RATS, FISHES AND MEIOSIS

This post started out to be about rats, but then I read a story about fish and it changed.  There are two rat stories, “Rat Park” and another previous experiment that I forget the name of, that were about the influence of environment on rats.  The one I forget the name of was a habitat that was fine -- various, interesting, provided food and places to sleep, places to interact, etc.  It was built in an old barn, rats could not get out of it, and scientists took a lot of statistics which I will sum up by saying that they just let the rats procreate to suit themselves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink and 
http://io9.com/how-rats-turned-their-private-paradise-into-a-terrifyin-1687584457

The result of this was that the population built up to a high rat density.  When it hit a certain point, the rats went ghetto.  They formed gangs, fought for dominance, killed the babies of rival gangs (and sometimes their own), and were generally sociopaths.  They abused females, hoarded food, damaged their environment.  I don’t remember anything about drugs.

The second experiment, which has been named “Rat Park” was about addiction.  The scientists noticed that when studying rats getting hooked, they were confined in sterile boxes with nothing much to do except choose between a bottle of cocaine water and a bottle of plain water.  They ingested cocaine until they died.  So the new experiment was to build a habitat for rats that was pleasant (on rat terms): things to do, places to explore, little niches for hiding and sleeping, different stuff to eat, other rats to meet, and so on, but the population was controlled.  They also had access to cocaine water.  But they rarely used it.  Addiction turned out to be a function of the environment.  At least very much affected by it.  Give those at-risk addicts something to do that really interests them and a safe, warm, fed place to do it and the addiction disappears.  It’s not a moral issue nor due to the nature of the substance.

Hotter weather can flip genders.

So here’s the twist.  The weather strangeness is killing a lot of fish and other aquatic creatures, but it’s also changing the sexes of some of them.  We’ve always known that turtle eggs, for instance, are gender-changed according to the temperature of the sand nest where their mother left them.  Other times something botanical or chemical would flip them from one gender “side” to the other.  Or just slide them along the continuum, sometimes into a change that made reproduction impossible.

So it turns out that there are three entities that must be involved for successful meiosis, which is the capacity of animals to disentangle one half of the double helix of genetic instructions in a cell, transport it into another cell, and twine it together with a different half of a different double helix which has managed to keep the whole cell except for that half-of-a-helix which it somehow had gotten rid of.  (Where does it go?)  Then when the cell goes to reproduce, the collaborating halves of the double helix have new instructions and make a slightly different creature.

Anthropomorphism in material culture

The environment then slips into the “marriage” with temperature, salinity, nutrition, hormones evoked in the cell by its attachment to the “cradle” or uterus of the ovum’s creator or a close enough version (maybe a different female) for the molecular reactions to work.  This is not mutation nor evolution: it is the direct condition of development.

I used to “preach” a kind of ethics by saying that the uterus is the cradle of fertilized egg, the woman is the cradle of the uterus, the man is the cradle of the woman, the culture is the cradle of the marriage, the ecology is the cradle of the culture, the ecology is the cradle of the planet, and the solarsphere is the cradle of the planet.  You wanna talk Russian dolls?  That’s not all there is to it.

How can the “germinal” chromosome with the instructions for all this stuff be changed?  The chromosome is XX or XY, as we know from CSI shows.  So far in the shows I've watched, there have been no DNA samples that came up XXY or XYY, which exist in nature with various consequences, and no YY’s because the X has most of the instructions for the actual ovum cell on it.  The new creature doesn’t have enough information to grow, so it dies before the zygote forms.

Even more strangely, Y’s are X’s with one leg missing.  I can see how to convert an X to a Y.  But how can a Y change to an X?  Where does it get the info?  (I’m leaving out surgery and hormone supplements for the trans person.)  Of course, I’m talking sea creatures which are far  simpler than a human being.

Mammal chromosomes are complex.  I may not have this quite right (odds are that I’m wrong) but as I get it there are three elements to that spiral helix.  There is a sort of spine inside the helix that the DNA info can twine around and link across without losing the sequence of information.  Then there’s a kind of sleeve of on/off molecules (methylation) that can affect any gene and they come from the environment.  We have figured out these change-makers and can now turn single genes on and off at will.  Of course, we don’t necessarily know what this will do.  To turn off something as complex as schizophrenia we probably need to turn off or on hundreds of individual genes who cause the disorder by interacting in mysterious ways.  But there are some inherited disorders that can be simply turned on or off.

I’m not just talking about that.  The entire environment is always acting on the whole human being in its nested complex way.  The culture is the part of the environment that uses morality and economics and violence to control what happens.  Not always consciously -- more often not -- but ever since we stopped being hunter/gatherers we’ve been teaching our bodies to digest grain and milk, teaching our sons to be priests, teaching our daughters to be courtesans, and teaching our children quite different lessons about spaces, like who owns it and how to guard it.  We've also been teaching other creatures, including disease vectors, how to use us.

Adapted from a shipping container

So I get the following basic premises.  Mammal overpopulation is a source of criminality.  Environment controls addictions.  The kind of people we are comes from our environment.  It’s possible that the more we live in dense, built, confining spaces, the more we will be kinds of persons who destroy -- eventually themselves.  Watching them die will be painful, whether they are woman hardly more than bones carrying her withered last child across the desert in search of food and water, or bloated celebrities who overdose, already lost before they do that.  Or our own family members.

What stands against that is attachment, rationality, and empathy.  Those are human qualities.  Should I say XYE?   E being the third part of the creative equation?  The algebra, the algorithm of survival.