THE BACK OF THE BOX

When I was a kid (b.1939), vitamins were such a new idea that the Cheerios box featured educational comics with little pixies, each representing a different vitamin, and a girl named Cheery.  Today Honey Nut Cheerios have had to be taken off the market because people are allergic to nuts, and the new recipe for the dough is announced to be “gluten free.”  We have gone from looking for good things to add to looking for bad things to remove.  

I remember having measles, scarlet fever, and chicken pox.  One of my brothers had rheumatic fever, which can affect the heart.  He did develop a bit of a heart murmur which obsessed my mother ever after, though he was cleared to compete in wrestling in high school and had no problem.  Now people in small towns nearly force their boys to play aggressive football, even knowing that it will probably at some point cause brain damage from concussions.  Our ideas about what is dangerous, esp. for children, change all the time.

Other ideas about what to do will persist without anyone even noticing.  Here’s a benign example:  people know I have a lot of books and that I write all the time.  Their assumption is that it’s like the reading they know, which was mostly in school.  They ask, “How many books do you read in a week?  Three or four?”  The number of books read in a time period is the way schools and libraries try to encourage reading.  You read it, then discard the book.  It’s over.  Consumed.  Consumer thinking.

But I read half-a-dozen books at a time.  Sometimes I only read a few pages, put the book down, come back to it months or even years later.  I read by chasing themes in content, or because there’s a side-issue that’s suddenly gripping.  On the shelves I try to keep general subjects together, which means the contents may be separated in the writing by years.  My grandmother’s books mix with what came in the mail today.

Jared Diamond’s “The World Until Yesterday” is living in the bathroom where I’m working my way through child-raising practices in self-contained tribes away from “civilization.”  More focused on coping with trauma and predation (tigers) than on diseases, there are strategies so negligent that adults often have burn marks from getting too close to fires.  No one intercepted them or taught them not to get close.  Compare with modern fire-retardant chemically treated child’s pajamas which turned out to get into the child’s system with damaging consequences.

On the other hand, children growing up in the Amazon rain forest where dangers are everywhere, are on their mother’s backs at first, then within her reach, then within her eyesight which is close in a jungle.  Lifelong, they go in groups.  But in safer places, like the Australian outback, Diamond assures us that the infamous deadly snakes are rare and there are no big mammal predators.  Children go on “walkabout” alone.

My copy of Gambles’ “Origins and Revolutions” is traveling through the house everywhere.  I have to hunt it down because I read short bits, need a quote, or am ready for the next bite.  Then I’m distracted and put it down in a new place.  I need Diamond’s information about tribes, in that constantly on-going dialogue we’re all having about whether things are getting better or worse and what changes we should make.  Once we accept responsibility for ourselves and our lives, how they evolve, we have a lot of research and thinking to do.   

Are isolated change-resistant enclaves, like the upscale mothers of Marin County — who refuse vaccination and thereby start epidemics — right to so emphasize what’s “natural”?  There are tribes who leave their children almost entirely unsupervised.  Child mortality is high, but those who survive are the ones with brains, gumption, and confidence.  The adults are admirable, except not very compassionate. There is an isolated group that cherishes their babies, refuses all abortion, tolerates handicaps.  The gene for club feet is in this closed population and the rate of affliction has risen to 15% of the babies.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2075152-did-zikas-recent-mutations-let-it-explode-as-a-global-threat/?cmpid=NLC|NSNS|2016-2801-GLOB&utm_medium=NLC&utm_source=NSNSAL

Clearly the way we raise our children is an interaction among morality, danger, attachment, and all sorts of other contingencies.  Now, as this new plague traveling with the mosquitoes expanding their territory across oceans because of airplanes and climate warming, and the first horrific cases of babies with tiny heads are beginning to hint that there are other consequences due to the same virus (possibly paralysis), the best we can do is to warn women not to get pregnant.  As though that ever works!  Women have been warned not to get pregnant for centuries. Might as well warn mosquitoes not to bite.  And I’m not looking forward to the mosquito-phobes (who also tend to be bat-phobes) insisting on intense spraying of Valier this summer.  (Dandelions are also a target.)

When I was a kid, childhood diseases were considered inevitable.  We were all vaccinated for smallpox.  A classmate died of tetanus because her father wouldn’t get her the vaccine because they were poor and it was costly.  About the time I was born, the daughter next door died of polio.  Luckily we never got mumps or whooping cough, since there were no vaccines for them.  Now there are, but people still resist.  Vaccination was a group experience when we lined up in grade school, but now in the US it is likely to be a private experience, which makes it easier to refuse.

I got pneumonia and had a penicillin shot.  Since my bed was up against one of the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that lined our house, I found “Riders of the Purple Sage” and read it in a fever haze, my first grownup novel.  Earlier, when my brother had rheumatic fever, I was put to sleep on the couch downstairs, which was very exotic to me.  I had the idea that people only slept on the second floor.  I had found “Biography of a Grizzly” which was a small book with little drawings, so I read it all night while the mantel clock struck away the hours.
  

That's a geyser, not a volcano.

The story happens near Yellowstone.

Engulfed in grief for poor Wahb, dying old and alone, I finished about the time the others got up and had to convince them my fatigue and red eyes were not a symptom.  When I discovered that my mother, on medical advice, had burned my entire paperdoll collection, a village that lived in a suitbox under the brothers’ bed, it seemed to me related to the death of Wahb.  

Holocaust, natural death, disease, and care-taking were combined.  Every bit of fabric was washed with bleach or Lysol.  All surfaces in the room were scrubbed.  Somehow my father’s books were ignored.  It was as though books were a kind of privileged status, protected and protective.  They made your brain big.

