I had to talk and think about wedding plans for at least eight hours today. This evening, every single conversation I had was about some aspect of a nuptials. After dinner, I was standing in the kitchen with my father. He gave me the affixing stare of someone about to impart something essential about dress ruffles, speaking to seamstresses, or making wreaths out of broom corn. I braced myself as he leaned in.

"I've been wondering about the provenience of the type specimen for Nothrotheriops shastensis. The name indicates that it's local, but I can't find evidence of it except in the Southwest."

I love my dad.

Sustainable long term weight loss.

I promised I'd figure out all the addresses for invitations today. This is why I'm reading Health At Every Size and writing a blog post.

I love that the author is a little on the cold and clinical side. While she's explaining the "weight thermostat" concept, she cheerily covers the horrific tests run on obese mice. Ways that mice can permanently lose weight follow.

Connecting the veins of an obese mouse to the veins of a thin mouse results in the obese mouse becoming thin.

Traumatic brain injury to the hypothalamus often results in complete loss of appetite. (Or occasionally dramatically increased appetite)

When all food tastes bitter, the mice maintain a lower weight as long as the food is bitter.

Short Faced Bears.

Okay, this is just too awesome for words. It's an article about the Bay Area during the Pleistocene. There was a river to rival the Amazon! The continental shelf was exposed, resulting in a thirty mile band of coastal prairie west of Golden Gate Bridge! There were mammoths, cave lions, cheetahs, dire wolves, and giant ground sloths! There was a twelve foot tall bear than could sprint 40 mph!

If there were three huge rivers trisecting the Bay Area, the island effect would lead to speciation- populations would be divided, and you'd expect to see an unreasonably high number of endemics. And this is so! I've been fretting about the diversity of crazy rare plants in the Bay for a while.

The best part of the article is that it cribs heavily from a book on Paleobotany that is currently on my nightstand. I now have more reason to feel guilty about not reading it.

No, the best part is that the type specimen for short-faced bears is from Shasta Caverns- an entire skeleton! Oh my goodness, that is an awe-inspiring thing to contemplate.

I bumped into a friend of my parents in a field of poison oak behind a locked gate yesterday. He gave me a list of everything he'd found in the area, starting with a field stripped rifle (a 308, so nothing super scary) wrapped in several garbage bags, a couple of caves, a rare aster, a rare salamander, a feral pig skull, and a terrible allergy to Toxicodendron. Thus, I am inspired to find bear teeth. (I have previously stated that I maintain certain friendships primarily for entertainment value and exposure to truly insane schemes- remind me to do a post on R's first roommate- and I believe this man serves a similar purpose for my father. Except he's pleasant. And most of his schemes involve trail building and waterway restoration.)

Also, I keep bitching about poison oak in the abstract, fact-of-life fashion that occurs in the workplace, and people keep offering sympathy. At work, I'll say "I want to bite this skin and worry at the rash like a dog." and my coworkers respond "I'm so coated in tar I no longer do a spot check before peeing." On Facebook, I make a pleasant reference to Technu showers, and dudes start talking about how they once had oak balls whilst ladies try to sell me on pharmaceuticals.

I want to do a series on "Why I hate your Myers/Briggs personality type", but I think it may be unwise. Thoughts?

Underwater Panther*

So... there's moderate interest in how wetland type is determine by soil type. That's what y'all are here for, right? Ecological ephemera?

There's a fee for destroying wetlands and tributaries to navigable waters in this great country. A large fee. It's enforced by the Army Corps of Engineers- who might be shaky on maintaining levees, but is really... dedicated to managing our water and wetland resources. (Seriously seriously dedicated. Ever since the Clean Water Act was passed, they've been slowly expanding their purview. The Supreme Court has given them jurisdiction over pretty much anything wet expect vernal pools- and they responded by quietly explaining to developers that destruction of vernal pools will lead to court case that will be appealed all the way to the highest court.)

Sometimes, one can't avoid destroying wetlands. Sometimes one is increasing the volume of the state's largest reservoir by 40%, and one can afford to pay for a little mitigation. Then one maps all the sweet ephemeral streams and seep springs in the flood zone- and pays for their destruction. Dearly.

