Page 44: Fruit Flies

Evolution speeds vary a lot.

Elephants come to sexual maturity late, have a very long gestation period, and generally stay within a tight social framework. The opportunity for new genes to be introduced to the pool is limited by social bonds and relatively infrequent reproduction holds down the number of mutations. In other words, Elephants will tend to evolve slowly.

On the other extreme, consider the fruit fly. The female fruit fly reaches sexual maturity in 8-12 hours. About 7 days later, she will produce a new generation. Not only that, she will mate with multiple males, producing a sort-of "proportional representation" set of offspring of mixed genetic material. There's a lot of mixing and there are a lot of babies. That means there are lots of new genetic combinations and lots of mutations. In other words, fruit flies evolve very quickly. This makes them useful.

Scientists like three things about the fruit fly. First, their genes are relatively simple and easy to manipulate; second, they produce new generations very quickly; and, third, there aren't a lot of activists marching around with signs that read "save the fruit fly".

I got the fruit fly example from Matt Ridley's great book The Agile Gene, in which he talks about the fruit fly several times. The story he tells in the chapter Learning Lessons (page 180 of the paperback) is fascinating.

Did you know fruit flies can learn? Scientists at CalTech figured this out by spraying a smelly chemical at a box full of fruit flies right before electrifying a metal plate on which the flies were sitting. This may sound cruel, but, hey, they are only fruit flies (see what I mean about the activists?). The scientists found out that some of the fruit flies were able to learn that when they smelled the bad smell they better get flying or else get shocked.

But not all the fruit flies learned. The scientists observed that a fruit fly had to have specific genes (17 of them) in order to remember the link between the stink and the shock. The genes make it possible for the fruit flies to learn, but they don't contain any information. The learning comes from the shocking. Both the genes and the experience are necessary. The shocking experience causes certain neurons to weld together (using a protein made possible by the genes) in a specific part of the fruit fly's brain. It is the whole system of genes-proteins-neurons-brain that enables the fruit fly to recall that the stink and the shock are linked. The system "hard-wires" the memory into the fly's brain.

The breeding characteristics of the fruit fly made this scientific discovery possible. Because of the fast fruit fly lifecycle, it was possible to breed a few flies, see which ones can learn, separate them, then breed them again. After a few generations (a couple of weeks), you have "pure" learners and pure, well, dunces. It's really cool. It's what nature does, only on fast-forward.

Meanwhile, in a separate experiment, some other scientists had inserted a mutant gene in some flies. Believe it or not, this mutation made it so that a particular fly would be paralyzed in hot weather. Literally, at 20 degrees C the fly is perfectly fine, at 30 degrees C, it drops from the sky. Amazing.

Then they combined the two experiments. The scientists switched the heat-sensitive paralyzing gene from the part of the brain that controls motion to the part of the brain that controls memory. So now their flies could fly in hot weather, but couldn't use the memory parts of their brains that had been hard-wired with the stink-shock memory. Sure enough, in cool weather the flies remembered the implications of a bad smell and in hot weather they got shocked. Astounding.

So, basically, they used fruit flies to prove that memories get permanently or temporarily "hard wired" in our heads by specific proteins generated by specific genes. And it was all made possible by our friend the frisky, fast-evolving fruit fly.

Page 23: Feathers also tickle

Because Old Blood has feathers in it and I had to pretend that I didn't know what their significance would ultimately be, I came to find out about "Acarophilia" the same way as the detectives: I looked it up on the internet. At first, I was afraid to click on any links for fear of poisoning my computer, but then quickly realized that 99% of all tickling out there is harmless.

I was more amazed that the study of tickling has become a bit of a science. It's funny how we, as a species, have decided that everything can be turned into science. We give out federal grants to study practically anything to which we can give a Latin-sounding name. The Wikipedia entry on tickle fetishism is hilariously deadpan.  Here's the deadly serious "terminology" section from the entry:


Knismolagnia is the experience of sexual gratification from the act of tickling. Acarophilia, a related term, refers to a general love of tickling and being tickled, but doesn't necessarily have any sexual or fetishist component to it.

