Medieval Humors for the Modern Era: An Assault on Psychosomatic Diagnoses

Sometime during the spring of last year (2011), I became gravely ill. By the end of March I could hardly walk, I couldn’t remember words and had trouble speaking when I could remember them, I became easily lost, I experienced a constant headache and extended panic attacks, and my mind was encapsulated in what I can only describe as a nearly impenetrable haze. I became depressed and despondent, too scared to drive a car and too fatigued to get out of bed (almost, in both cases – I managed to keep my job, somehow, and I regularly drove myself to the hospital). I thought I was going crazy or dying, or both.

I visited no fewer than 15 doctors over the next five months, and was preemptively diagnosed with a cornucopia of ailments, including Meniere’s disease, rheumatoid arthritis, chronic sinusitis, hepatitis, Epstein-Barr virus, syphilis, HIV, fibromyalgia, and lupus. In following with conventional, scientific medicine, the initial diagnosis is the “hypothesis” stage, after which comes the “experiment” stage: testing. I was tested for all of these conditions and more, and the results all invalidated the hypotheses/diagnoses. At that point all but one of those 15 doctors diagnosed me as having anxiety/depression – it is both handy and very telling that those two words are always lumped together like that – and concluded that my symptoms were psychosomatic.

And to test that hypothesis... yes, well, that’s the problem.

To spoil the surprise, I was eventually diagnosed with both neurological Lyme disease and thalassemia beta-minor, two clinical diagnoses that were confirmed with a battery of serological tests. But we only reached that point after I flatly told my doctors they were wrong and, along with the help of some diligent friends and a skeptical psychiatrist, continued to insist on ever more comprehensive testing. Had we not pursued that course, I would still be stuck with a diagnosis of anxiety/depression and would be either completely immobilized or dead by this point.

So mine is a cautionary tale, and one that is not specific to me alone: among my personal friends a fellow archaeologist was recently diagnosed with depression after visiting a doctor to complain about several months of severe fatigue, forgetfulness, intermittent fevers, muscle aches, sleeplessness, digestive malfunction, and malaise. The idea that depression can cause forgetfulness, fatigue, sleeplessness, and/or malaise is not much of a stretch, given that those feelings are largely subjective, but digestive malfunction can be observed in a laboratory and a fever can be observed with a two-dollar thermometer from Wal-Mart. Yet depression, or the more expansive anxiety/depression, remains the official diagnosis. It is the causative agent that explains the correlation between a set of symptoms that, for all intents and purposes, need not necessarily have anything to do with one another. Such a diagnosis is not only a handy method for waiving away a pestilential patient, it is also possibly correct. Who knows? However, in terms of scientific integrity, it is complete bullshit.  

The main thrust of my argument is this: when you suspect an ulterior agent, be it a condition or a disease or a device or whatever, it is both logically and scientifically wretched to posit an agent that cannot be tested. Take a popular example: a data distribution shows a positive correlation between consumption of ice cream and rates of skin cancer, yet it goes against sound reason to assume that the two are directly related. So you concoct a bunch of hypotheses: 

1. Ice cream is a luxury food, so as people get more wealthy they can afford both ice cream and tanning salons;
2. Ice cream is a staple of the cultural type who likes to go tanning, and the connection is thus sociological;
3. People consume more ice cream when it gets warmer, so overall rates of both ice cream and skin cancer will increase as a result of more sunny days;
4. People standing in line to get ice cream are exposed to sunlight while they stand there;

….and then you set about testing them.

1.   Tanning salon visitation in the study area does not increase during the study period, and in fact seems to decrease – invalidated.

2.   Ice cream is not a staple of “tanning culture,” because avid tanners are highly image-conscious by default and thus shy away from fattening foods – invalidated.

3.   Weather records indeed reflect a general upswing in temperatures in the study area during the study period – supported.

4.   The days of the “ice cream stand” are long-gone, and most people in the study area buy their ice cream from indoor shops – invalidated.

This example demonstrates a well-worn academic truism: correlation does not necessarily mean causation, and a causative agent can indeed be something ulterior and not immediately obvious within a set of correlating data. This is when it is important to be able to think outside the box, up to a point…

       
     Here, then, is that point: all of the ulterior agents of causation posited above can be tested, resulting in their respective hypotheses being supported or invalidated. The trouble begins when people start introducing untestable agents. Of the myriad examples of this, I am especially irked by three forms of untestable agency: spiritual, supernatural, and mental.

            
     Suppose, instead of ice cream and cancer, you’ve got a mysterious and unpleasant illness and a “cure” that seems to work but, as in ice cream and cancer, the idea of direct causation goes against sound reason. A favorite among anthropologists is malaria and shamanic healing ceremonies, which have – depending upon your source – a rate of success statistically comparable to that of modern medicine. Assuming this to be true, what’s the explanation?

            Psychologists have provided one, and (unfortunately and ingratiatingly) it has become perniciously pervasive throughout the whole of modern medical practice: the psychosomatic hypothesis. Simply put, this is the idea that the human mind is of such considerable caliber that it can cause the body to mimic or even manifest physiological ailments, and/or lessen or even totally eradicate them.
     
     This is not so unbelievable: innumerable experiments have proven that the human mind can indeed manifest and/or provide relief from physical maladies in certain situations. Good so far, but what are the parameters of those situations, and to what degree of certainty are they known? In fact most doctors, when asked this question, simply shrug and say something like, “Well… I suppose the possibilities are endless.” (That’s a direct quote from a doctor who diagnosed me with anxiety/depression before a series of blood tests showed me positive for both Lyme disease and thalassemia.) To put that another way: they don’t know. But the answer “I don’t know” is not an answer that anyone in the modern medical community is willing to say, and for the somewhat justifiable reason that a doctor telling a patient “I don’t know” is a good way for that doctor to be charged with malpractice. In our society the doctor is supposed to be omniscient. He or she knows the human body down to its individual cells and can recite the entire canon of medical conditions, including their symptoms and treatments, verbatim. An answer of “I don’t know” throws the ball back into the patient’s court, where it can easily wind up in the hands of a lawyer.

