A reminder for commenters in difficult threads

We’ve just had a difficult comment thread revive itself both on the original post of mine and in the Thunderdome, and a commenter central to both threads said something that I thought deserved pointing up.

Note: I don’t do so to make that commenter feel bad: for the purpose of this thread, I’d like to keep personality off the table as much as possible. My intent here is more to note and discuss a common dynamic rather than spawn a new subthread on that specific topic. That central commenter said:

I think my reputation at Pharyngula was completely shot early on in [that] thread. That is one of the reasons I kept going—I was pretty sure that if I didn’t clarify that I’m not all that bad, right then, it would always be too late.

Once we take this out of the context of the argument in which it happened, I think we can all identify with the feeling expressed. Sadly, it’s almost never a helpful impulse.

Reading that passage reminded me that it’s been some time since I’ve seen one of the essays I found most helpful in my own ability to hear criticism. It’s aimed at discussions of racism, but change a few nouns and a few adjectives and it can be applied to almost any argument among people with differing levels of privilege.

It’s by the blogger/cartoonist Ampersand, and it’s entitled How Not To Be A Doofus When Accused Of Racism (A Guide For White People). Many of you will have seen it already (perhaps under a different title), and for others it will be 101-level stuff. But every so often when a useful essay is buried under eight years of Internet it’s a good idea to dust it off and remind people it’s there.

Of special relevance for me are these two points:

Breathe. Stay calm. Stay civil. Don’t burn bridges. If someone has just said “I think that sounds a bit racist,” don’t mistake it for them saying “you’re Klu Klux Klan racist scum” (which is a mistake an amazing number of white people make). For the first ten or twenty seconds any response you make will probably come from your defensiveness, not from your brain, so probably you shouldn’t say whatever first comes to your mind.

and

Don’t make it about you. Usually the thing to do is apologize for what you said and move on. Especially if you’re in a meeting or something, resist your desire to turn the meeting into a seminar on How Against Racism You Are. The subject of the conversation is probably not “your many close Black friends, and your sincere longstanding and deep abhorrence of racism.”

Like I said, even for those of us for which this is old hat, a reminder from time to time can’t hurt.

Finally! My own personal time machine!

I’ve been playing with it for a while. It turns out that when you go back to Cretaceous Morris, you need to be able to swim really well, but Cambrian Morris is high and dry on a fairly small landmass (whoa, but oxygen is way down and carbon dioxide way up). You can have your own time machine, too — it’s the EarthViewer app for iPad, and it’s free from HHMI Here’s what it has:

• Data and continental reconstructions dating back billions of years

• Climate and carbon dioxide data for the last 100 years

• The ability to manipulate the globe and zoom to any location

• Track the location of modern cities back over 500 million years

• In depth features on major geological and biological events in Earth history

• Clickable details on geologic eons, eras, and periods

• Automated play modes

• An extensive reference list

• Suggestions for classroom use

• Tutorial videos

Did I mention that it’s free? This HHMI thing is pretty danged sweet.

Hey, there’s a virtual book floating on the verge of existence here

cover

I have good news and bad news.

The excellent news: I have received the copy-edited manuscript of my book-to-be, The Happy Atheist, from Pantheon. After many delays, it’s finally going to happen for sure! Go pre-order your copy now! Buy buy buy buy buy!

The heart-attack-inducing but not at all unexpected news: I’m supposed to review this manuscript and make any corrections and changes (and I’m on a firm deadline, so have no fear, this will not cause any further delays), and when I opened it up, it was a wall of purple editor’s marks — just page after page of nits picked and wording/grammatical errors hacked into submission. Editors are truly scary people, but I know they have an essential role in the ecosystem — I think they’re kind of like a top predator, poised to cull the herd and feast on the flesh of the weak.

Anyway, I can tell what I’ll be doing this week. Licking wounds. But it’s good for me!

Mother’s Curse

It’s a harsh world for us men. Oh, sure, we’ve got all the political and economic power, and we’ve got most of the guns, but step into a senior citizens’ center and you’ll notice the preponderance of elderly women. Men die younger, on average. I’m also acutely aware of the growing disparity as we get older: my wife seems to be aging at about half the rate I do. If you’ve been watching House of Cards on Netflix, you may have noticed that the character played by Kevin Spacey, face a bit puffy and deeply lined, is married to a character played by Robin Wright (Princess Buttercup!) who is looking fabulous: mature, a bit severe, but still looking great. This situation is not unusual.

