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Did you stuff yourself at Thanksgiving? Do you feel stupid about it? Do you wonder what the hell you were thinking as you went for that second helping of pie, your belly already swollen with turkey and cranberry sauce?
I'll tell you what you were thinking: the same thing your ancestors thought. They were suckers for fat, sweets, and extra helpings, too. The difference is, back in their day, those urges were healthy. You're not weaker or more gluttonous than they were. You just live in a different world—a world of cars, McDonald's, and corn syrup.
If you want to understand this mismatch between your genetically inherited tastes and your industrially inherited world, go pick up a copy of Barry Popkin's new book, The World Is Fat. (The title is a play on Tom Friedman's The World Is Flat.) I've written about Popkin before. He's an astute analyst of what's causing the obesity epidemic.
If you're like me, you grew up worrying about people starving in other countries. Your mom would tell you things like, "Eat your food. There are kids going hungry tonight." But hunger, as a global threat, is now dwarfed by overweight. According to Popkin, the population of obese and overweight people worldwide—1.6 billion—is now twice as large as the population of malnourished people.
This isn't the first time dietary changes have radically reshaped the human body. Popkin reports that average height shrank by about 4 inches during the Agricultural Revolution, apparently because previously diverse diets narrowed to a few crops. Then, as diets diversified again during the Industrial Revolution, average height in Europe and the United States regained 2 to 4 inches.
But Popkin's most important insight is that today's reshaping of our species—getting fat—is a result not of bad habits but of good habits that lost their context. During our ancestors' evolution, he explains,
To help us survive as a species, we developed preferences for sweet and fatty foods. ... Sweet foods provided nutritional balance to our diet, and they helped us survive during periods when animal foods were scarce. Sweet foods also provided the glucose needed to fuel our brains. At this time, however, sugars were only found in fruit. Because there are nine calories of energy in each gram of fat ... consuming as much fat as possible would have helped our hunter-gatherer and hominid ancestors to get an adequate amount of calories.
So, when you reach for that second helping of pie, you're doing what nature intended but in a world so radically transformed that nature's previous dictates no longer make sense. You're experiencing the disjunction between the rapid pace of technology and culture on the one hand and the slow pace of evolution on the other. Your body hasn't caught up to your world.
I'm a big fan of Popkin's theory for two reasons. First, it's consistent with the evidence. And, second, it's consistent with Human Nature's first law: Bad things happen because, initially, they're good. So, check out Popkin's book. Or if you're still not sold, start with a short overview of his argument. Bon appétit!
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You think the economy is bad? I have worse news: We're living longer.
Well, that's not exactly news. Steady increases in life expectancy have been a regular topic here at Human Nature. Now they're relevant for an awkward reason: The longer you live, the longer you have to stretch out your retirement savings. And right about now, your savings probably aren't looking like they're up to the job.
As the latest Reuters report notes, over the last four decades, U.S. life expectancy has climbed from 70.8 to 77.8 years. By 2015, it's on track to hit 79.2 years. Meanwhile, unlike other industrialized democracies, the United States has replaced pensions with 401(k) plans. So your retirement-income pie can suddenly shrink—as, for example, it's doing right now—and, at the same time, the longevity you've gained from all this lovely industrialization requires you to carve that pie into more and more annual pieces.
Financial planners have even coined a term for this paradox: longevity risk. The Reuters story features an 84-year-old retired nurse who now worries "about outliving her savings." A financial advice executive tells the wire service, "Probably half our clients are retired and yes, we have a lot of very worried, concerned clients. Their leading concerns are, No. 1, that they're going to run out of money."
So, the good news, in a way, has become bad news. And that's not the worst of it. The worst of it is that a lot of these old people who now expect to outlive their savings might decide to kill themselves before they run out of money. I wonder what the financial planners will call that.
(P.S. If you're on the main HN blog page and are looking for a link to add your own comment, just click the headline of the relevant item, and you'll get a page that has a "discuss" link.)
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When I wrote last week about the possibility of resurrecting Neanderthals through cloning, I felt a bit sensationalist. Would scientists really do that? It sounded unlikely.
Now I'm less incredulous. Agence France Presse reports:
Japanese scientists said [Nov. 18] they had created a cloned embryo from the dead body of an endangered species of rabbit and are hoping for a birth. ... Professor Yoshihiko Hosoi of Kinki University ... said his team had extracted a cell from a dead Amami rabbit's ear and put it into the egg of an ordinary rabbit. "After we confirmed that the egg developed into a cloned embryo, we put it back into the fallopian tube of the host mother," Hosoi said. "In about 30 days the host mother may give birth to a baby rabbit which has the gene information of Amami rabbit."
