The story of evolution-10: The debate over natural selection in Darwin’s own time

In Darwin’s own time, there was a three-way dispute concerning the theory of evolution. Strange as it may sound these days in the US where so many question whether evolution even occurs at all, the idea that evolution had occurred and new species were being created and old ones dying out was not such a major problem in the mid-to-late 19th century. Elite opinion of that time had been exposed to that idea and had accepted it even before Darwin because of all the fossil records that were being discovered all the time. Even Darwin’s own grandfather Erasmus Darwin, a freethinker, had around 1795 published a book Zoonomia that had floated the idea that species had evolved, but he used a Lamarckian model. What religious people mostly shied away from was the idea that human beings were also part of the evolutionary process and shared common ancestors with other species, a reluctance that still persists.
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The story of evolution-9: Early challenges to Darwin’s theory

In an earlier post in this series, I listed the three stages involved in natural selection, each of which seemed to have seemingly small probabilities. In the previous post, I showed how because of the large numbers of organisms and long time scales involved, the first item got converted into a very high probability event.

The next item in the list, the issue of how a mutation with a small advantage in the properties of an organism can end up with that property dominating the species, was both Darwin’s greatest challenge and his greatest triumph.

The triumph came from a crucial insight that Darwin had concerning the importance of varieties within species. Recall that Platonic ideas were dominant at that time, and that laid the emphasis on the idealized forms of things. So for example while a real triangle drawn on paper would contain imperfections, these were considered incidental, the drawing being a mere approximation to the idealized triangle that one could envision in some abstract space.
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How universal single-payer systems protect us against catastrophes

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

I think almost everyone across the political spectrum would concede the fact that the fifty million Americans currently without health insurance would definitely benefit from the adoption of a universal, government-run, single-payer health care system. The reason that it has not been adopted is that many of the remaining 250 million have been frightened into thinking that their medical coverage would decline from what they have now.
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The story of evolution-8: The sufficiency of the mutation rate

One of the challenges faced by Darwin was whether the rate at which mutations creating new favorable varieties would occur was sufficiently rapid for his purposes. Since during his time the laws of inheritance were not known and neither was the mathematics involved, advocates of natural selection had to assume that things would work out eventually.

In his excellent book The Making of the Fittest (2006), Sean B. Carroll demystifies the various numbers and calculations involved in natural selection using our current knowledge.

Recall from the previous post in this series that DNA is made up of a string of bases A, C, T, and G. New genetic information is created when there is a change in the DNA and the most basic (but not the only) way that this can occur is by mutations acting at the level of a single base site in the DNA, changing one of the bases A, C, T, and G to a different one.
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Time for ‘socialized’ medicine in the US?

(For previous posts on Sicko and the merits of a government-run, universal, single payer health care system, see here and here.)

Michael Moore’s excellent film Sicko has cinematically exposed the deep flaws of the US health system. His film scarcely touches on the awful plight of the 50 million people who have no insurance at all. That would have been bad enough but instead he sought to highlight the plight of those who do have health insurance and think they are secure, but discover to their horror that their insurance companies let them down in their moments of greatest need.

He emphasizes the fact that when you introduce profit-making entities in between the patient and the health care providers, you have guaranteed that attempts will be made to deny health care as much as possible. The insurance companies actually have employees whose task is to dig deep into your past to see if they can find anything, anything at all, that would enable them to invoke the fine print in their policies and deny coverage. Hence many people receive nasty shocks that they are not covered just as they are reeling from the discovery that they have a serious illness.

And this is why in the US you have a system in which the minority who are rich and powerful and influential have access to very good health care because they are in a position to create trouble for the insurance companies, while the vast majority are vulnerable to finding out that getting ill can mean ruin.

One of the curious things about the health care debate in the US is that the opponents of a government-run, single payer, universal health care system try to portray it as this mysterious, unknown, complicated, untried, massively bureaucratic, expensive system that one should not experiment with.

This is ridiculous. It is the system in the US that is mysterious, complicated, massively bureaucratic, and expensive. Government-run, universal, single payer systems are the norm in the developed world and in many countries of the third world. There are any number of working models that have been in existence for over half a century for which cost-benefit analyses exist and the operating structures are well known. It is the US, almost in isolation, that has a bizarre, labyrinthine, bureaucratic, and expensive system.

