Conservatives and Liberals experience the world differently

When someone reacts to something conservatives say by asking what universe they exist in, the question may make sense beyond just being snark. Science is beginning to determine that liberals and conservatives really do live in different universes. This is a quick report from Wired.

Research has already shown that, compared to liberals, conservatives display heightened responses to threatening images. Michael Dodd of the University of Nebraska wanted to explore this in finer detail: He showed 46 left- or right-leaning Nebraskans a series of images alternately disgusting (spiders on faces, open wounds) and appealing (smiling children, cute rabbits.) Dodd's team found that conservatives reacted most strongly to negative images, and liberals most strongly to positive photographs.

Then he showed them pictures of well-known politicians. The same patterns held: Conservatives displayed more distaste than liberals for politicians they disliked, while liberals felt more positive than conservatives about politicians they liked. Given these and other findings, wrote Dodd's team, "those on the political right and those on the political left may simply experience the world differently."

That sounds pessimistic, but it doesn't have to be. It can be a healthy reminder that people with whom we disagree aren't stupid or irrational; they just have different perspectives.

""

Image: Each graph depicts the arousal response of conservatives (triangle dots) and liberals (square dots) to images that are disgusting or appealing (left set) and pictures of opposing politicians (right set). (Dodd et al./Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B)

Citation: "The political left rolls with the good and the political right confronts the bad: connecting physiology and cognition to preferences." By Michael D. Dodd, Amanda Balzer, Carly M. Jacobs, Michael W. Gruszczynski, Kevin B. Smith and John R. Hibbing. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Vol. 367 No. 1589, March 5, 2012.

Tyler Cowen on the Great Stagnation

Tyler Cowan describes how America is no longer the innovative society it was. Watch this. You'll be surprised when America was at its most innovative. He also proposes one way to increase the innovativeness in our nation.

Mirror Neurons and empathy - the science that shows Libertrianism is a lie

The premises on which Libertarianism are based are a crock. This talk shows why.



The invisible hand that makes economies, nations, families and busineses work is not self-interest. It is empathy based on mirror Neurons that makes all these groups work.

[H\T to Daniel De Groot at OpenLeft.

Original source http://www.cognitivemedia.co.uk/ (Cognitivemedia]

Is coffee good for you?

Well? Is it? Good for you I mean.

Apparently it is a mixed bag (Quelle surprise!) but according to this article from CNN, on net coffee is probably good for you. So go read it.

Coffee: Is it healthier than you think?

By Sarah Klein, Health.com

Were humans evolved to be runners?

The New York Times offers an interesting speculation on the evolution of the human body.

The scientific evidence supports the notion that humans evolved to be runners. In a 2007 paper in the journal Sports Medicine, Daniel E. Lieberman, a Harvard evolutionary biologist, and Dennis M. Bramble, a biologist at the University of Utah, wrote that several characteristics unique to humans suggested endurance running played an important role in our evolution.

Most mammals can sprint faster than humans — having four legs gives them the advantage. But when it comes to long distances, humans can outrun almost any animal. Because we cool by sweating rather than panting, we can stay cool at speeds and distances that would overheat other animals. On a hot day, the two scientists wrote, a human could even outrun a horse in a 26.2-mile marathon.

Why would evolution favor the distance runner? The prevailing theory is that endurance running allowed primitive humans to incorporate meat into their diet. They may have watched the sky for scavenging birds and then run long distances to reach a fresh kill and steal the meat from whatever animal was there first.

Other research suggests that before the development of slingshots or bows, early hunters engaged in persistence hunting, chasing an animal for hours until it overheated, making it easy to kill at close range. A 2006 report in the journal Current Anthropology documents persistence hunting among modern hunter-gatherers, including the Bushmen in Africa.

“Ancient humans exploited the fact that humans are good runners in the heat,” Dr. Bramble said. “We have such a great cooling system” — many sweat glands, little body hair.

There is other evidence that evolution favored endurance running. A study in The Journal of Experimental Biology last February showed that the short toes of the human foot allowed for more efficient running, compared with longer-toed animals. Increasing toe length as little as 20 percent doubles the mechanical work of the foot. Even the fact that the big toe is straight, rather than to the side, suggests that our feet evolved for running.

