If you currently, or have ever, or have even thought that maybe you do, suffer from RLS, or Restless Leg Syndrome, I am sorry. I do not believe you.
This topic has been simmering in the back of my mind for many years now, and a weekend of listening to The Corrections (by Jonathan Franzen) while driving to and from a snowy camping trip in Vermont, away from the insanity of modern society, spurred me to voice my thoughts, at least in a preliminary way.
Particularly, my thinking has been focused on the distinction between diseases (or "syndromes," "infections," or whichever other piece of medical nomenclature) and simple states of existence. On the surface, this seems to be an intuitively simple question, but I actually find it to be very problematic.
There is an obvious biological answer: a "disease" (et. al) is a state which puts your physical existence into some kind of detriment or danger. AIDS is clearly a disease, because there is a not-at-all unclear connection between having AIDS and risk of death. This seems fairly unproblematic.
A definition such as this just doesn't work for "mental illness" however. There is no clear way in which not being able to pay attention in class, or having a leg that itches too much (maybe getting out and doing a bit of physical activity might be a good "prescription" for this "disease") poses any danger to our physical well-being.
Well, then what's the problem? The problem is a psychological and social one, and not biological. These conditions do not endanger or damage the physical lives of people, but their social/mental lives. These conditions disrupt the act of being or becoming a healthy and productive member of society. "Healthy" and "productive," however, are clearly not universal or easily definable terms, however. Rather, they are very specific to certain cultures and certain times.
I think the fact that ideas of health will depend highly, if not completely, on culture, is an inevitable, and not necessarily bad, fact. What seems insane to me, however, is the fact that in our culture, we have a very small subset of our population (our medical institutions) defining what it means to be "healthy" for the rest of us, and then selling us drugs to conform to these "normal" mental habits. When a child is prescribed Ritalin because he can't sit still in the classroom, no longer does this mean that he doesn't like math, but rather that he has a disease (ADD) that prevents him from the reaching the normal state of being able to strap yourself down in a chair and silently filter information into your mind. This disease has to be treated, and so culture actually steps in to not just affect an individual's personality through typical, external, cultural influence, but now through the biological and medical process of directly affecting mental states. Remind anyone of lobotomy? (also, note the shift of responsbility, and therefore autonomy, away from the individual). Now it certainly seems like certain mental states are more conducive to individuals leading productive lives within the given contemporary social constraints given to them, but it seems to me that these alternative (perhaps to be generalized as "creative") mentals states are actually very important and very influential in society as a whole, and may be necessary as we enter a period in human history where change is accelerating (TED seems to be a good example). I'm reminded of the portfolio (or diversification) effect in ecology (drawn from the finance realm) where diverse ecosystems tend to be the most stable over long periods because they are able to weather a wider variety of inevitable environmental changes.
I know I sound like a conspiracy theorist, and I apologize, but the undeniable truth of this thang just keeps on popping up in my face. See John Stewart for a much more insightful, and much lighter, treatment.
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Thursday, November 20, 2008
cancer as an infectious disease
The New York Times just posted a very interesting piece (by Erica Rex) on cancer in the population of Tasmanian Devils (yes they are real) in Australia. The Devils have recently been added to Australia's endangered species list because of a widespread cancer that is devastating the population.
Although seeing a new species added to the endangered species list is, unfortunately, sort of a routine and utterly not-fantastic event today, this particular species is decline is especially fascinating (and frightening) from a biological perspective. This is because the cancer devastating the Devils is working as an infectious disease, spreading throughout the population.
In humans, cancer is a product of a person's own cells dividing out of control. Typically, cells in your body are stopped from dividing ad infinitum by a series of cell cycle regulating molecules, and typically cancer is a result of malfunctions in any of a variety of these regulatory molecules. From this perspective, then, cancer has really very little to do with a person's immune system, and cancers in humans are not known to be at all infectious, but are rather largely genetic.
The cancer taking out Tasmanian Devils is different, however. As a brief review of the immune system, your body uses a set of molecules called the MHC (for major histocompatibility complex). These are little markers on the outside of all cells which work like a language to figure out which cells are supposed to be in our body and which aren't, and then other cells in your immunse system digest the stuff that's not supposed to be there.
It's a great system, until something learns to work around it. It is the misfortune of the Devils to be a sort of experiment in evolution, where certain cancerous cells have evolved to not have any of the cellular markers that tell the body that it is foreign, or from another organism. This means that this cancer can begin to act as an infectious disease, spreading between individuals.
