Book-in-Progress: Spirit on the Brain: The Paleolithic, Neolithic, Neurological and Magical Origins of Religion
This forthcoming book (c. 2012) will trace the evolution of religion and meditation-based spirituality from paleolithic, pre-scientific times into our own—from shamanic rituals and healing, through alchemy, into the neuroscience underlying higher-state-of-consciousness experiences.
Recent Posts:
June 29: Disorderly Genius
June 25: Growing Plants
From Richard Wrangham on Cooking and Human Origins—plus Ray Mears’ Fruit Gums:
Wrangham proposes that males and females originally cooked their own food, but believes that opportunistic males worked out how they could exploit females, first by forcing them to cook for them, and then offering protection against other males who were similarly disinclined to cook for themselves—he contends, a female cooking food for herself and mate could deter would-be thieves by threatening retaliatory action when her man returned—presumably from hunting. I daresay there will be objections to this somewhat stereotypical depiction of gender divided labour, but Wrangham makes the point that wherever he’s encountered foraging tribes-people, and even those wherein women share a more egalitarian platform within a given society, it’s still invariably the women who get lumped not only with all the cooking, but the general cleaning chores as well.
There is a brief discussion as to how the origins of this arrangement may have begun, partly as a protection racket by males—if she feeds her man, he offers protection against other males who might have considered stealing her food for themselves, and so on.
As one commenter said, “We’ve learned that at least some Linux users fit the unflattering stereotypes. Granted, it’s not ‘you insulted my cracker [i.e., Catholic Host] so you die,’ but … sheesh.”
I was playing an open stage a couple of weeks ago, wearing my “geek inside” t-shirt, and it turned out that one of the other artists (using the term loosely—he was not very good, though he certainly was eccentric) also did I.T. work (aside from whatever his real post-grad degree was in). Seeing that shirt, he said to me: “I guess you’re a Linux user?”
“Uh, no. I’ve done websites in PHP, though.” [Which draws on approximately 1% of what I know about I.T.]
“I was going to say, I’m not sure you’re a real geek if you’re not using Linux. Well, at least you know how to type.” As opposed to just drag-and-dropping in ASP.NET, he meant. So he mimed some typing. “I used to be the guy who’d go and do work for companies, and see they had a couple of machines running NT, and convert them over to Linux. I guess not a lot of people use NT anymore.”
“Uh, no.” Not since 2000, actually. But if you’re a decade behind in business-world technology, it’s no wonder you think Linux rocks, and Windoze sux.
As much as I “need to get out more,” the people in that Ubuntu story really need to get a life. Harassing a cute girl who just wants to take some online courses without having to bloody learn a new operating system is not merely cultic, it’s borderline sociopathic.
“You insulted my O/S by implying it’s less than Supremely Usable? Burn in I.T. hell, infidel!!”
I’m serious about that being cultic behavior. It’s on the same level as people sending death threats to book reviewers who gave Harry Potter less-than-stellar reviews.
This is currently on the Yahoo! Canada home page, under the highly misleading heading Big Risks to a Vegetarian Diet? A big downside to the green diet:
A joint Australian-Vietnamese study of links between the bones and diet of more than 2,700 people found that vegetarians [in four groups, combined: semivegetarian (which excludes meat, but not seafood, e.g., pescetarianism), ovolacto veg, lacto veg, and vegan] had bones five percent less dense than meat-eaters, said lead researcher Tuan Nguyen.
The issue was most pronounced in vegans, who excluded all animal products from their diet and whose bones were six percent weaker, Nguyen said.
There was “practically no difference” between the bones of meat-eaters and ovolactovegetarians, who excluded meat and seafood but ate eggs and dairy products, he said.
“The results suggest that vegetarian diets, particularly vegan diets, are associated with lower bone mineral density,” Nguyen wrote in the study, which was published Thursday in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
“But the magnitude of the association is clinically insignificant,” he added.
It’s not actually new research, being rather a meta-analysis of nine previous studies (out of 922 candidates) that met the authors’ criteria for inclusion.
The first problem is that meat eaters tend to be heavier, so they naturally have denser bones. You need to control for that.