This is not fair. The average life expectancy of women in the US is 80 years, while men live to be about 75.

Why?

It’s not sufficient to say it just is that way; we have to dig deeper and figure out the differences. Part of the answer is that human males have a youthful history of riskier behavior than females, but again we have to ask why: what is driving men to do stupid stunts that lead to higher rates of mortality? But even if we have a good answer for that one, it doesn’t address that other problem, the accelerated rates of male senescence. I’ve survived my heightened risk of death by misadventure, so why am I getting increasingly decrepit while women my age are looking more fit and healthy?

Part of the answer may be in your genes, your mitochondria, and evolution. Mitochondria play an extremely important set of roles in aging. They hold the keys to cell death and responses to cancer; most apoptotic responses are triggered by the release of signals from the mitochondria. Mitochondria are the agents that produce energy for the cell, and also produce reactive oxygen species in their normal operation. You may be hearing the hype about anti-oxidants, and are diligently taking cofactors and vitamin pills to reduce, hypothetically, the deleterious effects of these avidly destructive molecules, but the primary source of those oxidants is by the activity of mitochondria. There are overt hereditary diseases of mitochondria, like LHON and MELAS which reveal the importance of mitochondria in normal metabolism, but there are also other diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s that have a mitochondrial component that plays a role in the severity of the effects. And aging is a disease that is also associated with mitochondrial function.

But wait, you’re thinking, mitochondria are equally important in men and women, so how can they account for a difference between the sexes?

Keep in mind that mitochondria are not magically autonomous. They contain about 35 genes essential for metabolism, and use about a thousand more that come from the nuclear genome, so there’s a significant amount of information shuttling back and forth between the nucleus and the mitochondrion. There are also epigenetic influences: mitochondrial states are known to modulate states of DNA methylation in the nucleus. And obviously, there are subtle differences in between the nuclear genomes of men and women, and probably even greater epigenetic differences between the two. So here we have two complex genetic units, the nucleus and the mitochondria, interacting with one another, and in a perfect world they’d be beautifully fine-tuned and singing in harmony with one another…but at the same time we have sex differences in the nuclear genetics, which complicates the problem of matching the two.

And this is where evolution steps in. There’s a genetic problem here.

The inheritance of mitochondria is asymmetric: you only get them from your mother, and your father makes no mitochondrial contribution at all. Your father’s mitochondrial contribution dies with him and is not passed on. What does that mean? It means that there can be no selection to fine tune mitochondria to the male nuclear genome. As a recent paper by Wolff and Gemmell explains:

The asymmetry in mtDNA inheritance, however, becomes problematic in the case of traits that affect exclusively males and shared traits that, if compromised, have a disproportionally greater effect on males than females. In this instance mutations that harm males but leave females unaffected will escape purifying selection and lead to the accumulation of a mutational load in the mitochondrial genome detrimental to male-specific traits; a scenario described as mother’s curse. Male reproductive traits have long been in the limelight as ideal candidates to fall victim to this mechanism. Compelling support for such male specific reproductive effects comes from a recent study. Using a fly model, Innocenti et al. expressed five different naturally occurring mtDNA variants alongside a standardized nuclear genome and profiled the resulting gene expression within these mitolines. A pronounced asymmetry in nuclear gene expression profiles was observed between males and females with the majority of affected transcripts being overexpressed only in males and highly over-represented in male reproductive tissues. Overall, this study suggests that naturally occurring mtDNA variability exerts a much stronger effect on male fitness than it does on female fitness, strongly supporting the concept of mother’s curse. This finding is well in line with a range of studies that identified either mtDNA variants or specific mito-nuclear lineages as associated with male reproductive impairment across a variety of taxa.

The name “mother’s curse” is a bit unfair. It’s not just the maternal contribution that affects us males, but the fact that our nuclear genomes (which are derived from both our mother and father) may be subtly out of synch with our mitochondrial genomes (which are derived exclusively from our mother). Don’t blame your mom for your wrinkles and grey hair, guys — you should still call her on Mother’s Day.

