they have more daughters than sons. Physical attractiveness — being beautiful — is good for both boys and girls, but it’s much more advantageous for girls. Physical attractiveness of a woman is one of the most important considerations for men when they select both long-term and short-term mates, but a man’s physical attractiveness is important for women only when she’s looking for short-term mates. Women like to have affairs with good-looking men, but they don’t necessarily want to marry them, unless of course they are also rich and powerful.
So beautiful daughters will be more likely to take full advantage of their physical attractiveness than beautiful sons. Beautiful daughters are more likely to pass on their genes successfully to the next generation than beautiful sons, because they are more likely to find themselves in stable marriages to desirable spouses. In a representative sample of 3,000 young Americans, those who are “very attractive” had 36% greater odds of having a daughter compared to everyone else. Similarly, studies have found that big and tall parents are more likely to have sons, and short and thin parents are more likely to have daughters, because body size is more of an advantage to men than to women. Women are attracted to big and tall men much more than men are attracted to big and tall women.
DC: In the book you debunk the notion of “midlife crisis.” Why?
SK: We don’t debunk its existence; we believe it exists. But we suggest that it might exist for different reasons than people think. Midlife crisis is a mystery for evolutionary psychology, because there is really no reason for middle-aged men to change their behavior suddenly when they reach middle age. So we speculate in the book that middle-aged men may engage in a constellation of behavior which we associate with the phrase “midlife crisis,” not because they are middle-aged, but because their wives are. When their wives reach menopause, it means that, not only is the wife’s reproductive career over, but so is the husband’s, unless, of course, he can find a younger mate to replace (or, as often happened throughout evolutionary history, add to, since humans are naturally polygynous) the menopausal wife. We believe that “midlife crisis” might be a reflection of middle-aged men’s attempt to attract younger women because their wives are no longer reproductive. So we hypothesize that a 50-year-old man married to a 25-year-old wife will not undergo midlife crisis, whereas a (very rare) 25-year-old man married to a 50-year-old wife will. And, of course, evolutionary psychology can explain why there are very few young men married to middle-aged women. If you want to know, you have to read the book!
DC: Finally, what are some of the remaining mysteries in evolutionary psychology? Are there things that you still don’t know, questions for which you still don’t have answers?
SK: There are many questions for which we don’t yet have answers. We devote our last chapter to discussing some of these questions. For example, why do most middle-class people in western industrial nations have so few children? Most middle-class Americans can easily raise five or six children, and feed, clothe, and shelter them all very well. Yet most couples only want (and have) two children. This is a mystery for evolutionary psychology.
A related mystery is the fact that there seems to be a genetic transmission of fertility from parents to children, so that parents who have many siblings tend also to have many children themselves. This makes absolutely no sense from an evolutionary psychological perspective. If your parents had many children, that means you have many brothers and sisters who carry some of your genes, so you can afford not to have many children yourself. Conversely, if you are an only child, nobody else besides you carries half of your genes, so you have to have many children to spread your genes, to compensate for your parents’ lack of reproductive success. So there should really be a negative correlation between your parents’ fertility and your own, but all the demographic studies show that the correlation is positive. Only children tend to beget only children. This is a mystery.

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Posted on October 21st, 2007 by Dan Colman Home continue to: Information R/evolution: The New Video »
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CommentsThis entry was posted on Sunday, October 21st, 2007 at 11:40 pm and is filed under Books, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
14 Comments so far
Soni on October 22, 2007 7:58 pm
“Most middle-class Americans can easily raise five or six children, and feed, clothe, and shelter them all very well. Yet most couples only want (and have) two children. This is a mystery for evolutionary psychology.”
This is hardly a mystery, at least to my mind.
It seems obvious to me that the reason to have many kids is to ensure that at least a few of them survive to pass on genes, like a dandelion. But this strategy is only actually viable in a high-stress environment, because kids take lots of resources to raise to reproductive maturity and so having tons of kids is expensive and only really works when most of them are likely to die before they reach sexual maturity anyway. Also, in a stressful environment, resources are scarce and closer to borderline in terms of ROI in producing them. Ergo, it is in the family’s best interest to have lots of workers around to ensure subsistence levels of resources are achieved.