            
     While I sympathize with healthcare practitioners caught between these two menacing forces, the simple fact is that handing out psychosomatic diagnoses in a hospital setting is like handing out counterfeit money in a bank – good for making people feel as though their needs have been served, but ultimately totally worthless. To return to the hypothetical example of malaria and shamanism mentioned above, the four simplest explanations of such a correlation would be:

1. It’s spiritual, e.g., soul or spirit energy is being healed in ways not obvious in a quantifiable, material sense.
2. It’s magical, e.g., direct causation is indeed occurring, but through employment of a type of non- or super-natural energy that is highly elusive and wholly unknown to science.
3. It’s mental, e.g., either the condition was all in the patient’s mind, or else it was the power of the patient’s mind (the “placebo effect”) that cured the condition.
4. It’s a mystery, i.e., “I don’t know.”

     Because the fourth one is absolutely taboo in our culture where medical practice is concerned, arguably more so than even the first two, we can effectively say that the supposed or hypothesized answer will never be that one.
     
     So what’s wrong with the resulting picture? Quite simply, none of the above hypotheses is testable, at least not to a degree that even begins to approach useful certainty (again: #4 is off the table). They are all based on faith, in other words – faith in spirituality or faith in the supernatural or faith in the power of the mind – and not in the material positivism on which the scientific method is based. 

            
     All of which is beside one glaring point, which is that any one of those hypotheses might well be the truth. There may indeed be spiritual forces, or supernatural forces, or mental forces capable of creating or eradicating serious medical conditions. There is certainly a place in the human world for faith, and I for one am glad of that. But the bedrock fact is not that these explanations aren’t possible; it’s that they aren’t testable, and therefore aren’t scientific. No reasonable person would ever expect a medically-trained professional with a white coat and stethoscope to pronounce him or her “cursed” or the victim of “black magic,” yet these same professionals routinely pronounce patients as having “anxiety” or “depression” as if those conditions were capable of manifesting literally any symptomology. How? By what neurological pathways? Demonstrated by what biochemical signatures? As a result of what physiological mechanisms? What, simply, is the method by which the human mind can sicken and/or cure the human body?
     
     Theories abound, but the general answer is that nobody knows.

            
     By way of discussion, I would like to mention that the existence of psychosomatic conditions is a well-documented and effectively proven phenomenon, at least to the degree that they have been shown to occur with regularity in comparison with predictive models (but again: nobody is certain how). Recent studies have linked the psychological condition of “heart break” with extreme physiological discomfiture, and studies that go back into ancient times have demonstrated that, according to the old saw, laughter is indeed a very effective medicine. I am not attempting to refute the existence of psychosomatic symptoms, somatoform diseases, or the placebo effect, any more than I am attempting to say that spirits don’t exist or that magic is impossible. There is literally no limit to what is possible.

            
     However, in sum, the problem with introducing psychosomatic hypotheses into hospital settings is one of both dismissiveness and blatantly unethical science. Handing a diagnosis of “it’s all in your mind” to a patient is tantamount to tossing the scientific method, with its insistence on positive causation and testable hypotheses, straight out the proverbial window. It is not a way to make patients leave satisfied or cured; it is simply a way to make them leave. When a patient presents with, for example, severe fatigue, forgetfulness, intermittent fevers, muscle aches, sleeplessness, digestive malfunction, and malaise, a diagnosis of depression might well be apt but it had better be followed by a thorough and precise explanation of the biological processes by which depression is indeed linked with those symptoms. Otherwise the diagnosis might as well be “your humors are out of balance,” and then we’re right back in the Dark Ages.   

Latest on the Lyme Geography Paper

 Revising the Lyme Landscape, 11 Feb 2012

The Tao of Evolution

The only really effective way to make sense of the world (if, of course, it’s “sense” that you’re after) is by drawing analogies between something you don’t understand and something that you do. When Alan Watts wanted to explain the Taoist concept of the world, he used the analogy of music, where “the end of the composition is not the point of the composition” and it’s the moving through time and relationship of present notes and chords to those already played that paints an enrapturing audible picture. He also used weaving to explain the tantric view of the universe, where a red bird and a red cloud are separate on one side of a tapestry but, should we turn it over, they are in fact created and connected by a continuum of the same red thread. It is by such means that people can make sense of the world, and from this we can extrapolate the role and value of myth: a myth is a picture or model in terms of which people make sense of the otherwise incomprehensible world.

For my part, my preferred "myth" is evolution, and for the same reason that Watts chose music and weaving. He was raised by a mother who wove for a living, and he was a classical music fanatic; I am a student of evolutionary models, both biological and social, and toward that end I am also a hopeless fanatic. Most people see evolution as a cold, mechanical procedure that molds and shapes life according to the vagaries of environmental circumstances – a worldview that has been denigrated as the “engineering” idea of the universe. I disagree. To me, evolution is like a ballet or an epic story, wherein the story unfolds (incidentally: the word “evolution” literally means “unfolding”) and twists and winds in complex and unforeseeable patterns that are at once dazzling and sensational. Orchids, for example, are pretty flowers in their own right, but when you consider the ways in which they have co-evolved with other creatures, in order to propagate and proliferate, their behavioral strategies become almost mind-boggling. To see an orchid – the flower, sexual organ of a plant, devoid of a brain or even a rudimentary nervous system – fool a bee into thinking its stamen [?] is a viable sexual partner is simply astonishing. To see something so simple and brainless as a fungus, specifically those of the cordiceps family, invade the minds of insects to the point of zombifying them to the end of behaving in a way that is totally at odds with their own survival, but absolutely assures the propagation of the fungus, is again almost otherworldly. And ants… they farm, they form cities, they enslave other creatures, they even evolve during their own lifetimes to suit their specific social roles (e.g., an ant that is “appointed” to be a soldier ant will morphologically adapt to that role, despite having no difference in its genetic sequence than an ant that is “appointed” to be a food collector) is as mystifying and tantalizing as the most hyperbolic of science fiction. And the list goes on.