When I googled for information about Zika, what I got was advertising for an amusing video game called “Tiny Brains”.  So here’s what we’re teaching kids:  you are entitled, privileged and smart BECAUSE of adults helicoptering your lives and emphasizing amusement.  The adult bargain with fate is that if they pour every attention and expense into the present happiness of their children, other people’s children can go to hell.  They don’t even need school lunches.  And if you don’t obey the adults, they will withdraw that support and kick you out, the same as your boss treats you at work.  What this kind of attitude creates is genocide supporters and gated cities.

By Jim Kirwan

But the planet is relentless.  Mosquitoes, viruses, climates — old age.  No one gets out alive.  What matters is what you do until then.  There are two kinds of survival: individual and group.  Your life is shaped by how you define your group, and to what degree your group helps you survive.  So now what shall we do about Zika and the other plagues coming out of Pandora’s box?  Personally, I don’t eat boxed cereals anymore.  I get my info from books.  And the occasional website post.

https://aeon.co/opinions/artificial-food-has-made-human-civilisation-possible?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=f72a7e8e04-Daily_newsletter_Thursday_28th_Jan_20161_28_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-f72a7e8e04-68600437

UNDERSTANDING OPPOSITIONAL DEFIANCE BROADLY

Oppositional Defiance Disorder, which was originally defined to describe kids who defy any kind of authority, is now being applied to adults who are being defiant.  Of course, that’s pejorative, implying that the disobedient are simply not yet adult, unreconciled to the kinds of compromises every adult must make.  And it also carries the diagnostic stigma that one is “crazy.”  

I have two cats, both female, womb-mates, now aging.  The yellow one is mellow, a cuddler, a sleeper, a treat-eater, rather stupid.  The tortoise shell is a living example of ODD.  When she was little, she ignored her own name unless I threw a slipper at her to get her attention.  I thought she was deaf.  I’m saying that ODD must have some kind of physical basis.  Maybe it is more of a failure to be domesticated than it is immaturity or psychosis.

Here’s a story about the genetic basis of domestication in cats.  http://allday.com/post/1458-how-the-cat-went-from-wild-beast-to-domestic-object-of-adoration

I’ll summarize:   Thirteen genes changed as cats became domestic.  They include changes in the genes controlling memory, fear-conditioning, and stimulus-reward (operant conditioning).  Five genes influence development by neural crest cells, which affect skull shape and coat color, but they also have impact on the whole body.  (A round head that fits into a human hand is appealing.  Temperament in cats is often related to coat color.  Also, the fourth-leg on the gender chromosome X carries a color which is why tri-colored cats are always female.)

Some genes were changed by diet, esp. an adaptation that dropped whatever it is that processes fats in hyper-carnivorous diets and maybe added lactose-tolerance to adult cats, parallel to the same adaptation in humans using dairy sources as food.  But also a dulling of sense of smell, in contrast to dogs.  It seems associated with the disinclination to hunt.  Why eat a mouse if you don't have to?

“Even though the smoking gun genome is found in the DNA of cats, scientists are also considering how it may apply to the domestication of a host of other mammals including dogs, cows, pigs and even humans. The reason for comparisons, particularly to humans, and their furry pets is that the structure of cat chromosomes more closely resembles that of homo sapiens — even more so than dog's DNA.” 

Crackers and Squibs

Having raised a series of bobcats, I can attest to both the similarities and the radical difference between wild and domesticated cats, especially after adolescence when the bobcats left if they could, looking for their own place in the world.  In general, the bobcat kits were far more ODD.   They just didn't care about humans that much.  But even the bobcats were not alike.  The littermates “Rufus” and “Gimpy” were as different from each other in temperament as my present Mellow Yellow and ODD Tortie domestics.

Colonel Przewalski's never-domesticated horses.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/estonia/1318590/When-wild-horses-were-dragged-into-domesticity.html  is one among many recent articles exploring the genetic basis of domesticated horses.  Of course, you’ll remember that ALL American horses are feral, domestics gone wild, so their genome needs to be compared with those of Asian wild horses like Colonel Przewalski’s plus DNA from ancient bones.  This article suggests that feral and domestic horse genomes prove to have many sources as shown in matrilineal lines, but comparisons with early horse genes do turn up the evidence of change in the direction of domestic usefulness.

The race horse veterinarian, Sid Gustafson, points out that horses are pack animals, like wolves, but cats are not.  If an animal has the genes for participation in a society, a group, then they are more easily domesticated because they let the humans become their herd and are reciprocated by inclusion in the human “family.”  A pack trip integrates both horses and people.

Sid Gustafson family trip

Roy Rappaport defines survival as relating to the individual as well as being for the group, and the balance between the two -- individual versus group -- may sacrifice one or other.  Individuals die in wars for the sake of survival by groups.  Sometimes individuals may destroy whole groups, as Hitler attempted.  His justification for extinguishing a “race/religion” was supposedly genetic, but the real problem was that he himself didn’t belong.  He was a killer in search of ingratiation with the German people by inventing a common enemy and then eliminating it.  The old triangulation strategy.

So for an individual trying to solve a relationship that interferes with either the survival of themselves as individuals or the survival of the larger group, it is in a sense a problem of domestication, "who ya gonna throw in with."  Strategy by affiliation.  Mammals (so undoubtedly humans as well) have at least some basis in their genomes for belonging to a specific group which develops in response to a specific environment, but also is shaped by life history.