OTOH, the advanced civilizations of Westerners all but guarantees that a high ratio of kids born will live, so they can genetically afford to have fewer and invest their surplus resources into ensuring the kids live a long and healthy life, rather than going for the dandelion approach. Plus, resource acquisition is relatively easy and therefore Westerners do not have to resort to breeding their own labor pool to ensure adequate resource accumulation.
Your mileage may vary, but it makes sense to me. Why strain your resources unnecessarily with a lot of kids if you don’t have to?
adri on October 22, 2007 8:48 pm
because their parent want more kid if the first kid beautiful and have a good chance to increase their income because a lot of people like beautiful, that can used in media such as tv, film,advertising
jason on October 23, 2007 6:35 am
“When the environment undergoes rapid change within the space of a generation or two, as it has been for the last couple of millennia, if not more, then evolution can’t happen because nature can’t determine which traits to select and which to eliminate.”
Perhaps this explains why cultures in general place high importance on conservative values and long held traditions because they are trying to stabilize environmental condition to allow evolution to occur.
Con on October 23, 2007 7:04 am
One flaw in this storyline is that the environment has actually remained sufficiently constant for most people for long periods over the last 10,000 years to be capable of driving evolution. Starting about 10,000 years ago in the Middle East, and spreading gradually around the world, the neolithic revolution turned most of the world’s population into farmers, living a lifestyle that changed very slowly between its introduction and maybe 150 years ago. This has had evolutionary effects, such as the lactose tolerance of northern Europeans whose farming systems relied (and rely) to a significant extent on milk production. My guess is that there are two main reasons for the evolutionary hang-overs in behaviour described here. One is that they have not resulted in significant disadvantages over the last 10,000 years. The other is that the evolutionary roots of much of our behaviour are very deep, shared in essence with chimpanzees and bonobos, and it would take significant evolutionary pressure to eradicate them, as opposed to driving the minimum behavioural changes required for efficient survival and reproduction.
ben on October 23, 2007 10:42 am
i hate to be a troll here, but this sounds like total bullshit.
i’m sorry
Dan Colman on October 23, 2007 11:23 am
Criticism is fine, indeed welcomed here, but how about a little substance (or else it looks like trolling)….
DC
L.B. Jeffries on October 23, 2007 12:58 pm
This is nothing new from a philosophical point of view. Olaf Stapledon broke down the species and behavior patterns from an evolutionary perspective in 1930 when he wrote ‘Last and First Men’. 2 billion years of evolution for our species, breaking them into 18 variations due to their genetic differences and behavior patterns. We, the first men, don’t fare very well.
Give it a wiki to get a better idea.
JLM on October 23, 2007 1:29 pm
I’m not sure that I necessarily agree with either the premise, or the way they are explaining the concept. The quote you sent infers that the parents are some how able to purposefully have more of one gender or the other, which I don’t think is possible.
I can sort of see how it makes sense if they are talking about populations of parents instead of individuals: a population of parents who have a trait that is more valuable to girls will quite likely have their female descendants survive/thrive better than their male descendants. However, the more I read it the more I think they are talking about individuals, in which case I think they are BSing:
“In a representative sample of 3,000 young Americans, those who are “very attractive” had 36% greater odds of having a daughter compared to everyone else.”
That makes no sense at all. There is no way that genes that will one day in the future determine how beautiful a baby is will affect the likelihood of an X-sperm fertilizing the egg over a Y-sperm… I call shenanigans.
JLM on October 23, 2007 1:30 pm
More that I disagree with:
“… and when we watch porn we get turned on. We cry when someone dies in a movie. Our brain cannot tell the difference between what’s simulated and what’s real, because this distinction didn’t exist in the Stone Age.”
It’s called empathy. I suppose that the fact that it may be a fictional story may come in to play, but I think that part is only a tiny part in why we react this way. I’m sure that neolithic hunters cried when someone told them a sad story…
JLM on October 23, 2007 1:31 pm
“For example, why do most middle-class people in western industrial nations have so few children? Most middle-class Americans can easily raise five or six children, and feed, clothe, and shelter them all very well. Yet most couples only want (and have) two children. This is a mystery for evolutionary psychology.”
It’s not a mystery. Well, it’s true in the same sense that it’s a mystery why some people like chocolate and some people don’t… It has far more to do with the fact that unlike previous generations/societies, we don’t need to have many children to help us provide for ourselves. Thus, the negatives associated by some with having many children VASTLY outweigh the positives, and so we don’t have as many children. This is also very much a cultural issue, but I don’t think it has a god damn thing to do with evolutionary psychology; or rather, it has no more to do with it than it does with a myriad of other issues. Obviously evolutionary psychology is important, very important in particular issues, but I think these guys are out to lunch with what they’ve said in this interview.