Excessive tickling has been described as a primary sexual obsession and, under these circumstances, is sometimes considered a form of paraphilia.^[2] People whose sexuality is based almost solely on tickling can be said to have a tickling fixation. This fixation may also exist outside of sexual contexts.

(here is the link to the whole article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tickling_fetishism)

Next time you tickle a baby's chin (and enjoy the baby's little saliva-bubbly giggles), know that your condition has a name. You are an Acarophiliac! I am! We should form a group!

But then, in the dark of night, you remember that in high school you had those dark desires to give that other person a back rub or a tickle. That definitely wasn't an innocent urge. You can wonder whether you had slipped over into Knismolagnia. You can say to yourself: "I'm pretty sure that I'm okay, but, well, you know... I'm at least very sure I'm not fixated."

Speaking of fixations, there really are clubs and conventions where people get together to tickle. There are "Footnights" and "Ticklenights" and, in London, "Slap and Tickle" nights. Wikipedia even mentions a real television show in Brazil about "tickle games". Fair warning: Some of those links might not look so good in your browser's "history" section.

As I mention in Old Blood, most of it seems pretty harmless. In fact, it's kinda funny. I dare you not to laugh along with this YouTube video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_wh9--WtR4&feature=PlayList&p=41DBA716A7287302&index=0

I hope we all find something that lets us laugh this hard this weekend!

Page 187: Malthusian forces

The source for much of Rhiannon's discussion of Malthusian forces is a book called A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World by Gregory Clark.

The book starts with a blockbuster statement:
"Before 1800 income per person -- the food, clothing, heat, light, and housing per head -- varied across societies and epochs. But there was no upward trend."

Think about that for a second. For all of human history to 1800, there was no economic progress.  "Life expectancy was no higher in 1800 than for hunter-gatherers". Human stature "a measure of both the quality of the diet and of children's exposure to disease, was higher in the stone age than in 1800."

But what about all the progress humanity made? What about the cave paintings and Beowulf and Galileo? We invented art and did some nice things in science, but through all of it we -- as a whole -- were no better off. According to Clark, any "culture" that was created in human history before 1800 was only a result of societal inequality. Inequalities were brought about by the replacement of a hunter-gatherer economy with an agricultural one.

Here's how it worked:

Hunter-gatherers are egalitarian, everyone shares the work. Therefore, nobody really has any free time. Suppose a hunter-gatherer society comes up with an efficiency improvement that frees up 5% of its time. That would mean everybody in the tribe gets about 36 minutes of extra free time in a day. That could result in a picture of a buffalo scratched onto the wall of a cave, but it's not enough time to paint the Mona Lisa or think through General Relativity. As a result of a simple economic reality, hunter-gatherer societies never made much cultural progress.

The shift to agriculture changed the dynamic. First, "collective productivity" went out the window. Because specific production could be tied to specific land, it quickly became clear who was a good farmer and who was a bad one. Next came specialization of labor. Specific agricultural tasks lent themselves to the development of experts ("I've got the plow, get out of my way."). Measurable productivity and demonstrable expertise are the death of egalitarianism. The person that created 1000 ears of corn was clearly more valuable to society than the guy who produced 50 ears. It's as simple as that. One might say the main reason we aren't egalitarian today is not due to some societal flaw but rather that we just aren't equal, but that's another subject. The point is, productivity in an agricultural system tended to create inequality. Inequality creates culture and science. A 5% increase in productivity in an agricultural society of 1000 people doesn't free up 36 minutes for everybody, it frees up 50 people to do other things (or nothing). Those people had enough time to think and to paint. The only reason that we had Archimedes and Newton and Leonardo is that somebody else was suffering through the hard work required to feed them.

But, as Clark amply demonstrates in his book, humanity overall wasn't becoming more productive at all. We were just shifting things around. Leonardo had a nice, cultured life but the flip side was that his luxury was bought by 19 people living less well than they would have as hunter-gatherers. We were caught in the "Malthusian Trap".