Then, given the nature of the particular infant, the success of maturation depends on the interface with the parents and larger culture.  Terry Brazelton, the pediatrician, has insights into this.  http://www.touchpointsbook.com/touchpoints.html  If baby and culture are a pretty good match and if people are sensible about adjusting strategies, things turn out very well.  But a quiet baby will have trouble with a hyperactive overachieving mother, and a vigorous, seeking baby will struggle with a passive or confining mother.

I propose that an oppositionally defiant child was probably misfitted as an infant -- forced to be on a schedule that wasn't in sync with the baby or ignored when needs were pressing.  (I don't just blame Mom.  She may have been as trapped by culture as the baby.)  The lesson such a baby may have learned is that you have to take care of yourself as you can, maybe by making a big fuss and maybe by hiding.  Sometimes everything was fine until there was a distressing change and since babies can’t really understand the causes, they can only do the freeze, flight, fight things that are hard-wired into mammals as a matter of survival.  But clumsily, since they are babies and without consciousness or memory.

At about age three or four, children try to help and comfort others, esp. their parents.  They try to be parents themselves and in cases where the parents are more like children than the children, they sometimes really do help.  I’ve never forgotten the woman who had passed out and whose toddler had brought her a blanket and a glass of water, then settled down beside her to keep vigil.  I’m sure it is a tableau that repeats.  Someone must have done that for the child.  But many people will try to parent their parents through their whole lives.  Of course, teenagers think their parents are incompetent anyway.  And humans try to parent their domestic animals.  Parenting per se is a spectrum of behavior, not one thing.

Being stubborn in defense of vulnerability is a moral sort of defiance.

There has been a lot of cultural fuss about the death of the Big Papa in the Sky, God.  In a good seminary or divinity school, equal attention is paid to the nature of human beings.  This is religious anthropology and it soon becomes obvious that human and “god” are reciprocal concepts.  It also becomes obvious that “god” concepts get captured into the service of hierarchical authorities who claim privilege in their relationship with this constructed idea.  One who is ODD is defined as an heretic and may even risk being burned at the stake.  

The commodified, internationally controlling corporations of our present society have made a religion of patriotism, product loyalty, and strategic ignorance as the price of survival.  Posing as parental, they grind up individuals.  Like tanks they threaten to crush the defiant for the good of the whole.  The man who stands in front of the tank is acting out moral ODD.  Most analysts of obstinacy neglect the moral dimension.

What practical things could a defiant person do to survive as an individual, perhaps in service to the survival of the group?  Here are some early ideas, pretty general.

1.  Find or create a niche where the individual is protected.  (Monasteries?)

2.  Assume a disguise.  (Guy Fawkes masks)

3.  Make yourself exceedingly valuable with a major skill.

4.  Go to an edge and live in solitude. (Me)

5.  Find a powerful protector.

6.  Make an enduring record that will survive. (Arts)

7,  Make common cause with many others.

8,  Protect the even more vulnerable -- maybe not human, maybe the planet.

9.  Good health.

10.  Know stuff, including skills.
11.  Focus.  
12.  Analyze yourself bravely but not mercilessly.

This is a confused post because I am still confused.  Why is ODD -- Oppositional Defiance considered "aggressive"?  If it is resistance to authority figures, why isn't it the authority figures who are the aggressors?  It seems the word "disorder" is a tip-off to authoritarian motivation, esp. cops, but it triggers something like "obsessive control syndrome" which justifies the use of suppressing violence even to the point of death.  THAT's aggressive.

THE FOUR STAGES OF IDENTITY

At present my understanding of the process of being a person with an identity is in four parts that respond to basic principles, which follow.

Identity is a time-art that takes in and discards in the same way that a body does, but it is more than a body.

The identity of any person is interactive with an ecology that is partly physical -- food, weather, material culture, molecules of various kinds -- and partly mental.

It is impossible to escape one’s identity, but one can constantly negotiate the terms of dwelling in it, even though much of it is not available to the conscious mind.  And one can mentally grasp the existence of the uniqueness of every identity in the world as well as believing in the existence of internal functions that can’t be accessed by introspection, but explored by experiment.  That is, we know there are parts of us we can't know.

Likewise, it is impossible to escape one’s instrument of existence, which is the body, but by admitting the existence and bringing to consciousness the elements that impinge on that body -- from emotion to disease to trauma to physical contact with others -- it is possible to protect oneself, be effective in the world, and form attachments to others.

Language is the formal capture of spoken thought, which represents concepts formed in the brain by acquiring and filtering our interaction with the world and our viscera.  First in spoken words, then in written translation.  Music is a language that needs no words but can accompany words to add meaning.  The same is true of dance, painting, sculpture, or any other art form.  But also science and games.  All carry meaning based in “felt concepts” which are then expressed in math, models, structured rules, and so on.

The sum total of felt concepts may be encapsulated in sense memories, which are a kind of GPS system for the location of the concepts in the brain.  The more intense the experience the closer the link to the sensory information recorded at the time.  Remembering it will bring back the muscle memory as well as conventional smell, taste, sight and so on.  The sum of these will trigger emotion.  Sometimes even re-experiencing.  The current belief is that during sleep-dreaming and maybe daydreaming, the person is sorting memory, maybe re-combining or editing.

A “personhood” is in four parts:

1.  The world out of which the identity emerges.  That world will remain outside the body, but send in sense information even in the womb as soon as the brain is capable of recording it.  This includes the womb itself, the woman’s body and the nutrition and molecular support it provides, the sounds of her heartbeat and digestion, whatever impinges on her senses strongly enough to penetrate to the fetus: maybe music, maybe walking, maybe very strong sunlight.  Her emotional responses will travel through her blood in the form of molecules like adrenaline or serotonin and the baby will share them.