One of the things noted in wetland mapping is soil type- so one has a great bloody soils map that corresponds with the eternal shoreline. When the soil is cracked shale bedrock, the water seeps out of the cracks, forming springs and seeps, not drying out, supporting actual wetland vegetation. When it's granite, the water forms much cheaper intermittent and ephemeral streams. When it's limestone, there are meanders and oxbows and soggy places where someone once wandered through with their bulldozer, etching effigy mounds.*

So yes- same rainfall, similar topography, widely different wetland types. Which means we have to sample all of them.

*This is my actual experience with limestone- I think it was heavily mined and also easy to cut roads through. In addition, effigy mounds are awesome- the title is the new name for the Alligator Mound.

Disparate Topics

I was blathering on Facebook that I get to go to a party! An actual party! A costume party! Mike said that the theoretical lizards I killed to make my costume probably deserved it, and I was going to explain how they did not, but then I realized I have a blog for nonsensical ramblings- Facebook is for obtuse koans.

So. I go to Pilates Wednesday mornings. This Wednesday, my mother woke me up and explained that we were going to Pilates. It wasn't until we were halfway to the next town over that I realized she was talking about a different Pilates class in a different place. The instructor did not deign to show up for said class, so we ran on the machines and then sat in the hot tub. I was piqued about our miscommunication- and about not getting to do my stretches- so I was trying to be exceptionally nice to my mother.

Thus I mentioned that I was going to a costume party Friday, and asked if we might have any aquatic space Viking costumes.

We didn't. (I know that you are surprised.) We did have a WHOLE DAY to find and make a costume for me and a costume for C. I was gonna oil my boots, do some laundry, maybe find a funny hat... But now I have a costume. She's very excited because she has some lizard print fabric from 1998 that she finally gets to use. We went to the used clothing store and picked through their Halloween boxes in the basement, we hit up the neighbors for skin friendly adhesives so I could attach gills and we are currently dying gardening gloves and leggings into more acceptable colors. I... I live in a world where my attempts at pleasant conversation lead to me crawling around in the rafters, looking for the flippers from the penguin costumes.

Because we own nine penguin costumes. NINE.

Now, if I'm an aquatic Viking, I will necessarily be hunting aquatic reptiles. I have decided that they are some form of marine iguanas- pleasant animals, wouldn't hurt a fly. And I am thus reminded of the afternoon Darwin spent throwing an iguana into the ocean.

He grabbed a likely reptile, walked to a point, and hucked it into the waves. It swam back to his feet. He threw it in again. It swam back. And so on throughout the afternoon. Little bit of sadism on the father of the evolutionary theory, yes? And further examples of an animal reacting to stress by provoking more stress.

moss and gender

So if you're like me, you've often thought "Why am I not more like moss?" The possibilities of being hydrostatic aside, why are our gametes so pathetic? Why don't they live independent lives?

Note to self. Write science fiction with characters who can be completely dehydrated and revived. Also, with gametes that pull their own weight.

The cheery answer is that sometimes human gametes do. Recall high school sex education, where they explained that sperm contain a chemical that causes girls to fall in love? That is a lie and I did not know that until just now! I swear I have other examples!

Right. When the sperm and the egg fuse, some proteins from the gametes are still present. These proteins have startling effects on placental and embryo development. Sperm proteins determine the degree of implantation of the placenta- its ability to obtain nutrients from the bloodstream. (This is one of the major problems with egg fusion. No egg is going to encourage aggressive nutrient use on the part of the embryo. ) Egg proteins determine head size.

Oh, but that's not really gamete function at all- we want to anthropomorphize our gametes whilst they are still alive. Fine, fine, here. It's an article on how men will someday become extinct!

Except they won't. At least, not until everyone else does.

You'll have to excuse my terrible lack of citations here- all my science books are in storage. While Google is great, it cannot search for "that thing about 3/4 of the way through the book, next to the mostly green illustration". As a quick refresher- all eggs have an X chromosome. The chromosome present in the sperm (X or Y) will determine the gender of the embryo (female or male). Thus, most males have XY, most females have XX, and intersex persons have a dizzying array of possible chromosomal and hormonal variations. When fertilization occurs, there's a swap meet among the chromosomes- known as crossing over. This has less impact on the person who will get these genes than previously thought- you use all your DNA- but it makes a big difference to that person's offspring, because they get only the one copy. Oh genes, always thinking ahead.