Malthus, in a nutshell, observed that population and living standards (wealth) were constantly at war with each other. If there are few people and lots of food, the people are healthy and happy and they make more people. Once there are lots of people, they each get less food and are less healthy and less happy and they die, or their babies die, so there are fewer people. Once there are fewer people, there's more food... That's the trap. For millions of years an increase in population resulted in a lowering of living standards that in turn limited the population. It had always been that way.

Then, suddenly, around 1800, it all changed. But more on that later...

Page 13: MORT POUR LA PATRIE

Below is a picture from Wikimedia Commons of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier that sits beneath the Arc de Triomphe in Paris that plays a role in an early scene in Old Blood:

The eternal flame is in that pot at the top. The flaming sword on a shield is an interesting image for later...

Page 296: Clarke's Third Law

Science Fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke put forth, eventually, four laws about the future and technology. The most famous is the third:

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Clarke put forth the law in his 1961 essay Profiles of the Future. Since then, other authors have added things and even inverted it (Niven's law, for example, states that any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.)

I preferred to look at it a different way in Old Blood: What happens when magic is exposed as being "only" technology?

In some cases, it is only natural. Take, for example, things like electric trains. When I was a child, electric trains were magic. They ran all on their own! Then, of course, Atari came along and suddenly trains just went around in a circle (no longer magic). The Space Invaders were magic! They moved on their own and shot at you. Now, of course, there are iPod Touches...

The old "magic" gets packed in a box, perhaps brought out at Christmas for nostalgic purposes.

But the electric trains are just a sad story. What about what I think of as the "Wizard of Oz" problem? What happens when you find out that the guy who proclaimed himself in charge based on his magic "just" has technology? I always wondered what happened after Dorothy went home. Did the people of the Emerald City say "Hey, wait a minute, you're not a real wizard... Get him!"

Think of all the generations of shamans and medicine men and illusionists who drew social power from their "magic". Think of all the ritual sacrifices they made, all the tribute they demanded... It might inspire some revenge from the populace!

For millenia, the ability to, say, predict an eclipse could make someone the queen. What happens to her when her subjects find out that it was "only" math and not magic? Broadly, there are only two options: Repression or revolution.

Repression happens if the queen tries to cling to power despite the loss of "magic". Without magic on the queen's side, she has to use force to keep the aggrieved population in check. If there is revolution, well, the queen typically loses her head...

Page 269: Going by the book

When Azza refers to "the book" in this passage, he means the Book of Revelation, authored by John the Revelator (aka, John of Patmos) in the first century AD.

For those, like me, who didn't learn all this in Sunday School, below please find a nickel tour of the Revelation:

First, a bit of background. John the Revelator is the third important John in the Bible, following John the Baptist and John the Disciple. The three together give a certain structure to the overall story of the gospels. John the Baptist foretold the Christ story and put in place many critical rituals. John the Disciple participated in the Christ story and gave the "insider's view" in his gospel. And John the Revelator foretells the end of the story, so to speak, when the Lamb (thought to be Christ) gathers to him his chosen and the rest of humankind,well, dies.

The dying part is pretty fascinating. The meat of the story begins in Revelation chapter 5, where a being sits on a throne holding a book. The book is held closed by seven seals. Nobody is able to open the book until the Lion of David appears (in the form of a slain lamb) to do it. By Revelation 6, after much beholding and worshiping, the Lamb begins to open the seals.

The first four seals release the four horses of the Apocalypse. Seal 1 releases the white horse of conquest, which is commonly believed to be pestilence. Seal 2 releases the red horse, who is to "take peace from the earth"; commonly interpreted to mean war. Seal 3 releases the black horse commonly believed to represent famine. Seal 4 sets free the pale horse, clearly identified as Death. For all the fame of the "four horsemen of the Apocalypse", the text doesn't actually say that they do very much damage. The mayhem is reserved for the angels that come later.

