The story of evolution-18: Missing links

About ten years ago, a group of engineering students came into my office. They were taking part in a scavenger hunt during Engineers Week and the one item that was very hard for them to find was a ‘slide rule’. They had little idea of what it was and no idea how it worked or what one even looked like but they knew it was old technology and they figured that I was old enough to possibly own one.

They were partly right. I had once owned a slide rule as a physics undergraduate in Sri Lanka but unfortunately did not have mine anymore.

For those not familiar with slide rules, the standard type looks like a ruler with another sliding ruler attached, and you use it to do complicated calculations. It was the precursor to the handheld calculator but with the arrival of cheap electronic versions of the latter, the slide rule went extinct. I actually owned a more unusual type of slide rule that was cylindrical rather than linear and was like a collapsible telescope. It had the advantage that it was small enough to carry around in your pocket, and being able to whip out a slide rule when the occasion demanded defined the nerds of that time.
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US military bases abroad: A case study of Vicenza, Italy

In an earlier post, I highlighted Chalmers Johnson’s article that described the US global military empire that is sustained by a vast network of bases around the world, more than most Americans perhaps realize. The huge bases being currently constructed in Iraq should be viewed as the extension of this plan and creating such bases could well have been the driving force behind the decision to invade Iraq. This becomes more plausible since the various ‘official’ justifications (weapons of mass destruction, war on terror, spreading democracy) have been shown to be untenable.

Periodically, one hears of rumblings of discontent among the local population living near these US bases and demands for their removal. When this happens in countries whose governments are friendly with the US, such as in Europe, the reaction here is often one of indignation at those ungrateful people who are biting the hand that protects them.

A fascinating and detailed case study of one particular American military base is that in the town of Vincenza, Italy where in February 2007 somewhere between 70,000 and 150,000 people demonstrated against the expansion and extension of the US base in their city. The kinds of problems such bases create and the hostility they generate can be found in this article (and which has been highlighted here) by Paul Iversen, a professor of classics at Case Western Reserve University, who happens to have family connections in that town that take him there regularly.

Iversen emphasizes the deep and long-standing connections between Vincenza, a “world renowned city of art and architecture,” that influenced US government buildings through the fact that its native son architect Andrea Palladia’s work was the inspiration for many US government buildings including the Capitol dome, the White House, and Monticello. Perhaps because of these connections “Vicenza is thought by many Italians to be the most pro-American of Italian cities” and hence bitter protests over the US plans to expand its military base there cannot be dismissed as reflexive anti-Americanism.

Iversen says the extent of the public opposition was quite severe:

As for public opinion, local polls showed that 61% of the residents were against it, while a whopping 85% were in favor of settling the matter through a popular referendum. The City Council, surrounded by “unprecedented security”, had 20 representatives speak for the “yeas” and 20 speak for the “nays”, and then they voted first to reject the idea of a referendum and then to approve the expansion. The final tally for the project-vote was strictly along party lines, with 21 “yeas” (right coalition), 17 “nays” (left coalition), 2 abstentions, and 1 missing in action. The vote to reject holding a referendum was even closer, winning by only a margin of 1. After the vote, the previous mayor of Vicenza for 15 years, Achille Variati, is reported in the local paper to have said about the council’s decisions, “No, they cannot decide the future of Vicenza themselves. I will work to bring about the referendum.”

The main problem was that the plans for expansion did not take into account the already existing problems of congestion and pollution in the town and would actually aggravate them.

They would also inherit a new US air base that is a mere 25-minute leisurely walk from the Basilica Palladiana, which sits in the heart of the city.
. . .
Expanding the airport here, then, would be far worse than building a major military airbase one and half miles from the most historic piece of real estate in the US. As such it represents a serious callousness on the part of the US to local conditions and thus to justice itself.

As is usually the case, discussions over the decision to expand the US base is being done without consultation with the local populace or taking its interests into account, and involved heavy-handed arm-twisting by the US.

There was, however, one major problem with the discussions and agreement – the governments of Berlusconi, [center-right mayor] Hüllweck and the US had done all of the negotiating behind closed doors, thus keeping the people of Vicenza, including members of the city council, completely in the dark about it.
. . .
In fact, several months later Prodi’s Foreign Minister, Massimo D’Alema, would say that “Revoking the authorization would have been a hostile act on our part against the United States.” This clearly demonstrates that the US government was leaning hard on Prodi’s government and telling them that if they did not allow the base expansion, the US government would put Italy on a list of uncooperative or even “hostile” countries. This “all or nothing” approach to the relationship by the US, which amounts to extortion, is hardly what one would expect of a just and fair ally.

Iversen points out that such bases, contrary to conventional wisdom, are not an unmitigated economic boon to the local area.