Typically, if cancerous cells from another human were to invade your body, your immune system would quickly recognize these cells as foreign, mark and digest them, and the cancer would not be able to proliferate within your body. In the Devils however, this is no longer true, and a single cancer has begun to spread throughout the population. Amazingly, this entire cancer is probably the product of a mutation in one cell in one tasmanian devil, and this cell has now begun to divide out of control and spread throughout an entire population. Frightening, but very cool.
Although seeing a new species added to the endangered species list is, unfortunately, sort of a routine and utterly not-fantastic event today, this particular species is decline is especially fascinating (and frightening) from a biological perspective. This is because the cancer devastating the Devils is working as an infectious disease, spreading throughout the population.
In humans, cancer is a product of a person's own cells dividing out of control. Typically, cells in your body are stopped from dividing ad infinitum by a series of cell cycle regulating molecules, and typically cancer is a result of malfunctions in any of a variety of these regulatory molecules. From this perspective, then, cancer has really very little to do with a person's immune system, and cancers in humans are not known to be at all infectious, but are rather largely genetic.
The cancer taking out Tasmanian Devils is different, however. As a brief review of the immune system, your body uses a set of molecules called the MHC (for major histocompatibility complex). These are little markers on the outside of all cells which work like a language to figure out which cells are supposed to be in our body and which aren't, and then other cells in your immunse system digest the stuff that's not supposed to be there.
It's a great system, until something learns to work around it. It is the misfortune of the Devils to be a sort of experiment in evolution, where certain cancerous cells have evolved to not have any of the cellular markers that tell the body that it is foreign, or from another organism. This means that this cancer can begin to act as an infectious disease, spreading between individuals.
Typically, if cancerous cells from another human were to invade your body, your immune system would quickly recognize these cells as foreign, mark and digest them, and the cancer would not be able to proliferate within your body. In the Devils however, this is no longer true, and a single cancer has begun to spread throughout the population. Amazingly, this entire cancer is probably the product of a mutation in one cell in one tasmanian devil, and this cell has now begun to divide out of control and spread throughout an entire population. Frightening, but very cool.
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Evolution, Death, and the Free Market
Since the beginning of the current economic crisis, I've been thinking about the general parallels between biological systems and economic systems, and particularly about concepts of how each of these systems works toward becoming "better," whatever that means for each respective field. (Disclaimer: my understanding of the biological world has quite a bit more nuance than the economic, so I apologize ahead of time for all of the butcherings, false claims, oversimplications, and general prostitutings of economic ideas that follow).
Despite tons of differences, there are some overarching and important similarities between the economy and evolution. Both Adam Smith and Darwin were (explicitly or not) influenced by the thinking of Malthus, emphasizing the limited nature of many (if not all) resources. From this style of thinking, both Smith and Darwin realized that competition was an essential aspect of progress. Perhaps more fundamentally, each viewed their respective system as being spontaneously self-organized by limited resources and competition. (I see both of these systems as examples of the larger theme of emergence, a subject on which i will post in the near future).
Smith saw that in a system of economic exchange, competition was the most important driving force behind change. If you start with the premise that resources (money, time, goats, whatever) are limited, and that each individual is going to act in their own self-interest, society is bound to get better. Self-interest (importantly, combined with the ability to individuals within society to freely choose between a given set of options) leads to lowering prices and spurring innovation within markets and so on, the "invisible hand" of fundamental self-interestedness becomes the driving force behind socio-economic change, and the modern free-market economy is born.
Darwin most likely drew directly on the work of Adam Smith in his own revolutonary theories on the biological world. When applied to the biological world, the same basic principles of limitiations, competition, and self-interest emerge. Ultimately, there are not enough resources in the world for all species to reproduce infinitely. Given this fact, and the fact that there are differences between individuals in terms of their ability to reproduce, those individuals who reproduce more (through faster generation times, higher survival, sperm competition, or any of a gajillion other evolutionary mechanisms) will pass their traits onto the next generation in greater numbers than others, and the world will look a little more like them. Through the self interest of genes (for lots lots more, see Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene) the world is in a continual process of change and progress (depending on your perspective).
So this, very briefly, covers, evolution and the free market. In both society and the biologocial world, there are lots of discrete actors (in society, us, in biology, genes) fighting for limited resources in a slf-interested way, and this leads to a change in the landscape of society/biology. In general, I think this overarching analogy between are fairly well explored and acknowledged, despite lots of infighting over piddling details among academics. But now, I want to talk a little more about why i actually posted this up here, and this is death, and how it relates to this analogy.