The basic concept of how single payer health care works is very easy to understand as this wonderful little animation illustrates. What is needed is to select the model that might adapt best to the US and modify it to meet our needs. The only difficulty to doing that would be to combat the vested interests of the health insurance and drug interests who will fight tooth and nail to keep making massive profits off the sickness of people.

Even magazines like BusinessWeek concede that the French system is superior to the US:

In fact, the French system is similar enough to the U.S. model that reforms based on France’s experience might work in America. The French can choose their doctors and see any specialist they want. Doctors in France, many of whom are self- employed, are free to prescribe any care they deem medically necessary. “The French approach suggests it is possible to solve the problem of financing universal coverage…[without] reorganizing the entire system,” says Victor G. Rodwin, professor of health policy and management at New York University.
. . .
France also demonstrates that you can deliver stellar results with this mix of public and private financing. In a recent World Health Organization health-care ranking, France came in first, while the U.S. scored 37th, slightly better than Cuba and one notch above Slovenia. France’s infant death rate is 3.9 per 1,000 live births, compared with 7 in the U.S., and average life expectancy is 79.4 years, two years more than in the U.S. The country has far more hospital beds and doctors per capita than America, and far lower rates of death from diabetes and heart disease. The difference in deaths from respiratory disease, an often preventable form of mortality, is particularly striking: 31.2 per 100,000 people in France, vs. 61.5 per 100,000 in the U.S.

There will still be some bureaucracy because it will be needed to do all the paperwork to run the health care system. But the point is that this bureaucracy is invisible to the patients. As far as the patient is concerned, you go to the doctor and you get treated. That’s it. You do not have to fill in any forms. The paperwork goes on behind the scenes between the government, the drug companies, hospitals, and the health professionals. Even for the doctors the paperwork is simplified because they are now dealing with just a single payer of their services and don’t have to keep track of multiple health insurance companies, each of which has different rules for what they can and cannot do. This is why the entire health system in Canada has fewer workers (scroll down) to serve its population of 27 million than Blue Cross requires to service less than one-tenth that population in New England alone.

But while the surface debate is about policy, the deeper debate is about a fundamental difference in philosophy

At one extreme, there are those who take the view that it is up to each one of us to look after our own interests and feel perfectly comfortable ignoring the needs of others. Such people take the point of view that each person is responsible for their health care. The ‘free market’ should operate and people should shop around for what works for them. If they do not have the means to do so, then that is their own fault or their own tough luck. They have failed to provide for themselves and cannot expect the rest of society to look after them, except for what private charities might provide.

At the other end (which is where I am) are those who feel that when it comes to basic issues like health care, it is the responsibility of every one to look after everyone else. Decent health care is not a commodity like toothpaste to be bought and sold on the market. It is a fundamental right that everyone (especially children and the elderly) is entitled to, irrespective of their ability to pay, and should be seen as a collective social obligation. Most such systems are based on spreading risk over a large number of people and because of that principle, while there are options for people to buy supplemental insurance on the private market, there cannot be an opt out provision, just as there is no opt out for police or fire systems or trash collection or libraries or parks or all the other similar collective systems that we currently have in place.

Those who oppose single payer health care systems try to frighten people with all kinds of bogeymen. The extent to which they are willing to go sometimes reaches levels of downright lunacy. In the wake of the release of Sicko, some have even said, if you can believe it, that adopting a single payer system could result in more terrorism! There are no depths of fear-mongering to which they will not sink.

But the tried and true standby to try and frighten people is the charge that single payer systems equate to ‘socialized medicine’, as if that is an automatic disqualifier.

It is a tribute to the success of the propaganda model that simply the word ‘socialism’ strikes such fear in so many people in the US. But the fact is that the word is ill-defined in this context. There are some health care systems where the hospitals are actually run by the government, and the health care professionals are government employees. This is perhaps closest to what might be meant by ‘socialized medicine’ and is close to what England has with its National Health Service. Then there is the French system where things are a mix of public and private, and the government mainly acts as the sole entity financing the system, collecting money in the form of taxes and using that to pay for services.

If the scaremongers want to invoke the word ‘socialized’ so broadly as to mean the spreading of the risk across the whole population, then that is no strange concept to the US because then socialism is already rampant in the US.