The argument of philosophers and mystics that evolution reduces the beauty and sublimity of the natural world to a series of cold, heartless calculations is not so much a reflection on the theory of evolution as it is on their own theories of the natural world. First of all, to a passionate mathematician there is nothing cold or heartless about a calculation; I’ve seen math fanatics froth at the mouth and quake with tremors of ecstasy. But, more importantly, I find this distaste for evolution as merely symptomatic of that perennially menacing psychological paradigm known so well to feminists and other civil rights activists: the appointment and disavowing of the other. “It is not us, it is not like us, we do not understand it, and we hate it.” Taken to its extreme, from this comes eugenics and racism and all sorts of other historical wretchedness. But to restrict ourselves from extremes, it is also from this that we get simple misunderstandings about the nature and role of ideas, or myths, about the natural world and what it means to us. Someone who pounds on the pulpit of evolution in order to sound a trumpet of war against spiritualism or Biblical creationism is misusing the concept, but likewise someone who rails against evolution as a disgraceful and ugly reduction of the natural world to a series of numbers and equations likewise misses the point. If to watch a flower unfold is a meditative, sublime and cherished undertaking, then to watch – via comparative taxonomy, long hours in the library, and even longer hours pondering the expansive but inevitable gaps in the fossil record – the unfolding of natural history via evolution is no less transcendent an experience. It is, to return to Alan Watts, not the end of the thing that’s the point of the thing; the point of the dance is the dance. And evolution encompasses the entirety of known and imagined life throughout all but a fraction of the history of the Earth itself. It is the greatest dance of all.

Adapt or Perish: An Open Warning of Things to Come

In 1493, Johannes Gutenberg introduced the printing press to a mortified ruling elite, who feared that movable written type would precipitate dissemination of knowledge to the ignorant masses and, with it, dissemination of their power. In 1970, Philips introduced the recordable VHS to a mortified entertainment industry, who feared that moving the trade and retention of movies into people’s living rooms was tantamount to the destruction of the movie business – so much so that the MPAA tried to convince federal legislators to ban the sale of VCRs (they failed, obviously). And in 1971, Advent Corporation introduced the recordable hi-fidelity audio cassette tape to a mortified music industry, who were so afraid that people copying each other’s tapes would decimate sales of music media that they actually did convince federal legislators to pass what are known as “blank media” or “private copy” taxes that are charged in the purchase of all recordable media… to this day.

With the benefit of hindsight, we can now look with smug certainty back upon those early dissenters and decry their wearying woes. By making books more widely available, both authors and bookbinders found a practically inexhaustible market, and with it an equally inexhaustible demand for ever more unique genres and styles. By making movies accessible and dispersible between people’s homes, moviemakers had two avenues of transmission for their product – the VCR and the movie theater – and it widened the market to include far greater creative variety. And by making music more easily recordable, portable, and tradable, audio cassette players paved the way for a flood of independent music promotion and, along with the subsequent advent of CDRs and MP3s, ushered in an unprecedented era of individualized musicianship.

So that’s one underlying thread in these three historical anecdotes: in each case dissemination of a previously narrowly-controlled medium amongst the general public resulted in an overall increase in both its quantity and quality. The other underlying thread is that technological advances sowed terror amongst a privileged few who saw in those advances dissemination of the very thing over which they practiced unilateral control. And in that sense they were right. By making it incalculably easier to manufacture and distribute written text, Gutenberg narrowed the gap between creator and consumer in the book market, i.e., an “author” was no longer a semi- (or, indeed, sometimes genuinely) mythical far-off figure but a person who quite possibly lived down the street. Of a sudden, both subject matter – for better or for worse – and volume counted for a lot. Same thing in the movie industry, in that an individual or a family wanting to watch a movie could, if there weren’t any good ones in the  theater, opt to borrow or copy one from a neighbor instead. And the impact in the music industry is not only still being felt but is in fact still picking up speed, as the transition from tapes to CDs to MP3s has made it easier and easier for consumers to “cherry pick” quality songs where previously they were compelled to purchase entire albums that often contained a lot of filler. In sum, in all three cases the power of the purchaser increased dramatically as the gap between creation and consumption narrowed, and in all three cases it has resulted in the respective industries having to adapt. With that in mind, we turn now to three modern industries that would do well to heed the lessons framed above: academia, food, and medicine.

First, if you don’t think academia is an industry then you haven’t set foot on a college campus since about the turn of the 20^th century. Whereas schools are supposed to be about scholarship – that is, teaching and research – they are increasingly becoming lucrative boondoggles. Campus bookstores are among the most atrocious rackets in the landscape, with newer-edition textbooks coming out far faster than the rate of any relevant information in order to stay ahead of interpersonal book traders. Research facilities are constantly being squeezed or shut down outright in favor of new arenas, exhibits, and stadiums. Full-time professorships are disappearing so fast that currently tenured professors in many schools, including all three of the ones I’ve attended, are beginning to counsel students away from even considering academics as a career path. And many schools continue to admit more and more freshmen every year without building more dormitories for them, as if they know those students will barely be there long enough for their tuition checks to clear and are, in fact, counting on it.

In the food industry, new food products are foisted on the general public every year, and the language of food is so slippery and malleable that consumers are often totally unaware that, for example, dextrin, dextrose (or anything else ending in “-ose”), maltodextrin, evaporated cane juice or cane extract, rice syrup, corn syrup, malt syrup, sorghum or sorghum syrup, and treacle all mean “sugar.” The surge of interest in organic foods has had both positive and negative impacts, with, respectively, an increase in availability of genuinely organic foodstuffs and a widening of the term “organic” to include anything that spent any measurable fraction of time outside a factory. Meanwhile federal subsidies still inordinately favor classic staples like corn, leading to ever-more creative ways for purveyors to offload their wares: in addition to its use as a nearly-indigestible sweetener, American corn is now used to create ethanol and plastic, and, thanks to NAFTA, is also being sold cheaply in Mexico, thereby undermining the livelihood of innumerable Mexican farmers (leading to, among other things, an increase of illegal immigrants). And the battle between health advocates and food lobbyists has led to the creation of an entirely nutrient-based information scheme, wherein daily values of fats, sugars, proteins, vitamins, minerals, and so on are parsed and sallied back-and-forth while nobody dares turn over a whole card like “hamburger” or “soda."