“The big toe is lined up with the rest, not divergent, the way you see with apes and our closest nonrunning relatives,” Dr. Bramble said. “It’s the main push-off in running: the last thing to leave the ground is that big toe.”

Springlike ligaments and tendons in the feet and legs are crucial for running. (Our close relatives the chimpanzee and the ape don’t have them.) A narrow waist and a midsection that can turn allow us to swing our arms and prevent us from zigzagging on the trail. Humans also have a far more developed sense of balance, an advantage that keeps the head stable as we run. And most humans can store about 20 miles’ worth of glycogen in their muscles.

And the gluteus maximus, the largest muscle in the human body, is primarily engaged only during running. “Your butt is a running muscle; you barely use it when you walk,” Dr. Lieberman said. “There are so many features in our bodies from our heads to our toes that make us good at running.”

This makes a good case, and it is well-known in medical circles that a human in training can run down a horse given several days. The horse can always sprint away at first, but the human continues to run and catches up when the horse stops to rest. After a day or so, the horse will simply stop running away and the human catches it. The human, if trained, is capable of greater long term endurance than the horse does.

Interesting, no?

How bad can grief over the death of a loved one get?

What happens to the people left behind when someone dies? In the U.S. 2.5 million people die each year and on average four other people are affected. The death of a loved one can be painful and lasting but most people get over it in time. However for roughly 15% of the survivors the effects persist for 2 to 20 years to the extent that the person can barely get out of bed in the morning.

This extreme form of grieving is called complicated grief or prolonged grief disorder. For over a million people a year

...becomes what Dr. M. Katherine Shear, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia, calls “a loop of suffering.” And these people, Dr. Shear added, can barely function. “It takes a person away from humanity,” she said of their suffering, “and has no redemptive value.”

Research has shown that such grief can become a mental disorder quite as debilitating as Depression or PTSD. Research shows that it can. For susceptible people such prolonged grief can predict sociality, a higher level of substance abuse, cigarette and alcohol consumption better than can a diagnosis of depression can.

The New York Times science section has an interesting report on this disorder. It apparently is likely to appear in the Diagnostic and Statistics Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) scheduled to be issued in 2012.

Global Warming can't be blamed for all climate problems, it seems.

The drought that afflicted the the Southeastern U.S. from 2005 to 2007 was a result of population growth, not of global warming. At least this is what Richard Seager, a climate expert at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory who led a study of that drought told interviewers when asked. The drought was apparently no different from others in the same region over the last century, so the only significant factor that changed was the population increase in that region.

The researchers said rainfall patterns in the Southeast were linked only weakly to weather patterns like La Niña and El Niño, the oscillating warm and cold conditions in the eastern Pacific linked to precipitation rates in the Southwestern United States.

Instead, they wrote, any variation in rainfall in the Southeast commonly “arises from internal atmospheric processes and is essentially unpredictable.”

Idiots who fantasize that somehow this proves that there is no global warming should remember that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. There is enough other proof of global warming to guarantee that it is a real phenomenon.

Thinking about thinking - not just for human beings now

The ability of humans to think about what they are thinking about (Metacognition)has long been considered by many as a uniquely human behavior. Maybe not. Maybe it's just easier to test for in humans because humans can talk about what they are thinking about, while similar tests in animals require observing the animal behavior and inferring what they are thinking about. This from Live Science at Yahoo News:

Some animals are more thoughtful than others, according to a comparative psychologist who says evidence is mounting that dolphins, macaque monkeys and other animals share our ability to reflect upon, monitor or regulate their states of mind.

J. David Smith of the University at Buffalo notes that humans are capable of metacognition, or thinking about thinking. "Humans can feel uncertainty. They know when they do not know or remember, and they respond well to uncertainty by deferring response and seeking information," Smith writes in the September issue of the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

And accumulating research, he says, suggests metacognition is not unique to humans.

"The idea is that some minds have a cognitive executive that can look in on the human's or the animal's thoughts and problem-solving and look at how its going and see if there are ways to guide it or if behavior needs to pause while more information is obtained," Smith told LiveScience.

So what, you say?