The story steps up a notch when Seal 6 is broken. There is an earthquake, a mighty wind, the moon looks as blood, and the stars of heaven fall to earth. At the breaking of Seal 6, the "day of his wrath has come".

In Revelation chapter 7, four angels appear at the corners of the earth and another one powerful one appears in the middle, who tells the other four to "hurt not the earth" until some of the humans are "sealed" or marked as chosen to be survivors. Revelation 7 makes clear that 12,000 people will be chosen from 12 different tribes, for 144,000 total.

After that, if you'll pardon the expression, all hell breaks loose. In Revelation chapter 8, the Lamb breaks Seal 7 and more angels appear, including 7 who hold trumpets. Angel 1 blows his trumpet and there follows a hail of fire and blood that burns up a third of the trees and grass. Angel 2 blows and a mountain of fire falls into the ocean, turning a third of the waters to blood. Angel 3 turns one-third of the fresh water to poison. Angel 4 dims the light of the sun, moon, and stars by a third.

As if all that might pass without comment, another angel flies into the picture. In John's vision, there comes "an angel flying through the midst of heaven, saying with a loud voice, Woe, woe, woe, to the inhabiters of the earth by reason of the other voices of the trumpet of the three angels, which are yet to sound!" So, according to Revelation 8, the three remaining angels are the really bad ones.

And so they are. Angel 5 blows his trumpet and a star falls from the sky, opening a bottomless pit. From the pit emerges a swarm of locusts ("like unto scorpions") under orders to attack any human without the mark of the seal (i.e., one of the chosen 144,000). But the locusts are instructed not to kill, but rather just torment the humans.

Angel 6 begins the killing. When the sixth trumpet is blown four angels are summoned with orders to reduce the human population by a third. They do so by setting loose a large army of 200,000 mounted soldiers. They, as you might imagine, do a lot of damage, mainly with the fire and brimstone coming out of their mouths.

The survivors get to live a little longer, but not much. In Revelation 10, the sound of Angel 7's trumpet indicates that "there should be time no longer" and that the "the mystery of God should be finished".  So endeth the world that we know.

Beyond Revelation chapter 10 there is more detail, involving serpents and women and vials of wrath, but more on that later...

Page 53: Faravahar

Bird people are an important lead for the detectives in Old Blood. They have been symbols of power and righteousness for thousands of years.

An earlier post discussed the Queen of the Night, Ishtar, also known as, Inanna, Aphrodite, etc. Another in the rich history of bird-people is the Persian godlike figure known as the Faravahar. The Faravahar, like the Queen of the Night, is a relatively normal-looking human with wings (see below).

The Faravahar is associated with Zoroastrianism, which is based on the teachings and philosophies of the great prophet Zoroaster.

Zoroaster, to quote Tom Holland from the very good history Persian Fire, was the "man who had first revealed to a startled world that it was the battleground in a relentless war between good and evil." He was also unique in his vision that "the cosmos would not keep revolving forever, as had always been assumed, but move instead towards a mighty end, a universal apocalypse where Truth would annihilate all falsehoods."

The two great actors in Zoroaster's play are Ahura Mazda, the force for truth, and Angra Mainyu, the force for chaos and untruth. Caught between the two forces, Zoroaster believed humans get to exercise their free will to do either good or evil.

Which brings us to the Faravahar. The Faravahar is literally or, rather, etymologically, a guardian angel that
helps people navigate the space between good and evil. Most notably, the Faravahar confers legitimacy on the leaders of the people, reassuring the people that they are in good hands or bringing destruction to the illegitimate ruler. As a result, Persian rulers throughout time have sought to associate themselves with the Faravahar as a sort of seal of approval. Darius went to far as to have a Faravahar carved into the side of a mountain along the all-important Khorasan Highway to legitimize his illegitimate seizure of power.

It is quite a monument. See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behistun_Inscription

So the ancients have "created" for us another bird-person in a position of power. Hmmmm...