Two other points to make: 1) this phenomenon of greater male senescence is universal, and seems to be found all across multicellular phyla. Apparently, earlier death is something that actually is a guy thing. 2) While there aren’t opportunities to directly select for greater compatibility between mitochondria and nuclei in males, don’t count inclusive fitness out. Male mortality can obviously effect female survival, so you can have indirect effects that promote better male survival.

It suggests that males are not only subject to heightened risks of disease and infertility, but implies that across almost all eukaryotic life they will have shorter lives simply as a consequence of the maternal inheritance of the mitochondrial genome. The diminutive mtDNA plays David to the nuclear Goliath because of the inability of selection to eliminate mutations harmful to males, but neutral or beneficial to females, under most scenarios. Recent theoretical work suggests that, under scenarios in which there are high levels of positive-assortative mating and strong inclusive fitness, the indirect costs to females may be great enough to enable selection to remove mtDNA types deleterious to males but not females. However, on the whole there is little opportunity for deleterious mtDNA mutations to be selectively eliminated from populations, unless they have direct fitness costs to females.

Hmmm. I should probably do things that make sure my health and fitness are correlated with my female partner’s health and fitness, so that my mitochondrial-nuclear matching is relevant to the survival of my offspring. Yeah, that’s the ticket. I should start consciously thinking that way.

Wolff JN, Gemmell NJ (2013) Mitochondria, maternal inheritance, and asymmetric fitness: Why males die younger. Bioessay 35(2):93-9. doi: 10.1002/bies.201200141.

Nevada seems to have more than its share of idiots

Finally my lifelong lack of a college degree pays off! As it turns out,  college degrees are bad for living things. At least that’s according to sterling citizen Cliff Gardner of Ruby Valley in Nevada, who said this to the New York Times:

“I’m sure most of the people being considered for [the state’s Department of Wildlife director] job graduated from a college. These people are the cause of the destruction of wildlife.”

[Read more…]

Godless goals, godless progress

Debbie Goddard has a most excellent post on Skepchick (she should write more!), declaring that the atheist movement should care about poverty.

Unless we address the classism and broaden the elitist culture of the atheist movement, the underprivileged students in the Philadelphia public school classrooms that I’m familiar with and in the South Los Angeles classrooms that Sikivu Hutchinson works in will continue to be marginalized and will never have access to the “enlightened” educational opportunities that the movement too often takes for granted.

Some would say it’s not the movement’s responsibility to address poverty and public education. I disagree. This is a movement; we want the world to be a better place than it is now. We want to reduce suffering and foster a just society. If we agree there’s no cosmic justice system and there’s no reward for suffering after we die, we need to effect change here, now, in this life, in this world, for as many people as we can reach. Education is key for change to occur.

You won’t be surprised to learn that I agree completely, and that education is an excellent priority for atheist communities to pursue. She cites the Black Skeptics article I mentioned earlier today, in which they are looking for donations for their First in the Family Humanist Scholarship. It’s a worthy cause, and I donated…you should too, if you can.

Every effort to improve human knowledge is a contribution to atheism, so anything you can do will help; teach a child, donate books to your local library, volunteer at your elementary school. It’s our cunning godless scheme to make the world a better place.

O’Reilly and the talking fetus opposition to abortion

Blowhard Bill has a bizarre argument against abortion. He’s speaking for the babies, he claims, and knows what the babies would say.

There comes a time when a human being has to either face evil or admit to allowing it. Abortion is legal in the United States, but it should not be celebrated or used as a political tool. Viable babies are human beings. If they could talk, they would tell Williams and other pro-choice zealots that their lives should not be marginalized by someone who thinks she’s the boss. That’s what the babies would say.

Gosh, well, my shoes were talking to me the other day, or they would have if they had voices, and they told me they’d really like to kick Bill O’Reilly’s ass. Aghast, I told them that violence was never the answer. Then my dining room table spoke up and said it agreed with me, but O’Reilly was still an odious human being. And then there was a regular cacophony as all of my furniture and appliances and even the cockroaches under the floorboards had to chime in and groan about that horrible creature, and then my television had the final say and wanted to refuse to every tune in to Fox News ever again, because it made her circuits itch. Then she told me that all the other televisions on our cable system were saying the same thing, and that we ought to abort “The O’Reilly Factor”.

That’s what they would have said, if they could talk, that is. And I think I’m the authority on what inanimate objects in my house would say.