The article above states that as Y chromosomes cannot recombine, single detrimental alleles are not exposed to selective pressure and eliminated. As such, most of the Y is nasty junk DNA, with only a cheery SRY (order: make testicles!) gene cluster maintaining some level of professionalism. (But there's evidence that they can recombine with themselves. Cool.) Since the DNA on Y chromosomes is crap, they are steadily shrinking. Soon they will vanish!

Well, okay. They'll vanish as soon as the SRY gene cluster moves to another chromosome. And all of the Y chromosome data becomes useless. Then males as we know them will vanish, as the genes that make them male will be on a different chromosome. (Italics for sarcasm.)

But we've strayed from our discussion about gamete adventures.

All living DNA is mutating at a steady rate. Since there are three times as many X chromosomes as there are Y chromosomes, X chromosomes have more time to experiment. (This is one of my favorite evolution facts. Larger populations mean a higher chance of an interesting mutation. Higher survival rates mean a smaller likelihood that the awesome will be lost due to random chance. This is why I am a liberal: because social supports might foster cool mutations.) Every so often, an X chromosome will decide that it can't trust a chromosome it can't recombine with- so all eggs containing this X chromosome will reject all sperm with Y chromosomes. Think of those amazon eggs, rejecting the possibility of becoming male! The excitement!

That's my gamete adventures Hail Mary pass. Sometimes eggs reject sperm with Y chromosomes. One of these shows up about once every... million years.

But let's think about the implications! The mutation can arise in a male, but after the first male passes it along to his daughters, there will be no males with that gene. (Well, until the magical circumstances that I'll talk about later.) Without males passing along this X chromosome, there can't be females who are homozygous for the trait. Thus, even if the gene gives you superhuman speed and the ability to eat rocks, it can't be present in more than 50% of all eggs. You'd end up with a male to female ratio of about 1:3. And what an advantage to the X chromosome! A 50% increase in available carriers! After a few generations as a zero sum gene, becoming 50% of all the mammals in a population!

But maybe a plucky sperm (with a Y) gets hit by a magic bolt of cosmic radiation. It's enough to knock off the DNA that marks it as a possessor of a Y chromosome, so it manages to fertilize an amazon egg. The resulting dude is a biological jackpot. Since his sons can carry the amazon gene, their daughters can be homozygous for that trait. Their sons will have the magic Y chromosome by default. Sperm from any other source is quietly selected against, because an ever growing portion of the population will be unable to bear sons with the old Y. Soon, everyone is a descendant of this dude. He wasn't even that awesome. (Everyone is also a descendant of the first person with the amazon X)

Man, that's another great science fiction short story. Oh, and platypus gender is freaky.

So this process has happened several times in our past. Every time, we've shaved a little bit more off the Y chromosome. Right now it is tiny. It's basically the SRY gene complex (testicles!) the SRY gene complex upside down, in case recombining is gonna happen, and about 50 million base pairs of mad ramblings. (The X has 150 million base pairs that code for things like blood clotting and color vision.) In the future, there will probably be further shaving of those mad ramblings. If the next amazon X recognizes the SRY complex as the marker of Y-ness, then we'll end up with that old 3:1 gender ratio. There can be no magic supersperm to remedy that, because the resulting person will have no sperm.

Unless the SRY complex is swapped to a different gene. See above sarcasm.

My, this is a long post.

What advantage do the other chromosomes gain by letting the X chromosome be picky about what sperm to accept? Well, at one time there were lots of human like things wandering around so it paid to be choosy about which sperm to accept. Mammalian hybrids don't survive very well- another way that moss is cooler than us- and since female mammals bear almost the entire cost of producing babies, X chromosomes in eggs were under significant pressure to reject dicey sperm.

One last thing. Over the last five million years, we've shaved 100 base pairs off the Y chromosome. The thousands of genes that once separated males and females have been reduced to less than ten. Human males are basically ladies with testicles.

C and I debate about this all the time. That's why I make him look at orangutans when we are at the zoo.

