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Basics: Noble Eagles, Nasty Pigeons, Biased Humans
By NATALIE ANGIER, The New York Times, April 29, 2008
The other day I glanced out my window and felt a twinge of revulsion delicately seasoned with indignation. Pecking at my bird feeder were two brown-headed cowbirds, one male and one female, and I knew what that meant. Pretty soon the fattened, fertilized female would be slipping her eggs into some other birds’ nest, with the expectation that the naïve hosts would brood, feed and rear her squawking, ravenous young at the neglect and even death of their own.
Hey, you parasites, get your beaks off my seed, I thought angrily. That feeder is for the good birds, the birds that I like — the cardinals, the nuthatches, the black-capped chickadees, the tufted titmice, the woodpeckers, the goldfinches. It’s for the hard-working birds with enough moral fiber to rear their own families and look photogenic besides. It’s not meant for sneaky freeloaders like you. I rapped on the window sharply but the birds didn’t budge, and as I stood there wondering whether I should run out and scare them away, their beaks seemed to thicken, their eyes blacken, and I could swear they were cackling, “Tippi Hedren must go.”
In sum, I was suffering from a severe case of biobigotry: the persistent and often irrational desire to be surrounded only by those species of which one approves, and to exclude any animals, plants and other life forms that one finds offensive.
It was not my first episode of the disorder, and evidently I don’t suffer alone. “Throughout history there have been vilified animals and totemic animals,” said John Fraser, a conservation psychologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society. “There are the animals you don’t like and that you dismiss as small brown vermin, and the animals whose attributes you absolutely want to own,” to be a tiger, a bear, lupine leader of the pack.
Biobigotry is different from the impulse to avoid organisms that can hurt or sicken us, like yellow jackets, mosquitoes or poison ivy, or to fend off traditional household pests like mice and roaches. Rather, it is the dislike we direct toward creatures that live outdoors and generally mind their own business, but that behave in ways we find rude, irritating, selfish or contemptible. The squirrels are gluttons, the crows are schoolyard bullies, the house sparrows are boring and look like mice when they skitter along the ground. How we love those noble falcons and eagles that lately have blessed us by nesting on our skyscrapers and bridges. How we beg them to feast freely on the pigeons and starlings that curse us by nesting on our skyscrapers and bridges.
Sometimes our biobigotry is merely attitudinal. In the course of an interview about spotted hyenas, for example, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, scornfully referred to the wildebeest that the hyenas frequently prey on as “wildeburgers.” Why? Because once a wildebeest has been caught, said the scientist, it just stands there with cowlike passivity and allows itself to be torn apart. Compare that with a zebra, the researcher said, which will go down fighting and kicking and cracking the predator’s jaw if it can.
“Oh, we’re all of us prone to a massive over-interpretation of the things that we see,” said Marc D. Hauser, professor of psychology and evolutionary biology at Harvard University and author of “Moral Minds.” “I distinctly remember, when I first went to Amboseli National Park to study vervet monkeys, how quickly I developed strong feelings about the personalities of the monkeys — here were the great and brave ones, there were the lame ones that hid in the bushes and acted pathetic.”
At other times, we take steps to favor our local heroes or thwart our chosen goats, whose greatest sin, as a rule, is being exceptionally good at their game. We try to squirrel-proof our bird feeders, yank weeds from our flower beds, call Animal Control, and when all else fails, reach for our guns. Stephen C. Sautner of the Wildlife Conservation Society cited the case of a friend and avid birder who has a colony of purple martins on his property. “He spends much of his time shooting and trapping starlings and English sparrows,” said Mr. Sautner, “both of which he describes as ‘evil.’ ”
We always have a story to justify our most aggressive attempts at unwanted-animal control. The animal is an invasive species like the European starling, and it doesn’t belong here. Or it’s a native species like the cowbird but its range has been unnaturally extended through deforestation. Or it likes our garbage and our raggedy parks and thus has an unfair advantage over fussier creatures. Whatever the self-exculpatory particulars, said Marc Bekoff, author of “The Emotional Lives of Animals” and emeritus professor of biology at the University of Colorado, “I see it as a double cross that we create a situation where cowbirds spread, or red foxes eat endangered birds, and then we decide, well, now we’ve got to go out and kill the cowbirds and the foxes.”
Our proneness to biobigotry, experts said, arises from several salient human traits. For one, we are equipped with an often overactive theory of mind — the conviction that those around you have their own minds, goals and desires, and that it might behoove you to anticipate what they’ll do next. We spin elaborate narratives out of the slenderest of observational threads: Look, the blue jay is trying to dislodge the cowbird from the feeder. Could the jay know the cowbird is a nest parasite and be trying to drum it out of town? “We interpret animal behaviors through a human lens and human morality,” said Mr. Fraser, the conservation psychologist.