Death is a sad, nasty thing in almost every way. It is the opposite of all meaning, inherently. Oddly, however, it is fundamental to any coherent understanding of evolution. The nice way to word evolution is that there is "differential survival" between individuals, which is another way of saying that some survive and some die (or are never born). Without death, there cannot be any overall change in the genetic structure of a population. These overall genetic changes in the long run improve the robustness of a species, because this species becomes more adept at survival in the face of a set of particular environmental changes.
Evolutionary thinking is frequently applied to the economy, both academically and colloquially (i.e. the "survival of the fittest"). Certain parts of this analogy, such as competition, limited resources, and progress through self-interest, transfer fairly directly and I think cleanly from evolution to the economy. I would argue that in addition to these, however, the role of death also tranfers to the economy. If we allow a "free market" system that runs in parallel to evolution, then there are obvious examples of market "death," the most obvious examples being bankruptcies and recession.
It seems to me that is an inevitable part of the analogy between evolution and the economy, and one deserving of attention. Clearly, death is a necessary part of the evolutionary system, both in the form of individuals deaths (analogous to bankruptcies) and also in the form of more devastating events such as the KT Event or the Permian extinction (analogous to major recessions and/or depressions) which usher in major systemic change in how a system functions.
The question that we face, I believe, is whether or not we are willing to accept the costs (i don't really think they're risks, because they are in some global sense inevitable) of having a free market system that is largely analogous to an evolutonary system. Are we willing to accept the effects of "market death," (i.e. widespread joblessness and inumerable social tolls)? If the answer is no, then this probably implies a move toward higher levels of market regulation (as well as increased social safety), which seems to be the direction in which we're heading. It seems obvious to me that some level of regulation is necessary, and that individual members should indeed be shielded from at least some effects of the free market (health care is for me, the most obvious and pressing example of this), but do these regulations weaken our economy as a whole, and its robustness in response to the larger economic environment?
To add a bit of personal complication, i find it kind of odd as I think through these issues that when I think strictly about politics and the economy, free of biology, I am a strong supporter of regulation and a more socialist system. But when i apply an evolutonary perspective, it is hard for me not to think about the pitfalls that seem to be associated with interfering with "death." I guess the ideal system would be one where we can allow the dynamics of the evolutionary/market environment (the competition, success, survival and death inherent in the market) to play out on a level that is removed from the lives of members of our society. And thoughts on how that could actually happen will be fodder for another post.
Despite tons of differences, there are some overarching and important similarities between the economy and evolution. Both Adam Smith and Darwin were (explicitly or not) influenced by the thinking of Malthus, emphasizing the limited nature of many (if not all) resources. From this style of thinking, both Smith and Darwin realized that competition was an essential aspect of progress. Perhaps more fundamentally, each viewed their respective system as being spontaneously self-organized by limited resources and competition. (I see both of these systems as examples of the larger theme of emergence, a subject on which i will post in the near future).
Smith saw that in a system of economic exchange, competition was the most important driving force behind change. If you start with the premise that resources (money, time, goats, whatever) are limited, and that each individual is going to act in their own self-interest, society is bound to get better. Self-interest (importantly, combined with the ability to individuals within society to freely choose between a given set of options) leads to lowering prices and spurring innovation within markets and so on, the "invisible hand" of fundamental self-interestedness becomes the driving force behind socio-economic change, and the modern free-market economy is born.
Darwin most likely drew directly on the work of Adam Smith in his own revolutonary theories on the biological world. When applied to the biological world, the same basic principles of limitiations, competition, and self-interest emerge. Ultimately, there are not enough resources in the world for all species to reproduce infinitely. Given this fact, and the fact that there are differences between individuals in terms of their ability to reproduce, those individuals who reproduce more (through faster generation times, higher survival, sperm competition, or any of a gajillion other evolutionary mechanisms) will pass their traits onto the next generation in greater numbers than others, and the world will look a little more like them. Through the self interest of genes (for lots lots more, see Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene) the world is in a continual process of change and progress (depending on your perspective).
So this, very briefly, covers, evolution and the free market. In both society and the biologocial world, there are lots of discrete actors (in society, us, in biology, genes) fighting for limited resources in a slf-interested way, and this leads to a change in the landscape of society/biology. In general, I think this overarching analogy between are fairly well explored and acknowledged, despite lots of infighting over piddling details among academics. But now, I want to talk a little more about why i actually posted this up here, and this is death, and how it relates to this analogy.