2.  The information from outside the skin is always coming to the body in what we call the “sensorium” which is far more than five senses.  The sensorium is complex, constant, sorted and filtered by the brain.  Besides the nerves that convey pain or operate our muscles, there is a second set of nerves in three parts.  As a whole they are called the autonomic nervous system and they are not normally conscious, but quietly operate the viscera.  There are three branches:  sympathetic and parasympathetic which have to do with arousal and relaxation (things like eye dilation, heart beat speed, breathing) and also the enteric branch which manages digestion and the colony of microbes in the gut.  When something is unusual, we have a “gut feeling” about it.

3.  The management of the information of the sensorium is done in a collection of “nodes” or complexes of neurons which are built by the brain as it grows, according to what stimulus it receives through its sensorium.  The basic centres about hunger, warmth, light, falling, become the foundation for a scaffolding about what to trust, how to express distress or pleasure, how to focus.  The most basic inner “rules” or filters are very hard to change and are not usually conscious.  Control of muscles is also part of this, working from the largest tasks (sitting up) to the smallest (threading needles).

At some point the brain develops enough to achieve self-awareness as if it were a world available to introspection and expression.  Concepts become defined enough to be “felt”, emotions are connected to them, and they can be attached to words or images.

Then comes the ability to look at other people and see what they are feeling and expressing, to see that they are like oneself but still unique.  This is a skill that comes from experience, exposure to many kinds of people.

4.  Community is the next step, beginning with the dyad of the caretaker who has empathy with the baby and teaches eye contact, cuddling, conditioning to behave in certain ways.  The small child assimilates what his community believes about the world and how to act in it.  These early life convictions are deep, indelible, and hard to bring to consciousness unless exposed to other ways.  The consequences of that depends on the community and how welcoming it is.  If the community forbids knowing about any other communities, then discovering them anyhow can be a terrible shock -- but also an enlightenment, like Buddha discovering that people suffer.

This is not the whole story, of course.  A process is a time art.  At about eight or nine the child’s adrenal glands begin a regime of lengthening bones, elaborating inner process, and kindling the sexual organs.  When that task is complete, at about the “teen” years, the child is fertile and nearly adult with strong drives.  He or she is adult enough to perpetuate the species -- give birth and protect a small child -- but must have time to learn how to do that well.  A community’s understanding of how to do that -- and there is not one way -- will determine the quality and success of that culture as well as that person.  In the past many cultures have not had the resources to keep a person alive long enough see his or her children grow up with enough time to pass on the best developed cultural contents.

“Nature’s way” -- which is not a way at all, but simply the interacting factors of existence which produce the illusion of some kind of plan -- is often to create many more individuals than the culture can support.  Some die of hunger, some of war, some of a mountain side engulfing the whole village at once.  Chance and opportunity control events.  

But now humans have become clever and informed enough to want to create a true “plan.”  But there is not and never will be enough resources to go around; we will all always be a plague waiting to happen.  We are attached to each other, to ourselves, to the world as we know it, and we wish to preserve that which we “love.”  Love is a powerful force for survival, even if it is the survival of the other.  How we love goes back to our time in the womb.

How we decide to sacrifice those who threaten us and our ways is the root of ethics.

Ecology is the complex interconnections that allow more, and more diverse forms of life to co-exist, thus extending the carrying capacity of the planet.  Because they “emerge” from the life around them, they fit or they could not have survived.  Most of our attempts to play Sim-World have been for too clumsy.  Worse than that, we simply don’t perceive as much as we need to, partly because of those foundational convictions being limited and partly because our sensorium isn’t picking up the evidence, and partly because those constructed meaning-sorting-centers in the brain are blocking what we need or telling us too much or wrong things.  Unforeseen consequences and side effects eat away at us.

What ecology will support humans?  One that is complex, varied, sustained by pleasure, shared by communities, and always in process.  But I look around and see the opposite.  We're afraid to kiss the sea anemone.  It doesn't care.  It was here first.

(ongoing)

IN THE PRESENCE OF THE BUFFALO by Daniel Brister

When it comes to me writing about Daniel Brister’s book, “In the Presence of the Buffalo: Working to Stop the Yellowstone Slaughter,” I have to be very careful not to sound patronizing, so I’ll put the info for how to help this movement right at the beginning.  There is a PayPal donate button on the website and things to buy.  Your contributions of songs, poems, etc. are invited. 

Dan, as of October, 2013, was fund-raising on the east coast.  Like so many spontaneous little groups fired by idealism, this is now a formal organization that requires maintenance in order to keep paying salaries for Brister and others.

Media & Outreach
Buffalo Field Campaign
P.O. Box 957
West Yellowstone, MT 59758
406-646-0070
bfc-media"at"wildrockies.org
http://www.buffalofieldcampaign.org

As Doug Peacock notes in his foreword, charismatic megamammals have inspired humans since the first auroch was sketched on a cave wall.  Of course, Peacock has become a bit of a megamammal himself.  His participation is a major endorsement.

Daniel Brister

Brister came to Montana right out of high school and was drawn into the Yellowstone Buffalo issue right away -- and in the most dramatic way, as a physical intervener trying to prevent the killing of buffs who leave the park in winter because there is not enough grazing inside it.  When they emerge, they come onto cattle grazing lands where they threaten to spread brucellosis and eat valuable grass that ranchers expected to use.  The fifteen-year-long pitched battle between authorities wanting to cull the herd and the youngsters wanting to save every animal produces this little book, written in the chiaroscuro of righteousness.  