Page 79: Windtalkers

Here is a timely article on the Windtalkers (referred to here as Code Talkers):

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091110/ap_on_re_us/us_navajo_code_talkers

Windtalkers, as is discussed in the article, are Navajo tribesmen who served as living Enigma machines, coding and decoding messages spoken over the radio in "real time" for American soldiers in World War II.  They performed this valuable service simply by speaking to each other in their rare and unwritten language. A rare and unwritten language is an unbreakable code -- unless you get someone who speaks the language, then it's easy.

As Hannah learns in Old Blood, breaking codes is an exercise in both linguistics and mathematics. Simon Singh's book The Code Book lays it all out perfectly, but I will attempt to convey the gist below.

The oldest codes are called "substitution cyphers" and consist of taking one letter or word and substituting it with another. If all j's are made k's and all o's made into p's, etc., my name would be kpio. These codes can be very useful, but are vulnerable to the limitations placed by the character set of the base language. Simply put, English uses a lot of e's. So, if confronted with a substitution code, you count up all the letters used. The most common one is probably e. There are frequency tables that help you guess what letter has been substituted for what. It's really just a matter of counting, then trying combinations until you get something readable. The perfect job for a computer.

Regarding the Windtalkers, because Navajo was an unwritten language, there was no character set, so no amount of substitution fiddling could crack the code.

Stronger codes use more complex modes of substitution that defy character analysis, but the weakness of all codes is that they ultimately say something comprehensible. The simplest way to crack a stronger code is to figure out what a message must be saying and work backwards. Nazis in World War II would radio the weather report to their U-boats. This practice had the double-weakness of being logical and being repetitive. If it was a sunny day all over the Atlantic, then that string of numbers or letters that was in every message sent out that day probably meant "sunny". From that linguistic insight the mathematics take over. If one is able to figure out how the code for "sunny" was derived, then it is possible to unravel an entire code and unveil more important matters.

That's why the more colorful practice of code names came about. It wouldn't matter if the allies figured out that messages were repeating the word "Barbarossa", because even if they cracked the code they would still have no idea what "Barbarossa" meant. Take it a step further and create a nonsense word that means something important. "XlFlip3fj" is a great code word because, even if a computer decoded it, it might not know it decoded it. This is why password protected websites want you to choose words that aren't in the dictionary, it denies the codebreaker an "aha" moment.

Which brings us back around to the Windtalkers: The only threat to the Navajo code was the weather-report method discussed above. The trick with the Windtalkers was to come up with Navajo words or phrases for the key things they needed to talk about that didn't repeat all the time. The Windtalkers cleverly came up with descriptions for things like the word "bomber" that conveyed the meaning without becoming repetitive. Linguistics ultimately trumped math: "Bird of destruction", "bringer of explosives", "death from the sky", etc. all describe the bomber without becoming a code giveaway. Without a Windtalker of their own, the Japanese had no chance of knowing what the Americans were planning.

In Old Blood, the detectives face an unknown character set written in an unknown language on an unknown subject. There's nothing there to work with. They need a Windtalker.

Page 125: The Queen of the Night

Once known, less evocatively, as the "Burney Relief", the Queen of the Night is an incredibly interesting artifact housed in an otherwise sort of dry room at the British Museum.

The Queen of the Night dates from the second millennium BC (~1800 BC) and depicts the goddess Ishtar, also known as Inanna, Astarte and other names (more on Ishtar later). The Queen of the Night, quite clearly, has wings and a, ahem, robust figure.

The big question, to me, is "why are so many of the early gods and goddesses bird-people?" Especially the most powerful ones? Of course, the rational mind says, it is only natural that ancient people would meld human traits with those of powerful, wonderful, magical animals when "creating" gods and goddesses. The same way that we modern humans tend to make bad aliens look like scary bugs. But have you actually looked at our modern scary aliens? They often ARE bugs (or, otherwise, elongated or foreshortened people). We really show very little imagination at all, we just computer-render what we see.

How about the ancients? Were the ancient carvers imagining things, or just creating portraits?

