Struggling to live life as an owl

Once again, I'm up late writing (it's almost midnight), but that is a natural thing for me to do, given that I don't actually become wide-awake until about 5 PM. That's the way it's been for me for as long as I can remember. Back in college, my grades started going up once I gave up on those 7:40 AM classes, and tilted my day toward the late morning through mid-afternoon. Quite often, I will get to work at about 10, working until seven or eight at night. This allows me to harness more of my peak time to do the challenging job I do (I am a consumer attorney). Several times a month, I find myself at the office writing a legal brief at one in the morning, working quite effectively. It's not that I don't like to sleep. I love to sleep. It's just that I love to sleep in. That's when it feels natural to me. I know that it's not merely a matter of biology. I stay up late because I want to get one more thing done, and then one more thing. I hate to give up the day, even when it turns into the next day. for me, there's no better time for concentrating than the night. For whatevercombination of nature and nurture, the night is my favorite time. I am an owl. Those other kinds of people, those "larks," often look at owls with suspicion, however. Even when owls spend as much time at work as larks, the larks assume that we owls are goofing off in the morning while they are working hard. What about those evening hours while we owls are still hard at work while the larks are long gone? Larks think that this is our own damned fault and the owls should be getting up earlier. I do think this is part of the Larkian thought process. This perceived tension has often provoked me to think about why it is that my schedule is tilted toward the afternoon and evening. Do I choose for it to be this way or am I biologically geared to be an owl? And why is it that so many owls (me included) end up marrying larks?

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As If We Didn’t Know

Politics dictated FDA policy? Say it isn't so! According to this NY Times piece, the Bush Administration (they get the blame because, after all, he was the Decider) bade the FDA to meddle with contraception when it suited a certain agenda. What I find so delightful about this, as with the Dover PA decision on Intelligent Design in the classroom, is that a Republican judge, this time a Reagan appointee, made the call. The thing is, contraception and all that it implies really ought to be a conservative issue. I mean, really---it has all the hallmarks of the last 60 years of conservative philosophy built on the rights of the individual, the freedom from interference being chief among them. You would think conservatives would have leapt on this a long time ago, staking it out as exemplary of the idea of American Individualism and the freedom to act as a moral agent, dictating one's own destiny and making determinations about how one will live one's life free from government meddling. Handing both men and women the tools---provided by the free market, to boot---to manage their own lives in accordance with their formulation as individuals of the American Dream should have been a slam dunk for conservatives. They should have been cheering for it since the days of Margaret Sanger. What is more, given the attitude of the communist states, which dismissed Sanger and the entire notion of family planning as a bourgeois, capitalist plot to undermine the growth of the collective, this should have been part and parcel of rearing a generation of people cumulatively opposed to Soviet style socialism and collectivism. Everything about the Choice movement smacks of good ol' fashion American Values! It is the perversity of the debate that is ironic, that it should be those who are castigated as liberal soldiers in the march to socialism and its destruction of all things individualist and true blue American who are the champions of the idea that people ought to have full say in the when and if of having children. How did this happen?

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Diminishing races, growing family

In the January 22, and 2009 edition of Nature (available only to subscribers online), Aravinda Chakravarti explains that our simplistic notions of "population" and "race" will need to be revised as we enter the age of "personal genomics." Chakravarti teaches at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Traditionally, we've used geological records to trace our family histories. We are now approaching a time where we will be able to use DNA databases. Whereas our traditional human records take us back several hundred years, our genomes will allow us to explore our ancestry for hundreds of thousands of years. Chakravarti argues that we will be entering unknown territory riddled with surprises and stretching the meaning of the word "family." How close knit is our human "family"?

All living humans are related via a set of common ancestors who lived in Africa about 200,000 years ago. Other studies have since shown that the world beyond Africa was settled even more recently. From 100,000 years ago, descendants of our African forebears spread out to populate other continents . . . the striking implication of this is that all living humans are mosaics with ancestry from the many parts of the globe through which our ancestors trekked. In other words, each of us has around 6.7 billion relatives.