The book is in five chapters that take on five points of view, none of them flattering to the authorities or offering a viable solution to the problem of limited range.  The present standing  bison-management agreement in force is due to expire in 2015, so it’s time to start thinking and campaigning.   

The first chapter explains how Brister got involved, since he is from back east, and sets up his poetic metaphor of collecting buffalo fur from barbed wire snags in order to make a hat from it.  This is associated with a vision involving his mother.  The second explains how in 1997 he came to be in the field, actually chasing the buffs through the snow, though much of his work has been in an office, doing publicity and so on.  The third relates buffalo mysticism to Sioux Indian beliefs and the fourth sketches the wickedness of the open range years of the American plains.  The fifth goes back to the personal intervention of people emotionally dedicated to this big iconic beast.

Brister doesn’t tell lies -- he just leaves a lot out.  In 92 pages one could hardly begin to address the complexity and ambiguity of this situation.  One of the problems is pinning down brucellosis, also known as “undulant fever,” which is quite real and not trivial.  At an early ASLE conference Barney Nelson, an expert on the matter, brought along a Crow Indian rancher named Small (who was not small in any sense!) to describe what it was like for a human to catch the disease from skinning a donated shot animal.  He spent the whole winter flattened on his sofa, fighting fever, fatigue, aching, etc.  Yet the more romantic at the meeting insisted that brucellosis was an invented disease, made up as an excuse to kill the bison.

Another issue that is slippery, because it is “science” and yet political, is the objection to cow genes being in buffalo, since they will mate with domestic bovines, which has been happening since early days.  The government maintains herds of buffalo that have been culled for animals with cow genes, but so far as I know none of the tribal herds have been tested this way.   Maybe it’s not surprising, considering what would happen if every Blackfeet were tested for Euro-genes and killed if they were found.  I often pass the Blackfeet herd which is kept along the highway on the approach to East Glacier.

When a rancher near here raised a sizable herd of buffs for sale to restaurants where people surrender their admiration for bison in order to eat buffalo burgers, no one went over to insist they be tested for purity nor did anyone risk serious injury to protect them.  To be fair, no one did that on behalf of the cows either.  These issues are compartmented, but they just about have to be in order to think about them.  In the end the rancher went back to cows because there was more money in them.

This book is considered here because the Valier librarian asked me to take a look.  A person named K.H. Brandt in Florida with the nicely oxymoronic email monicker of “Turtle on the Wing” was enough in sympathy with the issue to send copies to the Montana public libraries.  He won’t find as many romantics in Valier as in Missoula, but that’s natural.  Even ecological.

This bull was VERY angry: pissing, drooling, bellowing, compressed into a spring.

That's me just above his hump.  He did NOT smell like anyone's mother.

My relationship with buffalos goes back to when I was 21, new on the Blackfeet Reservation.  Since I was working with Bob Scriver in his Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife, an offshoot of his shop and studio, I put my hands on a bull buffalo every day -- he was standing in the museum, a casualty of a duel to the death with another bull.  We rode in the Moiese buffalo roundup for several years and at one point I even tried to turn  back a whole herd of buffs -- or rather my horse did.  I just went along for the ride, a kind of shrieker, futilely waving my hat.  The animals were not rounded up to be killed, necessarily, but to be counted, branded, given shots, live-sold to ranchers.  We didn’t cull for purity in 1962.  We just tried not to be killed ourselves.  

This is me feeding apples to the two orphaned pets of the Moiese range.  You had to watch out for the little buff because she would sneak up behind you and butt you in the butt so you went flat on your face.

Daniel presses his buffalo hair collection to his nose, inhaling what he fancies to be the scent of his mother.  That wouldn’t work for me nor would I worry about much flesh being torn out of a buffalo by the little prongs on barbed wire.  But what I know is from direct observation.  

Many years later I went to a writing seminar led by Peter Matthiessen.  I talked about buffalo being narrow from side-to-side, which impressed me when I watched from a catwalk above the animals in chutes.  One of the young men outright accused me of lying -- he seemed to think it was a criticism, a diminishment.  In fact, it’s what makes them so able to pivot on the attack.  Also, their front legs are balanced on a fulcrum almost halfway between their nose and tail so that when they go on the jump, gravity gives them an advantage.  The young man didn’t like THAT either.  How could a forty-year-old female school teacher know ANYTHING about a charismatic megamammal full of macho?  Matthiessen quietly assured him I was right but the guy could hardly look at me after that.

So what I’m saying is that this little book is an effective representation of that point of view, but it’s not much more than that, except for being a good fundraiser.

"The Buffalo Runner" by Bob Scriver

IS THAT A WORM OR A MUTATION?

My first awareness of toxoplasmosis was at animal control when people were fussing about what could be caught from animals. Dr. Watt, our veterinarian, and I went out to the parks of Portland with little paper cornets (meant for snow cones and printed with the words “yum yum”) to collect animal excrement samples from the grass and the sand boxes. Unfortunately or fortunately, our first-hand research revealed nothing. The parks were remarkably worm free. But toxoplasmosis worms were too small for us to have found with our screening methods anyway. They only have one cell. I read about them and about how they are in cat feces and pregnant women should not empty cat boxes because the worms would migrate to the fetus and eat their eyes and brains.

In an adult person, nonpregnant, they just make cysts because the immune system attacks them and that was the end of it. Or so we thought. But I was a little uneasy when the equivalent of me, the education person for Seattle animal control, told me that her seven-year-old daughter had complained there was a shadow that kept going back and forth inside her eye. Sure enough, when the eye doctor looked in there, it was a toxo worm. But it died and was absorbed and that was that. Or so we thought.

