Response to “I Can’t Lose Weight Because of my Metabolism

How often do you hear this excuse for obesity: [Person] cannot lose weight, no matter how little they eat, because of their low metabolism." Well . . . bullshit. Here's a few excerpts from a NYT article titled "What We Think We Know About Metabolism May Be Wrong: A new study challenges assumptions about energy expenditure by people, including the idea that metabolism slows at middle age."

Everyone knows conventional wisdom about metabolism: People put pounds on year after year from their 20s onward because their metabolisms slow down, especially around middle age. Women have slower metabolisms than men. That’s why they have a harder time controlling their weight. Menopause only makes things worse, slowing women’s metabolisms even more. All wrong, according to a paper published Thursday in Science.

Dr. Klein said that although people gain on average more than a pound and a half a year during adulthood, they can no longer attribute it to slowing metabolisms.

When it comes to weight gain, he says, the issue is the same as it has always been: People are eating more calories than they are burning..

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Daily Aphorism #4: Homage to a Three-Pound Organ

The more I learn about the brain, the more I am amazed and confounded. It doesn't seem possible that brains should work nearly as well as they do. Let me rephrase . . . it doesn't seem possible that brains should work at all. For starters, what's with consciousness? Yes, we are exquisite survival machines, but that doesn't necessarily mean that we should expect to have a front seat to the show, the sounds and lights and smells and touches associated with surviving. But we are plopped into front row seats and it's glorious and terrifying to be a conscious witness to our day-to-day adventures. This makes no sense to me. It seems that we could be exquisite survival machine yet not be conscious of anything. What is the value-added of being conscious witnesses? I'm not a believer in "free will," so I'm not convinced that it is necessary to have a conscious commander of my body. On the other hand, I can't believe that natural selection threw in would would seem to be an expensive add-on like consciousness just for the entertainment value.

All of the above is a mere warm-up to another miracle performed by brains. Today I was looking for a tiny bluetooth speaker, but could not find it. I decided to walk down to work in my basement on an entirely unrelated project, but my mind returned to the search for the bluetooth speaker. While standing in my basement, my three-pound brain retraced my steps over the past week, ruling out certain locations any playing little "videos" convincing me that the speaker was not somewhere other than my house. Then while my eyes were wide open, my mind generated imagery of me placing that little speaker next to a guitar case in my bedroom (two floors up). This imagery was vivid and convincing. I was now certain of where the speaker was, even though I wasn't yet looking at the speaker. I walked upstairs and found it exactly where my brain said it would be. My three-pound brain created an accurate model of my house and replayed my activities over the past week. It did this quickly and effortlessly, generating "videos" and a rationale for why I put the speaker where I did. Billions and billions of microscopic neurons doing something that seems impossible, even after I saw that it could actually happen. My brain did it without any programming by any sentient being. I has no central processing unit and no traditional software. As best we know, this set of miracles occurs as the result of this Hebbian insight: Nerves that fire together wire together.

My difficulties understand the magnificence of the brain reminds me of the story of the engineers who, studying the anatomy and physiology of a bumblebee, concluded that it would be impossible for such a creature to fly.

And now that same brain that found my lost object harnesses the intricacies of the English language, allowing me to share this story about how two ways in which ordinary brains are beyond-belief extraordinary. The only reason we aren't repeatedly stunned and disoriented by the amazing things are brains can do is because we have gotten used to such miracles, day after day after day.

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890 Million Year Old Sponge Fossils Discovered

Pretty amazing discovery, discussed in Smithsonian Magazine. It's equally amazing that sponges are our oldest ancestors. And see here. And here.

Turner, now a field geologist at Laurentian University, is finally ready to step forward with her discovery: The spangled stones she found are sponge fossils dated at 890 million years old, placing sponges as the earliest prehistoric animal that humanity has ever found so far. Published today in the journal Nature, her findings suggest that animals popped up long before Earth was considered hospitable enough to support complex life.

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The Problem with the Transgender Affirmative Care Standard

This is an excerpt from a review  of Abigail Shier's book Irreversible Damage by Dr. Harriet Hall, from a section called, "The customer is always right."