Most Americans might be surprised to learn that Italian tax payers actually cover a significant share of American bases on their soil (this is called Host-Nation Support [pdf], see also here). While the exact stipulations of who pays what for each specific project are mostly kept hidden per the stipulations of the post-WWII treaty, in Italy it is widely believed that Italian tax-payers are required to pick up just over 40% of the tab, in addition to the large sums for the enormous amounts of water and electricity. This doesn’t cover time of war, when America often asks Host Nations to kick in even more ad hoc support, so a new base may also entangle Italy in paying greater costs for future conflicts. Any suggestion, therefore that somehow the Italians or the other nations where we have bases are “freeloaders” is terribly misguided. They help pay for a significant chunk of our bases on their soil. In addition, few Vicentini think that America’s help during WWII, as much as it is appreciated, obliges them to build yet another base in their overcrowded and beautiful back yard. Most are tired of America always expecting another pay back and treating them as their eternal client state.

And always in the background is the fact that the disastrous Iraq war and other actions by the US has squandered any goodwill on the part of people around the world towards US government policies. Iversen continues:

There is no doubt that in Italy and most of the world there is a widespread and growing conviction that Bush’s America is no longer the same America that reluctantly fought to end a horrific war sixty years ago; rather, she is going out of her way to pick unnecessary fights, thus displaying obvious signs of fascist, militaristic and imperial behavior herself – things the Italians have quite a bit of experience with, can easily recognize, and for which they now have a term that recalls the Fascismo of yester-year: Bushismo. It also hasn’t helped that the Bush administration has thumbed its nose at the UN, IAEA, the Kyoto Protocols, the Geneva Conventions, Habeas Corpus, and is responsible for Abu Gharib, Guantanamo, the recent probable involvement of CIA agents in an illegal case of extraordinary rendition in Milan, and that the US military cleared of all wrongdoing the American soldiers who in Iraq killed an Italian Secret Service agent named Nicola Calipari while he was rescuing an Italian journalist. Naturally the Italian public would prefer the US to change its policies and behavior, but if the US doesn’t, even traditionally pro-American cities like Vicenza would rather risk future Vandals, Visigoths and Huns rather than be complicit enablers of US imperial hubris by hosting another American base.

Iversen has written a wonderful article. You should read the full thing.

POST SCRIPT: Hubris

It is great fun talking to classics scholars. They are a font of interesting information about the ancient origins of words and ideas, and Iversen’s article had an interesting digression on the origins of the word ‘hubris.’

The noun hybris is derived from the Greek preposition hyper meaning “above” (which is cognate with the Latin preposition super from which is derived the Latin noun superbia). Hubris to the ancient Greek, however, was not just a matter of “pride”, as the word is usually poorly translated in English. Hubris was the condition of having a haughtiness so high that it led to a feeling of impunity, which in turn led to a wanton act of violence. That is why the Athenians prosecuted crimes such as rape under the rubric of hybris. For the Greeks, then, the pride of hubris was one that produced a wanton act of violence that caused great ruin, even death (which is why hubris was later listed amongst the Seven Deadly Sins). That death, however, was not limited to the victim, as any one who has read Greek literature can tell you, but the ruin of hubris eventually doubled back upon the perpetrator’s own head.

While many people have used the word hubris to describe the Bush administration, Iversen’s clarification of its full meaning makes that description even more apt.

The story of evolution-17: How species diverge

When my daughter was quite young, about five or so, the question of where people came from came up in a mealtime conversation. Naturally we told her that human beings had evolved from ancestors who were monkey-like and then became human-like. She sat there for a while silently digesting this interesting bit of new information and mulling it over in her mind. It seemed clear that she was not at all disgusted or even bothered by the thought that we were related to the monkey family. That kind of revulsion seems to be something that has to be acquired, often nurtured by religions.

But something was bothering her and she finally articulated it, asking “But when that happened, wouldn’t the mother monkey notice that her child looked different?”

She had hit upon an issue that many skeptics of evolution raise. They argue that there is a contradiction if we assume that we had evolved from an ancestor species that was so different from us that we could not interbreed with that species. Surely, the argument goes, doesn’t evolution imply that if species A slowly evolves into species B, then there must be a time when the parent is of species A while the child is of species B? Isn’t it a ridiculous notion for parent and child to belong to different species?
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The dangerous consequences of a militarized foreign policy

Chalmers Johnson is a former CIA consultant and a professor of Asian studies at Berkeley, and was an avowed cold-war warrior during the Vietnam war era. He has written a very interesting article titled Evil Empire: Is Imperial Liquidation Possible for America? He points out the Iraq war as an unmitigated disaster on many levels and the failure of the media as culpable.