Every time there’s a scientific advance that produces a wave of new information, theories form -- often too soon and unconfirmed by later research. The earliest genetic thinking led to the idea that some people are just hopeless. Two families, the Jukes and the Kalikaks, were held up as the kind of people who had inherited shiftlessness, burdening the welfare rolls. This info wave turned demonic in Germany where it was used to eliminate anyone who seemed faulty: the insane, the retarded, the handicapped, the gays, the gypsies and the Jews. Hopeless! Snuff them! Out of the crowded lifeboat! That thinking still persists, but there is a strong backlash against it.

The most recent amazing information has come from more sophisticated investigation into the genome, into human tissue molecular interaction, and into fMRI records of brain activity. Much of that has focused on trying to understand the troublesome and even criminal non-conformists among us. How are sociopaths created? What should we do about them? The more of us there are, the more packed-together we are, the more the motivation for controlling outliers.

So a recent three-part series on NPR has attracted a lot of attention. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127888976 Keying off research by James Fallon, an expert on the criminal brain who investigated his own family’s history, upbringing and MAO-A gene (monoamine oxidase A) nick-named the Warrior Gene by those researching serotonin. He discovered that he was the only one he measured who had two of the three characteristics of a criminal. He is lacking abuse/trauma, which it is believed activates serotonin malfunction. But apparently, except for being morbidly obese, he is a happily functioning professional. One fillip of this theory is that the Warrior Gene comes from the mother (without affecting her behavior) to her sons, but it was the mother who pointed out the history of violence now and then cropping out in the family.

The problem is what to do with this information. Should all criminals be run through an MRI? Should all military draftees be tested for serotonin functioning or screened for childhood abuse? Should killers be forgiven in part because of their genes? What a terrific fund of insult for those who enjoy family battles based on inheritance, as families do. “What can you expect from someone from . . .um, Greenland? Everyone knows they are frigid people!” Jukes and Kalikaks all over again. Many times it doesn’t key into violence but into prosperity. My mother hated it, but easily fell into sputtering at my father, “You TEUTON!” She occasionally flung at me, “You’re just like your father!” My riposte was, “What did you expect when you married him?”

So, having found this lovely new source of measurement, I went around holding it up to relatives and friends, until Tim set me straight, soon joined by the counselor husband of a friend. First, it gives a false sense of reality to what is fantasy. Second. it is too easy to dispense with and punish those who are, shall we say, inconvenient by defining them as faulty. Third, it completely discounts the variables called “intent” and “free will” and “conscience.”

So I, smug in my belief that there was nothing wrong with MY genes (surely late onset blood glucose disfunction is environmental!), still wondered why among my relatives I’m such a daredevil, always jumping at the adventure instead of safety. Then I came to the research of Robert Sapolsky, who is quite slender but has hair somewhere between that of a Jewish patriarch and a Sixties hippie, and who speaks in a wonderfully vernacular way about highly technical matters. Early on he researched stress, but lately he’s turned to the effects of toxoplasmosis in the brain. http://nihrecord.od.nih.gov/newsletters/2009/03_20_2009/story4.htm

“Sapolsky and other researchers have found that the Toxoplasma genome includes a gene that can induce a host’s brain to create dopamine, the neurotransmitter most closely linked with feelings of pleasure or reward. The combined effects of reduced fear and stress and increased hedonism may account for a variety of behavioral abnormalities in rats as well as other mammals.” Like me. The enticing little story is that a rat infected with toxo will have its brain code altered in a way that converts the signal for fear to sexual desire. So when the rat smells cat pee, it is attracted. And when it meets the cat, it swoons instead of taking off. (No one says what effect toxo has on the cat’s brain.) But the suggestion is that human trauma due to recklessness is associated with toxo infection. This is quite different than the same worm making swiss cheese out of a fetal brain. A pathologist confided offhand to Sapolsky that many of the victims of motorcycle accidents he had autopsied had toxo infections.

This time I’m wary. But still . . . Our chief summer occupation when I was a kid was messing around in a sandbox. Nothing fancy. Just a board rectangle, some buckets of sand from along the Columbia River, and a lot of little plastic cowboys and Indians.





The neighborhood cats, of course, loved this sandbox which had no cover on it. It would cost me a couple of hundred bucks to find out whether I have toxoplasmosis antibodies, so I think I will just assume it is a sure thing. In fact, my animal control boss, Mike Burgwin, called a few nights ago to invite me to visit he and his wife near Seattle this summer. (I’m not going.) He remarked that I had seemed “afraid of nothing” -- actually, he said I had balls.

My mother, however, had a different explanation for my rebellious nature and tendency to get into trouble. She said it was because I had red hair. Her genetic theories dated back to the Thirties. Actually much earlier: maybe 1300 AD whenever it was that a mutation created red-headed people among the northern Europeans. They were soon stigmatized. Which made them lose patience a lot, which confirmed everyone's suspicions!

NONE OF YOUR EARWAX

When I was diagnosed with diabetes II and dropped all sugar, white flour, corn syrup, and processed food from my diet -- and I was SERIOUS about it! -- my physiology began to change. It wasn’t just that I dropped fifty pounds, which I did, but also strange small changes developed over the months. Actually, the one I’ve most recently noticed is not strange.

I’ve been a person who had a lot of earwax and bought those little kits with peroxide to fizz around in one’s ear and then a little bulb to wash out whatever has been loosened. Those little bulbs used to turn up around the house in strange places. It’s a remarkably erotic and rather addictive experience to use these kits. But for the last few years I’ve had very little earwax. Until now. It’s come back. Not as much, mind you. I use a q-tip, against all advice, but dip it into hand lotion or something to keep from scratching the ear canal.