Roberto Gonzalez-Plaza on October 24, 2007 9:08 am
There is no science-substance-behind this book: pure fantasy. Read Kanazawa, Satoshi. 2007. “Beautiful Parents Have More Daughters: A Further Implication of the Generalized Trivers-Willard Hypothesis (gTWH)”, Journal of Theoretical Biology. 244: 133-140. Nada, zilch. We should select for better editors….
JLM on October 24, 2007 9:47 am
Alright, it’s finally sunk in; it was what I said in the first post; they aren’t explaining it very well. It took me this long to realize that they were talking implicitly about a gender-having genes but explicitly about the beautiful-having genes.
That is, genes that increase the tendency to have a particular gender will become tied to the genes that benefit a particular gender:
This link would happen when the two genes “met in the wild”: there was a bigger advantage for the beautiful+girl-having combo than any of the other combos (beautiful+boy-having, ugly+boy-having, ugly+girl-having), and so that combo proliferated more effectively. In fact, it proliferated more effectively than the other beautiful+? combos, and thus, created the correlation between being beautiful and having girl-having genes.
CPR on October 26, 2007 1:18 pm
This is another example of extremely shoddy thinking being passed off as cutting edge science. They don’t even know the basics of when EP originated: they say it began in 1992, which is totally wrong. E.O. Wilson published SOCIOBIOLOGY in 1975. This was the origins of applying evolutionary theory to human behavior. The authors’ apparent ignorance of the fact that evolutionary psychology is simply another name for sociobiology is shameful.
As previous comments have noted, the premise that evolutionary processes are “stuck” and that significant change cannot have happened in 10,000 years is simply false. Not just false, but embarrassingly so.
EP could be a useful, important discipline, but it is dominated by people like these (and Pinker) who are peddling sloppy thinking in lieu of serious science.
J. Goodrich on November 2, 2007 7:30 pm
You should note that Mr. Kanazawa has never actually shown that beautiful people have more daughters. The original piece was shown to be faulty by professor Mark Gelman. Links to Gelman’s work:
a href=”http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/kanazawa.pdf
a href=”http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/unpublished/power.pdf
Also check out his blog post on the same topic:
www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2007/08/the_most_beauti.html
I have a series of posts on Mr. Kanazawa’s arguments. This link takes you to the last post which gives the links to earlier ones:http://echidneofthesnakes.blogspot.com/2007_07_01_archive.html#2846602295158944466
A final post on the question is here:http://echidneofthesnakes.blogspot.com/2007_09_01_archive.html#2386730832932158479




///////////////////////As Oliver Sacks observes the mind through music, his belief in a science of empathy takes on new dimension.
by Jonah Lehrer • Posted October 29, 2007 01:29 PM
Photograph by Doron Gild
In 1974 Oliver Sacks was climbing a mountain in Norway by himself. It was early afternoon, and he had just begun his descent when a slight misstep sent him careening over a rocky cliff. His left leg was "twisted grotesquely" beneath his body, his limp knee wracked with pain. "My knee could not support any weight at all, but just buckled beneath me," he wrote in A Leg to Stand On. Sacks began to "row" himself down the mountain, sliding on his back and pushing with his hands, so that his leg, which he'd splinted with his umbrella, was "hanging nervelessly" in front of him. After a few hours, Sacks was exhausted, but he knew that if he stopped he would not survive the cold night.
What kept Sacks going was music. As he painstakingly descended the mountain, he began to make a melody out of his movements. "I fell into a rhythm," Sacks writes, "guided by a sort of marching or rowing song, sometimes the Volga Boatman's Song, sometimes a monotonous chant of my own. I found myself perfectly coordinated by this rhythm—or perhaps subordinated would be a better term: The musical beat was generated within me, and all my muscles responded obediently...I was musicked along." Sacks reached the village at the bottom of the mountain just before nightfall.
A long convalescence followed, as he tried to regain the use of his injured leg, but the nerves in his limb had been severely damaged. When Sacks tried to walk, he was forced to consciously calculate his movements, to think before each step.