Related to the human impulse to see ourselves in nature is the persistent sense that nature belongs to us, and that we have the right and the means to control it. “In the past, when we talked about exploiting nature, that was seen as a good thing,” Mr. Fraser said. “Now we realize that that attitude is counterproductive to human success.”
Nowhere is our sense of droit du roi over nature more manifest than in our paradoxical attitudes toward farm animals. On the one hand, they’re the beloved figures of our earliest childhood. On the other hand, many of our most pejorative comparisons were born in the barnyard — you lazy pig, you ugly cow, you chicken, what a bunch of sheep.
Conservation groups, which keep track of public attitudes toward animals, acknowledge that they are ever on the lookout for the next Animal Idol — an ecologically important creature that also happens to be large, showy, charismatic and likable. If you have two important birds from the same region of Latin America, said Mr. Fraser, one a hyacinth macaw that looks like flying jewelry and can vocalize like a human, the other a storm petrel that is brown, squawky and cakes the coastline with guano, guess which face ends up on the next fund-raising calendar.
Not that public attitudes can’t be changed. Bats, for example, were long considered vermin, but nowadays, in the wake of the wildly popular children’s book “Stella Luna,” they’ve taken on a magical air, as the mosquito-eating Tinkerbells that if you’re lucky will soon take up residence near you. Until then, step away from that bat house, sparrow. Don’t make me shoot.
Essay: A Great Pox’s Greatest Feat: Staying Alive
By MARLENE ZUK, The New York Times, April 29, 2008
The findings were hardly earth-shaking. They dealt with an obscure bacterial infection found in an equally obscure group of natives in Guyana. Nonetheless, they made headlines.
Why? Because the disease was syphilis. The new research suggested that syphilis originated as a skin ailment in South America, and then spread to Europe, where it became sexually transmitted and was later reintroduced to the New World.
The origin of syphilis has always held an implied accusation: if Europeans brought it to the New World, the disease is one more symbol of Western imperialism run amok, one more grudge to hold against colonialism. Sexually transmitted diseases have always taken on moralistic overtones — they seem like the price of pleasure. We tell ourselves that if we can just make everyone behave responsibly, we can halt the attack.
But we may not have as much say as we might like to think. Infectious diseases are caused by living beings that spread from one host to another, and natural selection will favor anything that increases that spread — say, a higher probability of becoming airborne, or a better means of attaching to the gut wall.
The syphilis bacterium, Treponema pallidum, has no nervous system or brain, no consciousness with which to plot an attack. But it has an ability that is even better: it can reproduce at a rate that leaves us in the evolutionary dust. For any S.T.D., making the host more likely to have sex will benefit the pathogen that causes it. And syphilis may be a case in point.
Detailed records of syphilis infection start appearing in Europe from 1495, and a fearsome disease it was. Smallpox was called smallpox to distinguish it from the great pox, syphilis, which evoked this description from Ulrich von Hutten in 1519: “Boils that stood out like Acorns, from whence issued such filthy stinking Matter, that whosoever came within the Scent, believed himself infected. The Colour of these was of a dark Green and the very Aspect as shocking as the pain itself, which yet was as if the Sick had laid upon a fire.”
Two points are noteworthy about this vivid account. First, it contrasts markedly with modern experiences with the disease. Although serious in its overall effects — which can include heart problems, brain damage and infertility — the rash and other overt symptoms of syphilis are now much more muted, and the disease may go undetected for some time, which helps explain why it is so hard to control. Second, it is reasonable to suppose that a sufferer of the symptoms von Hutten describes would be unlikely to get a lot of dates.
These two observations led Rob Knell, a scientist at Queen Mary University in London, to propose (in a 2004 paper in The Proceedings of the Royal Society of London) that they were connected. If a syphilis-ridden individual were less likely to have sex, and hence spread the disease, it would behoove the disease organism to evolve a less acute effect on its hosts. Syphilis became less severe, he argued, because it was transmitted more readily if victims were still attractive to the opposite sex.
And while these changes were too rapid to be attributed to humans’ evolving resistance to the disease, he continued, for the syphilis bacteria, even a few years represents many thousands of generations. So we have syphilis itself to thank for the lessening of its symptoms. The disease is still serious, of course. But the rapid evolutionary change is striking.
Conventional wisdom used to hold that all diseases eventually evolved toward a more benign state, a “don’t bite the hand that feeds you” rationale. The muting of syphilis notwithstanding, we now realize that is not the case.