Death is a sad, nasty thing in almost every way. It is the opposite of all meaning, inherently. Oddly, however, it is fundamental to any coherent understanding of evolution. The nice way to word evolution is that there is "differential survival" between individuals, which is another way of saying that some survive and some die (or are never born). Without death, there cannot be any overall change in the genetic structure of a population. These overall genetic changes in the long run improve the robustness of a species, because this species becomes more adept at survival in the face of a set of particular environmental changes.
Evolutionary thinking is frequently applied to the economy, both academically and colloquially (i.e. the "survival of the fittest"). Certain parts of this analogy, such as competition, limited resources, and progress through self-interest, transfer fairly directly and I think cleanly from evolution to the economy. I would argue that in addition to these, however, the role of death also tranfers to the economy. If we allow a "free market" system that runs in parallel to evolution, then there are obvious examples of market "death," the most obvious examples being bankruptcies and recession.
It seems to me that is an inevitable part of the analogy between evolution and the economy, and one deserving of attention. Clearly, death is a necessary part of the evolutionary system, both in the form of individuals deaths (analogous to bankruptcies) and also in the form of more devastating events such as the KT Event or the Permian extinction (analogous to major recessions and/or depressions) which usher in major systemic change in how a system functions.
The question that we face, I believe, is whether or not we are willing to accept the costs (i don't really think they're risks, because they are in some global sense inevitable) of having a free market system that is largely analogous to an evolutonary system. Are we willing to accept the effects of "market death," (i.e. widespread joblessness and inumerable social tolls)? If the answer is no, then this probably implies a move toward higher levels of market regulation (as well as increased social safety), which seems to be the direction in which we're heading. It seems obvious to me that some level of regulation is necessary, and that individual members should indeed be shielded from at least some effects of the free market (health care is for me, the most obvious and pressing example of this), but do these regulations weaken our economy as a whole, and its robustness in response to the larger economic environment?
To add a bit of personal complication, i find it kind of odd as I think through these issues that when I think strictly about politics and the economy, free of biology, I am a strong supporter of regulation and a more socialist system. But when i apply an evolutonary perspective, it is hard for me not to think about the pitfalls that seem to be associated with interfering with "death." I guess the ideal system would be one where we can allow the dynamics of the evolutionary/market environment (the competition, success, survival and death inherent in the market) to play out on a level that is removed from the lives of members of our society. And thoughts on how that could actually happen will be fodder for another post.
Thursday, November 6, 2008
The Best Day of My Life
Possibly an exaggeration. But maybe not. As a young person, my entire adult life has been spent under a government that I have absoutely no trust in. It is not simply that I am opposed to the policies of the Bush administration: I have lost all confidence that they are making decisions that are in my best interest, and making those decisions intelligently and responsibly.
Inevitably, there are questions of how policies and certain agendas should be executed and the real world warps all ideals as they come into formation as actual policies. Ultimately, all ideals become compromised and that is a reality I am happy to accept. But not trusting in the intentions and entire ideological drive of the government of which you are a citizen is a deeper, much more alienating problem.
Tuesday night, for the first time in my life, I felt uncontrollable adoration for the person who would be the leader of our country. For the first time, I saw American ideals like equality and liberty (which I just finished critiquing) not as abstract and fictitious, but instead as real, possible, and important ideas that can and should actually having a shaping force in our world. And I saw them embodied in a person who I admire, and who is actually in the most powerful position in the world. For the first time, I was actually proud to be an American. What an odd feeling...
It's also good to know I'm not the only one who is excited. I've never experienced such mass, communal joy before, and i have to say it feels good.
Inevitably, there are questions of how policies and certain agendas should be executed and the real world warps all ideals as they come into formation as actual policies. Ultimately, all ideals become compromised and that is a reality I am happy to accept. But not trusting in the intentions and entire ideological drive of the government of which you are a citizen is a deeper, much more alienating problem.
Tuesday night, for the first time in my life, I felt uncontrollable adoration for the person who would be the leader of our country. For the first time, I saw American ideals like equality and liberty (which I just finished critiquing) not as abstract and fictitious, but instead as real, possible, and important ideas that can and should actually having a shaping force in our world. And I saw them embodied in a person who I admire, and who is actually in the most powerful position in the world. For the first time, I was actually proud to be an American. What an odd feeling...
It's also good to know I'm not the only one who is excited. I've never experienced such mass, communal joy before, and i have to say it feels good.