Here's the official article on the Queen:
http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/me/t/queen_of_the_night_relief.aspx

Page 214: An unauthorized drive through Belgrave Square Gardens

Belgrave Square is a beautiful place surrounded by beautiful buildings. In the center is a 10-acre garden reserved for the private use of local "keyholders", who pay for the privilege. Similar to Burton's Court (page 2), it looks like a public park but it isn't.

The unfortunate events that occur in the gardens, including the unforgivable frightening of the tennis players, happen along  the path described here:

The land is owned by The Duke of Westminster. The area, while developed from a cesspit in the early 1800s, is incredibly posh. Though much of it has changed to commercial use, there are a few private homes. This one, #10, was on sale in 2009 for a mere 100 million pounds!
http://property.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/property/buying_and_selling/article6075239.ece

Page 20: CCR-5 Receptor Mutation

Without doubt, my favorite things to write in Old Blood were the genetic discussions. I just love them. I wish I could write books on it, like Matt Ridley. His book, Genome, is a perspective changer.

The CCR-5 mutation is an incredibly cool thing that didn't really get a lot of space in the book. So here is a more straightforward telling of the tale:

The way to think about the mutation is this: If you thoroughly spray a nest of, say, 1000 cockroaches with a particular poison and 3 or 4 survive the treatment, what you have neatly done is find the 3 or 4 cockroaches that are immune to the poison. Bingo, you've committed evolution! You have, in a moment of poisonous spray, selected for a particular genetic trait. If the 3 or 4 cockroaches go on to make some baby cockroaches, most or all of their offspring will also be immune to the poison because they inherit the immunity gene from their parents.

The beautifully ironic thing about our 3 or 4 cockroaches is that their immunity gene was probably a reproductive mistake, a flaw, or, more colorfully, a mutation. A mutation that saved their lives.

On a much larger scale, the waves of disease that have washed through the human population, including the black death, cholera, and small pox have acted just like the roach poison above. They, by and large, killed almost everybody that wasn't at least partially immune. Because there wasn't advanced medical care back then, the diseases made a fairly "clean sweep" of the non-immune.

The immunity in humans was likely conferred by a mutation in a receptor, sort of like a door, through which infections sneak into cells. In other words, a few people had a flaw, a mutation, in their CCR-5 receptor. Their flaw was their savior. Correction, the mutation was OUR savior, because if you are of European descent you likely share the mutation. Most of us are mutants.

And we are lucky, for it was not a skill that enabled our ancestors to survive, but rather a lucky genetic break. But isn't all talent some form of genetic lucky break? A big question for human society is whether something that is subject to inheritance and probability is a legitimate differentiator. We tend to be okay with hard work: If hard work made you wealthy you get a smattering of applause. On the other hand, we tend to dislike luck and absolutely loathe inheritance. Many argue that because wealth is often tied to inheritance or luck rather than skill or hard work that confiscatory taxation is justified. Or consider another example, does the inherited hardiness of your genetic stock entitle you to a lifetime of reduced medical costs, or should you pay your "fair share" despite your "innate talent" for surviving disease? What about intelligence? When we all have to get on a spaceship to escape the asteroid, does being "lucky" enough to be smart guarantee you a spot on board? After all, to be smart is to have, at least in part, inherited good genes. These are difficult questions.

Equally difficult is the question of biodiversity. What if our 3 or 4 surviving cockroaches are highly allergic to, something they haven't yet encountered, say, pine nuts? What if being allergic to pine nuts was somehow related to their ability to survive the poison? The lucky survivors would carry a valuable immunity but also a fatal flaw that might not allow them to survive their first contact with pine nuts.  Their luck with poison could be placing them a moment away from extinction.

To wit, what if all the professor-types we shoot into space are too weak to move the big rocks on Planet X. Oops, we should have sent some other folks, too. It's hard to know in advance what will aid survival. Genetic selection is HIGHLY subject to the laws of unintended consequences. [This will form a big part of Bad Blood, on which I am working now.]

