cannot wait to learn about nucleic acids and genetics and finish my fat ass book about mitochondria so i can girlsplain about biology and disguise i5 as a spiderverse fanfic

TAFAKKUR: Part 245

CRYPTOGRAPHY AND CODES IN EXISTENCE

The confidentiality of information is vital for people, companies and countries. Cryptography develops methods of encoding and decoding information in order to protect it.

Cryptography mainly aims to save information and to transfer messages to recipients safely. Cryptography can change a message into a complicated form by applying several different methods. Encoded information can be resolved only when the receiver applies specific methods to it. Not only does computer cryptography render communication secure but it also gives users secure access to servers.

Nowadays, cryptography is becoming more and more significant, especially now people transfer their personal, commercial, military or political information to each other on internet. It is easy for someone to get personal information through online shopping sites which are very common today. Therefore, credit card information entered into the website is converted into unintelligible characters through an encryption method so that the credit card number can be transmitted to the server securely. Then, the server can easily retrieve the original form of the credit card number using decryption.

The encryption algorithm includes essential elements known as the "key." Protection of the key is always vital for information security.

HISTORY OF CRYPTOGRAPHY

To find the first examples of cryptography one needs to go back more than 4,000 years in history. For instance, in 2000 BCE the ancient Egyptians used hieroglyphs on the gravestones of their kings to describe their achievements when they were alive. Eventually, the system of hieroglyphs grew too complex to understand. Then people began to use it for encoding. Similarly, Chinese people used ideography, which conveys ideas through symbols, to hide the meaning of words.

There are also encoding examples from ancient Mesopotamia that have similar aspects to those used in Egypt. The Roman emperor Julius Caesar used a type of encryption technique called the "Caesar cipher" in which each letter in the plain text is replaced by a letter some fixed number of positions down the alphabet. In the Middle Ages cryptography received a lot of attention from many nations, especially in Europe. In recent years, many different methods have been developed in this field. Therefore, the classical methods are not as useful as they were in the past, especially since the 1970s. Today, more complex mathematical methods have replaced the classical methods of cryptography.

The Arabs were the first to make successful studies of how to decode encrypted messages. Ahmad al-Qalqashandi of Egypt (1355–1418) developed an encryption method which is still used today. This technique is based on a theory of language stability which explores the distribution and frequency of the words in a text. With this method, the frequency of the characters within the encrypted text is compared to the frequency standards in the language; in this way, it is determined what an encoded letter really stands for.

This method is used successfully in decoding messages encrypted by the mono-alphabetic method, which is based on sliding or replacement of a letter by another one.

In 1931, the French obtained documents from a German spy which showed the functions of a code named "Enigma" that was going to be used in World War II by the Germans. British mathematicians were then able to decipher the code during the war. Thus, the commands of Hitler could be learned immediately by the Allied Powers. The Allied countries won the war because of their access to the decryption technique. Likewise, the American army gained victory over the Japanese in the Pacific War in the 1940s because American decryption experts, along with their British and Dutch colleagues, were able to decode the system called JN-25 which was being used by the Japanese army.

Technological developments in computer science have enabled us to decode even previously unbreakable ciphers. For instance, an encrypted message which was created in 1977 and which, it was thought could be decoded only 40 quadrillion years later with the help of an algorithm that analyses the known large numbers into their factors, was actually decoded seventeen years later in 1994.

CLASSICAL AND MODERN CRYPTOGRAPHY

Cryptographic methods are divided into two categories: classical and modern. In the classical method, encoding can be done by consistent replacement of a letter by another letter in the same alphabet. For example, if we replace each letter in the word FOUNTAIN by the third following letter it changes into IRXQWDLQ. It can also be done by replacement of a word with another one or replacement of a character by another character. Of course, the recipient of the message must be the only person who knows the decryption method. In that way, for example, the unintelligible word above can easily be changed back to its original form by replacing each word by the letter three places before it in the alphabet. Such encrypted messages can only be decoded by linguistic analyses or after numerous trials. The classical method was invented hundred of years ago, and it has been used since then. Although this method is so simple that it can even be used manually, computers are the only devices which can have maximum security as well as very long keys and complex algorithms for the modern technique.

The "Spartan cylinder" is another device used in the classical method. A message is written on a piece of paper rolled around a cylinder with a known diameter. The encrypted message is then detached from the cylinder and sent. The only way to decipher the message is to have a cylinder of the same diameter. If the unrolled paper is re-rolled around a decoding cylinder properly, then the original message is obtained. This method is known to have been used by the Spartans around 600 BCE.

One modern method is called Public-Key Cryptography. In this form of cryptography, the key used to encrypt a message differs from the key used to decrypt it. The public key may be widely distributed while the private key is kept secret. Thus, incoming messages are encrypted with the recipient's public key; yet, they cannot be decrypted except with the recipient's private key. Hence, the possessor of the private key is the only one who can decrypt the message and read it.