Finally, the medical industry, that biggest and most astounding racket of all, regularly gets away with shenanigans that test the very boundaries of imagination. Pharmaceutical companies routinely support biased research that substantiates their claims and/or suppress unbiased research that refutes them, oftentimes right under the absentminded eye of federal watchdogs. Foregoing that, even scientifically sound research and development is often directed by market interests rather than the interests of patients and their well-being, a trend best summarized by James Surowiecki (paraphrased by Bill Bryson): “Given a choice between developing antibiotics that people will take every day for two weeks or antidepressants that people will take every day forever, drug companies not surprisingly opt for the latter.” And I needn’t even begin to comment on the myriad ways hospitals bilk the sick, injured, or enfeebled out of ludicrous sums of money, but will mention only the ubiquitous fact that hospitals can refuse service to un- or underinsured patients for anything but life-threatening emergencies – and, take my word for it, they are preternaturally adept at playing fast-and-loose with the term “life-threatening.”

 In all three of these cases, the unifying image is suspiciously similar to that shared by the Middle Ages intelligentsia and the 20^th century movie and music industries, which is one of a consolidated elite practicing unilateral control over something. Just as Europeans in and before the 1400s had to accept what was read to them (or, if they could read, had to accept only those texts that they were allowed to have), people in the 1950s had to watch what was in the theater if they wanted to see a film, and people in the 1960s-90s had to buy an entire album just to hear that one good single; so people today have to hold their breaths and shovel if they want a post-secondary education, have to choose between a very limited supply of food and food-like products manufactured in shady factories by shady characters, and have to stand in line like feedlot cattle for the very expensive privilege of being poked, prodded, and poisoned by circus clowns in white coats if they aren’t feeling well. Or do they…?

To reiterate: in the cases of books, VCRs, and recordable audio, technological advances sowed terror amongst a privileged few who saw in those advances dissemination of the very thing over which they practiced unilateral control. The time is rapidly approaching when that terror will visit itself upon the academic, culinary, and medical industries as well – if it is not, in fact, already here. Thanks to the near-universality of internet access in the modern world, modern students no longer have to rely solely and invariably on the texts and tuition costs of traditional schooling; they can, instead, take their pick from an ever-growing list of increasingly reputable online sources. Interestingly (and, for those of us who still remember high school as an awful experience, heartwarmingly), the same is true for secondary schooling. And even those who opt out of school as a whole can still pursue their intellectual whimsies with quality copy thanks to the advent and spread of open-source academic journals. In fact, beyond that, research needn’t even be restricted to academic journals anymore: while searching for a publisher for an article I wrote about Lyme disease I posted it on a popular hosting site, just so my friends could see it, and the readership generated by Facebook and various Lyme support groups has led me to think it’s a better idea simply to leave it there.    

Meanwhile people living in settings where a visit to a farmer’s market or food co-op is not a feasible option are now delightfully finding themselves able to tap into a widening array of online food-sharing services, such that it is no longer impossible to imagine buying grass-fed beef or heirloom tomatoes in a middle class suburb; and, as basic economic science dictates, as that array continues to widen the costs will concomitantly drop. Certain beneficent organizations are also going about distributing online coupons for those who have access to healthful food choices but simply can’t afford them. And on top of this there is an ever-increasing abundance of information, spanning the gamut from best-selling authors like Michael Pollan to bloggers who happen to have an interest in nutrition, so that even the everyday supermarket consumer can dispense with all that mystifying poly-unsaturated-omega-fatty-pasteurized-antioxidant-riboflavin nonsense and simply *know* that leafy green things and free-range animal bits are better than their alternatives.  

The same is also true of the medical industry: an absolutely dizzying profusion of online services offer patients access to their own medical tests, peer-reviewed literature, and (legitimate or otherwise) affordable pharmacies, and while a serious condition still necessitates visiting a hospital it is now easier than ever to arrange that visit in a place not hemmed-in by legislature and/or bullied by insurance company goons – in Canada, say, or even Mexico, where more and more American-educated doctors and dentists are setting up their practices for that very reason. Last year I contracted Lyme disease while working long hours outside and, foolishly, not wearing insect repellant, and I paid my way through four hospitals and 15 doctors before I finally realized that I could order my own serological tests and, depending on their results, direct my own treatment via an online community of medical professionals eager to practice outside the watchful gaze of what they call “Big Pharma.” I have since counseled others to do the same.

It is, in short, easier than ever to circumvent the unpalatable rigors of consolidated academic, culinary, and medical power structures in exactly the same way that printing presses and recordable media made it possible to circumvent theirs. The internet, central instrument of the Information Explosion, connects discriminate thinkers with a widening choice of teachers and research services, discriminate eaters with a widening choice of foods and/or information about foods, and discriminate sufferers with a widening choice of healthcare alternatives – and all at a rapidly accelerating pace. For those in power, the choice is clear: adapt, or perish. I for one don’t care which it is. 

Cracked: "Lyme disease"

My Lyme disease topic article on Cracked

Give a Monkey a Gibson: Behavioral Ecology and the Evolution of Sexual Selection (of Douchebags)

Original publication in We Still Like [] literary magazine, 2011 (3), pp. 42-47

            Contrary to evolutionary models of humanity that exaggerate the primacy of larger brains (an example of tail-wagging-dog), the freeing of our hands as a result of obligate bipedality is a popular and for more likely catalyst for the development of much of modern human behavior. It sheds considerable light on the fact that a lot of girls are inordinately attracted to guys who can play guitar, for example, even if they can only play the first three chords of about five songs by John Mayer and one or two by Tom Petty – the bare minimum, in other words.