Diseases can evolve to become more virulent, more benign or neither — it all depends on what’s in it for them. For some diseases — cholera, for instance — killing the host is immaterial if the pathogen can spread via contaminated water sources. But sexually transmitted diseases must get around via sex. From the pathogen’s perspective, simply sitting around in the intestinal tract waiting for a too cursory bout of hand washing is unsatisfactory.
The disease organism from which syphilis arose is spread through simple skin contact. In chilly Europe, that’s too chancy a mode of transmission. Sex, on the other hand, is a fairly reliable means of transport, even for a delicate bacterium.
So you might blame Columbus, not for wreaking havoc on the New World through the spread of a sexually transmitted infection, but for wearing clothes. If he and his fellow Europeans had been more prone to going about au naturel, maybe the great pox wouldn’t have been so great after all.
Marlene Zuk is a biology professor at the University of California, Riverside, and author of “Riddled with Life: Friendly Worms, Ladybug Sex and the Parasites that Make Us Who We Are.”
Really? The Claim: Tilt Your Head Back to Treat a Nosebleed
By ANAHAD O’CONNOR, The New York Times, April 29, 2008
THE FACTS
Most people know the right way to stop a nosebleed: lean the head back and apply pressure to the nose.
But medical experts say that what most people know about nosebleeds is wrong. Tilting the head back, a technique widely considered proper first aid, can create complications by allowing blood into the esophagus. It risks choking, and it can cause blood to travel to the stomach, possibly leading to irritation and vomiting.
The American Academy of Family Physicians says the best treatment is to sit down, lean forward and keep your head above your heart, which lessens the bleeding. Leaning forward also helps drain the blood from the nose and keeps it from the esophagus.
A report in the British journal BMJ says you can stop the bleeding by using your thumb and index finger to squeeze the soft tissue just below the bridge of your nose for 5 to 10 minutes. A cold compress or ice pack placed across the bridge of the nose can also help.
If all of this fails and the bleeding lasts for more than 20 minutes, or the nosebleed was caused by a blow to the head, seek medical attention.
THE BOTTOM LINE
Never treat a nosebleed by leaning your head back.
By NATALIE ANGIER, The New York Times, April 29, 2008
The other day I glanced out my window and felt a twinge of revulsion delicately seasoned with indignation. Pecking at my bird feeder were two brown-headed cowbirds, one male and one female, and I knew what that meant. Pretty soon the fattened, fertilized female would be slipping her eggs into some other birds’ nest, with the expectation that the naïve hosts would brood, feed and rear her squawking, ravenous young at the neglect and even death of their own.
Hey, you parasites, get your beaks off my seed, I thought angrily. That feeder is for the good birds, the birds that I like — the cardinals, the nuthatches, the black-capped chickadees, the tufted titmice, the woodpeckers, the goldfinches. It’s for the hard-working birds with enough moral fiber to rear their own families and look photogenic besides. It’s not meant for sneaky freeloaders like you. I rapped on the window sharply but the birds didn’t budge, and as I stood there wondering whether I should run out and scare them away, their beaks seemed to thicken, their eyes blacken, and I could swear they were cackling, “Tippi Hedren must go.”
In sum, I was suffering from a severe case of biobigotry: the persistent and often irrational desire to be surrounded only by those species of which one approves, and to exclude any animals, plants and other life forms that one finds offensive.
It was not my first episode of the disorder, and evidently I don’t suffer alone. “Throughout history there have been vilified animals and totemic animals,” said John Fraser, a conservation psychologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society. “There are the animals you don’t like and that you dismiss as small brown vermin, and the animals whose attributes you absolutely want to own,” to be a tiger, a bear, lupine leader of the pack.
Biobigotry is different from the impulse to avoid organisms that can hurt or sicken us, like yellow jackets, mosquitoes or poison ivy, or to fend off traditional household pests like mice and roaches. Rather, it is the dislike we direct toward creatures that live outdoors and generally mind their own business, but that behave in ways we find rude, irritating, selfish or contemptible. The squirrels are gluttons, the crows are schoolyard bullies, the house sparrows are boring and look like mice when they skitter along the ground. How we love those noble falcons and eagles that lately have blessed us by nesting on our skyscrapers and bridges. How we beg them to feast freely on the pigeons and starlings that curse us by nesting on our skyscrapers and bridges.
Sometimes our biobigotry is merely attitudinal. In the course of an interview about spotted hyenas, for example, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, scornfully referred to the wildebeest that the hyenas frequently prey on as “wildeburgers.” Why? Because once a wildebeest has been caught, said the scientist, it just stands there with cowlike passivity and allows itself to be torn apart. Compare that with a zebra, the researcher said, which will go down fighting and kicking and cracking the predator’s jaw if it can.