Conversely, in secret-key cryptography, a single secret key is used for both encryption and decryption. One disadvantage of secret-key cryptography is the distribution of the private key since it is always at risk of being acquired by third parties.

If we look at the universe, we can observe similar cryptographic methods in every creation process. For instance, living cells produce protein by deciphering nucleic acids (DNA, RNA), which include encoded genetic information in ribosomes.

THE STRUCTURE OF ENCODED DNA AND ENCRYPTION IN PROTEIN SYNTHESIS

There is divine wisdom in the encoding of DNA and the transference of these codes to ribosomes in the protein-making process. If we compare DNA molecules, which contain the genetic instructions inside living organisms, to a book, the letters in this book can be symbolized by A, T, and G and C. These symbols represent four molecules which are used in the encoding of the genetic program that shapes the basic form of all living organisms. Each human genome is identified with different sums of those letters. For instance, while the sum of genomic letters is approximately 3 billion in mice and human organisms; it is about 4–5 million in a bacteria. Furthermore, when the genome sequences of two humans are compared, the combination difference between the two appears to be only one percent; nevertheless, no human being is exactly like another in appearance.

There are some interesting distinctions between humans and animals in terms of their genome numbers. The various encoding techniques used in DNA are a basic biological mechanism which can also be considered the mystery behind the genetic diversity in the creation of living organisms. If we compare the genome to a program booklet, we can consider the booklet to be a tiny model of the "Manifest Record" (Imam al-Mubin) mentioned in the Qur'an, in which the future lives of all things and beings, including all the principles governing those lives, and all their deeds and the reasons or causes are kept pre-recorded in this world. The instructions and mechanism used in this encoding program are identical in most living beings. This uniformity shows that they are all created by one Almighty being.

Scientists also observe another kind of encoding which helps transmission of the right message to ribosomes during the protein-making process. The main idea is that unlike the base-pairing of DNA, in messenger RNA (mRNA) the complementary base to adenine is not thymine, as it is in DNA, but rather Uracil, and also that every three nucleotides (a codon) carry information of one amino acid. For example, while codons in DNA appear as "AAT, GCC, GAT, GTA," they appear as "UUA, CGG, CUA, CAU" in mRNA. Here the main goal is not to keep the information safe against the third parties as in normal encryption, but rather to transmit the message properly and preserve the diversity of living beings.

Developments in the area of cryptography do not only provide confidentiality of information, but they also shed light on our understanding of God's wonderful creation in the world of living creatures. All these extensive and essential practices, including the encoding of the information by the four letters of DNA, proper transmission of this encoded information to the cells, and the necessary synthesis in the cell, prove that the All-Knowing and Omnipotent God has great wisdom in all His actions in the Universe.

Evolution: An Introduction

so I thought this might be a useful post b/c a lot of stuff we’ve described abt evolution has been spread out over several different posts. now I can just link to this instead of trying to quickly describe something as complex as evolutionary theory, lmao. keep in mind I’m not especially versed in molecular bio-- there are prolly nuances I’m missing here b/c they fly over my “big picture” bio head, so don’t take this as like, a professional review of evolution

anyways this is another longform post, so prepare urself. some of this may be familiar b/c I cut it out of other posts, but most of it is fresh new writing~

Table of Contents

PART 1: Definition

- Genetic Variation/Diversity

- Fitness

- Niche

PART 2: Energy

- Give-and-Take

- Survival vs. Reproduction

PART 3: Speciation

- Species Concepts

- Speciation

PART 4: Taxonomy/Classification

- Cladistic Taxonomy

- Parsimony

PART 5: Some Misconceptions

- Change =/= Improvement

- Impractical =/= Impossible

PART 6: Beyond Darwin

- Epigenetics

- Horizontal Gene Transfer

- Universal Biology

PART 1: Definition

First, a ‘brief’ definition of Darwinian evolution:

Random genetic mutations regularly occur during meiosis (the sexual cell division giving rise to gametes/embryos) and increase the genetic diversity in a species’/community’s gene pool. As environmental conditions naturally shift over time, certain conditions will become more or less favorable for the array of random traits that a species’ gene pool exhibits. Thus, some lucky organisms will exhibit traits that increase their fitness compared to others within their population when these environmental shifts occur. These individuals with high fitness will better survive and/or reproduce, so their genes (including those that produce the advantageous trait) survive and are inherited by their offspring, allowing them survival/reproductive advantage as well. Thus, the advantageous trait lives on, while others without the advantageous trait either die out or shift into a new niche to survive in (and potentially evolve into a new species themselves).