I’d never really gotten my head around this unusual contingency, because, being an unwitting child of the “evolutionary” mythology that is still so prevalent in modern intellectual circles, I’d always assumed that people evolved to select for mates with adaptive traits that underscore their fitness as spouses and child-bearers; why, under that narrow paradigm, would broad swaths of young women be more attracted to a scraggly, awkward, and often jobless immature man-child than to a rugged, intelligent, hard-working young man? (I harbor no illusions about the fact that my wonder emanated primarily from basic jealously, which springs eternal.) How could the very aspects that make someone a terrible provider also make that person inordinately appealing? At last, evolutionary theory and behavioral ecology have provided a reasonable answer.

            Beginning several million years ago, humans started to walk upright rather than on all fours. The reasons for this are still unclear, and hypotheses range from the ability to grab fruit from trees to the ability to see farther away to, believe it or not, the ability to keep one’s head above water when evading water-shy lions by standing in a river. Whatever the reason, our upright stature subsequently freed our hands from the previously monopolizing purposes of forward ambulation and/or climbing. Suddenly, what with our opposable thumbs and all, we could grab, manipulate, and utilize tools, and it probably didn’t take long – the mere blink of an eye in an evolutionary sense – for this to begin having significant implications for the morphological future of our ancestors.

            Biological evolution is a non-linear, non-directional process of adaptation to environment by the selection and retention of preferable traits. This is typically, although certainly not always, done through the ubiquitous Darwinian method of “natural selection,” whereby limits and parameters of an ecosystem apply the selective pressures. In a cold climate, for example, animals with thick insulation and efficient homeostatic systems are the most likely to thrive; in snowy environments, animals that are lighter in color are the most likely to evade predators; and so on. When environments change, it is those animals that adjust in the fastest and most thorough manner to the new environmental parameters that gain the reproductive upper hand. But the term “environment” can be misleading, especially in our modern era of “environmentalism” which, at least in the popular sense, translates roughly to “ecstatic love for all natural things that aren’t human.” An environment is a conglomeration of living conditions, pure and simple, and environments can span the gamut from very basic organic ecosystems of soil and rain to exasperatingly complex constructs of concrete, steel, automobiles and computers and processed food-like substances. A house is an environment; so is a workplace, a community, a city, a country. And environmental conditions need not even be physically tangible things – in the modern world, for example, it is expected that people will obey laws and act in certain ways, even though expectations aren’t physical things and do not physically exert any force. And a person with a propensity to fulfill the incorporeal expectations of a cultural environment is “fit” in just the same was as an animal with a propensity for camouflage in a snow bank. This is known as “cultural selection,” as opposed to natural selection, and the erratic and largely unpredictable offspring of the two is called “sexual selection.”

            In his exhaustive tome The Ancestor’s Tale, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins notes the following observation: “anytime I see sudden and erratic changes in evolutionary direction, I think sexual selection.” Sexual selection doesn’t really follow any rules, at least not in the sense that “rules” in science are thought to be logical constructs. Two of biologists’ favorite examples come from the world of birds. Peacocks have enormous fans of brightly-hued tail feathers, which take considerable and expensive proteins to construct; are heavy and bulky, and cause the bird unnecessary trouble in flight; and are effectively a PEACOCK OVER HERE sign to any predators that aren’t totally blind. The peacock’s elaborate fan is, in other words, opposed in every way to what logic dictates should be an advantageous adaptation, and yet the beasts proliferate – why? Because the sexual success of peacocks with the biggest and most alluring fans gives their genes a significant edge in the game of reproduction, such that a peacock with a gigantic and burdensome fan will likely father the bulk of offspring in a given area before succumbing to an almost-inevitable death in the jaws of a predator.

The other favorite example is a species of small birds that live in Papua New Guinea called bower birds. Male bower birds go to practically unbelievable lengths to create practically unbelievable twig-and-branch constructions, called “bowers,” that often look like gazebos or backyard canopies with elaborate collections of colorful items – flowers, bits of fruit, beetle wings, leaves, mushrooms, rocks – carefully and deliberately arranged inside like displays in a museum. Some of them are as large as garden sheds. Amazingly, these bowers are not simply large, densely decorated nests; the birds live and sleep in small, unassuming nests of common shape and size. The bowers are used exclusively to attract mates. More amazingly, these considerable showpieces also follow regional “customs,” so that a bower which may be considered a perfect and exemplary product in one area will not attract a single female mate in another. Parallels with human culture and its own regional customs are tantalizing. Meanwhile, the amount of time and energy involved in a small bird constructing something of that size, and amassing the requisite collection of baubles arranged throughout its interior, is a behavioral example of the same lack of logic that underlies the physical adaptation of peacock fans. But, again, the advantage outweighs the disadvantage: while a male bower bird may attract predatory attention and/or totally exhaust itself while erecting the most attractive bower in the region, he has a competitive edge over his rivals for passing on his genes beforehand.  

            While these examples seem to be inconsistent with commonplace logic they do fit comfortably into the predictive framework of behavioral ecology. As an evolutionary approach to understanding behavior, behavioral ecology approaches behaviors as sets of traits selected for their economic fitness (note: economic in the sense of general value, not in the specific sense of money). In the light of purely mechanical models of evolution, peacocks’ tails and bower birds’ twig-figured museums are unfit adaptations, being inefficient uses of energy and burdensome, predator-attracting frivolities; but in the light of behavioral ecology, these same phenomena exhibit fitness for their environments because their value to mates outweighs their mechanical disadvantages. In other words, even though gaudy tail feathers and excessive artistic displays wouldn’t seem to do anything for their creators other than shorten their life expectancies, the attractiveness of these things to members of the opposite sex is sufficient enough to neutralize and, indeed, exceed such limitations in the overall scheme of the environment. Their up-front value as attractors is greater than their long-term deficiency as perils, and so they are beneficial. In behavioral ecology this is known as “marginal value,” the idea that immediate value changes with quantity – be it amount or duration in time – and that something perceived as very valuable will be utilized immediately and excessively before it gets exhausted or depreciated. This isn’t always true, certainly, but in many cases it is, and in the case of sexual selection it appears to be true in spades.