Some scientists believe the modern phenomenon of allergies (which have demonstrably gotten more intense over the centuries) is related to diseases such as cholera. The survivors of cholera had an incredibly sensitive, some might say jumpy, immune system that reacted quickly to fight the disease. Those hyper immune systems now go off like alarm bells at the first sign of invasion by, well, pollen. So what was once a BIG blessing is now a minor curse. But it is still working for us, even if we are all sniffly.

Speaking of working for us, it is also thought that CCR-5 mutation is offering at least partial protection against HIV, which may explain why the disease has been more prevalent in Africa and Asia than in Europe or the United States. Another lucky break.

So being lucky is good, luck got us here alive. And now? Embrace your flaws, they may save your life someday.

Page 28: The Basque History of the World

The Basque History of the World, by Mark Kurlansky, is a great book.  It is one of those books that proves that if you move your lens a little bit and look at history from a different angle, it is possible to draw very different conclusions from what you've seen.  It's a perspective changer.

Kurlansky has also written two other, somewhat related, perspective changers: Cod and Salt.  Salt was the first one that I read, and for me it was a mind-bending experience.  In a nutshell, Salt makes a persuasive argument that the pursuit of salt created the modern world.  Back in the day, people in a local area were fairly self-sufficient because almost everything they knew enough to want was locally available.  Then somebody figured out that salt could be used to preserve food.  Suddenly, salt was in high demand.  But salt was not generally available, it only came from specific places.  To get salt, people without salt had to dream up stuff that the people with salt wanted so that they could trade.  Poof! there was a market.  While there had always been trade, it had always been sort of optional -- "hey, that's a nice little bowl, how about I give you this knife for it" or "I'm sick of rice, how about I swap you for some of that wheat".  But with salt, it was different.  People felt they needed salt.  Anyway, the historical string played itself out and everything in modern history, up to and including the ShamWow, can be, more or less, traced back to salt.

I closed the book and said to myself, "nobody ever mentioned salt to me in school."  There was this irreducibly simple concept out there that explains so much, and it was practically a secret.  I wondered if there were other simple secrets out there of similar import.

The Basques, as Kurlansky obviously saw, are a similar story.  They have been deeply involved in all sorts of seriously humanity-changing things and nobody ever really talks about them.  They were probably the first Europeans in America (they were chasing Cod, which is one of the most important factors in the development of the United States), as mercenaries they helped build the Roman Empire, as evangelists they were critical to the growth of the Catholic Church, the list goes on.

But the Basques are difficult to explain:  They are genetically distinct from Europeans, their language is ancient and unique, and their culture is highly distinctive.  The rumors Dudley refers to (Lost Tribe of Israel, the Euskera language being spoken in the Garden of Eden) are true rumors, if not necessarily true facts.  What is certainly true is that the Basque culture is very, very old and relatively unspoiled.  It gives us some clues to humanity's "original nature".  But not very clear or consistent clues.

As Kurlansky says, the Basques are an enigma.  But most enigmas are fun to think about but irrelevant.  The Basques are a relevant enigma.  If for no other reason than the fact that their struggles have always reflected those of the wider world.  As Kurlansky writes:

"When Basques first began appearing on the stage of recorded history, even before there was a name for them, they were observed acting like Basques, playing out the same roles that they have been playing ever since: defending their land and culture, making complex choices about the degree of independence that was needed to preserve their way of life, while looking to the rest of the world for commercial opportunities to ensure their prosperity."

Sound familiar?

Page 190: The tricky bit

Rhiannon's "Celtic Reconstructionist"/Feraferia philosophy advocates a return to the "simple times" before human mass productivity (of food and other items).  As Rhiannon and Nigel discuss, back to nature/cultural resistance philosophies have a central implication (which some might call a "fatal flaw").  Namely that:

[Hunter-Gatherer] population densities tend to be lower than those of agriculturalists, since cultivated land is capable of sustaining population densities 60–100 times greater than land left uncultivated.
 (From this article: http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Hunter-gatherer#encyclopedia)

60 times is a lot.  Going all the way back to the "wilderness" (assuming a 60X productivity) would suggest a U.S. population of 6 million versus 350 million today.  That would be in the ballpark of the North American indigenous population before Columbus.