Metacognition is a critical part of what it means to be conscious. If we can understand metacognition, then we are further down the road to understanding what consciousness is.

Calcium leaks cause muscle fatigue, not lactic acid

The New York Times reports the new discover of how muscles get tired. The old explanation, that muscles release lactic acid, turns out to have been wrong.

In a report published Monday in an early online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr. Marks says the problem is calcium flow inside muscle cells. Ordinarily, ebbs and flows of calcium in cells control muscle contractions. But when muscles grow tired, the investigators report, tiny channels in them start leaking calcium, and that weakens contractions. At the same time, the leaked calcium stimulates an enzyme that eats into muscle fibers, contributing to the muscle exhaustion. [Snip]

Dr. Marks, a cardiologist, wanted to discover better ways to treat people with congestive heart failure, a chronic and debilitating condition that affects an estimated 4.8 million Americans.

Its hallmark is a damaged heart, usually from a heart attack or high blood pressure. Struggling to pump blood, the heart grows, sometimes becoming so large that it fills a patient’s chest. As the disease progresses, the lungs fill with fluid. Eventually, with congested lungs and a heart that can barely pump, patients become so short of breath that they cannot walk across a room. Half die within five years.

In his efforts to understand why the heart muscle weakened, Dr. Marks focused on the molecular events in the heart. He knew the sequence of events. As the damaged heart tries to deal with the body’s demands for blood, the nervous system floods the heart with the fight or flight hormones, epinephrine and norepinephrine that make the heart muscle cells contract harder.

The intensified contractions, Dr. Marks and his colleagues discovered, occurred because the hormones caused calcium to be released into the heart muscle cells’ channels.

But eventually the epinephrine and norepinephrine cannot stimulate the heart enough to meet the demands for blood. The brain responds by releasing more and more of those fight or flight hormones until it is releasing them all the time. At that point, the calcium channels in heart muscle are overstimulated and start to leak.

When they understood the mechanisms, the researchers developed a class of experimental drugs that block the leaks in calcium channels in the heart muscle. The drugs were originally created to block cells’ calcium channels, a way of lowering blood pressure.

Dr. Marks and his colleagues altered the drugs to make them less toxic and to rid them of their ability to block calcium channels. They were left with drugs that stopped calcium leaks. The investigators called the drugs rycals, because they attach to the ryanodine receptor/calcium release channel in heart muscle cells. The investigators tested rycals in mice and found that they could prevent heart failure and arrhythmias in the animals. [Snip]

Dr. Marks wondered whether the mechanism he discovered might apply to skeletal muscle as well as heart muscle. Skeletal muscle is similar to heart muscle, he noted, and has the same calcium channel system. And heart failure patients complain that their muscles are extremely weak.

“If you go to the hospital and ask heart failure patients what is bothering them, they don’t say their heart is weak,” Dr. Marks said. “They say they are weak.”

So he and his colleagues looked at making mice exercise to exhaustion, swimming and then running on a treadmill. The calcium channels in their skeletal muscles became leaky, the investigators found. And when they gave the mice their experimental drug, the animals could run 10 to 20 percent longer.

Then, collaborating with David Nieman, an exercise scientist at Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C., the investigators asked whether the human skeletal muscles grew tired for the same reason, calcium leaks.

Highly trained bicyclists rode stationary bikes at intense levels of exertion for three hours a day three days in a row. For comparison, other cyclists sat in the room but did not exercise.

Dr. Nieman removed snips of thigh muscle from all the athletes after the third day and sent them to Columbia, where Dr. Marks’s group analyzed them without knowing which samples were from the exercisers and which were not. The results, Dr. Marks said, were clear. The calcium channels in the exercisers leaked. A few days later, the channels had repaired themselves. The athletes were back to normal.

There is discussion in the article of a drug being developed to correct the problem of calcium leaks, but any effective medications are a long way off. What really matters is that researchers are beginning to have a greater understanding of muscle fatigue, and that understanding is going to result is new ways of getting the human body to work better.

We all experience muscle fatigue, and the researchers are only just now getting a better handle on understanding of it. Could these findings shed light on Chronic fatigue syndrome and Fibromyalgia?

