Brian.Carnell.Com

At the beginning of August, Nature published a report that the genome of the bacteria that causes Cholera had been sequenced. So far the only other disease that has been completely sequences is E. coli.

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases funded the effort to decode the cholera gene. Cholera was a major killer in the 19th century and early 20th century but had largely disappeared as a major killer of people around the world until it re-emerged in many areas of the developing world beginning in the 1970s. In Latin America, for example, there had been almost no recorded cases of cholera in over a century before the disease spread throughout the area beginning in 1991.

Cholera causes diarrhea and is usually contracted by drinking contaminated water. Although today it is not a major killer, but in the 1990s it infected hundreds of thousands of people and caused several thousand deaths.

The sequencing turned up one unusual twist about cholera — most bacteria have a single chromosome, but cholera turns out to have two chromosomes of different sizes. John Mekalanos of Harvard Medical School told the BBC that, “it makes us think that part of its environmental adaptation has to do with the second chromosome. It gives us very specific experiments that we can do to address the role of genes in the small chromosome.”

If all goes well in the next three or four year the result of such investigations will yield better treatments and hopefully more effective vaccines for cholera.

Source:

Scientists sequence genome of cholera bacteria. CNN. August 2, 2000.

    The Environment News Network recently ran a fascinating story about Sri Lanka, after failing miserably to protect endangered wildlife, is turning to traditional tribal hunting groups to prevent illegal poaching of wildlife in its forests.

    The story of the Veddah hunters is amazing. Anthropologists believe the aboriginal group were the first human beings to settle in what is now Sri Lanka, but Sinhalese colonizers displaced them long ago as the main source of political power. For the most part, though, the Sinhalese, followed by the Portuguese, the Dutch, the British and then the Sinhalese again after de-colonialization, all left the Veddah alone to carry on their traditional hunting and gathering lifestyle with minimal interference.

    That changed in 1983 when the government started ambitious development projects which included erecting dams and relocating the Veddah. The government officially banned hunting in the forests the Veddah formerly hunted in.

    The results were predictable — while the wildlife conservation staff spent its time harassing Veddah hunters who returned to hunt, soldiers, police, and others poached the wildlife with impunity. The animals continued to decline, deforestation accelerated, and no one was happy.

    Now the government has come to its senses and started to reverse that policy. It’s helping to relocate the 200 or so Veddah families back to their forest and restoring their right to hunt for food. In return the Veddah hunters are helping conservation officers crack down on poachers. According to the ENN report, the Veddah hunters recently helped authorities identify a group of soldiers who were poaching animals.

    This is the sort of common sense approach to conservation that the animal rights position pretty much rules out. Hunters will play an increasingly important role in species preservation, and it will be thanks to them in large measure that many of these animals will continue to exist as species for groups like PETA to claim they have rights.

Source:

Tribal hunters turn wildlife protectors by hunting again. Environmental News Network, July 27, 2000.

    Wired is running an interesting article (Rape Theory Too Much To Take) on the most recent chapter in evolutionary biologist Randy Thornhill’s controversial claim that impulse to rape has a biological basis. Thornhill details his argument in his book, “A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion,” in which he argues that there is a “human rape adaptation” that is present in all or most men that biologically predisposes them to rape.

    Wired reports that several men in the audience tried to shout Thornhill down, and his book received very negative reactions when it was first published, from feminists, from those who reject sociobiological principals, and others.

    I haven’t read Thornhill’s book, but have read enough excerpts and criticism and defense of it to be very wary of his specific claims. On the other hand the broader issue that Thornhill raises, and the reaction to it, especially by feminists, is worth pondering further — are there biological roots to violence?

    As Richard Pipes notes in “Property and Freedom” even many hard core defenders of evolutionary biology end up in weird contortions in order to assert that violence is almost environmental. Pipes writes that many the same folks who would cringe at the idea that human beings are a unique or special species have no problem insisting that unlike every other species human beings have no innate predispositions to behaviors such as violence. In fact on the radical feminist spectrum there are not a few theorists who claim that a) human beings have no innate abilities or impulses at all — everything is environment, and b) Darwinian evolution is simply wrong to the extent that it implies otherwise.

    Unfortunately, science often gets in the way of political fantasies, and the evidence for a wide range of innate behaviors is pretty overwhelming at this point, with language acquisition being the real lynch pin. It is very difficult to look at the available evidence and conclude that language is acquired in any way accept through innate structures in the brain/mind. Given that violent acts appear to be an integral part of lives of many mammalian species, especially those living species closest to our own, it would be astounding if there weren’t some biological predisposition to violence in our own species.

    People seem to want to avoid reaching this conclusion for two separate but closely related reasons.

    First, they want to avoid simple biological determinism, which is understandable. Just because I might be predisposed to act violently in certain situations thanks to my evolutionary heritage does not meant that I inevitably must act violently. In fact Freud was hardly the first person to suppose that the main project of civilization was the tempering of such innate behaviors. While evolutionary biology might explain a certain level of violence across human beings as a species, it doesn’t necessarily explain individual acts of violence nor does it mean that I lack the power to choose whether or not to commit violent acts (in fact the vast majority of human beings are, judging by how they live, fully capable of interacting peacefully with other people).

    The second objection is a bit harder to comprehend. As conference organizer Gerfried Stocker tried to explain the controversy, “Some of the people got the idea that he thinks rape is natural or good.” It is interesting that Stocker chose to equate “natural” with “good” since that is exactly the heart of the problem — just because something is natural does not in any way mean that it is good. This should be self-evident given the numerous example of natural things that are definitely not good. One wonders, for example, if Thornhill published a book entitled, “The Natural History of Small Pox,” if protesters would show up to silence him with shouts of “You’re saying small pox is good!”

    Radical feminists have contributed to this ridiculous view that natural=good with their glorification of nature which is set in opposition to “patriarchal” science’s “reductive” view of the world. Many radical feminists, especially in academe, like to contrast women’s inherent, deep connect with an idyllic nature with that of a harsh, cold view of men and accomplishments such as science (ignoring, of course, the important contribution made by female scientists, or denigrating that contribution as self-loathing). If women are good, as represented by their special connection with nature, then certainly the millions of years of brutal killing that is evolution and natural selection certainly creates problems.

    The bottom line is that violence almost certainly has some sort of biological imperative behind it, which is entirely natural, and definitely not good when it goes beyond merely defending oneself and into striking out against other people. To reject such ideas simply because they don’t comport well with how we wish the world worked is to reject rationality itself (which, again, not a few radical feminists are more than happy to do).

Not following the comics industry too closely, I had no idea who Scott McCloud was until the publication of his first book, Understanding Comics. Now he has a new book out, Reinventing Comics as well as an awesome personal web site and other web-centric endeavors.

On his personal site, McCloud has some awesome comics. My Obsession With Chess, for example, is fascinating both for its compelling story as well as the graphical layout.

McCloud is also writing a column for ComicReader.Com which showcases his ideas for putting comics on the web. McCloud touches on a wide range of design issues there. The column, I Can’t Stop Thinking, shows how graphic intensive stories should be told on the Internet. This is the sort of thing I read and get a hundred new ideas from each column.

Finally, a new episode of McCloud’s Zot! comic book series is now being put on the web, with one new issue of the series added each week at ComicBookResources.Com.