Kinki, indeed. So the due date for this clone of a dead member of a dying species is somewhere in mid-December. And this comes just six months after scientists reported in PLOS One:
We isolated a transcriptional enhancer element from the genome of an extinct marsupial, the Tasmanian tiger ... obtained from 100 year-old ethanol-fixed tissues from museum collections. ... Using a transgenic approach, it was possible to resurrect DNA function in transgenic mice. ... Our method using transgenesis can be used to explore the function of regulatory and protein-coding sequences obtained from any extinct species in an in vivo model system, providing important insights into gene evolution and diversity.
There you have it: a rationale for, and pilot demonstration of, the resurrection of DNA from extinct species. Tissue taken from a museum and brought to life in a mouse.
You can save a species by cloning new members from its corpses. Or you can reactivate part of the DNA of an extinct species by integrating it into an existing species. Or you can reassemble a whole member of an extinct species (the mammoth) by incrementally reengineering its known DNA from a closely related existing species (the Indian elephant). Scientists seem to be making progress on the first two ideas. It's hard to believe they won't try the third.
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Happy Thanksgiving. Here's a request to those of you who are cooking today: Go easy on the salt.
In case you haven't heard, salt is the latest target of the health police. First smoking, then fat, now salt.
In the case of smoking, I'm with the health cops all the way. As one country after another has banned indoor smoking, I've been fist-pumping. When the health crusaders turned to fat, I celebrated again. Trans fats? Don't need ‘em. Soda? Disgusting.
But then they banned new fast-food restaurants in south L.A, and I freaked out. Cigarettes are industrial and nutrition-free, I figured. Trans fats and soda are artificial, too. But burgers and fries? The cooking's modern, but meat and potatoes are basic. They're food. You can't do that to food.
What happened to calories and saturated fat is now happening to salt: Public-health groups are clamoring for regulation, the FDA is holding hearings, and industry is adapting. Here's the latest from Reuters:
Burger King said on Wednesday it would limit sodium to 600 milligrams or less in all of its Kids Meals advertised to children younger than 12. ... McDonald's Corp already prepares its children's meals with less sodium. Its four-piece Chicken McNuggets Happy Meal ... has 390 calories and 570 milligrams of sodium. ... Burger King's currently advertised Kids Meal is its first to meet the new criteria. ... The meal has 340 calories and 505 milligrams of sodium.
That's still too much salt, but it's a start. And I'm with the health cops on this one. Salt is different from meat and potatoes. It's food, but it's also an additive. It's great that industry is reducing it voluntarily. If industry doesn't move far enough and the health cops want to restrict salt in prepared food, I won't cry. You can always add more salt from a shaker or from takeout packets.
Here's my pitch to the burger joints: Thanks for letting us choose whether to leave out the lettuce and tomatoes. Do the same with salt
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Looks like I missed a joint.
A couple of months ago, I wrote about the artificial parts we've been putting into people: hips, knees, shoulders, spinal discs, and elbows. U.S. government stats show more than 1 million such replacements per year. Piece by piece, we're mechanizing the body.
Next up: ankles.
Lauran Neergard of the AP has the story. There's a healthy (actually, an unhealthy) market for new ankles: More than 200,000 patients go to doctors for ankle pain every year. The prevailing surgical option is to fuse the ankle bones, which gets rid of the friction, and therefore the pain, but skews the way you move your foot. That, in turn, increases the strain on other foot joints, causing more pain and more fusions.
So why hasn't ankle replacement become as popular as hip or knee replacement? Because ankles are smaller and have to shoulder (so to speak) more stress. The original generation of artificial ankles broke down under normal wear and tear. A new generation is just now taking off. They cost up to $50,000 but are designed to operate more like a natural ankle, which would avoid the downstream damage associated with fusion. Neergard explains how they work:
Each model is slightly different but consists of two attached parts. Surgeons drill a tunnel into the lower leg bone and slide in the stem of the artificial joint. A bottom piece connects to the top of the foot. Thin plastic hooked to one side functions as cartilage. Bone then grows into the implant, holding it in place. In Europe, doctors also can use a similar but three-piece artificial ankle, where the plastic cushion is free-floating.
So the artificial cushion relieves day-to-day strains on the ankle, while the body, through bone growth, adopts the new mechanism as its own. Biology absorbs technology. Very cool. Let's hope it works.
