Five years ago I gave out copies of this 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.

An insect performs no miracle in walking up a wall or upon the surface of a pond; the small gravitational force pulling it down or under is easily counteracted by surface adhesion. Throw an insect off the roof and it floats gently down as frictional forces acting upon its surface overcome the weak influence of gravity.

Gould’s defenestrated insect inspires questions about the other central characteristics of physical reality. Can organisms render space or even time itself as negligible? Spatiotemporality seems so much more integral to the fabric of reality than gravity that even imagining what exactly ‘overcoming; or ‘intensifying’ space and time might mean is hard enough to get a handle on.

In one sense some organisms rein in space’s expanse. Over the course of relatively brief durations these organisms are able to place themselves in locales many thousands of miles away from each other. Lesser snow geese, monarch butterflies and green turtles do so not through fantastical wormholes, but by arduous long-distance migration. Despite its great physiological costs and the fatalities that litter its wake, migration is annually accomplished by millions of animals. To their local predators, on the other hand, migration vastly expands the space that separates them from their usual meal.

Time seems another matter entirely. How do organisms transverse time in such a way as to bring two remote moments together or separate sequential moments apart? Brown bears and ground squirrels partake in hibernation, butterflies and moths in diapause, snails and mud turtles in estivation, plants in seed banking, and cicadas in prime-number periodicity. The aforementioned migration excises winter. Pelagic larvae of the sea slug Phestilla sibogae suspend developmental growth while searching for appropriate habitats in which to live their benthic adulthoods (Miller 1993). In contrast, offspring of some prey species accelerate metamorphosis to escape predation risk, even at the expense of smaller adult size (Stibor 1992, Lafferty 1993, Belk 1998).

It appears many organisms express life history traits that physiologically compress or distend experienced time in a type of biological relativity (Wallace et al. submitted).

Are the examples, however, little more than analogy, a tenuous means of establishing causality? Cicadas don’t actually skip any physical time, existing within every moment over their thirteen or seventeen years in the ground. And the ‘remoteness’ or ‘nearness’ of a moment are relative terms that derives meaning only in comparing life histories across taxa. But perhaps such a ’soft’ relativity is exactly the point and enough.

We biologists have for the last century sojourned among the autonomous epistemological features of our field, among the philosophical and logistical underpinnings that define biology as a unique science (Mayr 1982, 2004). The reasons for undertaking such a journey were just, the rewards plenty. Biological systems are defined by mesoscale dynamics distinct from the subjects of the other natural sciences.

But we may have maneuvered ourselves out of understanding a truly magnificent possibility long staring us in the face: namely, organisms manipulate key aspects of the nature of the very temporality they experience. By virtue of their elastic ontogenies and their ability to reproduce variable offspring, living things, even viruses, by varying degrees and modalities, adaptively surf physical time in what could be a peculiar form of time travel.

Organisms may embody a biological relativity that carries considerable currency only because it arises on a planet that is in part formed by the naturally selected designs of its living occupants. In other words, organisms have constructed a time of their own mileau.

The physical laws that define the universe are not ubiquitously practiced. While, as we learned in Physics 101, a bag of feathers and a bowling ball of equal mass dropped in a vacuum atmosphere will hit the ground at the same time, that’s not the planet Earth-bound organisms thrive on. There is no vacuum, and the vagaries of their size and Earth’s environment permit Gould’s insects, and by other means many creatures in the sea, to largely ignore gravity.

It would appear many organisms have done likewise with time, collectively constructing ecologies in which the manipulation of the timing of events–of birth, maturation, migration, reproduction–instantiates a biological denomination valued, so far, only here on Earth. Traveling time this way comprises a key mechanism by which life, a wonderfully variant astronaut, persists on physical time’s ever-breaking crest.

December 2004

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.

In early 2009 a previously undescribed influenza, what we now know as swine flu H1N1 (2009), emerged in humans in central Mexico and spread around the world. Three of the new virus’s segments appeared to be from the classical swine influenza (HA, NP, NS), three from the North American H3N2-avian swine recombinant we just described (PB2, PB1, PA), and two from a Eurasian swine recombinant (NA, M) that originated in birds. In short, every one of the new H1N1’s genetic segments is most closely related to those of influenzas circulating among swine.

Something of a mystery remains, however. How did genomic segments from influenza circulating on opposite sides of the world get together? The most parsimonious explanation is that the final reassortment event occurred among swine where the first human outbreaks emerged in Mexico. A second possibility, with the first human infections estimated months before the first recognized cases in Veracruz, the strain emerged in Asia where all three of the influenzas that would form sfH1N1 (2009) have been found.

While the specifics of the strain’s origins remain unclear, the general mode of swine influenza’s movement is now clearer. Unlike as in avian influenzas, no migratory waterfowl can be offered as an obvious intermediate host by which the viruses are transported long distance. By sfH1N1 (2009)’s emergence, only hog populations were implicated. As hog transport is facilitated by human handlers alone, there can be no mistake that human agency has played a defining role in the spread of swine flu’s source strains.

With the globalization of the livestock filiere, the distances over which food animal populations are transported have expanded to continental and even intercontinental scales. Data is scarce, but Baltussen et al. (2009) report that in 2007 alone 22 million live piglets and slaughter pigs were traded across Europe. Their figure 2 shows the main routes of hog transport among European countries.

The surge in livestock miles goes hand in hand with the global spread of a corporate model of vertically integrated husbandry associated with farm consolidation and increases in head count per farm. By way of structural adjustment programs and neoliberal free trade agreements, agribusinesses are moving company operations to the Global South and Eastern Europe to take advantage of cheap labor, cheap land, weak regulation, and domestic production hobbled in favor of heavily subsidized agro-exporting.

But as David Burch explains, companies are also engaging in sophisticated corporate strategy. Agribusinesses are spreading their production line across much of the world. The CP Group, for one, now the world’s fourth largest poultry producer, has poultry facilities in Turkey, China, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the United States. It has feed operations across India, China, Indonesia, and Vietnam. It owns a number of fast food chain restaurants throughout Southeast Asia.

A supply chain arrayed across multiple countries allows companies the means by which to compensate for any interruptions in business, including of their own making. The CP Group operates joint-venture poultry facilities across China, producing 600 million of China’s 2.2 billion chickens annually sold. When an outbreak of deadly bird flu occurred in a farm operated by the CP Group in Heilongjiang Province, Japan banned poultry from China. CP factories in Thailand filled the market gap by increasing exports to Japan.

Despite working out much of this over the past year, it never occurred to me the lengths to which agribusinesses are willing and able to move their wares. A recent Winnipeg Free Press article describes a Manitoba company’s newly implemented efforts at flying thousands of pigs out of Winnipeg to Germany before a truck trip to Russia. As the video below shows, it’s Winnipeg to Krasandor on the other side of the world in four days. Even if pigs are rarely flown so far, still an open question, the agro-economic pressures placed on increasing the geographic extent of livestock transport are obvious.

The implications for influenza are fundamental. First, the scale of transport increases the likelihood previously isolated influenza serotypes can trade genomic segments, as occurred for this year’s transcontinentally recombinant H1N1. Second, increasing the virus’s geographic scope should select for deadlier strains. A renewable supply of susceptibles–ever available on the next horizon–is thought to act as a primary fuel for the evolution of virulence.

When pigs fly may be a bad time.

Flying pigs from Winnipeg to Germany.

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.

For now I’ll offer here what I’d like to think is something of a start. I recently published a paper in Antipode on influenza and the political virology of farming (see the abstract below). It lays out in more detail than provided so far on this blog the likely reasons for the emergence of the new ensemble of virulent influenzas. The paper also offers an albeit provisional plan to keep us from whacking ourselves with a much deadlier influenza than the presently circulating swine flu H1N1 (2009).

If you can’t access the paper through the journal’s site here, I’ll email you a copy, gratis.

