the systemic roots of a global pandemic

collapseofindustrialcivilization |  Over the ages, a number of empires have exploited and looted the resource-rich lands of Africa. At its height, the Roman Empire stretched from Scotland in the northern hemisphere to the deserts of Africa in the south. The Romans stripped their North African territory of its trees, making it their breadbasket of grain production. Originating in central Africa, malaria was likely spread to the center of the Roman Empire on their cargo ships. Passengers on their boats could have carried malaria in their bloodstream before becoming symptomatic, and water barrels on board could have harbored mosquito larvae. In fact, the DNA work of Dr. Robert Sallares has proven that the most lethal form of malaria helped topple ancient Rome. Fast forwarding to today, the blow-back from industrial agriculture and transnational corporate land grabs in Africa has now reached the shores of the hegemonic American Empire in the form of a deadly tropical disease called Ebola.

The Roman Empire seized fertile African land by brute force, but in modern times capitalist industrial civilization takes over Third World countries with the stroke of a pen. Structural adjustment loans by such tools of western power as the IMF and World Bank are signed requiring privatization of the economy and government cuts in social spending. Vast tracks of forests are cleared for mining or monoculture crop production such as palm oil. Subsistence farmers are dispossessed of their ancestral lands and forced to migrate to cities in search of work. Deprived of adequate healthcare and the opportunity to earn a livable wage, these urban poor live in squalor and are driven to hunt in the surrounding forests for a cheap source of protein known as bushmeat. Fruit bats, a keystone environmental species, have been identified as an Ebola virus host that has spread the disease through bushmeat consumption, habitat destruction, and human encroachment. Thus the neoliberal agenda of ‘developed’ nations has acted to create the atmosphere from which this pandemic arose.

Due to the long history of exploitation by outside powers, native Africans are justifiably wary and prone to conspiracy theories involving intervention by Western institutions as well as their own governments which have been, to a great degree, corrupted by the resource curse. These unpleasant facts are, of course, never mentioned by the MSM because it might spark a flicker of moral compunction in the ‘developed’ world which has ended up with so much of Africa’s wealth in the form of rare earth minerals used inside electronic devices, gold and diamonds in jewelry, or petrol pumped into vehicles. The horrific realities behind conflict minerals are always kept out of sight and out of mind by the next consumer diversion.

deep cooperation: the mammalian equivalent of honeybees?

nytimes |  Researchers have known for some time that wild dogs are exceptionally social and civic-minded. Among most group-living carnivores, big adults feed first, gulping down the choicest organs and leaving junior diners to scrounge through gristly leftovers. Among wild dogs, said Patrick R. Thomas, the curator of mammals at the Bronx Zoo, “it’s the exact opposite.”

“The adults let the puppies feed first,” he said. “It’s very peaceful to watch.” 

For puppies too young to leave the den, or for injured pack members unable to hunt, hale-bodied adults go further, provisioning the needy by regurgitating a portion of a recent meal.

Researchers have also known that wild dogs are so-called cooperative breeders. In any given pack of closely related animals, a single male and female will do the bulk of the reproducing, while the other half-dozen or so adults serve as guardians, babysitters, even wet nurses for the alpha pair’s pups. Family is family, after all. 

Yet researchers continue to be impressed by the depths of the dogs’ self-sacrificing behavior. In one recent study, Dr. Creel and his colleagues determined that the bigger a pack grew, the more efficiently it hunted and the greater the number of offspring it raised. However, the researchers were startled to see that not everyone benefited from the swelling ranks. 

“Big packs with lots of offspring turn out to have poor adult survival,” Dr. Creel said. The cost of regurgitating food for a surging number of pups, it seemed, exceeded the advantages of bringing down more prey. As a result, nonbreeding adults in big packs would gradually become malnourished and end up dying at a somewhat younger age than their peers in smaller clans. 