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Once again, Sacks was saved by the sudden appearance of song. As he was struggling with physical therapy—and growing increasingly frustrated—his mind was inexplicably filled with the resonant strings of Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto. "In the moment that this inner music started," Sacks recounts, "the leg came back. With no warning, no transition whatever, the leg felt alive, and real, and mine." Sacks would later describe his vivid hallucinations of the Concerto as a kind of miracle, in which the music "descended like grace," reminding him of his own "kinetic melody." The song had restored him to himself.
I'm sitting in Oliver Sacks's office in New York City's Greenwich Village. Bookshelves are cluttered with neurological texts and periodic-table paraphernalia, so that a rod of tungsten (his favorite element) sits next to the collected works of William James. The air conditioner is perpetually set on high, its wheeze so loud that it drowns out the noises of city and street. This is where Sacks writes, at a desk facing the window by the air conditioner, on long yellow sheets fed into a manual typewriter. "I like the clacking of the keys," he says. "I can't write without that sound."
Sacks's latest book is Musicophilia, an exploration of the musical mind. As in his previous works, such as An Anthropologist on Mars, or The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Sacks describes a series of ordinary people transformed by their extraordinary neurological conditions. He writes, for instance, of Tony Cicoria, who, after being struck by lightning, suddenly developed an insatiable obsession with Chopin's piano music. Before the accident, Tony had been a respected surgeon, with little interest in classical music. But now he insisted on spending all of his spare time practicing the piano. He even began composing his own pieces, "giving form to the music continually running in his head." Sacks also describes the case of Martin, who developed uncanny musical talents after contracting meningitis as a child. While the affliction impaired many aspects of Martin's mind, it left him with a limitless auditory memory. And then there's Mrs. C., who was besieged by musical hallucinations after becoming deaf. She couldn't stop hearing Christmas carols.
But Musicophilia is not just a collection of neurological case studies. There is an unexpected thread running through the book. That thread is Sacks's life. Even as he explores the neurology of music, Sacks returns, again and again, to stories from his own past, almost as if he's rediscovering them. There are the famous patients from Awakenings, who were unfrozen by the sound of music. There are the musical hallucinations of his mother, who, at the age of 70, was temporarily seized by patriotic songs from her childhood. And there's the tale of Sacks's own musical healing so that at times it feels like a memoir told through the prism of music. In Musicophilia, Sacks is both a sensitive observer and a subject. As usual, his own story is inseparable from the stories of his patients.
"I had no intention of writing a book devoted to music," Sacks says. "I'm not a musician or an expert on music...but this book found me. I began to revisit all of these older stories and present them in an explicitly musical light. That's the way writing is sometimes. One doesn't know what story one is telling until the story is told."
At first glance, music seems like an unlikely theme for Sacks. He's hard of hearing, and has to turn down his beloved air conditioner during our conversation. There's also something distinctly unmusical about Sacks's movements. He is charmingly clumsy, and his fingers are constantly fumbling with things, be it a mug of tea or that rod of tungsten. Sacks bears the scars of numerous falls, and says that he's so accident-prone his friends were convinced he wouldn't make it past the age of 30. It's hard to imagine his hands playing a piano (which, very occasionally, they do).
And yet, Sacks has always been enthralled by music. One of his earliest childhood memories is the sound of his mother singing Schubert Lieder in the drawing room. As a teenager, he spent endless hours "trembling" to Mozart symphonies, transfixed by feelings he couldn't comprehend.
Music has also played a crucial role in Sacks's work as a neurologist. In his writings, he uses music as a metaphor for his unusual approach to medicine. He cites a Novalis aphorism—"Every disease is a musical problem; every cure is a musical solution"—in several books, usually when discussing the therapeutic powers of music. But it's clear that Sacks also believes in a deeper, less literal connection between medicine and music, which is why Musicophilia reads like a retrospective. Music encapsulates two of the most essential aspects of his work: listening and feeling. The art form is the model for his method. As a doctor, Sacks is exquisitely attentive, not just to the symptoms, but also to the person. He treats each patient like a piece of music, a complex creation that must be felt to be understood. Sacks listens intensely so that he can feel what it's like, so that he can develop an "intuitive sympathy" with the individual. It is this basic connection, a connection that defies explanation, that allows Sacks to heal his patients, letting them recover what has been lost: their sense of self.