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Breeding Influenza: The Political Virology of Offshore Farming

Abstract. The geographic extent, xenospecificity, and clinical course of influenza A (H5N1), the bird flu strain, suggest the virus is an excellent candidate for a pandemic infection. Much attention has been paid to the virus’s virology, pathogenesis and spread. In contrast, little effort has been aimed at identifying influenza’s social origins. In this article, I review H5N1’s phylogeographic properties, including mechanisms for its evolving virulence. The novel contribution here is the attempt to integrate these with the political economies of agribusiness and global finance. Particular effort is made to explain why H5N1 emerged in southern China in 1997. It appears the region’s reservoir of near-human-specific recombinants was subjected to a phase change in opportunity structure brought about by China’s newly liberalized economy. Influenza, 200 nm long, seems able to integrate selection pressures imposed by human production across continental distances, an integration any analysis of the virus should assimilate in turn.

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.

Daniel Defoe wrote of a similar spectrum that emerged during the Great Plague of 1665, an account he claimed for any generation confronted with something similar some terrible year in the future,

I now began to consider seriously with myself concerning my own case, and how I should dispose of myself; that is to say, whether I should resolve to stay in London or shut up my house and flee, as many of my neighbours did. I have set this particular down so fully, because I know not but it may be of moment to those who come after me, if they come to be brought to the same distress, and to the same manner of making their choice; and therefore I desire this account may pass with them rather for a direction to themselves to act by than a history of my acting, seeing it may not be of one farthing value to them to note what became of me.

The rich and their servants largely fled Defoe’s London. In their flight some, carrying Certificates of Health from the Very Worthy Lord Mayor, &tc., helped spread the pathogen to other towns along the way. The tradesmen, Defoe included, agonized over saving themselves or their businesses. Did obeying God mean trusting Him to save one’s life (and so stay) or trusting Him to save one’s shop (and so leave)? The working poor and destitute had little recourse save their choice in superstition. Opportunistic prophets of doom and peddlers of dubious fetishes ran up a bubble market.

Three hundred and fifty years later, we can still see the twists and turns the human mind takes in assimilating an outbreak, this one very much of our own making. Given their scope, pandemics hold up a mirror to humanity in all its deep and dark complexity. Deciding on the right path, then, is not an easy matter, even as choices have to be made in the face of an urgent, and potentially catastrophic, situation.

Here I take on some of the characterizations about swine flu H1N1 (2009), from more to less flippant, with an eye that such a review might help us—myself included—think through the personal and political choices that must be made.

“What’s the problem? Swine flu is no more virulent than a seasonal influenza, maybe even less so.”

Not true. Data rolling in from a variety of levels of analysis show the virus, while no 1918, to be more dangerous than seasonal influenza:   

 

• At the molecular level, the virus is capable of bonding with lung receptors as well as those in the throat in ways unlike seasonal influenza.
• At the clinical level, the virus induces a nastier infection across mammalian models, a result we discussed in some detail in an earlier post.
• The World Health Organization reports a severe form of the infection in circulation that targets the lungs, causing severe illness in otherwise healthy adults. Some countries are reporting as many as 15 percent of hospitalized patients require intensive care.
• At the population level, the virus has caused 100 times greater mortality in some human populations, with greater mortality for people in their prime, again largely unlike seasonal influenza.
• Despite the notorious difficulties in pinning down etiology, the new influenza is indeed the culprit. According to the World Health Organization, swine flu H1N1 (2009) is now the dominant influenza type circulating. It has outcompeted the three seasonal influenzas and so far this season represents 75% of those testing positive for influenza.

 

“I got swine flu. Didn’t get very sick. It’s no big deal.”

A scientist commits an ecological fallacy when he or she concludes that a characteristic of the population can be applied to every individual in the population. The converse fallacy, committed here, involves sweeping declarations about the nature of a phenomenon based on personal experience alone.

What may be mild for one person may be deadly for another. Infections manifest the variation central to Charles Darwin’s population thinking, rather than its typological predecessor. That is, variation, and not some singularly idealized expectation, is what’s real.

Other testimonials refute the typecast. Here’s a description of the swine flu infection one blogger’s husband suffered this spring,

Now while H1N1 hit me quick and hard and then moved on, it doesn’t always play that way. When I first started on this blogpost, I had been living for seven weeks at the intensive care unit of one of the best hospitals in town. While our daughter and myself recovered quickly enough, H1N1 almost killed my husband…

 

You see, a certain number – and it’s currently impossible to know how many – of those non-deadly H1N1 cases are much like my husband’s: people in whom the virus does not follow its relatively benign trajectory, but in whom it provokes severe damage to the lungs and other organs. In my husband’s case, by the time we got to the ICU (after 72 hours in the ER) the flu had triggered septic shock – a failure of the circulatory system – and Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome, an oftentimes deadly devastation of the lungs caused when toxins spill into them from the blood system. ARDS is thought to be the cause of most of the deaths in Mexico in March.

The variation is more than descriptive, however. It’s causative. Those of us who, unvaccinated, manage to avoid the worst of an infection can still act as carriers, infecting others not so lucky. A pandemic operationalizes the critical principle that health is a communal obligation. We are plugged into a network of neighbors and coworkers that, like a Russian doll, extends out to the rest of the world.

The mutual integration renders unsubstantiated claims in the other direction, that this flu is milder than or at worse similar to a seasonal flu, nigh on sociopathic. Blasé dismissals for what will be for many a fight for their very lives should be held to account, if only by calling them out.

“Vaccines are unsafe.”

For a more exhaustive refutation, try this blow-by-blow post on the junk science underlying the anti-vax movement. For instance,

For some vaccines, substances called adjuvants are added to increase immune system response & spread a smaller quantity of antigen over more doses.

For one thing, the H1N1 vaccine doesn’t have any. Secondly, even if there were aluminum salts or squalene in the bloody thing, that wouldn’t be a reason to fear it. There is no evidence aluminum-containing vaccines are a serious health risk or justify changes to immunization practice. Aluminum salts have been used as adjuvants for about 80 years, and there’s much more aluminum in breast milk & infant formula than there is in the vaccines.

For our purposes, we’ll note that

• Vaccines have had an excellent track record, with fundamental impact on global public health across multiple diseases.
• Given the scale of production, the adverse effects of influenza vaccines are miniscule in incidence (see here, here and here).
• The preliminary results–albeit largely from the vaccine industry (although peer-reviewed nonetheless)–indicate the vaccines for swine flu H1N1 are safe, with minimal discomfort (see here and here).

For most years, the public health fallout from vaccine denialism or just plain absenteeism is largely minimal. There exists enough partial immunity at the individual level and herd immunity at the population level to slow down a seasonal infection.

But during a pandemic year, a new strain’s emergence, outpacing vaccine production, is in a fundamental way as important as the state of its virulence. Even if swine flu clocks in with the same virulence as a seasonal strain, and continues to in the coming years, a contention no health official in their right mind would make, orders more people are going to be infected than between pandemics. Without partial immunity and herd immunity brought about by previous infection or timely vaccination, many more people infected will likely lead to more deaths.

Forgoing vaccination, then, is a much more consequential course of action this year. And with 30% of parents polled declaring they won’t vaccinate their children against swine flu, even as the CDC reports more children already killed so far this season than last year’s grand total, skeptics need to own up to the gravity of their decision. Unless, in their own minds, in an expression of a particularly American contradiction, they expect medicine will somehow rescue them from the pandemic they chose to ignore until it turned nasty.

“Vaccines are ineffective.”

Shannon Brownlee and Jeanne Lenzer recently weighed in on the effectiveness of the influenza vaccines (as opposed to their safety). They argue that the vaccine doesn’t work for the elderly (and seems effective only to the extent that the healthiest elderly are the ones to get vaccinated in the first place). The pair also argues vaccines are largely effective for most other diseases, but for influenza, which evolves season-to-season, questions vaccination as a long-term strategy.