“Oh, we’re all of us prone to a massive over-interpretation of the things that we see,” said Marc D. Hauser, professor of psychology and evolutionary biology at Harvard University and author of “Moral Minds.” “I distinctly remember, when I first went to Amboseli National Park to study vervet monkeys, how quickly I developed strong feelings about the personalities of the monkeys — here were the great and brave ones, there were the lame ones that hid in the bushes and acted pathetic.”
At other times, we take steps to favor our local heroes or thwart our chosen goats, whose greatest sin, as a rule, is being exceptionally good at their game. We try to squirrel-proof our bird feeders, yank weeds from our flower beds, call Animal Control, and when all else fails, reach for our guns. Stephen C. Sautner of the Wildlife Conservation Society cited the case of a friend and avid birder who has a colony of purple martins on his property. “He spends much of his time shooting and trapping starlings and English sparrows,” said Mr. Sautner, “both of which he describes as ‘evil.’ ”
We always have a story to justify our most aggressive attempts at unwanted-animal control. The animal is an invasive species like the European starling, and it doesn’t belong here. Or it’s a native species like the cowbird but its range has been unnaturally extended through deforestation. Or it likes our garbage and our raggedy parks and thus has an unfair advantage over fussier creatures. Whatever the self-exculpatory particulars, said Marc Bekoff, author of “The Emotional Lives of Animals” and emeritus professor of biology at the University of Colorado, “I see it as a double cross that we create a situation where cowbirds spread, or red foxes eat endangered birds, and then we decide, well, now we’ve got to go out and kill the cowbirds and the foxes.”
Our proneness to biobigotry, experts said, arises from several salient human traits. For one, we are equipped with an often overactive theory of mind — the conviction that those around you have their own minds, goals and desires, and that it might behoove you to anticipate what they’ll do next. We spin elaborate narratives out of the slenderest of observational threads: Look, the blue jay is trying to dislodge the cowbird from the feeder. Could the jay know the cowbird is a nest parasite and be trying to drum it out of town? “We interpret animal behaviors through a human lens and human morality,” said Mr. Fraser, the conservation psychologist.
Related to the human impulse to see ourselves in nature is the persistent sense that nature belongs to us, and that we have the right and the means to control it. “In the past, when we talked about exploiting nature, that was seen as a good thing,” Mr. Fraser said. “Now we realize that that attitude is counterproductive to human success.”
Nowhere is our sense of droit du roi over nature more manifest than in our paradoxical attitudes toward farm animals. On the one hand, they’re the beloved figures of our earliest childhood. On the other hand, many of our most pejorative comparisons were born in the barnyard — you lazy pig, you ugly cow, you chicken, what a bunch of sheep.
Conservation groups, which keep track of public attitudes toward animals, acknowledge that they are ever on the lookout for the next Animal Idol — an ecologically important creature that also happens to be large, showy, charismatic and likable. If you have two important birds from the same region of Latin America, said Mr. Fraser, one a hyacinth macaw that looks like flying jewelry and can vocalize like a human, the other a storm petrel that is brown, squawky and cakes the coastline with guano, guess which face ends up on the next fund-raising calendar.
Not that public attitudes can’t be changed. Bats, for example, were long considered vermin, but nowadays, in the wake of the wildly popular children’s book “Stella Luna,” they’ve taken on a magical air, as the mosquito-eating Tinkerbells that if you’re lucky will soon take up residence near you. Until then, step away from that bat house, sparrow. Don’t make me shoot.
Essay: A Great Pox’s Greatest Feat: Staying Alive
By MARLENE ZUK, The New York Times, April 29, 2008
The findings were hardly earth-shaking. They dealt with an obscure bacterial infection found in an equally obscure group of natives in Guyana. Nonetheless, they made headlines.
Why? Because the disease was syphilis. The new research suggested that syphilis originated as a skin ailment in South America, and then spread to Europe, where it became sexually transmitted and was later reintroduced to the New World.
The origin of syphilis has always held an implied accusation: if Europeans brought it to the New World, the disease is one more symbol of Western imperialism run amok, one more grudge to hold against colonialism. Sexually transmitted diseases have always taken on moralistic overtones — they seem like the price of pleasure. We tell ourselves that if we can just make everyone behave responsibly, we can halt the attack.
But we may not have as much say as we might like to think. Infectious diseases are caused by living beings that spread from one host to another, and natural selection will favor anything that increases that spread — say, a higher probability of becoming airborne, or a better means of attaching to the gut wall.