Of course Sacks is still a neurologist, intimate with the folds of the brain and the advances in neuroscience toward understanding our relationship with music. He knows that how we experience music is just an emanation of the temporal lobe, a side effect of neural electricity. But Sacks remains most interested in what anatomy lessons alone can't explain. "There is also a certain danger here," he observes. "A danger that the art of observation may be lost, and the richness of the human context ignored."
Sacks relays in Musicophilia, for example, the case of Dr. P, the infamous patient who mistook his wife for a hat. Dr. P's surreal condition left him unable to perceive objects and people, so that he was "lost in a world of lifeless abstractions." One of the most telling lines in the case history comes at the end, when Sacks is presenting his formal clinical diagnosis: "a massive tumor or degenerative processes in the visual parts of the brain." That single sentence, an ambiguous afterthought, is Sacks's sole nod to "classical, schematic neurology." Instead of looking for the physical source of the illness, Sacks immerses himself in the life of the patient. He describes Dr. P's experiences as a music teacher and the ways in which the sound of music eases his sensory confusion. (In order to get dressed, Dr. P had to sing to himself.) When Dr. P asks Sacks what's wrong with his brain, Sacks replies, "I can't tell you what I find wrong, but I'll say what I find right. You are a wonderful musician, and music is your life. What I would prescribe is a life which consists entirely of music." It's an astonishing prescription, wholly focused on preserving Dr. P's tenuous identity. This is what Sacks tries to treat: not the disease, not even the brain afflicted by it, but the person. Any science of the mind that "neglects the personal," Sacks says, "misses out on our most essential aspect." Although he meticulously follows the latest advances in neuroscience and applies that knowledge to his patients, Sacks is ultimately guided by his sympathetic instincts, his uncanny ear for the consonances and dissonances of being. "We underestimate the power of listening," Sacks says. "It is by listening to our patients that we can discover their humanity. It is the only way to grasp what they are going through."
Photograph by Doron Gild
Sacks was not always such a sympathetic character. Empathy was an epiphany for him, a late revelation. Long before Sacks was a famous neurologist, he was a struggling writer. After he received his medical degree from Oxford, Sacks decided to wander the world. He began, in 1960, with America. His parents thought his trip was just a brief vacation, but once he arrived, Sacks sent them a one-word telegram: "Staying." He traveled across the continent by motorcycle, racking up more than 10,000 miles on an "erratic, zigzag" journey. He fought wildfires in British Columbia and hitchhiked across Alabama with a trucker named Mac. He called himself "Wolf."
At the time, Sacks despaired of ever becoming a doctor. In a journal entry written in the summer of 1960, Sacks confessed that medicine wasn't his chosen profession. "Others chose it for me," he wrote. "Now I only want to wander and write. I think I shall be a logger for a year." While Sacks rarely talks about these years of his life—"They remain a bit of a mystery, even to me," he says—excerpts from his immense travel journals, which he reads aloud to me in a vintage British accent, provide a window into his development, both as a writer and as a person. Many of the entries resemble early Kerouac, filled with odes to the open road and vaguely mystical encounters with nature. His prose is loose yet lucid. And yet, this isn't the writing of the Oliver Sacks the world knows. Something is different.
Sacks had begun sending his journals to his friend Thom Gunn, a British poet living in San Francisco. While Gunn enjoyed Sacks's acutely observed travelogues, he found parts of the journals to be a "little nasty," full of "sarcasms and grotesqueries." Gunn would later write Sacks a letter in which he confided that, after reading Sacks's early prose, he had "despaired of your [Sacks] ever becoming a good writer...I found you so talented, but so deficient in one quality—call it humanity, or sympathy, or something like that."
In 1961, after a year on the road, Sacks finally "settled down" and began an internship at Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco. After completing a residency at UCLA, he moved to the Bronx and got a job in New York working in a neuropathology lab at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. "I was awful at bench science," Sacks says. "Truly awful. I think the final straw was when I dropped some food into the ultracentrifuge. They said to me, 'Sacks, get out, you're a menace. Go see patients: You won't be able to do much harm to them.' That's when they sent me to Beth Abraham."
Beth Abraham was a chronic hospital, an asylum for patients for whom there was no cure. In this hopeless place, Sacks ended up working with the most hopeless patients. He was drawn to the "sleeping sickness" ward, filled with people who had been locked in a Parkinsonian trance for decades. An aftereffect of the 1920s encephalitis epidemic, the disease left the patients in an "ontological death," numb to everything around them.