Brownlee and Lenzer claim the medical establishment refuses the placebo-controlled trials needed to confirm the bias of healthy participants by hiding behind an ethical quandary,

Lone Simonsen explains the prevailing view: “It is considered unethical to do trials in populations that are recommended to have vaccine,” a stance that is shared by everybody from the CDC’s Nancy Cox to Anthony Fauci at the NIH. They feel strongly that vaccine has been shown to be effective and that a sham vaccine would put test subjects at unnecessary risk of getting a serious case of the flu.

As applied to humans, Brownlee and Lenzer’s view of vaccines is a minority opinion. The efficaciousness at the population level is, however, under debate for multiple host species, including livestock. Influenza is an evolution machine and requires new vaccines every year. The approach works, but, with influenza’s relentless reemergence year-to-year, by definition represents no panacea. Some years the vaccine misses the mark or a new influenza emerges, including this year’s swine flu, for which we have no vaccine until later in the season.

There are other issues. The scientific literature describes a number of examples in which livestock vaccination has selected for new influenza strains or kept outbreaks from burning out by generating reservoirs of subclinical infection.

Vaccines, antivirals, and other reductionist interventions are problematic if only because the pathogen refuses to obey the epistemological model under which much biomedicine operates, a key point in our recent book. Such pathogens instead live and evolve in response to multiple levels of biocultural organization over large swaths of geographic space.

So influenza remains a very difficult problem and requires interventions at all of the levels at which it operates, a full-court press as yet unpursued. The disease’s difficulties , however, don’t mean we can wash our hands of our responsibilities to do something about it this year. The answer certainly isn’t to shelve vaccination. In fact, vaccines are essential. For the long term, however, we’ll need to expand the scope of the interventions we partake. Not only non-pharmaceutical interventions now encouraged by public health authorities–regular washing, social distancing, self-quarantine, paid pandemic sick and family leave, among others–but into more contentious territory, including, like an ancient river, to the pathogen’s source.

A burgeoning variety of new influenza subtypes capable of infecting humans, swine flu H1N1 (2009) included, appears the result of a concomitant globalization of the industrial model of poultry and pig production. Since the 1970s vertically integrated stockbreeding has spread out from its origins in the southeastern United States across the globe. Our world is encircled by growing cities of millions of pig and poultry pressed alongside each other, an ecology well-suited for the evolution of multiple virulent strains of influenza.

An onslaught of new influenza recombinants raises the stakes. It increases the chance a truly virulent influenza evolves. It increases the range of strains vaccines must potentially cover. As a result, it also increases the unpredictability of any one year’s crop of human influenzas further complicating vaccine production.

“Vaccination may work, but why should I trust an industry in such a condition?”

As there has been very little money to be made from influenza vaccines, production, largely privatized since the Reagan administration, has suffered over the past two decades in both output and regulation.

In 2003, for instance, the FDA discovered bacterial contamination at a Chiron Corp vaccine plant in England, one of only two supplying the U.S. at that time, but did nothing but suggest voluntary changes. It wasn’t until 16 months later that British regulators finally shut down production, causing a gap in vaccine coverage here that flu season.

The last five years have seen something of a reversal in production at least in industrial countries. Governments, however, are ramping up production for this pandemic in part by indemnifying pharm companies from litigation should safety problems emerge. That kind of interference, or lack of it, speaks to a structural—as opposed to a nefarious–corruption. That doesn’t mean that this year’s vaccines are unsafe, but that we are flying with less of a net than we might.

With the caveats about their long-term sustainability discussed above, well-produced vaccines work year-to-year. This year the likelihood of getting a serious influenza infection by far outweighs the chance of getting a bad shot, no matter how distasteful the economics on which their production is presently based may be. The public’s confidence in vaccines, however, requires the industry be subjected to the strictest of regulation.

“Donald Rumseld owns Tamiflu stock” and “Swine flu will be Obama’s rationale for justifying a dictatorship.”

There’s plenty to call out for swine flu: agribusiness, Big Pharma, neoliberalism, foot-dragging governmental agencies, WHO, among others. But there is a fine line between a healthy skepticism about the pharmaceutical-government complex and sociopathic tendencies. Just because Roche–and Donald Rumsfeld and whatever bête noire the left or right can think of–profits off antivirals doesn’t mean swine flu isn’t capable of killing people.

There remains a material reality for which any political framework must still account, other than getting the drop on one’s talk show opponent. Given the potential danger at hand, it may serve us all better if for once we avoided confounding the politicians we despise with the pathogens that might kill us.

That isn’t to say that we shouldn’t demand clarification about and accountability for swine flu policy from politicians, scientists, and health officials alike, often a difficult expectation given the fluid nature of a pandemic. The expectation, however, comes at a price. Contrary to a prevalent ethos, particularly online, a free fire zone of anonymous flaming with few personal consequences for its practitioners, accountability also flows in the other direction. Public health requires public participation, including getting vaccinated.

Following in Defoe’s footsteps, a pandemic is a bad situation that forces us into a corner where we are able to exercise only limited options. That’s an ideological no-no in a land that over the past thirty years traded in the social safety net for the dream of a billion cheap commodities. To protect this Homeland of the Mind one can try to rationalize the danger away. In something of an orthogonal direction, one can try to confound what we should do about the pandemic in the immediate term with the long list of institutions which deserve the blame for bringing about the crisis (and which even now may be mishandling it).

But in the end it’s about duct-taping together the best response under bad conditions that, yes, the present system brought about. Swine flu H1N1 is the real deal and our neighbors’ health is intertwined with our own. That’s why I champion vaccination. It’s also why I believe it necessary to force the issue whether vaccination and antivirals can continue to be the sole means of controlling influenza.

For now, surviving the year is an important stop on the road to a new model of public and animal health, one we can make ourselves proud passing on 350 years later.

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.

Why the bother? Why struggle against the Food Empire? The best place to start may be the end: what does a meal of locally grown organic meat and vegetables look and smell like? Putting aside nutrition and politics, putting aside all expectations about what socially conscious food means, putting aside the ridiculous amount of work involved, how does the food taste? Once we can identify a destination–delicacies any and all Americans deserve on a regular basis–all arguments that follow shift to the ways we can get more people there.

I remember my first simple grass-fed burger here. Bodily fluids were mixed: I cried salty tears into the burger’s juices. I was tasting beef for the very first time. All else, many hundreds of patties over nearly four decades, were but a prelude of corn-fed cardboard. Veggies and fruit and cheeses? Similar revelations. There’s nothing so viscerally convincing as an argument for a new agriculture than a damn good meal shared al fresco among the evening fireflies with good friends and a good regional beer.

Below you’ll find photos of meals my wife Alexis prepared this summer using vegetables from Burning River, our CSA farm, and some local organic meats. The captions are hers.

So join us. Bring a dish. You will have some work to do too. Cut veggies, wash some dishes, babysit, or top off the first round. Otherwise, get the fuck out of the kitchen and go blab with some other guest waiting outside in the yard. Let the artist finish preparing tonight’s gift.

Burning River Farm, Community Supported Agriculture.

Squash ready for share boxes.

One week's CSA bounty: Kale, salad greens, summer squash and zukes, carrots, cucumbers (yes!), beets, garlic (double yes!), broccoli, onions and fresh thyme.

Mixed greens with beets and cucumbers, braised cabbage, tiny bit of leftover carrot-cauliflower puree, roast chicken (chicken is from local farm, not the CSA). Summer squash pasta with light cream butter sauce.

Lamb burger with mint, oregano, bread crumb and lemon, cucumber yogurt dressing, mixed greens and zucchini fritter. All produce from the CSA, lamb from the farmer's market, mint from the backyard.

Roast chicken with sage, oregano and thyme, cornbread, steamed collard greens with lime (out of lemon!) and butter, and mixed greens with beets, cucumbers and blue cheese (which was made at a local university).

Steamed rainbow chard with cheese sauce (local raw milk, cheddar, thyme), mixed green salad with beets, cucumbers, tomatoes in a apple cider vinegar, sage and walnut oil dressing, and cornbread!

Summer squash soup, grassfed beef burger, mega fresh corn on the cob.