This article leads me to a speculation. I use caffeine (coffee or tea) when I am feeling fatigue. Caffeine causes a physical reaction similar to the fight or flight mechanism. Noting the description above of how the body puts out the fight or flight hormones of epinephrine and norepinephrine to make the muscle cells contract harder when they are fatigued, I wonder how the caffeine and calcium leakages interact?

I also wonder how many other physical, emotional and mental events we all experience are just waiting to be unraveled this way.

Blue eyes: result of a recent mutation which has been identified

Originally all human beings had brown eyes. Then, sometime between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago, there was a mutation to "the so-called OCA2 gene, which is involved in the production of melanin, the pigment that gives color to our hair, eyes and skin." Jeanna Bryner at MSNBC reports the story.

"A genetic mutation affecting the OCA2 gene in our chromosomes resulted in the creation of a 'switch,' which literally 'turned off' the ability to produce brown eyes," Eiberg said.

The genetic switch is located in the gene adjacent to OCA2 and rather than completely turning off the gene, the switch limits its action, which reduces the production of melanin in the iris. In effect, the turned-down switch diluted brown eyes to blue.

If the OCA2 gene had been completely shut down, our hair, eyes and skin would be melanin-less, a condition known as albinism. [Snip]

Eiberg [from the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the University of Copenhagen.] and his team examined DNA from mitochondria, the cells' energy-making structures, of blue-eyed individuals in countries including Jordan, Denmark and Turkey. This genetic material comes from females, so it can trace maternal lineages. [Snip]

...we can conclude that all blue-eyed individuals are linked to the same ancestor," Eiberg said. "They have all inherited the same switch at exactly the same spot in their DNA." Eiberg and his colleagues detailed their study in the Jan. 3 online edition of the journal Human Genetics.

That genetic switch somehow spread throughout Europe and now other parts of the world.

"The question really is, 'Why did we go from having nobody on Earth with blue eyes 10,000 years ago to having 20 or 40 percent of Europeans having blue eyes now?" Hawks said. "This gene does something good for people. It makes them have more kids."

I find this fascinating.

Now, just to satisfy my curiosity, when will the Chinese geneticists tell us about the history of the epicanthal fold that many people of East Asian and Southeast Asian descent have. But that is probably not something that can be pinned down to a single mutation so easily, and I'd guess that it's a little older than the blue-eye mutation. both are a direct result of the migration of human beings north out of Africa, as described in Nicholas Wade's outstanding book Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors.

Oh, wait. We don't need to find out those things, because the fundamentalist theological schools have already told us - those things are the results of decisions by the "Intelligent Designer." Such things are much to complicated for us mere human beings to understand, so we make a mistake trying. It is for us to do nothing more than worship the Intelligent Designer, obey the superior church leaders and tithe so that they can buy better cars and bigger mansions. Why would we mere sheep have to know about such things that are so far above our God-given station?

[Makes me want to contribute to some genetics research somewhere, just to spite the Discovery Institute and Mike Huckabee.]

Further ruminations on the idiocy of Libertarianism

Here is another really good point on Libertariamism, from What's wrong with libertarianism.

Distaste for facts isn't merely a habit of a few Internet cranks; it's actually libertarian doctrine, the foundation of the 'Austrian school'. Here's Ludwig von Mises in Epistemological Problems of Economics:

As there is no discernible regularity in the emergence and concatenation of ideas and judgments of value, and therefore also not in the succession and concatenation of human acts, the role that experience plays in the study of human action is radically different from that which it plays in the natural sciences. Experience of human action is history. Historical experience does not provide facts that could render in the construction of a theoretical science services that could be compared to those which laboratory experiments and observation render to physics. Historical events are always the joint effect of the cooperation of various factors and chains of causation. In matters of human action no experiments can be performed. History needs to be interpreted by theoretical insight gained previously from other sources.

The 'other sources' turn out to be armchair ruminations on how things must be. It's true enough that economics is not physics; but that's not warrant to turn our backs on the methods of science and return to scholastic speculation. Economics should always move in the direction of science, experiment, and falsifiability. If it were really true that it cannot, then no one, including the libertarians, would be entitled to strong belief in any economic program.

