The Expulsion

In 1845 a diplomat delivered a letter from Friedrich Wilhelm to Louis Philippe of France protesting the insults leveled at the Prussian king by expatriates living in Paris. King Louis had the radicals’ newspaper closed down and the group, along with one Karl Marx, deported.

This was not the first time Marx’s pen had piqued a monarch. A protest from the Tsar of Russia had Marx previously expelled from Germany. And he would be banished twice more before landing in England for the rest of his life.

There is a tapestry of ironies in this. In pushing the man from country to country, Europe’s monarchs exposed Marx to a series of epistemological niches that informed his later works, including Capital: German philosophy, French political thought, British economic theory and, of course, Belgian beer and chocolate. Marx’s mash-up would eventually frame and inspire revolutions and rebellions around the world, several culminating with European authorities expelled in a hurry from newly liberated territories.

Do Pathogens Time Travel?

Evolution arises from a wealth of failure: 1) natural selection requires large and variable populations comprised largely of organisms that fail because their designs do not match their present circumstances and 2) chance destruction occurs at all spatiotemporal scales.

So clearly strict optimization does not reside in the designs, contra religiosos and radical adaptationists alike. Nor does it reside in the process of selection: every species eventually dies out–by maladaptation, stochastic extirpation or an external force (say, a large meteorite in yo’ face).

And yet biological life began early on Earth and continues on, four billion years later, and will do so after the present climate state collapses or we nuke ourselves senseless.

We Are All Astronauts Now

Five years ago I gave out copies of the following essay to a few friends and family as a year-end holiday gift. As a first stab I think it’s aged well, despite its innocent omission of the work of Bergson, Reichenbach, Harvey, among others. I offer it now to everyone else in a similar spirit–all in good fun, a little eggnog nightcap spiked with brandy.

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In fertility time grew –Pablo Neruda

In an early essay on size and organismal shape Stephen Jay Gould (1977) wrote of the effects of gravity,

We are prisoners of the perceptions of our size, and rarely recognize how different the world must appear to small animals. Since our relative surface area is so small at our large size, we are ruled by gravitational forces acting upon our large weight. But gravity is negligible to very small animals with high surface to volume ratios; they live in a world dominated by surface forces and judge the pleasures and dangers of their surroundings in ways foreign to our experience.

Pigs Do Fly! Implications for Influenza

The influenza genome is segmented. Eight pieces of single-stranded RNA encode for 11 proteins: PB2, PB1, PB1-F2, PA, HA, NP, NA, M1, M2, NS1, and NS2. The segmentation allows influenza of different subtypes infecting the same host to trade segments like card players on a Friday night. Most of the resulting viruses will express phenotypes for the worse, but a small subset may be transformed into strains more infectious in their usual hosts or to a new host species.

This reassortment accounts in part for the origins of this year’s pandemic. Livestock pigs have long hosted their own version of seasonal H1N1, evolutionarily related to our own. From 1930-1998 the pig version evolved only slightly. But starting in 1998, the virus was subjected to a series of reassortment events. In North America, an aggressive swine H1N1 emerged with internal genes of a human H3N2 virus and an avian influenza. That virus subsequently spread across pig populations, with limited transfer to humans, usually to farm workers, who routinely offer the influenza virus human test subjects every step in its evolution.

Breeding Influenza: The Political Virology of Offshore Farming

What better way to medicate against a holiday’s genocidal origins and the hunger now swelling worldwide in the wake of a banker-brought recession than with a bellyful of turkey, stuffing, yams, and pumpkin pie? Despite its dark ambiguities, Thanksgiving remains my favorite American holiday. Take a breath, eat well, love your family, make time for friends, and, a few drinks later, curse God, badmouth your boss, and regroup for the descent into winter. Here in Minneapolis, dusk is approaching its solstice nadir. Five in the afternoon and pitch black.

Thanksgiving obviously reminds us too of the pathogens the livestock breeding that produces the birds most of us will be chowing on also offers. If the bone breaks your way, you might with sardonic irony wish for a way out of this and subsequent pandemics. It isn’t, of course, merely a matter of a little luck (although that would help). There are due causes for the bad things that happen, often specifically related to the decisions people in power and in the money make. I believe we can think through these fixes and with enough courage to act in the face of threats to life and fortune change the world’s course.

A Visitation of the Influenza

In seeping through the world’s every nook and cranny, pandemics have a way of forcing themselves into our lives as a lurking presence. Even the most insular of functionaries, who typically makes his living solving problems by ignoring them, straightens up and takes notice.