Mmm, mmm, mmm tomatoes with locally-made fresh mozz, basil from the backyard, flatiron steak (grassfed), corn soup, yummy bread from rustica bakery.

Roasted chicken, salad with tomatoes, cukes, feta, oil-cured olives, sauteed greens, and black bean corn, zucchini salad with some sort of grain (can't remember).

This was a crazy meal: Haggis (work with me here), Riders of the Purple Sage Potatoes (purple spuds, fresh sage topped with flash-fried sage leaves), mixed green salad with a bounty of veggies from Burning River: beets, sungold tomatoes, cucumbers, red onions, plus Donnay Farm goat cheese. Hellz yeah!

The white dinner: white Belgian beer, arborio rice with white onions and roasted white eggplants, white beets in oil and vinegar, and baguette with white bean hummus. Take that, Paltrow!

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.

It isn’t, however, just a matter of a few bottom-feeders. The axioms underlying the imperial project extend deep into population biology’s critical organs. No mere artifacts since transitioned into more benign use, liberal capitalism’s first principles clang aloud today in even the field’s best work. The epistemological debris of Victorian exploitation wasn’t just left behind somehow. Whether or not its practitioners acknowledge it, the premises remain at the heart of the modeling.

*

At first take biologists bear little blame. Who knew given we’ve been so busy since Charles Darwin’s revelation? The field’s rolling successes have kept my fellow population biologists, some of the sharpest people I’ve met, a bit preoccupied. Understandably so. Some have just sequenced the genome of Phytophthora infestans, the pathogen of the Irish potato blight. Others have begun mapping epigentic networks underlying norms of reaction. Still others can now predict ecological regime shifts from time series alone. Exciting stuff. It’s why then the willful paramnesia on the part of many of my colleagues sets me aback.

How to change course? Or, better yet for a start, why change if all is going so swimmingly? There are reasons aplenty, with roots deep in human history, some back long before science itself. We explore here a few of what appear external to the field and leave more internal ones for posts to come.

Fifty years ago Joseph Campbell (above) sketched out the basics of the relationship between human thinking and cultural circumstance. For Campbell our best minds have always been a box of rocks,

I cannot forget that for many centuries the vast majority of the great as well as minor thinkers of Europe believed that the world was created about 4004 B.C. and redeemed in the first century A.D.; that Cain, the eldest son of the first human couple, was the first agriculturalist, the first murderer, and the first builder of cities; that the Creator of the Universe once held in particular regard a certain tribe of Near Eastern nomads, for whom he parted the waters of the Red Sea and to whom he communicated, in person, his program for the human race; and that, because of the failure of this people to recognize himself when he then became incarnate among them as the son of one of their daughters, the Creator of he Universe transferred his attention to the northern shores of the Mediterranean: to Italy, Spain, and France, to Switzerland, Germany, and England, to Holland and Scandinavia, and for a while, also, to the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

And here all along I thought South Minneapolis was God’s country. So fundamental to a political infrastructure is a geographically tilted metaphysics that ample evidence to the contrary is met with terminal prejudice. Campbell quotes the Inquisition’s judgment upon Galileo,

The proposition that the sun is in the center of the world and immovable from its place is absurd, philosophically false, and formally heretical; because it is expressly contrary to Holy Scriptures.

The scientists among us may see such hubris as positivism’s vindication at religion’s expense, but that isn’t Campbell’s point,

What can the value or meaning be of a mythological notion which, in the light of modern science, must be said to be erroneous, philosophically false, absurd, or even formally insane?…[Its] value, namely, is to be studied rather as a function of psychology and sociology than as a refuted system…rather in terms of certain effects worked by the symbols on the character of the individual and the structure of society than in terms of their obvious incongruity as an image of the cosmos…

In other words, psychologies and societies evolve in tandem with their symbolic overhead. Campbell reviews the ways the roles such symbols play changed as human civilizations emerged from the Proto-Neolithic. For one, the communalism and division of labor introduced by agriculture imposed an attendant crisis of identity,

The problem of existing as a mere fraction instead of as a whole imposes certain stresses on the psyche which no primitive hunter ever had to endure, and consequently the symbols giving structure and support to the development of the primitive hunter’s psychological balance were radically different from those that arose in the settled villages, in the Basal and High Neolithic, and which have been inherited from that age and continued into the present by all the high civilizations of the world.

The inheritance is cultural and contingently so,

[It] may be asked whether this whole history and mythology of the earth-rooted, walled town or village, with its temple tower in the center, lifting the goddess earth to her divine connubium with the all-father of the overarching fertilizing sky, is not, perhaps, only a highly specialized formula, not normal to the psyche of the species, but rather, an effect of the tensions, fears, and expectations generated in a society based on an agricultural economy. And we may ask, also, then, whether today, when that economy is giving way to one based on industry, and the cosmological image commensurate with an agricultural horizon has been shattered for us forever–whether today, in this next great age of transformation, the images generated in that earlier period of crisis still are of use, and if so for whom, and why?

Campbell follows with some fascinating discussion about the ongoing clash between agriculture’s ghost–a regimented Chain of Being administered by a priesthood–and industry’s return to a shamanistic, if now materialist, self-sufficiency. Here, though, we part ways. Under capitalism, the individualistic turn is as regimented, and in many ways more so, than its predecessor. Alienating labor–by surplus value and Taylorism–anneals billions to a system of production that divorces them from their work’s fruit in plan, deed and outcome. The basics of life–food, water, shelter, land–are socialized as never before but under ownership privatized to an unprecedented degree.

The relevant question–if we may redirect Campbell–is how scientific symbolism, the new scripture, organizes economically derived tensions, fears and expectations under the new regime. Whose tensions are organized? And, in the other direction, how do such sociopsychological archetypes define scientific symbolism, mathematical modeling included?

*

In many ways Darwin caught himself in a trap of his own making. In the course of capping materialism’s ascendency, Darwin found his career, family life, experiments, politics, metaphysics, and even health buffeted about by the transitions his work helped bring on.

Wallace and Wallace (2009) comment that the culturally plastic brain that enabled the human species to readily adapt to changing circumstances may have come at a cost. Some of the most common psychopathologies may arise at evolutionary-ontogenetic interfaces where consciousness’ historical sources–phylogenetic innovation, exaptation, and cultural heritages–have the most difficulty developmentally meshing even in the healthiest among us. It is a testament to Darwin’s genius and fortitude (and sense of self-preservation) that he was able to accomplish so much in the face of uncertain fortunes and the era’s fracturing self he helped bring about.

This kind of brain-and-culture condensation has emerged as a new orthodoxy in recent studies of human cognition. Richard Nisbett and colleagues (2001, 2004) review an extensive literature on empirical studies of basic cognitive differences between individuals raised in what they call ‘East Asian’ and ‘Western’ cultural heritages. In something of an overgeneralization, they view Western-based pattern cognition as ‘analytic’ and East-Asian as ‘holistic.’ But with a geography of human thinking Nisbett et al. find

• Social organization directs attention to some aspects of the perceptual field at the expense of others.
• What is attended to influences metaphysics.
• Metaphysics guides tacit epistemology, that is, beliefs about the nature of the world and causality.
• Epistemology dictates the development and application of some cognitive processes at the expense of others.
• Social organization can directly affect the plausibility of metaphysical assumptions, such as whether causality should be regarded as residing in the field or in the object.
• Social organization and social practices can directly influence the development and use of cognitive processes such as dialectical vs. logical ones.

Nisbett et al. conclude that tools of thought embody a culture’s intellectual history, that tools have theories build into them, and that users accept these theories, albeit unknowingly, when they use these tools.

The applications to evolutionary modeling’s development are enough to keep one busy blogging into the next century. How did a capitalist milieu shape evolutionary biology’s tacit epistemology? We’ll review a few specific possibilities in posts to come.

The mathematics omitted by history is another, less obvious, direction. A different prevalent social organization–say a democratic socialism–might have taken us into spaces of mathematical modeling never developed in capitalist countries or that were abandoned further east in the wake of Stalinism. It seems, like friends, we get the math we deserve.