A new “affirmative care” standard of mental health care has been adopted by nearly every medical accrediting organization. The American Psychological Association guidelines go much further than respecting and supporting trans identities; they mandate that therapists adopt gender ideology themselves. Therapists must accept and affirm the patient’s self-diagnosis. Shrier likens this to telling an anorexic teen “If you think you are fat, then you are. Let’s talk about liposuction and weight-loss programs”. She asks whether a standard guided less by biology than by political correctness is in the best interests of the patient.

We don’t provide affirmative care for anorexia. We don’t say “Yes, you are fat” and offer to help them reduce their weight even more. Part of a therapist’s role is to question a patient’s self-assessment.

Dr. Hall emphasizes that she is open to current treatments, but only where the patient needs them:
I support hormones and gender surgeries for adults who will benefit from them. I care about the welfare of these adolescent girls and it bothers me that some of them may be unduly influenced and take irreversible steps they will later regret.

Dr. Hall concludes:

[Abigail Shrier's book] will undoubtedly be criticized just as Lisa Littman’s study was. Yes, it’s full of anecdotes and horror stories, and we know the plural of anecdote is not data, but Shrier looked diligently for good scientific studies and didn’t find much. And that’s the problem. We desperately need good science, and it’s not likely to happen in the current political climate. Anyone who addresses this subject can expect to be attacked by activists. Is ROGD a legitimate category? We don’t know, since the necessary controlled studies have not been done. I fully expect Shrier to be called a transphobe and to be vilified for harming transgender people, and I’m sure I will be labeled a transphobe just for reviewing her book.

She brings up some alarming facts that desperately need to be looked into. The incidence of teen gender dysphoria is rising and appears to be linked to internet influences and social peer groups. The number of people identifying as lesbians is dropping. Therapists are accepting patients’ self-diagnoses unquestioningly, and irreversible treatments are being offered without therapist involvement. We know at least some of these patients will desist and detransition, and we have no way to predict which ones. Children are being instructed in how to lie to parents and doctors to coerce them into providing the treatments they want. Families are being destroyed.

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The Many Types of Gametes

Along with our ramped up search for UFO's, shouldn't we invest $ to document all of the intersex gametes? Gametes that are neither sperm nor egg? It appalls me that colonizing doctors keep pompously "assigning" labels of "egg" and "sperm" to gametes.

I'm reacting tongue-in-cheek to Colin Wright's collection of some of the prominent recent claims that there are allegedly more than two sexes and that "sex is a spectrum." Most surprising is the recent claim in a formerly respectable magazine, Scientific American. Wright's collection is worth a quick tour - click the image below.  Read it and weep.

What are gametes and why are they relevant to this discussion?

Gametes are an organism's reproductive cells, also referred to as sex cells. In species that produce two morphologically distinct types of gametes, and in which each individual produces only one type, a female is any individual that produces the larger type of gamete—called an ovum— and a male produces the smaller tadpole-like type—called a sperm.
It's rather amazing what one can do when one boldly separates the concept of gametes from the concept of sex. These days, it's a way for someone to claim victimization, to gain the warmth of a deluded tribe and to get a lot of attention. Here's why that conceptual move fails. 

In this hard-fought conceptual game, the Woke team prefers to categorize people by their feelings and intuition in terms of numerous "genders," ignoring that the traditional way of categorizing people into male and female, men and women, has deep biological roots related to the propagation of the species.  Using sex organs and games as the basis to categorize individuals as male or female is not an arbitration division. In fact, we divide every other mammalian organism into one of two sexes, male and female, based on the types of the type of gamete that organism produces. That division works virtually every time we encounter a mammal. Dividing humans into male and female is easy and intuitive, based on simple observation of sex organs. There is no need for a doctor to "assign" the sex of a newborn baby. With extremely rare exceptions (2 out of 10,000), that determination is purely scientific.

But we now have increasing numbers of people and organizations declaring that there are more than two sexes. It's a classic case of making shit up.

I'll close with this quote by a being that happened to look like an egg:

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."

"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."

"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master—that's all."

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