The Grandmother Hypothesis

So there seems to be mild to moderate interest in me rattling off about evolutionary psychology. I'm going to make an effort to separate my own musings from what I've learned- but in some cases, the whole thing's gotten mixed up. Thus, citations.

The grandmother hypothesis is a theory that addresses the conundrum of female longevity. Males can keep producing sperm into their second century, but a female giving birth after 50 is rare. Old Darwinism holds that if an organism can no longer reproduce, there isn't really any point in continuing to survive- so why do women live years and years past menopause- and on average, much longer than men?

One very popular theory is that grandmothers- and to some measure both sets of grandparents- increase the chances that children will survive. Another pair of eyes can keep someone from toddling into a sink hole, another pair of arms can carry around a miserably sick baby for a few essential hours, another pair of eyes can find some tasty treats, and another mind can remember and teach all sorts of skills.

There's a corollary to this theory; post menopausal women are frikkin' juggernauts. Since there's no longer any need to keep the body able to reproduce, they can drive themselves so very very hard and sacrifice everything for the good of their offspring. Recall how pTerry said there were entire civilizations based on the lifting power of little old ladies in black dresses? This explains why the only sport where women have an advantage over men is ultramarathons, where ladies in their fifties hold many of the crazier records. This explains why your mother is so much more productive than you are.

Everyone loves this theory, both because it makes intuitive sense and because it emphasizes those traits we admire in ourselves. Unfortunately, evidence is thin. It's pretty difficult to separate children who survived because grandma was around from children who survived because they had awesome genes, as did grandma- the proof that they are awesome is that she was still around.

An early experiment (not mentioned in the wiki article, but in my evolution textbook) looked at records of Canadian frontier families during the 19th and early 20th century. This is a wonderful combination of excellent record keeping with a horrible environment for children. As an illustration let's use the Little House books which are set immediately to the south; in the Dakotas, Minnesota, Kansas, and Wisconsin. After Laura and co. leave the extended family, everyone gets malaria- including the pregnant mother, and then a few years later everyone gets scarlet fever. They lose an infant during the scarlet fever, and an opportunistic infection gives the eldest child cataracts, leaving her blind. Then there's the long winter, where they nearly starve. The Ingalls had five children, four who survived to adulthood; one is blind, two are weak and sickly, and only Laura manages to reproduce. Shortly after her first child is born, her husband gets mumps and becomes sterile. (To her eternal fury, that child decided not to marry.) The frigid plains were not a happy place to raise a family. But this study found when a grandmother lived within 2 miles, there were on average .6 more children per family, and an increased survival rate of 11%. It's pretty solid evidence that grandmother presence and infant survival are at least correlated. (Oh, more Little House examples. While the original family has zero descendants, the siblings of Ma and Pa who stayed near Grandma and Grandpa have a couple hundred descendants today.)

So everyone was happy and excited, and decided to do more experiments. And blast, it doesn't seem to work anywhere else. The Hazda post menopausal women work very hard, and share freely with their offspring- but there's no increase in offspring survival. And there was a recent large scale study where living grandmothers are correlated with a decrease granddaughter infant mortality, but increase infant mortality in grandsons. There was some kerfluffel about murderous paternal grannies- clearing the way for granddaughters because they share more DNA. There's not a lot of evidence for it, but there isn't really another theory for post menopausal survival either.

Let's talk about the decreased grandson fitness study! Decreasing the fitness of someone who shares 23% of your DNA seems dumb, but I'm an optimist. I'm pretty sure LeeLee (my grandmother) preferred the brother to me. She quite liked the idea of a clever granddaughter who wanted to become a botanist, but she had real affection for the quiet child who was a dab hand at bridge. (Tiny, tiny sample size. Please yell at me for bad science.)

Here's my sciencey rationalization that explains the results: say you have a gene for resistance to viruses or mental alertness or extracting rare nutrients. There's a really common version that works fantastically 99% of the time. There's a rarer version that works 90% of the time. If you have two copies of the common one, you'll be just fine 99% of the time you need to use that gene. If you have two copies of the rare one, you're stuck with 90%. If you have both- called heterosis- then 99.9% of the time, you will win. (By win I mean not die.)