The problem is complicated by historical contingencies auxiliary to those directly imposed by political economies. It took forty years to develop turbo codes after Shannon and McMillan’s theory of communication. No matter how ready and willing the encapsulating culture, the work is at times hard enough under any of Nisbett’s lineages.

All is not lost, however. We may not easily imagine the alternatives we never lived, but that doesn’t mean they’re not there. First, over human history many brave and unheralded souls have tried and their efforts, to be discussed here in later posts, are worth our full attention. Second, the alternatives’ absence needn’t match their utility. A great idea may have never won the decades of development it deserved, if only because it could never wrangle away the research infrastructure the dominant models hoarded for themselves. Lee Smolin has written about this very problem in physics.

Before reviewing these alternatives we should complete our thought: where did a culturally plastic cognition place evolutionary biology during the last of Campbell’s transitions, between agriculture and the industrial age?

*

Writing on Darwinism in the 1930s, British Marxist Christopher Caudwell, one of the forgotten, anticipates the path Campbell and the Jungians would abandon,

When we in fact examine the theory of Natural Selection, we find that the machine for producing new species has a strange likeness to the capitalist economy of that era, as the capitalist saw it…The political economy of Darwin’s era, which produced Manchester liberalism and Free Trade was based on the following belief: If every man is left to himself to produce and exchange freely the commodities of society, the result will be for the maximum benefit of all, including himself. His private profit will be society’s good. All exchange-value will then represent value to society, and just as much, and no more, will be produced than society needs, while every man will get a fair return for his labours…Such a theory of economy reflects the programme of the bourgeois escaping the feudal constraints upon trade. Above all, it expressed the 1750-1850 revolutionary upsurge of the new bourgeoisie against old aristocratic monopoly in capital and land.

Darwinism updates a nature that had reflected feudal society, wherein an organismal hierarchy is defined with moral undertones by inherent type. Domination is now instead disguised in statistical and transient dynamics,

The struggles of the free wills for the sum of property appearing in the world markets, subject to the ‘laws’ of supply and demand, seem to secure the progress of society. For ‘property’, put ‘food supply’, for ‘market’, ‘environment’, for ‘individual free will’, ‘individual struggle for existence’, and for ‘laws of supply and demand’, ‘physical laws’…

Nature is made capitalist in nature, making capitalism, bombed peasants and all, natural.

Evolutionary biologists are quick to point out the baggage religiosity imposes on creationisms of various stripes. A subset will remark on Lysenkoism’s effects on Soviet science. And they are right. Yet many cannot see the burdens their own field’s origins place on the theories they depend on, however well or ill the resulting work.

Caudwell proves tougher on the cultural boulders loaded atop Darwinism than on Darwin or his scientific descendents. In other words, it isn’t personal. In fact, there is a tone of cautious sympathy. Working scientists, after all, must heave about that legacy in the course of their day-to-day work,

These assumptions are continually contradicted by practice, and thus every geneticist, when explaining his discoveries, has to waste his efforts on a preliminary wrestle with the unreal metaphysics he has inherited.

Unpinning evolutionary modeling from the more insidious of its capitalist precepts appears a good first step out from underneath.

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.

Graham et al. begin with the origins of modern industrial farming, a topic we’ve addressed here, here and here. Over the past 70 years, beginning in the United States and now extending globally, farming has become vertically integrated. All links in the filiere, from breeding through butchering, have been gathered top to bottom under the aegis of a small number of agribusiness conglomerates. In other words, a fundamental shift in basic pathogen ecology has emerged:

Large-scale animal production is based on high throughput processing of single breeds of livestock. Beef and dairy cattle, pigs, broiler and layer chickens, ducks, turkeys, crustacea and fish are now raised separately in large populations typically concentrated in and confined to feedlots rather than left out on open forage. These economies of scale are sustained by government-subsidized grain-based diets laced with antibiotics aimed at maximizing bulk over short generation times. The faster large animals can be processed (before their diet kills them), the more money can be made. According to Graham et al.,

In the U.S., this change began in the 1930s and now more than 90% of broiler chickens and turkeys are produced in houses in which between 15,000 and 50,000 birds are confined throughout their lifespan. For swine, this transformation occurred more recently and more rapidly: from 1994 to 2001, the market share of hogs produced in [intensive food animal production] increased from 10% to 72% of total U.S. production.

The geography of livestock has shifted too. Although orders of magnitude larger, farms are much more concentrated and often sequestered to regional agricultural ghettos. American swine, for instance, is largely confined to three states: North Carolina, Iowa, Minnesota, and parts of a few others. At the same time, livestock of different species are often raised in the same area, increasing the likelihood of zoonotic transmission.

Despite intensive veterinary supervision and, in the U.S., 24 million pounds of antibiotics a year, the scale of stockbreeding has outpaced efforts to control the pathogens intensive agriculture incubates. Industry assurances have belied themselves. Despite ‘biosecurity’s’ invocation of a prison hospital, no megalopolis of millions, grouping animals into supercolonies for which they never evolved, is ever so lockdown spic-and-span.

Graham and his colleagues identify a variety of pathways by which pathogens can spread out of and between large confined animal feedlot operations:

Farm workers. There is little regulation of occupational exposure to agricultural microbes. Workers are offered little or no protective clothing or opportunities for decontamination on-site. Clothes are typically washed at home. Poultry workers worldwide have routinely tested for antibodies to a variety of non-human influenzas, including pre-pandemic swine flu H1N1, H5N1, H7N7, and H9N2.

In work published after Graham et al.’s review, Wang et al. (2009) detected very few cases of H5 among 2191 Guangzhou workers occupationally exposed to birds. H9 influenzas, on the other hand, appeared widespread across the poultry commodity chain, especially among poultry market retailers (15.5%) and wholesalers (6.6%) and workers in large-scale poultry-breeding enterprises (5.6%). One study of an outbreak of influenza H7N7 in the Netherlands in 2003 found some farmers’ family members infected as well. In other words, influenza outbreaks have been tracked off farms and into civilian populations.

Ventilation. To regulate heat and humidity, high-volume fans positioned at one end of livestock buildings vent air out into the environment. The resulting aerosolized dust has been measured at a million-fold greater concentration than for air sampled nearby. A 2004 British Columbia outbreak of poultry influenza was attributed to venting across confinement lots.

Animal waste. Livestock shit contains a multitude of pathogens that can persist in the open environment as ‘live ammunition’ for as long as a year for bacteria and six months for viruses. In the U.S., concentrated animal feedlots produce 314 million metric tons of waste a year. That’s a hundred times more than what Americans produce. And yet, unlike human sewage, livestock waste is subjected to no requirements for treatment. Once landfilled, livestock waste can leach into surface and ground water or be pecked at by migratory waterfowl foraging for spillover feed. Workers moving and storing animal waste risk exposure by inhalation, ingestion, and skin contact.

Aquaculture. Poultry waste is now used to feed fish. The unregulated practice exposes migratory waterfowl which frequently visit aquaculture sites. The fecal-water-oral route is a highly effective means of influenza transmission.

Transport. Pathogens can be spread in the course of transporting livestock between farms and processing plants. Animal stress during transport increases pathogen shedding. Shipping containers can be contaminated, spreading infection across shipments.

Pests. Flies caught near a Kyoto broiler farm where a 2004 outbreak took place carried the same strain of highly pathogenic influenza H5N1. Rats appeared implicated in the spread of another Japanese outbreak of H5N1 in 2007. Pest species are an underappreciated intermediary by which pathogens may migrate between waterfowl and poultry facilities.

It would appear ‘biosecure’ operations are not so biosecure. In addition to the virulence such farms likely select for, their practices permit pathogens to spread beyond the lot’s edge,

At the animal-human interface in these operations, there is inadequate protection of workers and their communities, and, more generally, there is incomplete biocontainment to prevent transfers from the animal house to the general environment. Indeed, the main emphasis of disease prevention with increasing production intensity is typically on enhancing biosecurity, whereas biocontainment is considered less of a priority. Evidence would suggest that once a pathogen has been introduced into such a production facility, it can rapidly multiply; for some pathogens, enormous quantities of infectious organisms can be released and expose other production units.