The dogs are “true altruists,” essentially willing to shorten their lives for the sake of the hive, Dr. Creel said, adding, “They’re even further along the line of evolving into the mammalian equivalent of honeybees than we thought.”

ebola in west africa: the outbreak country by country

guardian |  The outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus currently sweeping through parts of west Africa has so far killed an estimated 673 people. As of 23 July there had been a total of 1,202 confirmed, probable or suspected infections

through the anthropocene looking glass...,

scientificamerican |  DNA sequencing and synthesis technologies might be used to create new microorganisms with potentially far-reaching environmental effects, thus contributing to the acceleration of the Anthropocene. But these technologies might also be used to mitigate and deal with some of the other consequences of anthropogenic climate change: by producing materials more sustainably, creating new antibiotics, and performing other ecosystem services. For their potential importance in both contributing to and dealing with the Anthropocene, the authors propose that the start of the Great Acceleration shouldn’t be 1945 or 1950, as most others have proposed, but 1953 — the year that Watson and Crick published the double helix structure of DNA.

This is a surprising proposal, because though they are increasingly powerful, DNA technologies haven’t created the same scale of global environmental impact as something like the steam engine. (At least not the microbial genome-scale synthetic biology that they mention in the article; genetic technologies in agriculture have certainly made big changes in land use, industrial farming practices, and other relevant Anthropocene measures). The hype surrounding novel biotechnological tools, however, frequently asserts that biology will enable technological solutions to the global problems that other technologies have caused. From algae that produce biofuels to bacteria that eat pollution to crops that can tolerate drought, biotechnologies are frequently defined by their potential to someday solve the ecological crises of the Anthropocene.

Perhaps rather than backdating the relevance of this sort of biotech, we might consider how this hype might lead us instead to a new phase of the Anthropocene. Now that we are coming to terms with the term “Anthropocene” and are proposing new technologies specifically to combat the problems caused by other technologies, the Great Acceleration might soon turn into a Great Technological Problem Feedback Loop. We might be setting ourselves towards a bio-techno-evolutionary arms race, where we design new technology that has an unforeseen impact on living things, then we design other problem-solving biotechnologies that have their own potential problems, and on and on.

In Through the Looking Glass the Red Queen tells Alice that “it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!” As we run to outpace technological problems of the past, are we creating the Red Queen’s Anthropocene of the future? This doesn’t mean that we should stop trying to solve the very real problems of the Anthropocene, but perhaps we need to think more about what it might mean to technologically “run twice as fast” to finally get somewhere else.

can plants think?

npr | In his latest piece for The New Yorker, Michael Pollan discusses the scientific controversy regarding the field of "plant neurobiology," and whether plant intelligence exists. Some plants, he writes, can hear caterpillars chomping on a neighbor's leaves. Others display altruistic behavior towards kin, restraining their growth to allow relatives to thrive. But is any of that evidence of intelligence?

entropy the root of intelligence?

forbes | We have been taught to think of entropy as a bad thing. “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,” wrote William Butler Yeats in the aftermath of World War I, in words that still ring true today. Yet Yeats was both a Romantic poet and a Modern one, and he followed up this couplet with a more counterintuitive one, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst /Are full of passionate intensity.”

These lines have always been a kind of zen koan for me. Lack of conviction would seem to lead to “mere anarchy,” but so often we find that it is fervent, fixed beliefs that lead us astray. Throughout history, poets, philosophers and heretics of all kinds have tried to express the kind of openness of mind that leads to reliably good outcomes. In the 70s Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics introduced a generation to the intersection of science and Eastern thought. Now, we can add a computational physicist to that crowd.

Alexander Wissner-Gross, a scientist, inventor, and entrepreneur associated with both the Harvard University Institute for Applied Computational Science and the MIT Media Lab, has proposed a theory of “Causal Entropic Forces,” that seeks to formalize the “deep connection between intelligence and entropy maximization.”

Put on your thinking caps here. Wissner-Gross completed a triple major—in Physics, Electrical Science and Engineering, and Mathematics—and graduated first in his class from the MIT School of Engineering. His idea is really very simple, but he has the mathematics (see link to paper above) and visualizations (see video below) to back it up. In short, everything in nature (our minds included) seeks to keep its options open. Instead of seeing entropy as a form of destruction (things falling apart) Wissner-Gross shows it to be a state of active play.

Wissner-Gross and Cameron Freer, a mathematician at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, “developed an equation that … describes many intelligent or cognitive behaviors, such as upright walking and tool use,” according to an article in Inside Science. They see “intelligence as a fundamentally thermodynamic process,” where any given system engages in a “physical process of trying to capture as many future histories as possible.”

the ghost in the machine?