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Several of you have implied in the Fray that I'm obsessed with drones. This is really quite unfair. If you want to see true obsession, visit Wired's military blog, Danger Room, where you can read more than 300 posts about unmanned aerial vehicles, or unmanned aerial systems, or whatever the hell the Pentagon (or is it the CIA?) is calling them now. The DR crew doesn't just follow the drone war in Pakistan from afar, as I do. They go straight to the Pakistani press.
Take a quick stroll through their recent archive and you'll see that they're way ahead of me in tracking the revolution. For example: Pakistan already has spy (not killer) drones. The Russians are buying drones ... from Israel. Iraq wants drones, too.
I could spend all day at that blog. But that might be a tad, you know, obsessive.
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Six years ago, President Bush's bioethics council opened its inaugural meeting with a discussion of The Birth-Mark, a Nathaniel Hawthorne short story. Council member Bill May summarized the plot, in which a scientist "loves his wife but kills her in the attempt to remove her single imperfection, a birthmark on her left cheek." For nearly an hour, the council sat around debating what the mark symbolized.
Today, the council has run its course—the Obama administration will probably replace it with a more sympathetic panel—but the news has come back to birthmarks. The Vascular Birthmarks Foundation and the Vascular Birthmark Institute of New York just held their eighth annual Vascular Birthmarks Conference, at which dozens of families met with doctors to discuss surgery and other medical options. The New York Times reports from the conference:
"We can no longer accept that a child can go through life being severely disfigured, and accept that as their lot," said Dr. [Milton] Waner, the co-director of the Vascular Birthmark Institute. "Something needs to be done, and I believe that every child has the right to look normal." ... Much of the concern, for many families at the conference, was financial. Doctors said insurance providers frequently refused to pay for the treatments, classifying them as cosmetic surgery. "Their definition of cosmetic is very broad," Dr. Waner said. "This is not cosmetic."
Strictly speaking, Dr. Waner is incorrect. Disfigurement per se is cosmetic. Merriam-Webster's medical dictionary, on which the National Institutes of Health rely, defines cosmetic as "of, relating to, or making for beauty." It defines cosmetic surgery as "correcting defects especially of the face." One question is whether insurers should cover such procedures. Beneath that question lies another: Do children need them?
When you read about these kids and the abuse they sometimes endure for looking unusual, your heart goes out to them. One mother tells the Times about a boy who walked past her son and said, "Look at your face. You look ugly." But which is the problem, the birthmark or the bad attitude? Something needs to be done, but is it surgery? Is every child entitled to "look normal"? Or is he entitled to respect regardless of how he looks?
As it happens, surgery for the kid who was called ugly is a no-brainer. That's because his disfigurement had functional effects, enlarging his tongue so he couldn't speak intelligibly. Dr. Waner and others who take on such cases pro bono are doing noble work. But the quest for normality can extend to iffier cases. The Times describes a baby at the conference who "has a circular, purple mark on her forehead about the size of a nickel." Such defects, known as hemangiomas, "often disappear or shrink in 10 to 12 years, but they can have a social and psychological impact—on children in particular, who must live with the stigma of looking different." Is that a good reason for surgery?
I'm not saying kids with purely cosmetic defects don't suffer. They do. But their suffering isn't medical. It's social. Cosmetic surgery changes an otherwise healthy body to fit culturally imposed aesthetic standards. If a purple mark on your forehead is too much to bear, what about male breasts? What about a flat female chest? How far should we extend the "right"—and, implicitly, the obligation—to look normal?
We had a vascular birth mark in my family. It was considerably bigger than a nickel. In time, it subsided and vanished. The child who was born with it had something more important than the right to look normal. She had the right not to.
P.S. It looks like our "discuss" link is still broken, so here's a handmade link to the HN fray in case you'd like to join the discussion: http://fray.slate.com/discuss/forums/2100253/ShowForum.aspx.
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A week ago, when we last checked in on the drone war in Pakistan, the news wasn't good. Insurgents had bombed a Pakistani hotel and a security checkpoint, apparently in retaliation for drone strikes on them. The Pakistani government, in turn, was asking the new U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David Petraeus, to call off the drones. Petraeus said he'd listen. It looked as though the United States might buckle.
Then Petraeus went to Afghanistan and praised the drones. "It is hugely important that three of 20 extremist leaders have been killed in recent months," he told the AP. And on Friday, the Pakistanis got their answer. A drone attack killed another dozen suspected militants at a Taliban commanders' house.
The machines have now racked up more than 100 kills in Pakistan since August. Petraeus has been lobbied, and Barack Obama has been elected, but the drone strikes go on.