Of course, most cultural resistance movements don't advocate a return all the way to hunter-gatherer status. However, most anti-globalization, anti-corporate farming, and anti-mass production philosophies do advocate at least a part-way return to the "old ways".  Whether it is right or wrong to go back, the fact is that the "old ways" cannot realistically support the current human population of almost 7 billion people.  Even if the factor is 10X and not 60X, that's a lot of people that can't be supported.  If they can't be supported, they die.  It seems clear that most of the movements haven't thought through the full implications of their philosophies -- or if they have, they aren't talking about it.

A (very) few of the resistance movements do openly acknowledge the ultimate implication of their advocacy.  One of them is here: http://www.optimumpopulation.org/.  They have drawn a logical, if chilling, conclusion that "fewer emitters = fewer emissions".


The Optimum Population group is very real.  It has the famous Sir David Attenborough as a public face.  They really do publicly advocate an outright reduction in the human population:

OPT researchers have concluded that, in the absence of radical breakthroughs in energy technology, an environmentally sustainable population for the UK may be lower than 30 million  
(quoted from their website)

30 million compares to the current UK population of 61 million people.

They don't mention what they plan to do with all the bodies.

Page 208: Feraferia

Many, many people believe that some sort of cataclysm is coming.  Extreme weather, rising sea levels, asteroids, soil exhaustion, war -- something is going to get us.  Many people believe that, in the aftermath of the inevitable disaster, a new culture will rise.  Neo-pagans tend to believe (hope?) that the new society will be much more devoted to the ideals of the Great Goddess.

Feraferia is one vision of the potential future utopia that awaits.  Created by Frederick Adams, the Feraferia philosophy/religion is a "Paradisal Fellowship for the loving celebration of Wilderness Mysteries with Faerie style, courtly elegance, refinement & grace." (quoted from Earth Religion News via the book Drawing Down the Moon by Margot Adler).

Feraferia was derived, at least in part, from a book called The Recovery of Culture by Henry Bailey Stevens.  Stevens' theory was that our primate ancestors lived in perfect peace and in balance with nature before the invention of agriculture and animal husbandry. Agriculture begat the ownership of land and animal husbandry begat the ownership of property that eventually spawned war -- over land and property.

Stevens believed that agriculture and animal husbandry were the "original sin" that literally cast humanity out of the Garden of Eden that was our primate past.

Feraferia wants to take us back to that past by worshiping the wilderness.

Agriculture and animal husbandry by humans emerged in the Levant and in Mesopatamia during neolithic times (9-10,000 years ago).  No one really knows how or why.  But more on that later...

Page 20: Albino dinosaur on the streets of Chicago...

Next spring when Robin Redbreast is hopping about in your yard, please keep in mind that the bird is a ferocious mini-dinosaur willing to tear you limb-from-limb at the slightest provocation.

Below is a link to an article that discusses the bird-dinosaur link:

http://www.amnh.org/science/specials/dinobird.html

Page 84: The Fifth Amendment

Probably the most famous part of the Fifth Amendment is "that thing from Law and Order" where you don't have to testify against yourself, as in "I'll take the Fifth on that, Your Honor".

However, the sting in the tail of the Fifth is at the end.  The final sentence is the opening that governments have used to assert their controversial right to declare "eminent domain" and seize property for their own use.  Here is the actual text of the Constitution:

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

You see, you don't actually have the right to private property.  You have the right not to have property taken from you without due process of law or "just compensation".  They are very different legal positions!

The key element is "public use".  As you can see above, one cannot be deprived of property without due process of law.  But the framers introduced an exception: "public use".  In the case of public use, the only thing you are entitled to is "just compensation".

Of course, we believe the framers intended private property to remain fairly sacrosanct -- and the government to remain respectful of its citizens.  But desperate times...