The people of the United States became mere spectators as an array of ideological extremists, vested interests, and foreign operatives — including domestic neoconservatives, Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi exiles, the Israeli Lobby, the petroleum and automobile industries, warmongers and profiteers allied with the military-industrial complex, and the entrenched interests of the professional military establishment — essentially hijacked the government.
. . .
One subject that the government, the military, and the news media try to avoid like the plague is the racist and murderous culture of rank-and-file American troops when operating abroad. Partly as a result of the background racism that is embedded in many Americans’ mental make-up and the propaganda of American imperialism that is drummed into recruits during military training, they do not see assaults on unarmed “rag heads” or “hajis” as murder. . . Some militarists will reply that such inhumanity to the defenseless is always inculcated into the properly trained soldier.
. . .
Imperialism and militarism have thus begun to imperil both the financial and social well-being of our republic. What the country desperately needs is a popular movement to rebuild the Constitutional system and subject the government once again to the discipline of checks and balances. Neither the replacement of one political party by the other, nor protectionist economic policies aimed at rescuing what’s left of our manufacturing economy will correct what has gone wrong. Both of these solutions fail to address the root cause of our national decline.

I believe that there is only one solution to the crisis we face. The American people must make the decision to dismantle both the empire that has been created in their name and the huge (still growing) military establishment that undergirds it.

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The story of evolution-16: The evolution of the eye

The eye is one organ almost invariably brought out by creationists to argue against evolution. How could something so complex have possibly evolved incrementally, they ask?

Darwin himself suggested the way that the eye could come into being. Due to the fact that eyes don’t fossilize and thus leave a permanent record, it is hard to trace back in time and see the various stages in the evolution of the eye as linear developments. So he looked instead at the eyes of currently existing different organisms at intermediate stages of development, and concluded (On the Origin of Species, 1859, p. 188):

With these facts, here, far too briefly and imperfectly given, which show that there is much graduated diversity in the eyes of living crustaceans, and bearing in mind how small the number of living animals is in proportion to those which have become extinct, I can see no very great difficulty (not more than that in the case of many other creatures) in believing that natural selection has converted the simple apparatus of an optic nerve merely coated with pigment and invested with transparent membrane, into an optical instrument as perfect as is possessed by any member of the great Articulate class.

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The story of evolution-15: How species evolve

The final feature that needs to be addressed is the probability of mutations cumulating to produce new organs and species.

This question lies at the heart of many people’s objections to evolutionary ideas. They cannot envisage how infinitesimal changes, each invisible to the eye, can add up to major changes. That is because they tend to think that the two foundations for this to occur (the occurrence of successful mutations and the mutations then spreading throughout the population) are both highly unlikely, and so that the chance of a whole sequence of such processes occurring must be infinitesimally small.
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Single payer health universal insurance coming to Ohio?

(For previous posts on the topic of health care, see here.)

Efforts are underway to try get a universal, single payer health care system in Ohio. The group behind it is the Single-Payer Action Network Ohio (SPAN Ohio), which is supporting legislation instituting such a plan. Their website provides more information about their initiatives and meetings.

The Health Care for All Ohioans Act has been introduced in the Ohio House (H. B. 186) and the Senate (S. B. 168).

The main points of the legislation can be seen here but here are the highlights:

  • Patients get free choice of health care providers and hospitals.
  • When you go to your own personal physician for visits, there are NO premiums, NO co-payments, NO deductibles, NO one excluded. You pay nothing.
  • When you get your prescription filled by your pharmacist, there are NO premiums, NO co-payments, NO deductibles, NO one excluded. You pay nothing.
  • If you need hospitalization, there are NO premiums, NO co-payments, NO deductibles, NO one excluded. You pay nothing.

In each case, the health care provider is reimbursed from the Ohio Health Care Fund.

So how does the Ohio Health Care Fund get its money? Under the proposed plan, people who earn less than the Social Security tax cap (currently $97,500 per year) pay no additional taxes. The money to fund the system comes from a variety of sources: up to 3.85% payroll tax paid by employers; up to 3% gross receipts tax paid by businesses; 6.2% tax on individual compensation in excess of the Social Security tax cap; 5% surtax on adjusted gross income over $200,000; funds from other government sources. Remember that currently employers that provide private health insurance have to pay for it. That money can now be directed to the Ohio Health Care Fund instead.

An Ohio health care agency runs the program and its governing board consists of the state director of health and fourteen other members, two from each of the seven regions that make up the state. The two members are elected for two-year terms by a regional health advisory committee, which in turn is elected by a meeting convened of the county and city health commissioners of each region.

Since there are many misconceptions (often deliberately perpetrated by the health care industry and its allies in the media) about what a single payer system involves, here is a handy document that compares the myths with the realities.