An industrial model aimed at treating organisms like widgets is undermined by the commodity’s living biology no matter how much its practitioners pretend otherwise. The price of their product should reflect the epidemiological costs governments must cover in clean-ups, culling campaigns, and antivirals. Cheap chicken is never as cheap as it’s rung up.

Better yet, a new agriculture is in order, one that treats its ‘units’ as members of an agro-ecological community shared with their human minders. Farm workers must be treated not as bipedal chattel but as the members of our communities that they are. Doing both would go a long way to mitigating the spread of deadly livestock pathogens into human populations. It’s a reasonable expectation that a chicken in every pot need not be accompanied, at any point later, by a virus in every lung.

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.

Back in England years later–never again to leave–Darwin continued his voyage. His post-Beagle notebooks lay out the very bones of a century and a half’s evolutionary biology to follow: natural selection, animal behavior, ecological genetics, human origins, systematics and phylogeography. The jottings attest to the stunning power of his mind.

One after another the pieces of paper burn with an indomitable human spirit. In resurrecting Darwin we animate ourselves. I melted with the possibilities. Given a chance, the human mind, with all its faults and failures, possesses the capacity to solve the most puzzling of riddles in spite of itself. In one exhibit case, Darwin’s rough phylogenetic tree, the first ever, encapsulates as never before descent, diversity and extinction. In a personal revelation, even the way the letters at the tips of the tree are arranged serendipitously reproduces many of the basic relationships among the human herpesvirus-8 subtypes I’ve studied.

Darwin’s intellectual descendents have since fleshed out many of the man’s ideas by means that would have both shocked and delighted him: DNA, viruses, genetic engineering, remote sensing, industrial computing, multivariate and nonparametric statistics, and the organismic diversity still daily discovered (and destroyed). But these offerings to the ancestor are wrapped in a hagiography that denies Darwin his humanity and, remarkably, encumbers our present efforts to solve riddles despite ourselves.

What did the simulacrum miss? In arriving at self-evident truths, Darwin–by acts both unconscious and corrupt–naturalized a particular Victorian capitalism as the way nature works. It isn’t just a matter of being caught in his era, dissolved in its assumptions and metaphors. Others disagreed with him even then (while very much admiring what he had accomplished). As noted by John Bellamy Foster, Karl Marx appreciated the verve with which Darwin capped the materialist revolution already long underway against the clergy. But Marx, laughing, delivered a devastating line on the Origins of Species, “Darwin recognizes among beasts and plants his English society.”

In their brilliant and empathetic landmark 1991 biography–since followed by Janet Browne’s series–Adrian Desmond and James Moore offer chapter and verse connecting Darwin’s life to the bourgeois rebellion his work helped champion.

A post-Beagle Darwin was professionally ambitious as any postdoc scheming today. He publicly kissed the rings of the don naturalists he scorned in private, a quiet friction no less heated than the open hostility of their more radical opponents:

Darwin became more and more frustrated by an arrogant theology…Yet he was desperate to earn the respect of his scientific elders. His double life became more nerve-racking as the months passed setting off an inner turmoil. What if they saw through his false face? He took so much pleasure in unravelling the enigmas of natural history, but his thoughts were becoming dangerous, his brooding masochistic. The pandemonium in his mind made a subtle and complex counterpoint to the public turmoil in urban Britain. (The country was now deep in an economic depression, and ahead lay the grimmest five years in the nineteenth century, with massive unemployment, starvation and riot.) What he was mooting was disreputable in Anglican eyes, and socially subversive (p 237).

Yet he distanced himself from the radical materialists whose ideas he had much in common but which earned his elders’ censure,

[Surgeon William] Lawrence was a republican whose scientific rhetoric achieved a pyrotechnical brilliance. He had been forced to resign his post at the College of Surgeons and recant his views after a vicious attack in the Tory Quarterly Review. The Quarterly execrated his materialist explanations of man and mind. The Court of Chancery ruled his Lectures on Man blasphemous, which destroyed its copyright…Six pauper presses pirated the offending book, keeping it continuously in print for decades…Darwin only had to stare at this shabby tome (which he was currently using) to see the fate awaiting him. He was no atheist, nor would he countenance being hijacked by sleazy fanatics. Lawrence was a reminder of how one’s good name could be dragged through the mud (p. 253).

To avoid such a fate, Darwin took to censoring himself,

He began devising ways of camouflaging his materialism. Don’t mention it, he admonished himself, talk only of inherited mental behavior: ‘To avoid stating how far, I believe, in Materialism,’ he scrawled in a rush, ’say only the emotions[,] instincts[,] degrees of talent, which are heredetary [sic] are so because brain of child resemble[s], parent stock.’ He was learning to guard his words (p. 259).

It was a monstrous struggle he dealt with for decades, one that probably presented as the intestinal ills he suffered the rest of his life,

He was a closet evolutionist besides. This was the heart of the matter. His Anglican friends were quelling the rioters, some of whom were armed with transmutation and godless sciences. Owen and Forbes were holding the line [against the Chartists] and protecting his privileges. But wouldn’t they condemn him as a fifth-columnist if they uncovered his secret? When he had cried ‘the fabric falls!’ ten years before, he did not have this sort of insurrection in mind. Anyhow, he had been a tyro then, speculating privately. Now he was squire, a family man, a member of the geological elite. For all his theory’s middle-class Malthusian core, and its capitalistic roots, he could still be a branded a traitor by the Tory diehards (p. 354).

To protect himself Darwin willfully condoned others’ public professional beheading. Among them, his own former teacher Robert Grant, from whom a young Darwin first learned to really see nature on the hikes they shared, from whom he learned how to ask scientific questions, with whom he collaborated on studies of molluscs and sea-mats, from whom he learned about continental theories of evolution proscribed in Britain, that provincial island empire,

The irony was complete. Darwin–from his Secretary’s chair–watched the polite company convene to bury Grant’s fossil heresy. Here he sat, a silent witness, before Sedgewick, Buckland, and the rest, most of them Oxbridge-educated, many Anglican divines, all loathing Lamarckism. Yet even as he watched the spectacle unfold, he was hatching his own evolutionary scheme. True, he had outgrown Grant’s nonsense… [But] what was he thinking as Grant was trounced? Did his heart bleed hearing Grant’s spirited defence? Probably not, for he was out of sympathy with the ultra-radical, and he went off to dine with the ‘elite’ at the Crown and Anchor tavern that night, as they gloated over their victory (p. 275).

In his muteness Darwin helped throw his former colleague under the horse and buggy, a tradition still widely practiced in evolutionary biology today albeit with more modern buses.

Darwin’s behavior puts something of an ominous light on the deal later struck in 1858 letting him share immediate credit with Alfred Russel Wallace for the theory of natural selection. While sick in the Spice Islands a feverish Wallace scripted out a theory of selection he mailed to his correspondent Darwin. A shocked Darwin, working in secret for 20 years on something similar, handed over Wallace’s work to his friends, botanist Joseph Hooker and geologist Charles Lyell. Hooker and Lyell hastily arranged, without conferring with Wallace, to have manuscripts by Wallace and Darwin read together into the record at the Linnean Society in London.

The deal has always bothered me. It isn’t that I think Wallace deserved credit alone–Darwin’s version is better substantiated–but rather I’m piqued by the old boy network, an accumulated class advantage Darwin could rely on to protect him from the consequences of his own cowardice. Darwin had shielded himself, and his petty personal ambitions, from Anglican retribution, going so far as helping hang fellow evolutionists, but now wanted the kind credit of discovery someone who had the guts to openly speak out about it plainly deserved instead.