My father was always digging in his ears with the mechanical pencil that lived in his shirt pocket with a little notebook. My mother cautioned him constantly against the possibility of something driving that pencil through his ear into his brain, but it never happened. She had a lot of earwax, too, so that now and then she had to go get the doctor to clean out what her hearing aid had impacted against the drum until nothing less than a seismic sound could get through.

One of the characteristics of Native Americans is that they have dry earwax, a kind of powder, as contrasted with Caucasians who have waxy “wet” earwax that can even be used for chapstick. I’ve never figured out a way to get this into a story.

Now I have even more information, thanks to gnxp.com, one of my fav blogs even though I don’t always understand what they are saying. It’s about genetics and uses a lot of math. I read it with my medical dictionary handy, but the stuff is so cutting edge it’s often too new for my dictionary. This latest news is about earwax, breast cancer, and bromodrosis/osmidrosis. That last is fancy talk for “B.O.” Body odor. This phenomenon was discovered by the marketeers just after WWII, I think. Lifebouy soap and all that.

I may not be your best friend, but I’m now prepared to tell you that “one single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP), 538G>A (Gly180Arg), in the ABCC11 gene determines the type of earwax. The G/G and G/A genotypes correspond to the wet type of earwax, whereas A/A corresponds to the dry type.” So on the long wound-up double helix, one little gene has a short section (an SNP or “snip”) that varies from person to person in an inherited way (polymorphic=many formed) and this what decides whether you have earwax or not, stink or not, or might be inclined to breast cancer or not. My father was a smelly man. My mother had breast cancer. Me? Come a little closer.

The good news is: “For rapid genetic diagnosis of axillary osmidrosis and potential risk of breast cancer, we developed specific primers for the SmartAmp method that enabled us to clinically genotype the ABCC11 gene within 30 min.”

If you want the scientific details, get out your own medical dictionary: “We herein provide the evidence that this genetic polymorphism has an effect on the N-linked glycosylation of ABCC11, intracellular sorting, and proteasomal degradation of the variant protein. Immunohistochemical studies with cerumen gland-containing tissue specimens revealed that the ABCC11 WT protein was localized in intracellular granules and large vacuoles, as well as at the luminal membrane of secretory cells in the cerumen gland, whereas granular or vacuolar localization was not detected for the SNP (Arg180) variant. This SNP variant lacking N-linked glycosylation is recognized as a misfolded protein in the endoplasmic reticulum and readily undergoes ubiquitination and proteasomal degradation, which determines the dry type of earwax as a mendelian trait with a recessive phenotype.”

The variation in earwax seems to conform pretty closely to that of EDAR which is the name of a gene. “This gene encodes a member of the tumor necrosis factor receptor family. The encoded transmembrane protein is a receptor for the soluble ligand ectodysplasin A, and can activate the nuclear factor-kappaB, JNK, and caspase-independent cell death pathways. It is required for the development of hair, teeth, and other ectodermal derivatives. Mutations in this gene result in autosomal dominant and recessive forms of hypohidrotic ectodermal dysplasia.” (Thank goodness for Google and cut-and-paste.)

“While the populations of Europe and Africa have wet ear wax, those of East Asia have dry ear wax. Other populations are somewhere in between. Nature Genetics has the original paper (don't be surprised if the link takes a while to load).”

There doesn’t seem to be any particular survival advantage in the nature of one’s earwax, unless one generates enough of it to be deafened, but since “earwax type and armpit odor are correlated, populations with dry earwax, such as those of East Asia, tend to sweat less and have little or no body odor, whereas the wet earwax populations of Africa and Europe sweat more and so may have greater body odor.” Razib, whose blog this is, remarks: “The adults I have known who do not need to make recourse to deodorants to ward off body odor have all been East Asian females. No surprise.”

So now I’d be curious to know about geographical rates of breast cancer and their correlation, which clearly involve survival value. And maybe lack of body odor has some advantages in tiger country. American Indians (esp. those in the seventh grade who have recently discovered deodorants) complain about the smell of Euros, which fits this, while the idea that “squaws” smell bad is clearly unjustified. For population scientists, this “allele” (genetic section) is an interesting way to track population migrations. In fact, perhaps those who claim to be genetic Native Americans (as opposed to pedigree-certified, the federal legal standard now) will be asked to pass a “sniff test.” Of course, they might be mongolian.

QUACK EVOLUTION: Not About Ducks

Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending have written a book called “The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution.” As one reviewer said, it’s all very interesting and probably mostly wrong. Sort of like the cover, which shows the usual (and discredited) walking continuum from ape to Adonis, this time in the form of florescent skeletons.

Cochran suggests that evolution didn’t stop when modern man emigrated out of Africa 55,000 years ago and was accelerated with the development of agriculture about 10,000 years ago. The changes in diet, disease, and dispersal probably triggered far more mutations, the favorite example being lactose which allows the digestion of milk. In fact, there have been two mutations that allowed for milk digestion in two different places and times. I’m fine with these ideas.

It never occurred to me to question that evolution has continued all along and will continue through and past homo sapiens, partly because of all the jokes about how television would cause us to evolve into bodies with a big single eye, a fat one-butt sitter, and wheels instead of feet. Many are hoping we will evolve improvements in the brain, maybe something like “mirror cells” which increase empathy and therefore compassion. Because of thinking about Diabetes II, I’ve also had some notion that diseases and malfunctions required or caused mutations when humans began to live in close proximity to domestic animals and to eat cultivated grains. Cochran puts major emphasis on infections producing mutations, which is logical enough. He is returning to an older era of medical assumptions and he claims that cardiac problems, diabetes and other problems are probably not lifestyle issues but rather infections. His model here is helicobacter pilori, a stomach bug that causes most ulcers, though for a long time it was not found and not thought to exist.