Sometimes US ‘socialism’ occurs a highly distorted form, where the risks are spread around to everyone but the benefits accrue to a wealthy few. Consider for example the FDIC insurance that banks carry. Every person is underwriting that insurance through our taxes, but it benefits the banks and those who have money to deposit. The past US government bailouts of the auto and airline industries when they were in trouble are examples where the costs and risks are borne by all of us, but the benefits accrued to a select few. The savings and loan debacle of the 1980s was again an instance of the risks and costs being ‘socialized’ (i.e., spread over the entire population), irrespective of whether people had money in the savings and loans institutions or not.

The better form of ‘socialized’ services is where everyone pays for services and everyone also benefits, such as is currently the case in the US with ‘socialized’ fire departments, ‘socialized’ police departments, ‘socialized’ parks, ‘socialized’ libraries, ‘socialized’ trash collection, ‘socialized’ hurricane and weather forecasting, ‘socialized’ air traffic control, ‘socialized’ roads, the list goes on endlessly. All these function on the assumption that there are certain things which are a collective good, and that we all should contribute to their maintenance so that we benefit as needed. ‘Socialized’ medicine should be seen as a natural addition to such existing ‘socialized’ public services, not some strange alien concept.

No health system is perfect. There will always be people who suffer and die because of the lack of equipment or drugs or incompetence. But no one should suffer and die because of the lack of ability to pay or because of bureaucratic hurdles erected in their path in order that some people can make a profit.

In the next post in this series on Thursday, I will look at the “But I’m ok, aren’t I?” attitude that opposes change in the health care system because the speaker thinks that he or she is secure now.

POST SCRIPT: Health care industry contributions to candidates

Michael Moore is helping us keep tabs on how the health care industry is contributing money to presidential candidates of both parties.

Of course, the industry is doing this purely out of a sense of public service and for the sake of supporting democracy, and not to bribe the candidates to make sure that a government run, single payer, health care system is never seriously considered, whoever happens to win.

The story of evolution-7: Genes, chromosomes, and DNA

In order to understand how inheritance works and the mathematics involved, it may be helpful to have a quick summary of some basic facts about genetics (a little simplified), using the human genome for concreteness.

All the genetic information in our bodies is found in the DNA, whose famous double helix structure was discovered in 1953. Thanks to the Human Genome Project, we now have a complete map of the DNA of humans, called the human genome, and know that it consists of a sequence of 3.1647 billion sites arranged in a row, each site containing one of four complex molecules (called bases) labeled A, C, T and G. It is this long arrangement of the four bases that define each of us genetically. Almost 99.9% of the arrangement of these bases is identical in all humans, and about 98% is identical between chimpanzees and us.
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Discussing health care seriously

In my discussions with people on serious and controversial topics, I have some simple rules of thumb to tell me tell whether the discussion is worth pursuing or whether the other person is not serious and talking further is a waste of time.

For example, when discussing evolution, as soon as someone says something along the lines of Mel Gibson’s “If we descended from monkeys, then how come there are still monkeys? How come apes aren’t people yet?” then you know that you are dealing with someone who is either being willfully dishonest or is so ignorant of the basic facts of the topic under discussion that it is not worth continuing unless one is willing to spend a lot of time to bring that person up to speed. The wrongful use of the second law of thermodynamics is another example of a warning sign.

A similar situation applies to global warming when, during a cold or snowy spell someone triumphantly suggests that this has conclusively proven that global warming is a myth.

In discussing politics, the signal is when one makes a criticism of some action of the US government (such as its decision to ignore habeas corpus, or to invade Iraq, or its numerous covert destabilization actions in other countries) and the other person replies “If you don’t like it, then why don’t you go to Russia/France/China/Cuba/Sweden/(fill in the blank for whatever other country the speaker does not like)?”

In all these cases, the signs are clear that there has been no attempt by the other person to really engage with the issue and he or she has resorted to what he or she thinks is a clever debating point but in actuality has little or no content behind it.

In the case of the debates over the merits of a universal, government run, single-payer health care system, the signal that someone is not serious is when he or she trots out the waiting times for hip replacements in Canada as an argument about how the Canadian system is so terrible in comparison to the US. In the wake of the release of Michael Moore’s film Sicko, we can expect to see this being trotted out repeatedly, as indeed it already has.

As Kevin Drum pointed out a few months ago, the hip replacement argument is a sign of egregious cherry picking of data.