The syphilis bacterium, Treponema pallidum, has no nervous system or brain, no consciousness with which to plot an attack. But it has an ability that is even better: it can reproduce at a rate that leaves us in the evolutionary dust. For any S.T.D., making the host more likely to have sex will benefit the pathogen that causes it. And syphilis may be a case in point.
Detailed records of syphilis infection start appearing in Europe from 1495, and a fearsome disease it was. Smallpox was called smallpox to distinguish it from the great pox, syphilis, which evoked this description from Ulrich von Hutten in 1519: “Boils that stood out like Acorns, from whence issued such filthy stinking Matter, that whosoever came within the Scent, believed himself infected. The Colour of these was of a dark Green and the very Aspect as shocking as the pain itself, which yet was as if the Sick had laid upon a fire.”
Two points are noteworthy about this vivid account. First, it contrasts markedly with modern experiences with the disease. Although serious in its overall effects — which can include heart problems, brain damage and infertility — the rash and other overt symptoms of syphilis are now much more muted, and the disease may go undetected for some time, which helps explain why it is so hard to control. Second, it is reasonable to suppose that a sufferer of the symptoms von Hutten describes would be unlikely to get a lot of dates.
These two observations led Rob Knell, a scientist at Queen Mary University in London, to propose (in a 2004 paper in The Proceedings of the Royal Society of London) that they were connected. If a syphilis-ridden individual were less likely to have sex, and hence spread the disease, it would behoove the disease organism to evolve a less acute effect on its hosts. Syphilis became less severe, he argued, because it was transmitted more readily if victims were still attractive to the opposite sex.
And while these changes were too rapid to be attributed to humans’ evolving resistance to the disease, he continued, for the syphilis bacteria, even a few years represents many thousands of generations. So we have syphilis itself to thank for the lessening of its symptoms. The disease is still serious, of course. But the rapid evolutionary change is striking.
Conventional wisdom used to hold that all diseases eventually evolved toward a more benign state, a “don’t bite the hand that feeds you” rationale. The muting of syphilis notwithstanding, we now realize that is not the case.
Diseases can evolve to become more virulent, more benign or neither — it all depends on what’s in it for them. For some diseases — cholera, for instance — killing the host is immaterial if the pathogen can spread via contaminated water sources. But sexually transmitted diseases must get around via sex. From the pathogen’s perspective, simply sitting around in the intestinal tract waiting for a too cursory bout of hand washing is unsatisfactory.
The disease organism from which syphilis arose is spread through simple skin contact. In chilly Europe, that’s too chancy a mode of transmission. Sex, on the other hand, is a fairly reliable means of transport, even for a delicate bacterium.
So you might blame Columbus, not for wreaking havoc on the New World through the spread of a sexually transmitted infection, but for wearing clothes. If he and his fellow Europeans had been more prone to going about au naturel, maybe the great pox wouldn’t have been so great after all.
Marlene Zuk is a biology professor at the University of California, Riverside, and author of “Riddled with Life: Friendly Worms, Ladybug Sex and the Parasites that Make Us Who We Are.”
Really? The Claim: Tilt Your Head Back to Treat a Nosebleed
By ANAHAD O’CONNOR, The New York Times, April 29, 2008
THE FACTS
Most people know the right way to stop a nosebleed: lean the head back and apply pressure to the nose.
But medical experts say that what most people know about nosebleeds is wrong. Tilting the head back, a technique widely considered proper first aid, can create complications by allowing blood into the esophagus. It risks choking, and it can cause blood to travel to the stomach, possibly leading to irritation and vomiting.
The American Academy of Family Physicians says the best treatment is to sit down, lean forward and keep your head above your heart, which lessens the bleeding. Leaning forward also helps drain the blood from the nose and keeps it from the esophagus.
A report in the British journal BMJ says you can stop the bleeding by using your thumb and index finger to squeeze the soft tissue just below the bridge of your nose for 5 to 10 minutes. A cold compress or ice pack placed across the bridge of the nose can also help.
If all of this fails and the bleeding lasts for more than 20 minutes, or the nosebleed was caused by a blow to the head, seek medical attention.
THE BOTTOM LINE
Never treat a nosebleed by leaning your head back.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-04-29 08:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-30 02:39 am (UTC)And I said "Whoo syphillis!" when I saw this article. :p
no subject
Date: 2008-04-30 03:27 am (UTC)Cheese is my favorite. He's one of the few things guaranteed to make me feel happy in any mood lately.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-30 03:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-30 06:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-30 01:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-30 07:21 pm (UTC)