Like the fellows at GNXP.com where Cochran also posts, he is very interested in who is smarter, whether IQ is hereditary (IQ is easy to discredit -- it simply asks for the “norm” in a white Euro community, so naturally those are the people who do well.), and what mutations would be helpful. He likes the idea of economics grouping people who then develop mutations that adapt them for special vocations. (If you’re rich and privileged, it’s because you evolved into it? That doesn’t fit the realities as I know them. Are the Kennedys more evolved than the rest of us? The Royal Windsors?) He’s attached to the idea of Ashkenazi Jews doing “brainy” work and becoming, as a result, selected to be smarter -- smarter ones being more likely to survive.

Having thus proved that he’s not afraid of dangerously political subjects, he suggests that homosexuality is a mutation produced by disease. I don’t quite follow his reasoning. First of all, he defines disease as anything that interferes with reproductive success, so why hasn’t homosexuality died out? Some arguments I’ve seen emphasize that to enhance evolutionary survival it is not the individual but the group with the genes that has to survive. Men without children of their own give the family an “uncle” advantage, that is, more males capable of work and battle. That’s something like the “granny” advantage which is an argument for how menopause evolved: so that the older women could contribute labor without the interference of pregnancy.

Cochran doesn’t seem to think in terms of the group, though in this case it would support his inherited mutation theory. But then, we live in a time obsessed with individualism. Our families are so scrambled and dispersed, they hardly count as people who know each other when they see each other. He doesn’t consider families that are assembled from various genetic sources, whether high tech egg/sperm implants or “Saturday Night Specials.” But he doesn’t seem to want to draw a bright line between heredity and upbringing, as though anyone could.

Also, he doesn’t consider pre-natal environment, though it is shown that the mother’s hormone state during gestation has a powerful influence on the unborn child. Of course, he is not at all looking at psychological or cultural influences. Personally, I’ve come to the conclusion that homosexuality is a category that includes genetic gays, plus fuzzily-gendered people, plus psychological gays, plus secretly het people who have their own reasons for seeming homosexual, plus atypical men (short, artistic, gentle) who are pressed into the category because of the stereotypes of others, plus people whom circumstances have “taught” male-on-male sexual behavior (prison, war, predator victims). If there is no objective test that reveals who is which, how can they be sorted? Presumably not all would be relevant to this theory.

Cochran is unclear in other ways. Is he saying there was a one-time disease that caused a genetic mutation in the brain that resulted in inheriting men desiring men? (He doesn’t address female same-sex desire. He wants to talk about testosterone, but I’ve not seen anything that said testosterone is the source of the desire for sex with males, or how could it be that I (female) desire males? I’m aware of studies that suggest testoterone is a thermostat controlling how MUCH desire there is.) Or is he saying that the disease organism itself is passed down somehow?

Or does he think homosexuality is not inheritable -- a one-gay-guy mutation? He says twin studies show that if one is gay, the other is not statistically inclined to be gay. No relevant brain change -- either mutation or disease -- has ever been isolated or identified. He is quick to provide examples like narcolepsy, which also cannot be “found” in the brain. He does seem to believe that gayness must be a brain disease rather than some hormone imbalance or maladjustment of the autoimmune system or maybe caused by something in our environment, like food processing. (My fav villain at the moment.) And he says homosexuality does not “interfere” with being brilliant and productive. (He does not identify his own desire valence, but doesn’t seem married.)

He points out that 6% of sheep demonstrate same-sex mounting, but says that the sheep must have caught the disease because humans screw them. GNXP.com commenters began supplying examples of relatives who “did” chickens, goats, etc. plus examples of famous dog acts. (There are also famous horse acts.) Cochran turned droll and claimed someone had a romantic relationship with an oryx in a certain hotel. By this time they were playing at what the English call “silly buggers.” Nervous joking to show superiority and make it clear that they personally would have nothing to do with such acts.

I’ve blogged about b*st**l*ty from my animal control days when we dealt with actual cases, but have yet to see the Humane Society of the United States take up this issue in their rush to be at the center of all animal controversies. There are logic problems: are these sheep shaggers who infected the ovines with their gay mutators looking for male partners who just happen to be sheep? Aren’t they actually screwing ewes? Gender doesn’t matter so long as the species is different?

Cochran is not a doctor nor a sociologist. He is a physicist specializing in high tech lenses (wouldn’t that be more of a very high level engineer?) and an “adjunct” anthropologist, which I take to be something like a “volunteer” self-taught anthropologist. His audience, as nearly as I can tell (which is not very clearly), are highly educated men, quite conservative, making good money, seemingly rigorous thinkers but not scientists and often single. They are also riveted by sex (while not ever admitting attraction to men and rarely to women who are not the Playboy ideal: young, blonde, buxom) and by religion (but usually the Abramic patriarchal kinds). I would suggest the subjects of sex and religion are entwined, both involving privilege and status. They resist immigration, not on the basis of skin color, but on the grounds of, well, all the things dark skin are supposed to stand for. You know.

Addressing the gay community in this way is both fertile ground and risky behavior, because there is no way to keep it from re-valorizing the issues associated with AIDS, even though HIV is has been proven over and over again to be simply a HUMAN virus and to be transmitted by bodily fluids in general, including spit, tears and milk. It begins to seem like shouting “fire” in a crowded theatre.