As an epidemic wave arrives, each of us faces intimate decisions we may have thought a concern only for someone somewhere else far, far away. Should my family flee, vaccinate, wear masks, scrub regularly, shun crowds, isolate itself, drink brandy-infused elderberry, or, for the jittery among us, just crawl into bed until 2011? Others, on the other hand, may ask whether we should even bother worrying.

The answers are as variable as the people who arrive at them. Over the past two weeks I’ve heard friends and family heatedly talk through their positions online and in the real world. I’ve overheard strangers in cafes, on buses, and on the street wrestle with what were months ago only abstract possibilities better left to the eggheads.

I Do Like Green Eggs and Ham

Much of what we’ve addressed on this blog has focused on the epidemiological dangers of industrial farming. But what of the alternatives? Can we farm in another way? Is another world possible?

It’s only since I’ve moved to the Midwest that I’ve learned that not only is that world possible, it’s growing right out from underneath the dried and dead soil laid atop agribusiness’s stronghold. A mob of thousands of new organic farmers have taken up pitchforks and torches against Frankenfood. Farmers’ markets are popping up all over. Food co-ops are blooming in even some of the smallest towns across the Upper Midwest.

Many of my brethren on the coasts–who I’ve now taken to calling ‘the flyovers’–are largely unawares of a new agricultural uprising that could strike at the very heart of the agribusiness model now dominating global production. For reasons we will explore in posts to follow there is no guarantee that the revolt will succeed. Many serious obstacles remain. But by much blood and sweat, acre by acre, store by store, kitchen by kitchen, real food and home cooking are making a comeback.

Heart of Modeling

Greed is often mistaken for humanity’s heart of darkness. Look instead to the rationalization that transforms the most rapacious pillaging into an act of benevolence. A one-ton bomb dropped on a peasant wedding party is dissembled into regret without responsibility or, baser yet, a tough love offered with warning enough its victims, until then on their happiest day, ignored at their own risk.

Massacring the poorest–by the pen or the sword–is abstracted into an industrial deduction no rough facts can peel back. In its desperate flight free, what evidence flutters out from between the secret policeman’s gloves serves in this framework as its own denunciation: the editor who publishes it loses his job, the journalist her access, and the whistleblower his freedom. Barbarism, backed by Ivy League pedigrees and the strategic brick of cash, can excuse itself with the right mix of red tape and inert banality.

The shock for some will be that even evolutionary biology plays its part. Set aside its more blatant frauds writing how the dead were inherently dumber than those who designed the bomb that killed them. As if even true it was alibi enough. In their unrequited loyalties the likes of Phil Rushton and Charles Murray speak as if they are somehow affiliated with the physics that went into the ordnance. No Einsteins these, the hangers-on refute themselves as soon as they open their mouths.

‘Biosecure’ Farms Not So Biosecure

There are times when perniciously false premises are treated as the criteria by which truth is determined. We lose the argument before it’s begun. And where does that leave us in our efforts to control mortal dangers of our own making?

An article of faith among veterinarians and epidemiologists is that large industrial farms are both biosecure and biocontained: livestock pathogens such as highly pathogenic influenza can’t check in, and if they do, they can’t check out. The premise is so engrained that international health agencies have codified levels of biosecurity by the size of farming sectors alone. The operational standard is the bigger the farm, the better its protection.

A paper published last year cuts against the grain. Graham et al.’s review shows industrial farming can promote the spread of pathogens to other farms, to the outside environment, and to farm workers. All three modes can expose surrounding communities to daily doses of the latest and greatest in xenospecific bugs, some of which, as this spring’s swine flu pandemic attests, may take root as widespread human outbreaks.

Darwin’s Simulacrum

I see dead people. And you can too. The museums are full of them, reanimated in a shamanistic glow funded by real estate developer Jack Rudin or Target or whichever oligarchical consortium rules your city state.

When we visit the clearing in the gentrified jungle we hope we might at least be blessed with a vision of an ancestral shade nominally more illuminating than what’s projected by the man behind the tree line.

Three years ago I attended the Charles Darwin exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. In a country where 40% of the population polled think evolution patently false and another 20% are unsure, the show proved a triumph. Despite friends’ complaints about its length, the exhibit, expertly curated by Niles Eldredge of punctuated equilibrium fame, encapsulated Darwin, his ideas, and many of their immediate implications in an easily understandable way.

There I was–cynic turned fetishist–thrilled to see Darwin’s pistol and Bible from his circumnavigation aboard HMS Beagle. Although he spent considerable time ashore, there is great appeal in summoning a young Darwin, before his health broke, astride a deck hauling himself from one intellectual port to another, from amateur enthusiast to professional naturalist. He had much help, of course, but on an autodidact’s schedule, at one and the same time a relaxed and fevered pace. In an irony still relevant today, his successes would render him the last of the artisan naturalists.