How is Pakistan greeting this aggression? Is it threatening to fight? Hardly. Yesterday the country's president told the AP, "We feel that the strikes are an intrusion on our sovereignty, which are not appreciated by the people at large, and the first aspect of this war is to win the hearts and mind of the people."
"Feel"? "Not appreciated"? It's hard to come up with weaker language than that. The real message seems to be: Do what you must, but try not to give us political trouble.
From that standpoint, drones are a lot less harmful than the alternatives. The biggest popular anti-American protests in Pakistan recently were triggered not by drones but by a U.S. ground incursion. Likewise, in Afghanistan, recent politically incendiary mass killings of civilians have been inflicted (accidentally) by human operators on the scene. Yes, the drones have killed some Pakistani civilians. But not nearly as many, it appears, as Pakistani forces have killed in their own clumsy campaign against the insurgents.
Why do the drones have a better record of minimizing mistakes? For one thing, they don't have to make quick decisions. They can hover, watch, and wait. The intelligence they collect can be sifted and weighed by multiple supervisors before reaching a decision to fire. And in Pakistan, they seem to have an additional asset: human sources on the ground. The Washington Post explains:
Brig. Gen. Mahmood Shah, former longtime head of [Pakistani] government security in the tribal areas, said the missile attacks have become noticeably more precise, leading some to believe that local tribesmen in the border areas are supplying the U.S. military with better information about targets. Shah said rumors about so-called U.S. spies among the tribes have fed paranoia about the possibility that signaling devices have been deployed in area villages. Tribesmen have lately made a habit of sweeping the areas around their homes for such devices, he said. "They're not sitting outside in their compounds anymore because they are afraid that they will be struck by these missiles," Shah said.
All this time, I've been looking for technological answers to the mystery of the drones' precision, their increasing ability to find the bad guys. But maybe the answer isn't machines. Maybe it's people.
And if it's people, then the bad guys don't have to fight the machines. They can do what they already know how to do: kill some people and intimidate the rest. That seems to be what they're trying. A day after Friday's drone strike, Agence France-Presse reported:
Taliban militants killed two Afghan men Saturday in Pakistan's restive tribal belt after accusing them of spying for US-led forces. ... The executions were the latest in a string of similar killings and come a day after a suspected US drone fired missiles and destroyed an Al-Qaeda sanctuary in North Waziristan, killing 14. ... Executions routinely follow suspected US missile strikes against militant targets in Pakistan, which officials say are often conducted on intelligence provided by paid local informants.
According to the AP, the two bodies were thrown onto a road, each pinned with a note that said, "See the fate of this man. He was an American spy."
Were the men really spies? If so, were they scouting targets for the drones? I don't know. But for the last three months, somebody's been doing a heck of a job finding the bad guys in northwest Pakistan. Maybe, as U.S. military sources have let on, it's the drones themselves. Or maybe that's the cover story for what's still the world's greatest enemy-detection device: the human being.
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Maybe you can ban steroids in sports because they're medically dangerous. And maybe you can ban carbon-fiber prosthetic legs because they're newfangled. But what about swimsuits? What do you do when a technology that's been around for ages—sleeker, tighter suits—becomes decisive? What can you say when the only objection to such technology is that most people can't afford it?
That's the situation today in collegiate and high-school swimming, according to Amy Shipley's enlightening report in Sunday's Washington Post. Swimmers wearing Speedo's LZR suits set 71 of the 77 new aquatic racing world records at, or just before, this year's Olympics. Now collegiate swimming programs are buying LZRs, and their competitors feel obliged to, um, follow suit. The trend extends to the high-school level, where the suits are showing up at state championship meets. Problem: LZRs cost around $500 retail. At best, with discounts, they go for about half that. And because of the fancy fabric, they wear out after just a few meets. Bottom line: Swimmers who can afford these suits will beat equally talented swimmers who can't.
Athletic federations are divided over what to do. Two months ago, USA Swimming prohibited kids under 13 from competing in the suits. The NCAA imposed a moratorium on the suits but then withdrew it.
In general, I don't like sports equipment bans based on sheer cost. Composite tennis racquets were pricey when they first came out. Should they have been prohibited? What about golf clubs or bike frames? Innovative materials are usually expensive at the outset. The way they become cheaper is by gaining notice, spreading to a broader market, and being produced more efficiently in subsequent iterations. If you ban them, you block this process.