The second, lesser problem with taking this study as definitive is that a mere two and a half months ago, in a different study (with a much smaller sample size), the same authors found no difference in bone density between carnivores and vegans:
A study comparing the bone health of 105 post-menopausal vegan Buddhist nuns and 105 non-vegetarian women, matched in every other physical respect, has produced a surprising result. Their bone density was identical.
The original news release for the more-recent study actually stated that “We found there was practically no difference between meat eaters and ovolactovegetarians…. While there is a difference between meat eaters and vegans, that difference is small.”
And whatever difference there is could surely be erased simply by taking a daily multivitamin, which we should all be doing anyway (and which I actually do, along with time-released iron, after being mildly anemic last summer—ah, the joys of aging).
So overall, this is really a non-story … unless you choose to see the fact that (non-vegan) vegetarian bone density is essentially equal to that of meat-eaters, in spite of the latter’s higher average weight, as a confirmation of the fact that the “typical” vegetarian diet is actually better for your bones than is the typical meat-eating one. Which, you know, in spite of the spin which our PC-except-when-it’s-bashing-vegetarians media is putting on it, is actually in line (at least in terms of the positive end results, whatever the mechanism may be) with what John Robbins and others have been saying for decades now:
The calcium-losing effect of animal protein on the human body is not a matter of controversy in scientific circles. [Robbins is actually overstating his case here; see below] Researchers who conducted a recent survey of diet and hip fractures in 33 countries said they found “an absolutely phenomenal correlation” between the percentage of plant foods in people’s diets, and the strength of their bones. The more plant foods people eat (particularly fruits and vegetables), the stronger their bones, and the fewer fractures they experience. The more animal foods people eat, on the other hand, the weaker their bones and the more fractures they experience.
Similarly, in January 2001, the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition published a study that reported a dramatic correlation between the ratio of animal to vegetable protein in the diets of elderly women and their rate of bone loss. In this seven-year study funded by the National Institutes of Health, more than 1,000 women, ages 65 to 80, were grouped into three categories: those with a high ratio of animal to vegetable protein, a middle range, and a low range. The women in the high ratio category had three times the rate of bone loss as the women in the low group, and nearly four times the rate of hip fractures.
Might this have been due to other factors than the ratio of animal to vegetable protein? According to the study’s lead author, Deborah Sellmeyer, M.D., Director of the Bone Density Clinic at the University of California, San Francisco, Medical Center, researchers found this to be true even after adjusting for age, weight, estrogen use, tobacco use, exercise, calcium intake, and total protein intake. “We adjusted for all the things that could have had an impact on the relationship of high animal protein intake to bone loss and hip fractures,” Sellmeyer said. “But we found the relationship was still there.”
* * * * *
From the published study itself:
The association between vegetarianism and BMD has been a subject of contention primarily because of inconsistent findings from previous studies. All previous studies showed that vegetarians had a lower BMD than did omnivores; however, only 2 studies showed a statistically significant difference (20, 22)….
For each study [of the nine in the meta-analysis], relevant data, including details of study design, mean age, sex, dietary type (e.g., vegetarian or nonvegetarian diet), BMD measurement, and the number of participants, were extracted….
The difference in mean BMD values between vegetarians and omnivores for each study was expressed as the ratio of the mean value in the vegetarian group to the mean value in the nonvegetarian group.
Again, no mention of controlling for weight, there (or anywhere else in the 8-page study paper). Plus, more than 60% of vegetarians are women. Not controlled for, either (drastically; see below).
And oddly, while the news release for the study states that it “showed that people on vegetarian diets have BMD roughly 5% lower than non-vegetarians,” the study paper itself gave a figure of “Overall, BMD was [approximately] 4% lower in vegetarians than in omnivores.” Blame the P.R. Dept., I guess, maybe for rounding to the nearest 5%?