Sacks was deeply moved by these frozen patients. "It was the experience of Beth Abraham that changed me," he says. "It was where I really came alive, almost for the first time in twenty years. I didn't just care for these patients. I lived with these patients." There was no medical treatment for sleeping sickness, and Sacks had nothing to offer the patients but unconditional kindness. "All I wanted was to give them a sense of being people again," he says, "to let them forge human relationships again, even if it was only with me."
In 1969 Sacks began a 90-day clinical study of L-DOPA, a new drug that was heralded as a miracle cure for Parkinson's patients. One group of his patients received the drug, while the other group received a placebo. The effects were immediate and profound. There was an "astonishing, festive 'awakening,'" as the L-DOPA patients suddenly emerged from their timeless limbo.
But the drug wasn't a cure. After a few months of treatment, Sacks's patients began to develop serious side effects, as their diseased brains adjusted to the increased levels of dopamine. And then, one by one, the patients began to sink back into their restless sleep. The "miracle" was temporary.
The following summer, Sacks sent a letter to The Journal of the American Medical Association, documenting the tragic results of his clinical study. His short letter provoked a storm of criticism. Some neurologists declared that the side effects never occurred, and that L-DOPA really was a cure. Others assailed Sacks for being "against L-DOPA" and for not properly controlling his study.
In his defense, Sacks wrote a detailed report describing the personal experiences of his patients, but every major medical and neurological journal rejected it. That's when Sacks realized the problem wasn't L-DOPA; it was the way medicine treated the mind. Modern neurology had become a hard science, a subject of mechanical circuits and anatomical anomalies. Treating patients meant fixing their matter. But Sacks had become acutely aware of what such brute materialism left out. It treated symptoms, not people, and had lost a sense of basic human empathy. The same quality that Thom Gunn had found lacking in Sacks's journals, Sacks now found lacking in modern medicine.
The inability to publish a medical article led Sacks to explore a new kind of medical writing. He was initially inspired by the work of A.R. Luria, a Soviet neurologist who had published two extended case histories that boldly merged clinical descriptions with, as Sacks puts it, "an empathic entering into patients' experiences and worlds." (When Sacks first read Luria's work, he assumed it was fiction.) "When I began writing," Sacks says, "I realized that I was going against the trend. Few doctors wrote case histories anymore. But I had been moved by these patients—I suppose I had fallen in love with them, you might say—and so I needed to tell their stories."
In the summer of 1972, Sacks returned to London, renting a small flat on the edge of Hampstead Heath. He had grown close to W.H. Auden, the British poet who occasionally visited Sacks at Beth Abraham. Auden encouraged Sacks to "transcend medical writing, to find some radically new and very personal form." And so, with Luria as his model and Auden as his mentor, Sacks wrote Awakenings, the story of his patients' experiences on L-DOPA. The prose poured out of him, and he wrote most of the book in just a few weeks. It was a strange composition, equal parts neurology and biography, filled with erudite digressions into dopamine, Leibniz, and the perception of time. The science of the disease was delicately interwoven with descriptions of his "intense sense of fellow-feeling" for the patients. Sacks had found his form.
The book was greeted with high literary acclaim and scientific disdain. (Auden declared it a "masterpiece.") "There was one particular review which stung me greatly," Sacks says now. "It said 'Dr. Sacks is clearly imaginative, and he's invented a set of impossible patients.'" Other doctors were dismissive of Sacks's admission of empathy. What kind of neurologist fell in love with his patients?
The work, however, has outlived the criticism: Sacks's writerly form is now its own literary genre. It's easy to take his originality for granted, to forget how unlikely it is that a book about neurological disorders would become a bestseller, or that a bearded neurologist would become a cultural icon. Sacks has used the broken brain as a point of entry into the mind, so that readers learn about the perception of colors from a color-blind painter, or about the structure of memory from a man who has none. But the real lesson of Sacks's work goes far beyond the confines of scientific knowledge. His case histories are essays in empathy, sincere attempts to enter into the experience of someone else, to know the individual and not just the disease. Sacks wants the kind of knowledge that can be known only through love, through listening.