One could reasonably argue his secrecy was the only way Darwin could work on–and substantiate–such a theory for so long in this kind of England. I think that a fair contention (and also open to rebuttal). But let us no longer entertain illusions of guileless innocence on the part of a boyish Darwin. That he allowed his proxies to conduct his Machiavellian affairs, however generous he was to Wallace himself, makes Darwin no less conniving.

Darwin’s biological initiative matched advanced Whig social thinking. This is what made it compelling. At last he had a mechanism that was compatible with the competitive, free-trading ideals of the ultra-Whigs. The transmutation at the base of his theory would still be loathed by many. But the Malthusian superstructure struck an emotionally satisfying chord; and open struggle with no hand-outs to the losers was the Whig way, and no poor-law commissioner could have bettered Darwin’s view. He had broken with the radical hooligans who loathed Malthus. Like the Whig grandees–safe, immune, their own world characterized by noblesse oblige–Darwin was living on a family fortune, and thrusting a bitter competition on a starving world for its own good. From now on he could appeal to a better class of audience–to the rising industrialists, free-traders, and Dissenting professionals (p. 267).

 He could shed the red evolutionists he had for years corresponded with,

visionaries who see life marching inexorably upward, powered from below [and who] denounce the props of an old static society: priestly privilege, wage exploitation, and the workhouses [and the] million socialists…castigating marriage, capitalism, and the fat, corrupt Established Church…[the] Radical Christians…who condemn the ‘fornicating’ Church…in bed with the State… [who viewed] the science of life–biology–…ruined, prostituted, turned into a Creationist citadel by the clergy (p xvii).

In cutting off his epistemological fellow travelers, Darwin dispossessed his newborn of a parent with much to offer to the child’s subsequent development. Marx and Engels would look down into the pram and recognize the “basis in natural science for the class struggle in history”, but would also see the way Darwin heedlessly confounded a particular and passing expansive stage of capitalism for all of nature. It’s a realization the science has missed out on since.

We are also living with the consequences of the estrangement in forums farther removed. Darwin’s was a model with political dividends, instantly replacing clerical authority with an Anglican moralization based in the statistics of production rather than on a deterministic, and very busy, God. As many must now recognize in an era of banker bailouts, it was also an application in which no one, not even the rich, could believe in deed, if not in word, once its punishments were applied beyond the poorest,

And English society will stay vital and progressive only through unimpeded competition. The sickly and degenerate deserve to be scythed down, [Darwin] believed, even as he sent subscriptions to the Downe charities to maintain his own paternal order and worried about his sons’ in-bred ailments. He decried ‘primogeniture for destroying Natural Selection’ even as he had Lubbock set up his eldest William in the banking business (p. 522).

Today evolutionary biology, the most historical of sciences outside cosmology and geology, refuses to grapple with the implications of the social origins of Darwin’s natural selection outside its struggle with religion, that old punching bag. Sins of omission are as telling as those of commission: the underlying presumptions of evolutionary biology’s economic bases are still very much in operation even as they are largely forgotten by evolutionists. The inscience continues to impede the field’s advance.

So what! one hears the reply. What’s the bottom line? Does the omission refute natural selection? As if a full denouncement–an indefensible stance–is the only critique permitted! The answer is neoclassical selection misses much of evolution’s story, something Darwin himself, if not his disciples, acknowledged. We will explore the details, including those Darwin didn’t catch, in the months to come.

In noting Darwin’s cowardice and conventionality in the face of his singular courage and acuity, we rescue the man from his simulacrum, a coffin in part his own making, in part our own. We respect the ancestors best when we interrogate them. We show that we take what they did seriously when we offer them not burning incense but cross questions. On his better days of the dead Darwin will appreciate both the sentiment and practice whatever the damage to his reputation.

I gave the following presentation last night at Give & Take, a show and tell for adults held at Intermedia Arts in Minneapolis. The organizers ask all presenters (and audience members) two questions: What do you know about? What do you want to know about? A lot of fun and a great learning experience. Other than the photo of the featherless chickens I show none of my slides here, but I think you’ll get the picture.

We begin with a visceral abomination. We recoil at the sight of these chickens bred for baldness. But we recoil for reasons other than those for flinching at mystery meats, for instance. We’re repulsed by the meat because we can’t connect our food to something identifiably organic.

Our featherless friends, on the other hand, seem a violation of temporality. We don’t expect the finished broiler—leg, breast, wings—to be walking about on its own. The sequence is all wrong.

You can imagine these as stars of your own personal Latourian nightmare. You’re dreaming you’re in your local supermarket—maybe only in your underwear, maybe not—and you watch these two birds walk down aisle 6 and hop right into a meats freezer. You look down into the freezer. Shivering birds “Hello, bok, bok, bok, I’m a red dot special! I’m a red dot special!” You wake up in a cold sweat with feathers from your pillow floating everywhere.

In actuality you probably couldn’t spot the difference between our featherless friends once processed and your typical supermarket poultry. Its breeding isn’t in the consumers’ interest—feathers have long been plucked at the factory anyway. Instead, it’s in the interest of the producer. They can now remove plucking from poultry processing, cutting production costs. The cost is also pushed back onto the living bird, which now expresses another attribute that would make it incompatible with living in a natural or ancestral environment. The bird has become further wedded to the industrial process.

We could consider bird baldness the anatomical equivalent of what agribusiness has imposed more broadly on livestock ecologies: thousands of poultry and swine housed atop each other, densities that could never persist in nature because of the disease costs they incur, but that allow more animals to be raised and processed faster.

Among a variety of complications, there is growing evidence that such ecologies are selecting for a greater diversity of virulent influenzas:

• Such populations are characterized by little genetic diversity, offering few immune firebreaks against an outbreak.
• Larger populations facilitate viral transmission.
• Immune systems are likewise depressed under such densities.
• And the high turnover rate of the poultry process—the duration from birth to processing has been reduced to 40 days—likely selects for more virulent strains able to reach their transmission threshold before their host is killed for food.
• By increasing the throughput speed, the livestock industry may also be selecting for strains able to transmit in the face of more robust immune systems. Not a good sign for those of us 20-45 years of age.

How did this industrialization of biology came about in the first place?

The Livestock Revolution

Industrial poultry emerged in what is now called the ‘Livestock Revolution’.

Here is a map of poultry across the US in 1929. Each dot represents 50,000 chickens and we see wide dispersion across the country—300 million poultry total at an average flock size of only 70 chickens. In other words, poultry was largely a backyard operation.

That changed after WWII and companies like Tyson, Holly Farms, and Perdue vertically integrated the broiler filiere, buying up other local producers and putting all nodes of production under one company’s roof. By 1992 poultry production is concentrated in a few states, but each dot now represents 1 million broilers, 6 billion in total, with an average flock size of 30,000 birds.

By the 1970s this production model was already so successful that it was producing more poultry than people typically ate. How many roasted chickens were families prepared to eat a week? You can only take your patriotic duty so far. Food science and marketing came to the rescue and repackaged chicken in a mind-boggling array of new products, including chicken nuggets, strips of chicken for salads, cat food, and so on. A market developed large enough to absorb the production.

The poultry market also spread geographically. In the 1970s the vertical model was exported to Asia and companies such as Charoen Pokphand set up vertical filieres in Thailand and, soon after, elsewhere in Asia. We see an explosion in the number of chickens produced in China from the 1980s on. Industrial poultry’s rise in China went hand-in-hand with the country’s economic liberalization.

The result worldwide? The globe is circled by cities of poultry and more recently by cities of pig: largely concentrated in China, the U.S. and Western Europe, but expanding elsewhere.

What are the effects of a globalized livestock on influenza’s evolution?

• First, more confined livestock, more infections and greater standing diversity.
• Within any one country the region hosting farms for one type of livestock often hosts other types too, permitting greater reassortment of influenza’s genomic segments across species.
• In geographically expanding, intensive agriculture destroys wetlands on which many waterfowl typically stop during migration. These birds aren’t stupid. With wetlands destroyed, they now go to where the food is—and that’s the very farms that helped destroy their wetlands, increasing reassortment of influenzas across waterfowl and livestock.
• Finally, for now, livestock are increasingly shipped and traded across greater geographic extents, increasing the likelihood previously isolated influenza serotypes can trade genomic segments. That’s exactly what happened with this year’s swine flu H1N1. It collected together genetic segments from influenzas previously circulating among Eurasian and North American pigs.

