Biology

Nonequilibrium?

June 14, 2022

I don’t know if you like parties. I don’t know if you’re organized or punctual. But I bet you don’t like rotting smells or long swims in freezing water. That is to say: People are different, but only in certain ways. What’s the difference?

~ “Dynomight” from, https://dynomight.net/better-personalities/

This article is about personality types, and it goes down the rabbit hole, (in a good way.) We’ve all learned about the theory of evolution, and there are countless examples where it’s used to explain—or at least to try to imagine—how some specific feature of ourselves came to be so.

Way down in that article he mentions in passing that we—us, the people—might not currently be in equilibrium with the current selection pressures. This was a startling thought for me. Evolution can be fast—a gene mutation leading to a significant change in one generation—but I’ve always had the impression that it is most often slow and steady. I’ve always imagined a big-ship with a small-rudder metaphor. And I’ve always had the impression that who we are genetically, (the big ship) has its rudder set for straight-ahead. I’ve imagined that at some point in our distant past, selection pressures made us who we are as a species, and that was then. This is now, when we’ve been on a stable, no-changes evolutionary course for all of recorded history.

What if, let’s say around the time of the invention of the transistor and computers, the social pressures changed drastically. That is to say: Suppose that introduced a major change in the rudder’s position? Suppose we, the big ship with the big pile of DNA-encoded information, are right in the middle of a slow course change. What if right now, important and noticeable features of our biology and psychology are being strongly differentially selected?

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Nature’s dominant creature

December 4, 2018

A further unpleasant fact of life: biologists have discovered that the more complex a life form is, the quicker it goes extinct. That hapless cream-puff of the animal kingdom, the jellyfish, rather uncomplicated in form and function, has been around for 500 million years and counting. The average kick at the can, for a complex species, lasts four million years, which happens to be about how long we’ve been around.

~ David Cain from, http://www.raptitude.com/2009/12/natures-dominant-creature/

This is such a wonderful kick in the complacency.

It’s taken me so much effort just to wrap my brain around the reality of the place of a human life [my life!] in the scale of things. In that effort, one thing I was tempted to fall back on was the crutch that at least a human life is part of the Grand Arc of Human History. Meanwhile, we still appear to be alone in the universe, day by day adding weight to the idea that there’s some sort of hard wall faced by intelligence during its evolution.

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Blood test results

March 27, 2018

You’ve gotten your blood test results back, but you have no idea what they mean. Here’s a short overview (from a ketogenic perspective) on how to translate the numbers, and what they mean. The information in the table below will help you sort out the numbers and figure out what you need to address in terms of your health.

~ Ellen Davis from, https://www.ketogenic-diet-resource.com/blood-test-results.html

Nothing heavy today. Just a reference to a short post that is useful for understanding the results of a typical blood test.

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From the ‘we are space craft run by bacteria’ department…

February 10, 2018

This work, led by Dr. Patrick Varga-Weisz shows how chemicals produced by bacteria in the gut from the digestion of fruit and vegetables can affect genes in the cells of the gut lining. These molecules, called short chain fatty acids, can move from the bacteria and into our own cells. Inside our cells, they can trigger processes that change gene activity and that ultimately affect how our cells behave.

~ From https://phys.org/news/2018-01-good-bacteria-genes.html

Have you heard of nutrigenomics? (“The study of the effects of foods and food constituents on gene expression.”)

Genetics is completely main stream. Certain genes for eye color, certain genes pre-dispose you to this disease or that cancer. Wizardy one hundred years ago. Totally main-stream today. Next came “the gut biome” (the collection of genes in the bacteria in your gut) and how that DIRECTLY affects you. Some people are not yet up to speed on the gut biome, but most everyone is now on board.

Next up is nutrigenomics. The realization (this is not wacky theory, but now a part of functional medicine) that what you eat LITERALLY alters the expression of your DNA. What you eat, literally alters how your body — your individual cells — activate and use your DNA.

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GMO and Roundup®

February 6, 2018

When you apply Roundup® to it — as we find with some other Roundup-ready crops — then that disease becomes very intense because the Roundup® will nullify the genetic resistence. So in corn for instance, in 2012 we lost one Billion bushel of corn to a disease that was considered a very wimpy disease of no significant economic consequence througout the corn belt, and that’s Goss’s Wilt.

~ Dr. Don Huber from, https://blog.bulletproof.com/don-huber-318/

Dr. Huber is — this is my personal take on the matter — the original whistle-blower on Roundup®. I do not like Dave Asprey’s interview style, but I gladly sat through Dave to hear Dr. Huber. If you’re not yet ready to commit to listening, here’s a few things to make you either listen, or rage-quit industrialized food entirely:

Roundup® is a brand name for a (relatively) simple molecule first used to remove scale from the inside of boilers. Generally, the chemical is called Glyphosate. Originally discovered in 1950, in 1964 it was first used as a “chelator” — that is a chemical that will grab and bind minerals such as magnesium, copper, zinc — to remove scale.

Wait. So why does it kill plants? Why is it used as a weed killer? Turns out that trace minerals are like keys to many biologic processes. A zinc atom unlocks this process, a magnesium atom unlocks that process, etc.. If you expose a plant to a chelator, each molecule of the chelator locks on to a mineral atom, and the plant dies for lack of minerals. (Glyphosate is special in that it locks on to MANY minerals. Most other known chelators only grab a specific mineral.) So Glyphosate kills all plants. (Actually, if you think about it, it would kill anything which relies on the minerals that the chelator locks on to. Care to guess if animals rely on minerals too?)

So at first look, chelators are NOT very useful on crops because they kill the crops along with the weeds. This is where the GMO versions of our food crops come into the picture: They are modified (bred, selected, etc.) to resist the chelator. So you can now spray the chelator on the entire field and only the crop survives.

I don’t know about you, but I find that all pretty depressing. But wait! It’s actually so much worse…

Bonus round 1: Does the modified food crop have any other differences? What if the GMO crop was entirely wiped out — as in erased from the planet — by some disease it was formally resistant to? (hint: pull quote above)

Bonus round 2: Does the chelator remain in the food crop? Does it end up in our food products? Is it present in sufficient quantity in the food products to have a meaningful affect?

Bonus round 3: What would happen to proteins in one’s body if the Glyphosate molecule (the chelator meant to pull minerals from the scale inside boilers) happened to be chemically similar enough to one of our normal amino acids (glycine)?

Bonus round 4: What’s the half-life (how many years must elapse before 1/2 of the stuff remains) of Glyphosate? How long after it’s sprayed on a field will it continue being picked up by anything that grows there?

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