One of the big distortions that will be perpetrated by the health insurance and drug industries and politicians is to treat ‘universal’ and ‘single-payer’ as if they are synonymous terms. They are not and people should be vigilant when that sleight-of-hand is attempted. ‘Universal’ refers to the fact that every person should be covered, with no exceptions. ‘Single payer’ refers to the mechanism by which the health care system is financed and health care providers reimbursed.

It is not difficult to provide ‘universal’ private health insurance coverage, if that coverage is bad. All one needs to do to achieve that is to compel everyone to purchase some kind of health insurance, like the way people are compelled to buy auto insurance in order to drive, and some states have gone that route. But all that achieves is people or their employers being forced to purchase high-deductible, low-treatment coverage. Such policies will not result in better and more accessible treatment for more people or reduce the frustrating bureaucracy that we all encounter now. In fact, it will be a profit windfall for the private insurance companies as they get even more people into their nets. Such ‘universal’ programs would not be an improvement on the current system, though it will be touted as such by the health-care industry and their apologists.

‘Single-payer’ means something different, that there should be just one single entity, preferably run by the government or at the very least a non-profit publicly accountable board, that collects the money and spends it on the health care system. The single payer plan calls for the complete elimination of profit-driven private health insurance companies from the health care system, and has to be an essential component of any meaningful health care reform. As Sicko pointed out, the introduction of profit-making bodies between the patient and the doctor is the single feature that has resulted in the health care system in the US being so inferior to its peer countries.

Candidates should not be able to evade the issue by saying they support universal health-care. The question that should be asked is whether they support single-payer universal health care. Of all the presidential candidates in both parties, only Dennis Kucinich is calling for such a universal single-payer system, although many of the other Democratic candidates have signed onto the vague ‘universal’ health care part.

A petition has also been started by SPAN Ohio to gather signatures to put the legislation onto the statewide ballot. This petition contains the officially approved summary of what the legislation contains, as well as the full text of the bill. It is a parallel track strategy to the bills in the state legislature to get the same results.

I am collecting petition signatures so if anyone wants to sign it, or collect signatures as well, please contact me or SPAN Ohio. My petition form is limited to those who reside in Cuyahoga County.

The Cleveland branch of SPAN Ohio meets at 7:00pm on the first Monday of each month at the ACLU building, 4506 Chester Avenue. Other branch locations and meeting times can be found on their website.

POST SCRIPT: Handy guide to candidates

With so many people running for president, it is hard to compare their stands on the various issues. One enterprising website has done us all a favor by preparing a table that gives capsule summaries of their views. Of course, you will need to look elsewhere for more details and nuances.

The story of evolution-14: How a single mutation spreads everywhere

In the previous post, we saw that if we start with a trait that is present in just 0.1% of the population (i.e., f=0.001), and if this has a small selection advantage of size s=0.01, this will grow to 99.9% (F=0.999) in just under 1,400 generations, which is a very short time on the geological scale.

But in a population of one million, an initial fraction of f=0.001 means that we are starting with about 1000 organisms having the favorable mutation. But it could be argued that new mutations usually start with just a single new kind of organism being produced in one single organism. How does that affect the calculation?

Suppose that you have a population of organisms of size N and they all start out having the same gene at a particular position (called the ‘locus’) on one of the chromosomes that make up the DNA. Now suppose a random mutation occurs in just one organism, the way that it was described in an earlier post in this series describing the shift from violet to UV sensitive sight in some birds. Most of the time, even a favorable mutation will disappear because of random chance because (say) that mutated organism died before it produced any offspring or it did produce a few and that particular gene was not inherited. But on occasion that mutation will spread. How likely is it that such a single mutation will spread to every single organism (i.e., become ‘fixed’ in the population)?
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CNN, Michael Moore, Sicko, and fact-checking as propaganda tool

(For previous posts on the topic of health care, see here.)

All Michael Moore’s films deal with very serious topics in ways that are both informative and entertaining. His films have dealt with corporate greed, violence in society, the Iraq war, and now the health industry. Along with Robert Greenwald’s Brave New Films, he provides a perspective and viewpoint that is almost completely absent from the mainstream media.
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The story of evolution-13: Differential rates of survival

Of the three stages of natural selection outlined before, the only one that occurs purely by chance is the first one, that of the occurrence of mutations. I discussed how although the chances of producing a favorable mutation by changes in any individual site in the DNA (called ‘point mutations’) on an individual member of the species is very small, when the number of individuals in a species and the long times available for the changes to occur are factored into the calculation, the result is that such mutations are not only likely, they are almost inevitable to occur and furthermore are likely to occur many times.
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