Chakravarti points out that our genealogy-based record-keeping is often riddled with error. It fails to indicate our interrelatedness to each and every other human being, for example. Further, evidence shows that at least one out of 20 people do not know the identity of their genetic father. Thanks to the falling cost of examining entire human genomes (Chakravarti indicates that it has fallen 1000- fold or more), we now have abilities we could only have dreamed of a few decades ago. Personal genomics might well destroy our simplistic notion of "race." Human populations are not intact groups. There is no such thing as genetically characterized racial categories. We are all "multiracial, related to each other only to a greater or lesser extent." Detailed surveys are making it clear that there is no such thing as a discrete racial group. Rather, it is clear that there is a "continuity in variation across the globe, not abrupt transitions between population-specific sequence patterns." Personal genomics would allow us to focus on individual human beings, instead of artificially constructed "racial" populations.

Genome-wide studies ... could result in the individual identity and kinship coming to define populations rather than the other way around. We could test once and for all whether genetic race is a credible concept. This would be tremendously exciting. It is bound to stir up our deeply held notions of who we are, where we came from, our history and thus our politics. .. . it may be time for science to reshape the views of society. By dismantling our notions of race and population, we may better appreciate our common shared and recent history and perhaps more importantly our shared future.

I recently posted on the topic of whether science should study race and intelligence. I think this would be a worthy topic of science (just as is every other potential field of study), but I warned that our current definition of "race" is horribly muddled. We need to get clear on this term, if that is even possible. I found Chakravarti's article to be a refreshing reminder that there might not even be a worthy scientific definition of "race." In fact, it might well be that, once we look carefully at the evidence, we will find that there are actually 6.7 billion "races" out there. Or is it more accurate to conclude that there is only one human race?

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Educational Ruins

Anyone who has actually visited and studied ruins knows that they are created from orderly structures by a particular combination of forces. First comes neglect, when people either lose appreciation for the value of the thing and stop maintaining it, or they simply abandon it. Next comes vandalism, when people actively damage the structure to scavenge materials and souvenirs, to leave their own mark, or to intentionally destroy it. The latter is usually for religious reasons, as in purging earlier figureheads like Hatshepsut, Trotsky or the Bamiyan Buddhas. But this post is about an institutional edifice. Education in the United States is falling into ruins. Sure, it still is funded in a nominal sort of way. But people have forgotten its value. They even vote against tax increases necessary to maintain current standards. Schools are closing; one K-12 building in my neighborhood is now condos. My Junior High school was razed for a housing development. Pharyngula points out how the University of Florida is now planning to shut down its geology department as a cost cutting measure. Geology is the science that gave Darwin the leg up to understand how natural selection works before anyone else. Geology and its understanding affects meteorology, biology, sociology, history, exo-planetary studies, and more. Florida is one of the states in which regular attempts are made to insert Creationism into school itineraries. And geology is the biggest stumbling block to accepting a Young Earth. But I hope that is not their underlying reason. It is simple neglect of education in general. But there is a strong vanadlism movement afoot in this country. Anti-science forces are working hard to put non-scientific ideas into science classes. Texas is a recurring battleground as school administrators attempt to keep up education credentials in spite of the onslaught. Recently, a doomed law is running the gauntlet in the Texas legislature to allow unaccreditable private schools to offer advanced degrees. See Hank's A Master’s in Creationism. If that seemed too harsh, try Pharyngula's If you fail an IQ test in Texas, do they automatically put you in the legislature? Hank is Australian. Yet he cares about how this sort of behavior is making the United States seem ever goofier. To let our once-admirable education system crumble is a step backwards for the world.

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“Extenuating circumstances” for faking drug testing data?

I don't get it. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that

A prominent Massachusetts anesthesiologist allegedly fabricated 21 medical studies that claimed to show benefits from painkillers like Vioxx and Celebrex, according to the hospital where he worked.

This fabrication is not surprising in light of the fact that Vioxx has now been shown to be of highly questionable effectiveness and based on real world use that has arguably caused tens of thousands of deaths--people who had heart attacks because they used Vioxx when they could have, instead, continued to use the extremely safe over-the-counter drug Naproxen. But then comes the good part, a claim by Dr. Rueben's attorney:

"Dr. Reuben deeply regrets that this happened," said the doctor's attorney, Ingrid Martin. "Dr. Reuben cooperated fully with the peer review committee. There were extenuating circumstances that the committee fairly and justly considered." She declined to explain the extenuating circumstances.

There you have it. There were "extenuating circumstances" for faking data in 21 medical studies. I wonder what those "extenuating circumstances" were? The desire to get rich by conniving with a dirty drug company (see the article for the evidence)? Our did those "extenuating circumstances" include the lack of any sense of professional responsibility? Or did those "extenuating circumstances" include sadistic impulses to endanger the lives of thousands of people?

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