There is no set of ideas that government can safely act on unless they come from a tradition of science, experiment, and falsifiability.Government acts on behavior, not on what people think. If there are no facts which can be established as "True" by using scientific methods, then government is demanding the right to tell you how to think. That is religious or ideological coercion by government. History has clearly demonstrated that such coercion of thought or belief always leads to rebellion, the cost of which exceeds the expected benefits of the government effort.

American ignorance enforced by religious beliefs

Too many people believe that Creationism and enforced ignorance of Evolution and the Big Bang Theory, the organizing principles of modern biological science and modern physics, are things that exist only in small towns in Tennessee and the Appalachian mountains. Not true. Here is a story from Fort Bend County, Texas, which is a large portion of the Southeast part of the Houston Metropolitan Area, and not coincidently, includes the people who have sent both Representatives Tom DeLay and Ron Paul to Congress. From Nancy Hentschel in Sugar Land, Texas Fort Bend Now:

I taught sixth grade in Texas for three years 2001-2004. During that time, I was absolutely warned to not begin to say the word “evolution” or we would have every preacher in the district, as well as the media, breathing down our necks, and then there would truly be no teaching or learning. Sadly, I needed the position, so I played the “hide the issue and hide the learning” game.

Every time I tell this story, usually at a dinner party, people look at me like I am reliving some ancient past. I remind them that this policy ruled only two years ago – and in their progressive community. Like many issues that are easier to disbelieve than to address, people inevitably choose disbelief.

It is more difficult for me to choose disbelief, but over time, even I can begin to question my experience. So several weeks ago, I decided to test the continued use of this policy. I interviewed with a high school in Fort Bend and asked if I could use current events in the English classroom to explore why real evolution education is often an inoculation against racism and eugenic posturing. The interviewer quickly replied, “We do not challenge the sensitive “beliefs” of our student community.”
Too bad, … our most ill-informed students fall easy prey to eugenic manipulation, intolerance, and gangs because they do not understand real evolution. As can easily be seen in our prisons, it is the most ignorant of our population who are the most susceptible to a twisted understanding of evolution and racism. In more affluent areas, evolution ignorance is commonly twisted into lame justification for oppression.

God forbid that we should teach knowledge over “beliefs.” No wonder our politicians keep repeating the mantra “I believe …this and I believe …that” The “belief” word demands free reign to twist reality without being questioned. It is a true tragedy when believing trumps thinking, especially in our schools.

This isn't some backwoods rural small town. This is the public education system of part of the Houston, Texas metropolitan area. But it spreads through much of Texas politics, supported by Texas' current governor, Rick Perry.

The Texas Education Agency (TEA) as an approval process for textbooks that are used in Texas Public Schools, and the state of Texas will not pay for textbooks which are not approved. Currently the TEA is considering the content of science textbooks for Texas schools. The textbooks that are printed for the massive Texas market are then also sold to school districts across the United States, because it is a lot cheaper to print only one version of a textbook.

But the members of the TEA are elected, in down-ballot but statewide elections that are of interest only to a few very committed political junkies and a whole lot of Texas religious nuts and Creationists. (Think Mike Huckabee, thought he comes from that small and mostly rural state north of Texas.) The Press does not cover elections to the TEA, so the candidates are not questioned regarding their policies or beliefs. also, the religiuos fundamentalists took complete control of the Texas Republican Party over two decades ago.

The result is that as long as the Press does not find a smoking gun issue that is can report on, the religious fundamentalists effectively appoint the members of the TEA, who then carefully craft the Texas textbooks to meet the demands of their religion. That means anti-science science textbooks, as well as pro-free market nationalist and nativist history texts. And remember, these same textbooks are offered cheap around the U.S.

That's the background behind the recent firing of the Texas Education Agency’s director of science, Christine Castillo Comer. What did she do to get fired? She emailed - without recommendation - information to likely participants regarding time and location of a talk to be given by a highly respected science educator who was also known as an opponent of Intelligent Design.

The TEA religious yahoos do not want good science information to be presented to children, because when they are ignorant they are easier to convert to Yahooism. They want the government to forbid science and teach only religion.

Mike Huckabee is a supreme religious Yahoo - with a great smile. He's a Dominionist This is another part of the Constitution that he wants to change because it conflicts with his definition of "God's standards."