The resulting increase in genetic diversity acts as the fuel for natural selection, including selection for greater transmissibility in humans and greater virulence.

But there appears a problem with our argument.

What About 1918?

If postwar confined animal feedlot operations are to blame, how do you explain the 1918 pandemic, which killed 50-100 million people worldwide? The implication is that because no such industry existed in 1918, livestock intensification need not be to blame for the recent emergence of new influenzas. Something else must explain the recurrence.

But there is an error in reasoning here. The 1918 comparison is an attempt to impose an algorithm upon contingent history, which resists such easy abstraction. Yes, natural selection is on its face an algorithm–propose, dispose, repeat–but the concrete–or rather fleshy–results are dependent on an era-specific mash of previous adaptations and passing ecological circumstances.

In other words, history matters. And pathogens—like humans—have histories. They have their origins, their diasporic migration, their classical eras, Dark Ages, and Industrial Revolutions. And as human pathogens evolve and spread in a world of our own making, these eras often coincide with our own.

For instance, for most of its history the cholera bacterium made its living eating plankton in the Ganges delta. Only once humanity became urbanized and, later, interwoven together by 19th century transport was cholera able to make its way to the world’s cities. The bacterium was able to transform from a marginal bug into a roaring success when municipalities began drawing drinking water from the same place they dumped their shit.

Other pathogens have engaged in similar shifts in epidemiological practice.

Simian immunodeficiency viruses of various stripes infecting monkeys, chimps and other non-human primates likely emerged from sub-Saharan forests when logging broadened the wildlife-human interface. It appears HIV, one of the SIVs, evolved when logging expanded the market for butchered bushmeat. Logging roads also better integrated the deepest forest with regional cities. The virus was thereby able to cross into humans and make its way out onto the global travel network.

So as for influenza. For eons the virus feasted on waterfowl populations that summered on the Arctic Circle. Influenza expanded into humans once we became farmers and our population densities and connections grew enough to support such an acute infection. But since WWII, influenza, as we described, has entered a new phase—its Industrial Revolution: billions of livestock monoculture pressed up against each other, an effort to which we are employed as a major contractor.

So even as livestock feedlots don’t explain 1918, it doesn’t mean they’re not responsible for our current batch of influenzas. That’d be like arguing oil isn’t a cause for war today because the Romans never fought for it. We acknowledge our own historical trajectories. We should be able to acknowledge those of our pathogens as well.

What I Want to Know About

So that’s something of what I think I know. I would like to learn a lot more. For instance,

• When and how did influenza originate in waterfowl?
• Is it possible to recover ancient influenza genomes from ice cores?
• How does an area’s agro-ecological resilience amplify or block the spread of influenza?
• And finally, how exactly does influenza use agribusiness to its advantage? And what can we do about it?

I’d be curious as to some of your own thoughts about this last question. Let me give you the example that prompted it.

In 2007 the University of Minnesota won a $22.5 million grant from the federal government to study influenza. The University’s partners include a variety of well-respected institutions, among them the Wildlife Conservation Society, the National Wildlife Health Center, the Southeastern Wildlife Disease Study, and the Minnesota Department of Health.

The consortium, however, also includes Cargill, the agribusiness giant, the largest privately owned company in the United States, with $120 billion in revenues in 2008, and poultry and swine operations worldwide. It’s hard to believe that the University’s consortium will ever be willing to address the question whether confined feedlots select for the most virulent influenza strains.

What does one do about that? What does one do about efforts aimed at discovering solutions to the new influenzas backed by those who helped bring about the problem in the first place?

Although most cases of swine-origin H1N1 influenza have been ‘mild’, half of those hospitalized with severe illness have none of the pre-existing conditions that might complicate an influenza infection: asthma, heart disease, hepatitis, immunosuppresion, pregnancy, among others.

A new study explains why. Itoh et al. demonstrate swine-origin H1N1, now pandemic, to be intrinsically more virulent than previously assumed. Indeed, the infection expresses characteristics of some of the more deadly influenzas, including highly pathogenic H5N1, the bird flu virus.

Itoh and colleagues tracked the pathogenesis of the new H1N1 infection. They conducted experiments on mice, ferrets, pigs and macaques, comparing the effects of swine-origin H1N1 and recent strains of seasonal H1N1. The team discovered,

• Mice suffered greater mortality from swine-origin H1N1 than seasonal H1N1. The dose required to kill 50% of the mice exposed was a power of magnitude less for swine-origin H1N1 than its seasonal counterparts.
• Swine-origin H1N1 replicated more efficiently in the mice’s lungs, causing bronchitis and alveolitis, with viral antigen openly present. It also elicited greater production of host cytokines that have been previously associated with greater morbidity and mortality in other influenza infections.
• Macaques infected with swine-origin H1N1 underwent greater increases in temperature than those infected with seasonal H1N1. Swine-origin H1N1-infected macaques also suffered a greater tissue range infected and more severe lung pathogenesis. Their lungs hosted inflammatory infiltrates, exudates clogging the alveolar sacs, severe thickening of the alveolar walls, and pneumocytes of types 1 and 2. Type 2 pneumocytes have also been reported in infections of highly pathogenic H5N1.
• Ferrets—a good small-animal model of human influenza infection—showed no difference in changes in temperature and body weight. However, swine-origin H1N1 replicated to greater concentrations in the trachea and lungs. Ferrets infected with swine-origin H1N1 also expressed greater bronchopneumonia and viral antigen.
• Virulence alone isn’t our sole concern. It’s virulence and transmissibility in tandem that’s keeping scientists up at night. The new H1N1’s pandemicity shows the virus by definition transmissible. But for experimental completeness, Itoh et al. ran exposure tests on ferrets. The animals were infected at the same rates when exposed to swine-origin H1N1 as when exposed to seasonal strains of H1N1.
• The experiments also spoke to the difficulties in identifying the geographic origins of the virus. Miniature pigs infected with swine-origin H1N1 suffered no clinical symptoms even as the virus replicated in the pigs’ respiratory organs. The asymptomatic infection may offer another explanation for the dearth of reportable outbreaks in possible source swine populations in Mexico or elsewhere.

Finally, Itoh et al. exposed the new H1N1 to influenza antibodies circulating in humans of different age groups. Does exposure to previous H1N1 strains, back to the 1918-1919 pandemic, protect humans from the worst of the new influenza? Only patients born before 1920 expressed the antibodies that could neutralize swine-origin H1N1. The new H1N1 appears to be expressing epitopes similar to those of the 1918 H1N1, epitopes to which very few of us have the antibodies needed to neutralize.

This last result raises two important points. First, seasonal H1N1 influenzas may be in fundamental ways different from their 1918 ancestors. For those more technically inclined, the level of polymerase CpG may be one explanation. Second, swine-origin H1N1 may have been able to revisit molecular solutions from a pandemic 90 years ago now that a large enough cohort of naïve humans has emerged. Although influenzas–with life cycles of only a few days–evolve from infection to infection, the constraints on influenza evolution may extend back a hundred years. In influenza time that’s the equivalent of a geological eon.

So, yes, swine-origin H1N1 2009, as transmissible as any human influenza, is worse than seasonal H1N1. Indeed, as WHO reports, in some patients it may be as bad as highly pathogenic H5N1, the bird flu virus that has killed over 60% of those reported infected. And very few of us—except those infected before 1920 and since April—have the antibodies needed to neutralize it.

Here’s hoping this autumn’s flu season, when many more are expected to be infected, doesn’t include a worsening virulence, as occurred in 1918. With a phenotype from a bygone era, H1N1 may be evolving into the viral Tyrannosaurus it once was.