            So what’s the connection between all of this and our upright stature and large brains? Chances are that, upon adapting and learning to walk upright, ancestral hominids almost immediately started using their dexterous and newly-freed limbs to manipulate (literally) tools. And chances are just as likely that they immediately started using this newfound boon to outcompete one another. The better one is at using his or her hands for constructing houses, collecting nuts and berries, hunting, building fires, weaving textiles or baskets, or whatever else can be imagined, the more likely that person is to have his or her genes passed along. In the beginning, it was almost definitely pure natural selection that exerted the selective pressure on the winners and losers in this scenario, as the people best-suited for survival were probably those who could best manipulate physical things to assure it. He or she who gathers the most food and keeps away the most lions is likely to have the most kids. And all the while, as manipulation techniques and, eventually, tools became more and more complex, so did the intellectual capacity that directed them – bigger brains, in other words, are most likely the result of increasing complexity of tasks related to manipulation of materials, or so the modern gospel goes. Additionally, at some point it is likely that simple ecological pressures were joined by the vagaries of sexual selection, and the same hands that were once used to secure survival and subsistence started to be used to impress others. This may or may not have been a conscious or deliberate development, and I rather suspect that it wasn’t, but it still goes a long way toward explaining artistic propensity and its exaggerated marginal value in at least one culture that comes to mind: mine.

            And now we come back to the issue of girls and their inordinate attraction to scruffy shitheads who can play guitar but display practically nothing else of social or biological worth. Bearing in mind that I am talking about my own experiences in contemporary Middle America, and that I can’t make any pronouncements on the male/female interactions in other societies for the simple reason that I’ve never lived in any others, I can say with certainty that this plays itself out over and over again in the modern United States and is by no means an unusual circumstance. True, the details may vary – in some cultural settings it isn’t guitar-playing but dancing, or snowboarding (an example of physical aptitude, to be sure, but by no means an example of fitness as a parent), or whatever – but the basic model is awfully common. In light of the revelations of behavioral ecology and the current evolutionary model that puts manipulative dexterity at the center of the development of the human animal, it seems not only likely but in fact very probable that people will, at some or several points in place and history, place far greater value on behavioral traits that are at once expensive and useless than on ones that are more advantages in a utilitarian or parental sense. For at least the foreseeable future, bower birds will continue to build extravagantly frivolous art galleries until they’re too tired to fly away from jaguars, peacocks will continue to waste egregious quanta of calories on tails that make them look just as appealing to their mates as to predators and poachers, and douchebags will spend all of their free time learning the catchiest bars of “American Pie” instead of studying math or exercising – and all of these will succeed gloriously in the face of logic and reason. No dog bites its own tail quite so hard as science, and we scientists are a toothy breed. I should have learned to play the guitar.  

Cracked: "Ethnobotany"

My Ethbnobotany topic article on Cracked

The Spirit of Non-Spirituality: A Short Treatise on Materialism

Among the aspects of Taoism that first attracted me was its general answer to what Douglas Adams called the big questions about Life, the Universe, and Everything: “Stop asking questions.” Nowhere in any Taoist text will one find such a succinct pronouncement, of course – or at least it isn’t likely – but the idea pervades the literature, as when Lao Tzu said, “The Tao that can be spoken is not the Tao.” Mahayana or Zen Buddhism teaches another answer to the Big Questions: “Who is asking?” That is the jumping-off point for a lot of further dialogue concerning identity and ego and pride and desire and so on – for another time. To me the most striking of these closely-related perspectives is their insistence on the importance of the experience rather than on the knowledge that experience begets. In slang terms, the essence of Taoism is “work with the flow of the universe” and the essence of Zen is “be mindful.”

Now take a modern example: a sweater. Most of us own one. The typical sweater is a long-armed wool, cotton or synthetic garment, sometimes with a hood and usually sown pretty thick. They’re also decorated, most of them anyway, and some are bright and festive; some are dreary or fierce with skulls on them; some are hand-sown and “rustic”-looking; and still others are embroidered with logos for teams or groups or their manufacturers. And all of these things are symbolic. Just as it is considered vital to the modern experience to know what letters mean (all of which are entirely symbolic), or how to interpret – at terrific speed – all the various dials and signs within and without our automobiles, it is also considered vital to be able to see the “deeper meaning” behind a sweater. This one means its owner is thrifty. That one means the owner is stingy or poor. She got her sweater as a gift. He’s wearing one that demonstrates membership in his respective tribe (say, “punk” or “hipster”). More socially-conscious people can see deeper meaning still: that one was made cheaply in the Philippines by underpaid laborers; that one was made by a craftsperson with a sewing machine; that one was made in a big, polluting factory in Oregon; and so on. And why is that one so dirty – is its owner a slob? A hard-laborer? A dirty hippie? And why is that dude wearing a sweater in the middle of July?! These and myriad other questions all frame the following: what does the sweater mean?

It’s a sweater. The only meaning it has is in your head. It has no essential nature beyond “sweater,” at least not one that is self-evident; remove it from its cultural context and those meanings all change or disappear. Furthermore, no matter what you think a sweater represents, I’ll bet it’s something altogether else to a dog. It’s an olfactory reminder of its owner. It’s a bed to lie upon. It’s a chew-toy.

This is what’s implied by one of my favorite old Zen stories: someone once asked a Zen master, “What is the eternal nature of the world?” He responded, “It’s windy again this morning.” In other words: the deeper meaning of the world is the world itself, just-so. In still other words: stop asking. Of course, Zen tales aren’t meant to be interpreted in the way of a myth or a fable; they’re structured more like jokes than like moral tales, in that the intention is to create or induce a state of mind. But one is free to interpret them if one so chooses, in the same way that one is free to try and interpret a sweater. Whatever answer one finds is in his or her own mind – the thing is still just the thing.

Now take another example: a chunk of quartz crystal. To the geologist it is an example of a process, specifically a crystallization process. To a gem collector it is either “a marvelous new addition” or else “another one of those things I’ve already got.” And then there’s the spiritualist… It is a frozen beam of cosmic energy. It is a receptacle for mental powers. It is a vessel for ancient spirits to inhabit. It is a conduit to a realm of spirits that inhabit all of nature. It is a magnet for good fortune. It is a healing scepter. It is an aura-cleanser. It is…

It’s a rock.