In the swimsuit case, it looks to me as though a logical compromise is already unfolding. What makes the suit prohibitively expensive isn't just the outlay, but the fact that it wears out so fast. The crucial number is the per-meet cost. And that number can be sharply reduced by using the suits only at championship events late in the season. This is exactly what some college programs are already doing. You don't need a Ferrari to pick up your groceries. Swim your regular meets in cheaper suits, and save your LZRs for the big events.
This policy coincides with Speedo's discount strategy. The company says it offers LZR discounts to sponsoring colleges. At conference championships, the discount is 40 percent. At the NCAA championships, it's 65 percent. The higher you go in competition, the more the suit matters, and the more worthwhile it is for the company to put you in its suit.
Don't ban the LZR. The unfairness at issue is cost, and cost is adjustable. Let's see how the players adjust before the supervisors go in with a heavy hand.
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I just got back from a talk by David Friedman at the Cato Institute. Fascinating guy, thinks a mile a minute. He must have spat out 100 provocative ideas in his half an hour or so. I can draw you a mental picture of him pretty quickly: bubbly, balding, not much over five feet tall, wears a backpack over his tweed jacket (did I mention the "recreational medievalism"?) and asked the audience whether anybody could give him a ride to Charlottesville tonight. There's still time--if you're going from D.C. to Charlottesville, try him at DDFr@DavidDFriedman.com.
Friedman touched on a range of topics covered in his new book, Future Imperfect. I haven't read the book yet, but he gave a pretty good sense of it. Here's the Cato summary (the podcast will be up later):
[Friedman] looks at a variety of technological revolutions that might happen over the next few decades, their implications, and how to deal with them. Topics range from encryption and surveillance through biotechnology and nanotechnology to life extension, mind drugs, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence. One theme of the book is that the future is radically uncertain. Technological changes already begun could lead to more or less privacy than we have ever known, freedom or slavery, effective immortality or the elimination of our species, and radical changes in life, marriage, law, medicine, work, and play. "If it can be done, it will be done," David Friedman has said. "So the interesting thing to me is not what should you stop but how do you adapt." We do not know which future will arrive, but it is unlikely to be much like the past.
In short, the book covers nearly everything Human Nature covers but with a libertarian bent. Which is sort of my bent, too, except that I'm less theoretically confident than Friedman is--or, to put it the other way, I'm more daunted by practical developments. Three years ago, for example, I wrote a series based on the idea that scientists would try to grow embryos beyond the conventional two-week limit, raising icky possibilities. The scenario made sense to me at the time, but in the three years since, it hasn't happened. A theorist would say, well, it'll happen eventually. I'm not so sure. My reaction is: Maybe I was just wrong.
So this is what I asked Friedman: Is there a contradiction between his technological optimism and his premise of radical uncertainty? When I say optimism, I don't mean a belief that technology will be good; I mean a belief that it will work. His talk was full of bold scenarios: conquering aging, developing artificial intelligence 100 times smarter than us in the next 30 years, and administering mind-control drugs that induce credulity. I agree that these scenarios are fascinating, and when I first came into this field, I took them very seriously. But everywhere I look, the news is telling me another story. The story is that in many fields, and in biology in particular, causality is turning out to be way more complex than we anticipated. The immediate manifestation of that complexity is that even our most conventional attempts to manipulate biology are producing unexpected and often decisive ill side effects.
Take the most obvious case: drugs. Friedman talked about three classes of mind drugs: those for pleasure, those for performance, and those for controlling other people. I've been to visionary or bioethics conferences where theorists have talked up these drugs and how cool or scary they'll become in the near future. But look at the news: Drugs are being restricted or pulled off the market because they're inducing ugly side effects. Not just drugs for the body, like Vioxx, but drugs for the mind, like Chantix. Steroids are boosting athletic performance but causing violence and circulatory trouble. Marijuana is being linked to heart attacks, brain shrinkage, and psychosis. I had high hopes for Bremelanotide, a new sexual-dysfunction drug, aka aphrodisiac. But last year its developer, Palatin Technologies, had to abandon that project due to "blood pressure increases" in some study participants. The company now touts the drug for "organ protection." It's turning out to be very hard to tinker with one function of the mind or body without affecting others.
Friedman's reply to all this was that we do better off "on net" by encouraging biotechnology than by limiting it, and that proposals to restrict it should be subject to the same skepticism that we might apply to the technology itself. That makes sense to me. Still, it's just a political answer. It doesn't address the underlying question of how soon--or even whether--biotechnology will achieve its promises.
I agree with Friedman that the future is radically uncertain. Too uncertain, in fact, to count on its arrival in the form that he envisions--or I do--anytime soon.