When comparing huge and complex systems like the health care or education systems in different nations, making point-to-point comparisons of isolated cases is of little use. No system is going to be better at every single thing, so this kind of debate results in each side selecting just those pieces of data to suit its purposes. There are probably some elective procedures for which there are longer waiting times in other countries than for those with high quality insurance plans in the US. It would not surprise me in the least if access to tests using expensive equipment like MRI machines is easier in the US (for those who have the requisite insurance coverage, of course) than it is for people in other countries. Health care in the US is aimed at servicing the well-to-do, because it is they who are the decision and policy-makers and as long as they are kept content, they are unlikely to want to make changes that reduce the profits of the health care industry, let alone eliminate them entirely, even if the changes benefit the general public.

One needs to look at aggregate measures to better compare quality and cost across nations. For example, the World Health Organization in 2000 put out The world health report 2000 – Health systems: improving performance in which it used the following measures for the comparison for health systems, using measures of both goodness and fairness:

  1. overall good health (e.g., low infant mortality rates and high disability-adjusted life expectancy);
  2. a fair distribution of good health (e.g., low infant mortality and long life expectancy evenly distributed across population groups);
  3. a high level of overall responsiveness;
  4. a fair distribution of responsiveness across population groups; and
  5. a fair distribution of financing health care (whether the burden of health risks is fairly distributed based on ability to pay, so that everyone is equally protected from the financial risks of illness)

Based on these criteria, according to the WHO study (p. 152), the US comes in at #37 in rank internationally, compared to France (#1), England (#18), Canada (#30), and Cuba (#39).

Michael Moore’s Sicko (which you should really see) points out that on measures like life expectancy at birth and infant mortality rates (i.e., the number of infants who die before reaching the age of one year for each 1,000 births), the US lags behind its developed world counterparts, even though its spends far more on health care as a fraction of its GDP (13.6% in 1998) than its nearest competitor Germany (10.6%). Per capita spending is also highest is the US ($4,178) with the next highest being Switzerland ($2,794).

The reason the US gets so much less for the money it spends on health care is because of the vast amounts siphoned off to the insurance and drug companies, partly due to profits and partly due to a huge bureaucracy to handle the complex billing and processing process involved with private health insurance. Such costs account for between 19.3 and 24.1% of health care spending in the US compared with between 8.4 and 11.1% in (say) Canada.

image001.pngThere is a strong (negative) correlation between infant mortality and life expectancy, as can be seen from this graph, where each dot represents the data for a country, along with a linear regression line. The implication is clear that the best way to improve life expectancy is to reduce infant mortality. The reason that many developing countries have high infant mortality rates and resulting low life expectancy is that lack of access to clean water results in diarrhea and this leads to dehydration, which is often fatal for infants. (As an aside, the international conglomerate Nestle deserves widespread condemnation for its policy of marketing infant formula in the developing countries, despite the lack of easy access to clean water to prevent infection. Breastfeeding is always preferred except in exceptional cases, but because of the Nestle marketing campaign became perceived as inferior to formula.)

But when comparing the US to the rest of the developed world, access to clean water is not the main issue, so widespread access to health care emerges as the prime suspect for its low ranking. For example, infant mortality rates for non-whites in US cities are two to three times as high as the national average.

What really irks many people in the US about Moore’s film is perhaps not so much the adverse comparison with Canada, England and France. People who for some reason are enamored of the system here will complacently trot out once again hip replacement waiting times to claim a spurious superiority. It is the fact that among the 221 countries listed, Cuba’s infant mortality rate (6.04, rank 40) and life expectancy rates (77, rank 56) are almost identical with the US infant mortality (6.37, rank 42) and life expectancy (78, rank 45) that really rankles.

The US government’s implacable animosity to Cuba, trying to strangle its economy with boycotts and embargos and repeated attempts at destabilization and even assassination of its leaders, has to be one of the cruelest policies ever implemented towards a country that is not a threat to its security. And yet despite that deliberate attempt at destroying the Cuban economy, Cuba has managed to create a public health system that is a model for third world countries, and produces results in key indices that are comparable with the US. Cuba is legendary among third world countries in its generosity, sharing its medical personnel and expertise around the world.

Kevin Drum wonders if Moore’s use of Cuba in his film was a clever public relations strategy, knowing that it would trigger the almost reflexive anti-Cuba venom that exists in certain quarters in the US and that they would make a huge fuss, thus giving him free publicity. “Moore’s brilliance at getting his mortal enemies to do all his publicity for him is unparalleled.”