Furthermore, it’s doing a superb job of being a rock, better than any actor with any amount of training. A chunk of quartz crystal is absolutely the finest example of a chunk of quartz crystal you can find in this wide world; anything else is an imposter. And the same can be said for everything else in the world – for trees and bushes, birds and flowers, and rocks and rocks and rocks. The world is beautiful, interesting and amazingly, intoxicatingly complex just the way it is; isn’t that enough?

Many people have, in many ways, pointed out the decline of religiousness in the modern world, which has left a lacuna that I find rather annoying, exemplified by what I like to call the Agnostic Credo: “There’s got to be more to all of this!” Yeah, maybe, but then maybe not; any philosophy that begs its own question is a three-legged one. Worse still is the more nebulous and begging phrase, “Everything happens for a reason.” Yes, as if there was a purpose for the movement of all energy in the universe – which may, in fact, be true, but if you can demonstrate to me how that purpose is made plain to human observers I’ll eat my hat. A more honest way to say that would be to cut “for a reason” off the end of it, but of course then you would just be stating the obvious. “It’s windy again this morning.”

For my part, I think this sort of thinking has more to do with socialization, acculturation, and the more simple psychological idea of imprinting than with people trying to fill a void previously filled with rampant religiosity. See, it was Pavlov who introduced us to the theory of imprinting when he got his dog to salivate at the sound of a bell – he, in other words, taught the dog that a ringing bell is more than just a ringing bell. He taught that the ringing bell had meaning. Note the word “taught” in that sentence, as opposed to “showed.” His teaching was within the parameters of a contrived experiment, and what it shows is contrivance. Pavlov did not just demonstrate learned behavior, which is no great thing; most behavior is learned. What he demonstrated was how learned behavior can be a conditioned response, and, more importantly, that interpretation can be taught in such a manner. Pavlov literally taught his dog that a ringing bell has a deeper meaning, a symbolic meaning, specifically interpreted as “food cometh.” What’s the difference between that and the person who sees deeper meaning in a sweater or a crystal?

I once read about a teacher who would, at the start of a new course with new students, produce a matchbox and say, “Now what is it?” Invariably some students would reply, “Matchbox!” “No, no, ‘matchbox’ is a word. This is not a word. I mean what is it really?” After the students looked around dumbfounded for a moment he would throw it at them. “There, that’s what it is.” And if you ask a great Zen master what will happen after you die, he or she might reply, “It’s windy again this morning.”

Finally, while it’s no great philosophical trick to show that the idea of something is not the thing itself, where I draw a harder line is on basic, earthly material experience. Most of what I’d call the higher philosophies (and no, I don’t just mean Eastern philosophies, I mean ones that are highly developed and well-worn) preach mindfulness, or being fully aware and involved in one’s doings and experiences, even if not necessarily consciously aware. But your eyes, your ears, and indeed your whole mind can only focus on so many things at once, and much of the time we go around swimming in thoughts and not focusing on the world around us at all. Most of what we see, in fact, is peripheral, and even when we’re staring something right in its face we’re seeing reels and reels of other sights in our minds. Many car crashes are caused by this. Meditation is a practice at focusing the mind, or rather at un-focusing it from trivialities. Better still, in the words of anthropologist Wade Davis, it is a method of calming our turbulent mental waters. But we needn’t go so far as all that. Just look at the sweater or the chunk of quartz crystal and see it, really see the thing without being distracted by the cloud of imagined accoutrements that swarm about and all but obscure it from view.

We are raised in a world of symbols and purpose, and we’re taught to believe that this is of utmost importance. And so it is, if you’re interpreting the symbolism on a menu or a stop sign, or if you need to remind yourself that the purpose of a sock is to keep your foot warm. And a sweater has an evident purpose, if not an evident meaning; its maker imbued it with purpose. But attaching symbolic meaning and, worse, a sense of purpose toward a part of the natural (that is: non-human) world, like a rock, detracts from the full experience of it. Maybe it is a healing rod or a wand of psychic energy and maybe it isn’t, but whatever else it may be it is most certainly a rock and it’s pretty damn good at being one. Show some appreciation.

Riot Starter: An Education in Insurrection

One of the most common questions of disillusioned or angered citizens is, “So what can I do?” There are a myriad of reasons for this feeling of inertia, but one of the simplest is that most people simply don’t know how to proceed, or even begin, to channel their frustration into proactive social change. In fact there is plentiful literature on this very topic if one is inclined to look for it, including the work of University of Massachusetts professor Gene Sharp, author of Nonviolent Action: A Research Guide. My experiences differ somewhat, but the greatest working example of Sharp’s methodology is the story of Otpor.

Otpor (“resist” in Serbian) was formed in October 1998 as a response to oppressive university and media laws in Serbia. Formed by a group of University of Belgrade students, the group based its philosophy on Sharp’s research and publications on nonviolent protest. At first, the group concentrated solely on academic issues; however, in the wake of the 1999 NATO air-strikes against FR Yugoslavia, Otpor expanded its scope and became a political movement against Yugoslavian president Slobodan Milosevic. Police repression of Otpor activists began immediately, and thousands of members and supporters were beaten or arrested. Regardless, the movement stayed on-track. In September 2000, Otpor launched a campaign called Gotov je (“he’s finished”), aimed at mobilizing young voters, which resulted in record voter turn-outs and Milosevic losing his reelection bid. No longer an elected leader, and with many of his atrocities brought to the global eye by Otpor and the media, NATO was able to swoop in and arrest Milosevic for crimes against humanity a few months later. Oddly, Otpor’s role in Milosevic’s downfall didn’t receive a great deal of media coverage in the US.