It is important to distinguish between vegan and lactoovovegetarian diets, because the latter includes dairy products and eggs in the diet. In this analysis, we found that much of the effect of vegetarian diets on bone density was mainly due to a vegan diet and that a lactoovovegetarian diet did not exert a markedly negative effect on bone density. Because vegetarians usually have lower intakes of dietary calcium and protein intakes than do omnivores (49, 50), the present study’s finding raises the issue of the role of dietary calcium and protein intakes in bone health. Dietary calcium is mainly found in dairy foods and vegetables. Several studies have found that higher intakes of dietary calcium were associated with higher bone density (6, 51) and reduced hip fracture risk (52). However, a meta-analysis of 33 studies found that the correlation between dietary calcium intakes and bone density was 0.13 (53), which suggests that the contribution of calcium to bone density is modest. This seems to suggest that differences in calcium intakes or sources of intake (i.e., animal or plant) do not have a significant effect on the observed variance in BMD. The average dietary calcium intake in the 9 studies reviewed varied from 200 to 1200 mg/d, with little difference between vegetarians and nonvegetarians. Therefore, it is unlikely that the lower BMD in vegetarians observed in this analysis was due to differences in dietary calcium intake.
The relation between protein intake, particularly animal protein, and bone health has been controversial. It has long been hypothesized that a high animal protein diet exerts a negative effect on bone health, because it generated a high endogenous acid load that would require buffering from bone, thus increasing bone resorption (54). However, empirical data are not consistent. On the one hand, there are data suggesting that higher dietary protein intakes are associated with a lower risk of fragility fracture (55) and hip fracture (56). On the other hand, other studies showed that higher dietary protein intakes were associated with increases in bone loss (57) and with a greater risk of fragility fracture (57, 58). Of the 9 studies reviewed herein, only 5 reported dietary protein intakes (22, 39, 41, 42, 47), but only 2 studies (22, 39) found that dietary protein intakes in vegans were lower than in omnivores. In these 2 studies, there was no significant difference in BMD between vegans and omnivores. On the basis of these data, it seems that dietary protein intakes could not account for the lower BMD in vegetarians observed in this analysis….
The complexity and possible interaction between dietary calcium and protein makes it difficult to attribute the modest effect of vegetarianism on bone density to either dietary factor. Indeed, it has been suggested that protein and calcium act synergistically on bone if both are present in sufficient quantities in the diet; however, protein may exert detrimental effect on bone density when calcium is low (16). Moreover, vegetarian diets often contain more phytoestrogens than do nonvegetarian diets, particularly non-Western vegetarian diets. The average intake of isoflavones in vegans has been estimated at 75 mg/d (59), which is higher than that in Western consumers (average intake: ,2 mg/d; 60) and in vegetarians (12 mg/d; 61). It has been suggested that these compounds can help prevent postmenopausal bone loss, although the case is not clear cut (62, 63) and there are less data as to how this might be relevant to vegetarians. The present study’s results are largely applicable to women, because only 2 original studies included data for men. In fact, a subgroup analysis for men showed that the effect of vegetarian diets on femoral neck BMD was not significant.
This was not mentioned in the news release, so not surprisingly it has not been mentioned in any of the MSM articles I’ve seen on the study. Only goes to show, you can’t afford to believe a word of what those scientifically illiterate, shit-lazy, news-release-regurgitating hacks write. And then they get all bitchy and pre-emptively defensive when you call them on it!
All studies included in this analysis were observational; therefore, no cause-and-effect relation between vegetarian diets and BMD can be drawn from the finding.
I have neither the time, the interest, nor the expertise to go through all of those studies on the effects of animal protein intake on bone health, and try to untangle them for bad experimental design (which I’d already be expecting to find a lot of) and confounding factors. For my purposes, it’s sufficient that even this latest, much-misrepresented study supports the contention that vegetarian (not unsupplemented vegan) diets are fully comparable to meat-based ones, for maintaining bones and teeth.
From Whales Might Be as Much Like People as Apes Are:
As the annual International Whaling Commission meeting stumbles to a close, unable to negotiate a compromise between whaling opponents and people who’ve killed more than 40,000 whales since 1985, scientists say these aquatic mammals are more than mere animals. They might even deserve to be considered people.
Not human people, but as occupying a similar range on the spectrum as the great apes, for whom the idea of personhood has moved from preposterous to possible. Chimpanzees, gorillas and bonobos possess self-awareness, feelings and high-level cognitive powers. According to a steadily gathering body of research, so do whales and dolphins.