Drum may be right. In the weird media world we live in, it is not enough for Moore to accurately portray the scandal that is the US health system compared to its peer countries. That information has been out there for a long time, and ignored by the power elites. He had to create a fuss and by going to Cuba, he did so.

POST SCRIPT: This Modern World

Cartoonist Tom Tomorrow sums up the predictable responses to Sicko by the apologists for the US health care industry.

The story of evolution-6: The probabilities of natural selection

There are three mathematical ideas that one needs to come to terms with in order to get the full flavor of how natural selection works.

  1. One is the rate at which favorable mutations occur in organisms. These do occur by chance and the question is whether the frequency of such occurrences is sufficient to explain evolution.
  2. The second is the rate at which favorable mutations become more numerous in the population. It is not enough to produce a single favorable organism. The population of varieties with advantageous properties has to eventually grow to sufficiently high numbers that it dominates the population and can form the basis for yet further mutations.
  3. The third is whether the rate at which repeated small and favorable mutations build on each other is sufficient to produce major changes in complex systems (the eye, ear, and other organs for example) and even entirely new species.

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Defending the right of free speech and Dennis Kucinich

Since today is a holiday, there will be no original post today. Instead, here are some video clips.

One is of the late Frank Zappa of the group Mothers of Invention on Crossfire talking about the right of free speech.

It is always fun when someone appears on these idiotic talk/yell shows and simply says what he thinks. In this clip from 1986, Zappa drives the person from the Washington Times crazy with his quick-witted defense of free speech and his sardonic sense of humor.

Also, here is an interview of Dennis Kucinich on David Letterman’s show. Kucinich is the only candidate for president who takes the correct stands on the two most fundamental issues facing the US: The Iraq war and the need for single-payer universal health care.

On the pursuit of happiness

On this day before independence day, I wanted to reflect on what to me is one of the most intriguing phrases in the US Declaration of Independence, and is contained in the famous sentence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

I have always found the inclusion of the phrase “the pursuit of happiness” as a fundamental goal to be quaint and appealing. One does not expect to see such pleasing and innocently worded sentiment in a political document, and its inclusion sheds an interesting and positive light on the minds and aspirations of the people who signed that document.

But the problem has always been with how happiness is attained. And in one serious respect, Jefferson’s suggestion that we should pursue happiness, while laudable, may also be misguided. Happiness is not something to be pursued. People who pursue happiness as a goal are unlikely to find it. Happiness is what happens when you are pursuing other things. The philosopher Robert Ingersoll also valued happiness but had a better idea about what is would take to achieve it: “Happiness is the only good. The place to be happy is here. The time to be happy is now. The way to be happy is to make others so.”

Kurt Vonnegut in his last book A Man Without a Country suggests that the real problem is that we don’t realize when we are happy, and that we should get in the habit of noticing those moments and stop and savor them.

I apologize to all of you who are the same age as my grandchildren. And many of you reading this are probably the same age as my grandchildren. They, like you, are being royally shafted and lied to by our Baby Boomer corporations and government.

Yes, this planet is in a terrible mess. But it has always been a mess. There have never been any “Good Old Days,” there have just been days. And as I say to my grandchildren, “Don’t look at me, I just got here.”

There are old poops who will say that you do not become a grown-up until you have somehow survived, as they have, some famous calamity — the Great Depression, the Second World War, Vietnam, whatever. Storytellers are responsible for this destructive, not to say suicidal, myth. Again and again in stories, after some terrible mess, the character is able to say at last, “Today I am a woman. Today I am a man. The end.”

When I got home from the Second World War, my Uncle Dan clapped me on the back, and he said, “You’re a man now.” So I killed him. Not really, but I certainly felt like doing it.

Dan, that was my bad uncle, who said a man can’t be a man unless he’d gone to war.

But I had a good uncle, my late Uncle Alex. He was my father’s kid brother, a childless graduate of Harvard who was an honest life-insurance salesman in Indianapolis. He was well-read and wise. And his principal complaint about other human beings was that they so seldom noticed it when they were happy. So when we were drinking lemonade under an apple tree in the summer, say, and talking lazily about this and that, almost buzzing like honeybees, Uncle Alex would suddenly interrupt the agreeable blather to exclaim, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”

So I do the same now, and so do my kids and grandkids. And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”

Good advice.