Personally, I have had limited luck experimenting with this sort of thing, and the results have been less proactive than vicious, but I have learned some invaluable lessons from them. The first occurred when I was 17: three friends and I launched a campaign to have our friend Jon elected Homecoming Queen as a farce on school-condoned popularity contests. He won by a landslide – or he would have, but the people tallying the votes threw every “Jon for Homecoming Queen” into the garbage. The four of us retaliated and sparked a dance-wide brawl. 

The following year, in New Orleans, twelve college buddies and I managed to instigate a full-fledged riot involving over 300 people when the police tried to stop us from dancing and playing music in the street. It was Mardi Gras, and the streets were filled with rowdy revelers, but our big group was the only one rife with visible tattoos, piercings, dreadlocks and instruments, so we were “disturbing the peace.” Sixty-five rioters were arrested and charged with assault; we retorted with a civil suit for excessive force, and the charges were dropped. 

And finally, in early August 1999, my girlfriend and I worked as volunteers at Woodstock 99 where 300,000 attendees were prohibited from bringing food or water into the festival area in the blazing heat. Venders offered tiny bottles of water for seven dollars apiece, shoddy hamburgers for nine. By the third day of the festival innumerable people were suffering malnutrition and/or dehydration, and so about 30 or 40 of us laid siege to the venders. Our goal was to hijack their commodities and redistribute them to the crowd. Instead, we ignited a quarter-million person riot in which everything in the festival area was destroyed, including both stages. National news agencies blamed Metallica.  

What did I learn from these experiences? People, especially in crowd form, are loaded with what physicists call “potential” (resting) energy, like a boulder perched on a cliff. Push the boulder and it becomes “kinetic” (impact) energy. In Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, in the section on raising an army, it is noted that it only takes a tiny spark to ignite a blaze. In each of my cases, as well as that of Otpor, the group that initiated the conflict was a tiny fraction of the whole – but, like Sun Tzu’s spark, it only takes a tiny push for potential to become impact. In fact, the only real difficulty seems to be keeping it nonviolent. 

Enter At Own Risk

The heat radiates above this cursed field of jagged volcanic rock like a palpable spiritual essence. One can almost hear it breathing, harsh whispers, like the tiny black snake in Kipling’s Jungle Book – “be careful, I am death!” Well, I am not careful, but then I’ve never been known for taking advice too seriously, even if it is the sound contention of nature in all its ugly, brutal beauty. It warns you to stay away from it, much the same as a tattooed harlot in black leather with a bullwhip warns you to stay away from her; the warning is as tantalizing as the danger. A sign that says All Are Welcome may be okay for a motel or for one of those sterile, fenced-in swaths of deciduous garden that passes for wilderness in most peoples’ minds, but this is the desert. Out here the signs say Enter At Own Risk and are typically riddled with bullet holes.

So why am I here? Good question… A simple answer would be, “why not?” Take the Socratic high road; corner the bastards with circular rhetoric. Or Mallory’s answer, which always works in a pinch: “Because it’s there.” Well, televisions are there too, wherever there is, and so are shopping malls and bars and trendy cafes and a whole lot of other congealed mishmash to boot. Bad news, plastic surgery, cell phone ring tones that sound like the awful stuff that oozes out of radios and MP3 players all over the doomed, infested countryside… A better answer would be, “because that isn’t there!”

Escapism – there, I’ve said it. It rolls off the tongue with an aftertaste of acidic guilt, like saying ‘alcoholic’ or ‘afflicted.’ You can attach whatever romantic trappings you want to it, roll it up in the sweet dough of life-affirming adventurous whoozafuzz or prop it up with the tinderbox scaffolding of academic pursuit, studying the ecology of ecology firsthand, but we all know the truth. We go into the wild because we need to escape the cages of the daily grind. We need to escape because our cages become filled with shit.

The other day, someone asked me why I thought it was that people drink or use drugs to such an alarming extent as they seem to nowadays, and I replied that we need to numb the senses, dull the spitfire parts of the mind that we no longer need but which continually menace our minds none the less. He looked at me like I was spewing poetic gibberish, but I’m always prepared for that, logician that I sometimes pretend to be, so I brought out some examples.

“There was a time,” I said, “that we needed to know everything that was going on around us, for the sake of mere survival. It looks like rain, so we need to take shelter, and I think I smell a tiger, and that man over there is holding his spear a bit nervously… We had to stay on our toes, because in the wilderness danger can come at you from any side. You’re staring transfixed at a flower, meditating as it were, and you step right on the cobra. So evolution worked its magic, and our species became highly adept at perceiving and gauging its surroundings, being bereft of wings or a hard shell, in order to keep ahead of peril. Only now, with the peril all but gone, our finely-tuned perceptions drive us out of our wits, bombarded at all times by inane and utterly useless nonsense, so that we either succumb to the madness and dive headfirst into our ridiculous culture, invent and bow down to a whole slew of half-illusory new perils like terrorism or obesity, or else we seek refuge. Some seek it in books or ideas, and for them that is enough. Some seek it in the wilderness. For others, it’s the bottle – or something worse.”   

“So… you think everyone wants to escape, so to speak, because we’re still hardwired to keep alert for tigers, but instead of hearing tigers we hear Britney Spears and how contaminated broccoli may be bad for our livers, or something. Is that what you’re saying?”

“Basically. We’re hardwired to be very much in tune with our world, and our world, at present, is absolutely goofballs. You can complain to your congressman, throw away your TV and follow the path of Zen, wind up a friendless but smiling weirdo in the unemployment line. Or you can get ripped to shit on alcohol and other fun substances and act like a heathen.”

He cocked an eyebrow. “There are other options, of course.”

I cocked an eyebrow right back. “But who would want them?”

Well, I was lying, but everyone does that from time to time – it keeps people on their toes, where they belong. There is another option, of course, and a far better one, but the signs say Enter At Own Risk and are typically riddled with bullet holes. Those are the places I like to escape to, such as I am in this journal entry. Scarred, scalded land bereft of lushness or verdure, overgrown with harshness and liberally sprinkled with the sorts of plants and animals that like to poke holes. Abbey’s country. My country. When the doctors finally tell me I can’t hike anymore I shudder to consider the alternatives.  

Journal Entry, July 2009