Guardian | The origin of life is one of the great outstanding mysteries of science. How did a non-living mixture of molecules transform themselves into a living organism? What sort of mechanism might be responsible?

A century and a half ago, Charles Darwin produced a convincing explanation for how life on Earth evolved from simple microbes to the complexity of the biosphere today, but he pointedly left out how life got started in the first place. "One might as well speculate about the origin of matter," he quipped. But that did not stop generations of scientists from investigating the puzzle.

The problem is, whatever took place happened billions of years ago, and all traces long ago vanished – indeed, we may never have a blow-by-blow account of the process. Nevertheless we may still be able to answer the simpler question of whether life's origin was a freak series of events that happened only once, or an almost inevitable outcome of intrinsically life-friendly laws. On that answer hinges the question of whether we are alone in the universe, or whether our galaxy and others are teeming with life.

Most research into life's murky origin has been carried out by chemists. They've tried a variety of approaches in their attempts to recreate the first steps on the road to life, but little progress has been made. Perhaps that is no surprise, given life's stupendous complexity. Even the simplest bacterium is incomparably more complicated than any chemical brew ever studied.

But a more fundamental obstacle stands in the way of attempts to cook up life in the chemistry lab. The language of chemistry simply does not mesh with that of biology. Chemistry is about substances and how they react, whereas biology appeals to concepts such as information and organisation. Informational narratives permeate biology. DNA is described as a genetic "database", containing "instructions" on how to build an organism. The genetic "code" has to be "transcribed" and "translated" before it can act. And so on. If we cast the problem of life's origin in computer jargon, attempts at chemical synthesis focus exclusively on the hardware – the chemical substrate of life – but ignore the software – the informational aspect. To explain how life began we need to understand how its unique management of information came about.

what causes lightning?

holoscience | Most people are unaware that we have no understanding of how lightning is created in clouds. The simplest answer is that lightning is not generated there at all. Clouds merely form a convenient path to Earth for electricity originating in space. Without clouds it is possible to have a “bolt from the blue”. That is happening on Venus (although the sky certainly isn’t blue). Weather systems are driven primarily by external electrical influences.

Consequently the Sun has weather patterns. And the most distant planet, Neptune, has the most violent winds in the solar system though it receives very little energy from the Sun. Electric discharges from space cause Mars’ huge dust devils and planet-wide dust storms. They are responsible for Jupiter’s Great Red Spot and the “spokes” in Saturn’s rings. It is why Venus has lightning in its smog-like clouds and its mountain-tops glow with St. Elmo’s fire. It is why the Earth has lightning stretching into space in the form of “red sprites” and “blue jets”, and why tethered satellites “blow a fuse”.

However, nobody is trained to consider electrical energy input to weather systems.

The image above is a NASA artist’s view of lightning on Venus during the descent of one of the Pioneer probes. Venus has smog-like clouds that are not expected to generate lightning and yet the planet suffers intense lightning. This argues against the popular notion of what causes lightning.

from plants and fungi to clouds

thescientist | The atmosphere is replete with aerosols made up of organic molecules, which are necessary for clouds to form, as well as for rain and other forms of precipitation to fall. However, how these organic aerosols form has largely remained a mystery to atmospheric scientists. Now, a new study published in Science this week (August 30) shows that salt compounds released by plants and fungi hover above the Amazon Rainforest, where the may exert a significant impact on the region’s weather by contributing to s aerosols to the atmosphere and serving as seeds for cloud and rain formation.

An international team of researchers led by biogeochemist Meinrat Andreae of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Germany found the particles by climbing up a 262-foot tower and collecting air samples, PhysOrg reported. The main source of these particles, which are rich in potassium, is likely fungal spores, which have a gel coating that make it easy for water molecules to latch on, although plants had been previously shown to efficiently release salts into the air.

“Our findings support the hypothesis that the Amazonian rainforest ecosystem can be regarded as a biogeochemical reactor in which the formation of clouds and precipitation in the atmosphere are triggered by particles emitted from the biosphere,” the authors wrote in the Science paper.