In fact, their capacities could be even more ancient than our own, dating to an evolutionary explosion in brain size that took place millions of years before the last common ancestor of the great apes existed.
“If an alien came down anytime prior to about 1.5 million years ago to communicate with the ‘brainiest’ animals on Earth, they would have tripped over our own ancestors and headed straight for the oceans to converse with the dolphins,” said Lori Marino, an evolutionary neurobiologist at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center….
Cetaceans even surpass most primates in their use of sound. “We’ve known for some time now that the communication systems of these animals is more complex than we can imagine,” said Marino. “People are starting to use some interesting statistical methods to look at their vocal repertoires, and they’re finding structural complexity that suggests there may be something like grammar, syntax, even language”….
“My strong suspicion is that a lot of sperm whale life revolves around social issues,” said Whitehead. “They’re nomadic, live in permanent groups, and are dependent on each other for everything. Social structure is vital to them. The only constant thing in their world is their social group. I’d guess that a lot of their life is paying attention to social relationships.”
I had an interview with a recruiter back on Monday, and did fine in it, so they said they’d forward my resumé to the company that was hiring. But they haven’t called back yet, so I’m guessing that’s not gonna go anywhere.
Too bad, ’cause it would have been a good fit for my skillset.
Then I found this: Overqualified (#23 of 74).
To: Human Resources
Re: Aliant Telecom.Thank you for taking the time to review my resume. I have to apologize for the bluntness of this cover letter. It is only through this channel, this job application form, that I have any chance of fooling it into letting my message get through. I need your help. I think the internet is trying to kill me. You have to hire me, give me access to your server rooms. You have to help me destroy the internet.
I have tried to kill myself three times in as many days. I spent six hours on the internet this morning, having shallow conversations with a dozen of my friends. They kept asking “how do you feel?” and posting the little hug icon from MSN. I feel empty inside. When was the last time I really paid attention to a conversation? I’m multitasking all the time now. I can do a hundred different things at once, and at the end of the day I can’t remember. I honestly can’t remember.
And it’s your fault. It has tendrils in millions of homes, all through the country, and I understand why you feed it, why you’re doing this. You get thirty dollars a month for every home, for every connection. You’re feeding it, and you’re getting fat yourselves, but it can’t go on. I can’t let you profit from the lives of my friends and family. You have to help me.
You have to tell me where it lives. If I can find the head, the heart, the brain, I can destroy it. I can set everyone free with one small act of violence. We need to burn the internet to the ground. We need to find out if it has had a chance to lay eggs yet.
Have you had any trouble breathing lately? When was your last x-ray? There could be eggs anywhere in your body. We have to stop it. We have to clean your server rooms with fire. We have to tear out its backbone.
I know that the internet lives somewhere in the tunnels underneath the Aliant Telecom offices in Halifax. There have to be tunnels, there’s no other explanation.
Please. Hire me. Give me the access codes to our salvation. If I am in the computers as an employee, it won’t see me come, gasoline can in hand.
Yours,
Joey Comeau
Hmm, so it turns out that the “suppression” of contradictory information in the recent EPA report on greenhouse gases may not have been all that, um, “suppressive“:
Climate researcher Gavin Schmidt of NASA, for example, has written a very devastating analysis of the claims made in Carlin’s paper, calling it “a ragbag collection of un-peer reviewed web pages, an unhealthy dose of sunstroke, a dash of astrology and more cherries than you can poke a cocktail stick at.” For instance, much like Washington Post columnist George Will notoriously did earlier this year, Carlin’s report claims the globe is in a cooling trend. This is an egregious misreading of the last 10 or so years of global temperatures, and is based quite literally on a trick: If you begin with the hottest year on record—1998—then of course it looks like we’ve been cooling since then.
The Carlin report also contains numerous other climate science canards, including suggestions that the temperature trends we’ve seen are better understood as a result of solar variability than of human activity—a claim that flies in the face, as Gavin Schmidt puts it, of mountains of peer-reviewed research undertaken to detect climate change and attribute its causes. On a scientific level, this just won’t cut it.