Eighteen months ago, Sacks noticed a looming shadow in his field of vision. The darkness was ocular melanoma, a rare type of eye cancer. The cancer slowly spread, and Sacks felt his sight recede. As a neurologist, he is morbidly fascinated by his own condition and keeps detailed notes on all of his visual problems. "My scotoma [blind spot] is Australia-shaped," Sacks says, "about thirty degrees across. It's almost like a window, and there are constantly hallucinations inside it. Just this morning I was staring at my clock radio and saw a crowd of tiny people inside it."
Sacks shows me his "melanoma journals"—"Melanoma is such a lovely word," he remarks—which are full of rough sketches of his visual sensations. There is one drawing that shows a torso with a scratched-out face, just a slew of horizontal lines. "That's my first horrified sketch of when I couldn't see my own head," Sacks says. "I looked in the mirror one morning, and there was just a shadow there." Sacks is also fascinated by how his mind compensates for the blind spot, automatically "filling in" the new void in his senses. "If I wait for a few moments," he says, "The form just creeps in from the periphery, like ice crystallizing. And then I look away, and the scotoma returns."
There is something deeply poignant about watching Sacks deal with his decaying sight. It's as if he's become a character from one of his books, bewildered by his own brain. He can't help but continually interrupt himself in conversation, remarking on the strangeness of what he's just experienced. His desk is littered with typewritten pages about his blind spot, which he struggles to type since he can't see the keys. "I've always had a great fear of losing central vision. Especially in the past few weeks, it seems to get worse each day," Sacks says. "But now I've come to a deal with the melanoma. If it takes my vision and leaves me my life, that's okay with me."
In his books, Sacks often describes his patients in heroic terms, as they struggle to maintain their identity in the face of disease. Sacks is no exception. The illness hasn't diminished his charming eccentricities. He remains obsessed with the periodic table, ferns, and cephalopods. He swims every day. When Sacks is talking about something that excites him, his voice slips into a slight stammer, as his mouth struggles to keep up with his thoughts. Although he calls his shyness a "disease," he is as exuberant as ever, eager to celebrate the world and its wonders.
Music brings out this romantic side of Sacks, providing him with a deep sense of comfort as cancer erodes his sight. He tends to get passionate about particular pieces of music and will listen, almost exclusively, to the same song or symphony for weeks at a time. Sacks revels in the mysteriousness of music and likes to quote Schopenhauer on its "inexpressible depth...so easy to understand and yet so inexplicable."
One of the final stories in Musicophilia is that of Clive Wearing, an English musician and musicologist who was struck by a severe brain infection that decimated his memory. As a result, Clive lives inside brief parentheses of time, just a few seconds long. "Desperate to hold on to something," Sacks writes, "Clive started to keep a journal. But his journal entries consisted, essentially, of the statements 'I am awake' or 'I am conscious,' entered again and again every few minutes."
The only thing that comforts Clive is music. When he is playing the piano, Clive is suddenly "himself again." A Bach prelude can't recover his past, but it does allow him to be fully immersed in the present tense. He can share, if only for a moment, the emotions of the melody. The music is a "bridge across the abyss," a temporary relief from the terrifying loneliness of his amnesia.
Sacks relays numerous similar stories of musical healing—in many instances, an awareness of music is a person's last awareness. "I have seen deeply demented patients weep or shiver as they listen to music," Sacks writes. "Once one has seen such responses, one knows that there is still a self to be called upon, even if music, and only music, can do the calling." He likes to quote a shard of a T.S. Eliot poem: "We are the music while the music lasts." For Sacks, the line is literally true. He knows that music is often the final means of human connection, our closing form of comfort. It is what we have when we have nothing else.




/////////////////////////CREDIT-CURIOUS MATHS=What is the largest number you can write with just 3 digits?
Tuesday, September 07, 2004 - 01:25 PM

No symbols and characters allowed. (Here's a hint: it's not 999)
Ask someone to write the largest three digit number and they'll respond with 999. Logical answer, but we can go bigger.Some may get the "power" brainwave and think of 999 (99 to the power of 9), which calculates out as 99*99*99*99*99*99*99*99*99.Even better is 999 (9 to the power of 99) which calculates out as 9*9*9*9*9*9*9 ... and so on 99 times.The correct answer, however, if you extend the idea even further ends up as...999 (9 to the 9th power of 9).Work out the second and third powers first (9*9*9*9*9*9*9*9*9 = 387420489.) We can therefore restate the sum as 9387420489 which works out as.... very very big indeed.No great mathematics needed here but a useful quick trick to ask children who think they are good at maths!


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