Sunday, November 2, 2008
Freedom from liberty
This is an idea I've been thinking about for a few days after listening to an NPR interview with MT Anderson, author of The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing. I have not read the book (and don't really plan on it), but there was an interesting, short bit of the interview where they were discussing the idea of "liberty." The basic idea, as I remember it (or as I have shifted it in my selective memory) was that there were at least two, competing conceptions of liberty in early American history, and especially during the period of the civil war. One conception of liberty was that argued for by abolitionists who believed in the fundamental liberty of man and used this to argue for slaves' right to freedom. On the other hand, secessionists also invoked liberty to justify their own political stance. Jefferson Davis, for example, argued for liberty against "the tyranny of an unbridled majority" (From wikipedia.)
Reflecting on how these contradictory political agendas could both be justified in the name of liberty, i began to appreciate the complications that arise from using this word. When we are speaking of universal liberty, are we talking about each individual's liberty? Or a territory or a state's liberty? The reality is, there is no set agenda on this. When people talk of liberty, they can be speaking on almost any level of analysis.
To add complication to this, "liberty" is used largely interchangeably with "freedom," which opens up another pandora's box of problems (i.e. the difference between positive and negative freedom, or the difference in definition between "freedom" in politics and in philosophy). It seems fundamental that liberty is constrained in a whole bunch of ways. A really interesting, and relevant, form of constraint on freedom in economic: We are all certainly constrained from certain actions for certain economic reasons, and the contours of these restraints depend on your income. I am restrained from buying a new car and lots of luxury items. Other people are restrained by their economic status from completing even more basic tasks, like buying food for their family. Wealthy individuals are constrained too just in a different way. Maybe they really want to buy a trip to space, but they just bought their 11th house, and so they can't quite afford it right now. This obviously sounds absurd when placed next to the other examples, but it is indeed on some level a constraint on action, however frivolous that action may be.
My goal here, though, is not to engage in the ongoing philosophical discussion on conceptions of freedom and liberty, on which subject many others have thought much longer and harder and have written much more eloquently.
Instead, when I was hearing about this historical complexity in the idea of liberty, I began to think about modern politics, and I realized that this complication has not disappeared at all. "Liberty" and "freedom" are invoked in almost any discussion or speech of American foreign (e.g. practically every Bush speech in the last eight years). There is part of me that thinks that the ideal of liberty has at least some good in itself, and we all have some instincts about it, even if we haven't engaged in deep philosophical thought about. We all have the general idea that liberty is good thing in the world. But the civil war example really begins home the fact that there may not be any inherent good in the idea of liberty at all. My thought then, is that if this is true, then "liberty" and "freedom" may have become very dangerous concepts in modern politics, because they subsume a huge variety of motives and policies under a word that has such strong historical weight behind it. Perhaps it would be better for us to stop using these words altogether...
Reflecting on how these contradictory political agendas could both be justified in the name of liberty, i began to appreciate the complications that arise from using this word. When we are speaking of universal liberty, are we talking about each individual's liberty? Or a territory or a state's liberty? The reality is, there is no set agenda on this. When people talk of liberty, they can be speaking on almost any level of analysis.
To add complication to this, "liberty" is used largely interchangeably with "freedom," which opens up another pandora's box of problems (i.e. the difference between positive and negative freedom, or the difference in definition between "freedom" in politics and in philosophy). It seems fundamental that liberty is constrained in a whole bunch of ways. A really interesting, and relevant, form of constraint on freedom in economic: We are all certainly constrained from certain actions for certain economic reasons, and the contours of these restraints depend on your income. I am restrained from buying a new car and lots of luxury items. Other people are restrained by their economic status from completing even more basic tasks, like buying food for their family. Wealthy individuals are constrained too just in a different way. Maybe they really want to buy a trip to space, but they just bought their 11th house, and so they can't quite afford it right now. This obviously sounds absurd when placed next to the other examples, but it is indeed on some level a constraint on action, however frivolous that action may be.
My goal here, though, is not to engage in the ongoing philosophical discussion on conceptions of freedom and liberty, on which subject many others have thought much longer and harder and have written much more eloquently.
Instead, when I was hearing about this historical complexity in the idea of liberty, I began to think about modern politics, and I realized that this complication has not disappeared at all. "Liberty" and "freedom" are invoked in almost any discussion or speech of American foreign (e.g. practically every Bush speech in the last eight years). There is part of me that thinks that the ideal of liberty has at least some good in itself, and we all have some instincts about it, even if we haven't engaged in deep philosophical thought about. We all have the general idea that liberty is good thing in the world. But the civil war example really begins home the fact that there may not be any inherent good in the idea of liberty at all. My thought then, is that if this is true, then "liberty" and "freedom" may have become very dangerous concepts in modern politics, because they subsume a huge variety of motives and policies under a word that has such strong historical weight behind it. Perhaps it would be better for us to stop using these words altogether...
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