What does this have to do with the previous study? Well, if this gene is on the X chromosome, grandma can be heterozygous at our theoretical allele and probably live longer than average. If a granddaughter is also heterozygous there should be a similar boost in survival. However, some grandsons could have the less awesome version of the gene, and are sadly missing a second copy of 1/26th of their DNA. It sucks to be a dude.

I think my next post will probably be on that.

At least I got it out of the bookstore...

Fifteen posts in January, two in February. That's the sort of trend we want to see.

So I went to San Diego last week to see... people without nicknames. What should I call y'all? It was lots of fun- C got to hang out with a former roommate and play video games and bicker in loud voices, I found someone else who follows my feminazi blogs; there was a dog with exceptionally soft ears and good food and slow lorrises and a tortoise fight. Also I bought some books. (Shocker)

One of these books is Madame Bovary's Ovaries- it's about how classic literature reflects things we've found about evolutionary psychology. It sounds like a worthy premise, but the book is terrible. There are no end notes, for starters.

Shouldn't such a book have a decent understanding of the literature discussed? I've read five Dickens novels- not one has a secret relative aiding the main character. The author states that this is the unifying theme in Dickens- like matrimony in Austen. Speaking of Austen- there are many ways to interpret Mr. Darcy arranging Lydia and Wickham's marriage, but I don't think his protective instincts towards children even enter the picture. There's an early 20th century theme where women discover that they are more than objects- please do not summarize that as ladies being happier when banging rockin' dudes. Let's just assume I yelled about sexism for about five minutes there.

I'm not even going to get into what he said about Lolita and menstruation.

The science is really formulaic. Did you know that adolescent males often disagree with their fathers? Did you know that males freak out about paternity? Did you know that stepparents and children often do not get along? Did you know that science has a reason for this? I was hoping for new concepts.

For instance, why not illustrate the grandmother principle using the Little House series? When the Ingalls live near their extended family little favors- like maple sugar, rennet, and help with the harvest- are constantly being passed around. During this period, all the children survive, no one becomes blinded or consumptive, and they eat things besides wild game and cracked wheat. Oh, and Proust survives with his genteel poor parents because his grandparents take them in. Grandmothers are similarly important to child survival in Toni Morrison and I, Claudius. (They survive. What more do you want?)

If you're going to talk about Austen, why blather about hypergamy? When you are poor, it is a good idea to marry a rich person. Duh. Why not talk about resource concentration due to primogeniture? It's one of the hidden themes of early European literature- generations of people willing to abandon most of their children so that a few can continue to be rich.

Why not talk about different theories for the survival of homosexual traits? Of forming complex social networks as safety lines, instead of just marrying the right dude? Of the advantages a female reaps due to cuckolding her mate, rather than just the disadvantages to the mate? Of limiting the number of offspring one has, delaying the date where one starts bearing offspring, and allowing bachelors and spinsters? Of generous uncles who neglect their own children?

My biggest pet peeve is in the mate selection chapter. He refers to what sounds like a fascinating study- comparisons of desired traits in mates across several cultures. I'd love to read more: please see no damn end notes. The author goes on and on about how males in most cultures seek young, attractive females, and females seek wealthy, high status males. He cheerfully explains that because of this dichotomy the war between the sexes will never be resolved and it is foolish to try. Then he states another finding from the survey to prove a point about the bitter rules society forces us to live by. Apparently every single culture has two traits that both sexes place in the top three traits one seeks in a mate: intelligence and kindness. Damn society for punishing us for stealing and cheating and driving drunk! The man is keeping us down!

Hold that little factoid in your hearts, chickens. Throughout the world, a majority prefers mates who know not to poke sleeping rhinos with sticks and are pleasant enough to let others know this is a bad idea. I have a friend (not, I think, a reader of this blog) who constantly bitches about how he can't get a girlfriend because he's short and doesn't have a shiny car. Dude. Dude. You lost your last girlfriend because you mocked her religion all the time, told stories about getting high at her work parties, and drove you both deep into debt buying coffee and computer games. You lost your last girlfriend because you weren't smart enough to think these were asshole things to do.

Keep in mind that nearly a hundred years of evolutionary psych was written by men- only now are we seeing papers on the terrible physical costs of motherhood to mammals, the other side of harem infanticide, and the benefits of mating with low status males.

Oooo, I think I'm supposed to talk about wedding dress shopping next week