The process of more “fit” organisms surviving over others is natural selection: environmental pressures push species to either adapt to the changes within their current situation, die, or move on to other niches. If there are no fluctuating stresses on organisms to survive, then there is no evolution, because no single trait is more beneficial to survival than any other.

~Genetic Variation/Diversity~

Genetic variation describes the tendency of genotypes (the genetic “blueprint” of an organism) to vary between individuals in a population. These variations are due to random genetic mutations in an individual’s DNA, and genetic “shuffling”.

Genetic mutations are actually far more common than most may think, as we usually associate mutations with visible, sometimes grotesque physical traits. Many mutations aren’t so blatant and unfortunate, instead merely lending to slight variations in our genetic code and physical/psychological state (if they even have a direct effect on us at all). Our genetic code is actually VERY good at minimizing errors due to the redundancy of codes in relation to resulting proteins (look into genetic degeneracy for more info).

The “shuffling” refers to processes like crossing over and independent assortment during meiosis. Without getting too deep into these processes, they’re essentially what recombines the genes provided by the parents into unique combinations for the offspring.

Genetic diversity is the total number of genetic characteristics in a species’/population’s overall genetic makeup. This diversity drives evolution, as it gives individuals a greater chance of possessing genotypes better suited to their environment/circumstances. If all individuals of a species are exactly the same in every aspect, then evolution won’t occur because no individual holds greater survival/reproductive advantage over another. This is why small gene pools can be so deadly to species, because a given individual will have little chance of possessing a lucky random survival trait when their environment inevitably shifts into a new state.

Genetic variation is often confused with diversity, though it’s understandable since the two terms are very similar. Think of it like this: variation is the “flexibility” of a given species/population’s DNA. IE—how common is it for the individual genotypes of a population to vary from each other within a given time frame? Diversity is the number of different characteristics the variation caused within a given population.

It may not be super important to know the difference between these terms for creature-creation purposes (tbh I prolly won’t remember the difference once I post this guide asdfg), but it can help when studying evolution.

~Fitness~

“Fitness”-- despite popular belief-- refers to an organism’s reproductive success as defined by their contribution to the next-generation gene pool. These genes are physically expressed in the organism via phenotype, which must curb the stresses of an individual organism’s external environment in order to successfully pass on to the next generation in via genotype.

An organism does NOT have to be physically fit to have high evolutionary fitness. Though fitness certainly CAN be influenced by more popularized ideas like physical strength or health—there are plenty of animals that intimidate others via size/pheromones/etc., which may lead to an outright battle for control of resources. One great example is the capercaillie—a large grouse that is so aggressive to any perceived threat during breeding season, they’ll even go after humans. Males that succeed in the most battles attract the most females.

However, physical strength or aggressiveness are NOT the only paths to success, as there are plenty of examples of small sizes or social cooperation benefiting a species! Vampire bats, for example, are known for sharing food among roostmates who failed to find food on their own. Surviving strictly on blood is a tough life, and just a couple days without food can spell death for a vampire bat. Thus, well-fed bats will often regurgitate part of their meal to feed those that weren’t so lucky that night. While there is contention over the exact factors that play into this reciprocation (such as kinship), there’s strong evidence that long-term association and past investments correlate with a bat’s willingness to share food.

Now an interesting caveat to this is that a trait that may benefit an individual’s evolutionary fitness can sometimes threaten their individual health and survival. As I will discuss in more detail later (see Part 2), fitness balances BOTH individual survival AND overall reproduction. So long as the individual lives long enough to pass on more of their genes compared to others in their community, their fitness is considered a success. This can sometimes mean an organism only lives a few years, but they produce many successful offspring to pass on their genes. Thus, successful fitness.

~Niche~

A “niche” is how an organism responds to the abiotic and biotic aspects of their environment and the resources available. It’s essentially how an organism fits into the life web of their environment/community, and how they make a space for themselves out of the resources available to them. Competition for resources can result in changes to the organism’s morphology (such as paws/claws better suited for scaling trees to reach fruits), physiology (such as developing a tolerance for the bitter taste of a certain abundant fruit), or behavior (such as only foraging for fruits during the dawn/dusk when less competition for fruit is out and about).

PART 2: Energy

~Give-and-Take~

Evolution is a delicate balance of give-and-take. Often, in order for an organism to have a highly-refined trait in one aspect of their life, a different trait of theirs must be reduced. This is due to energy management-- organisms only have so much energy to spare, and evolution must often must ‘decide’ what traits benefit most compared to other traits.

Thus, one of the most important things to remember when applying evolutionary theory is purpose. Every action, emotion, and additional part of the physical body takes up energy to create during development and/or sustain during an organism’s lifetime. If it doesn’t serve a purpose on the organism, then the energy used to sustain it will likely be redirected towards more important purposes over time. This is why useless structures on organism can be such a liability—if they don’t help out at all, they’re using up precious energy that could be put towards more vital processes.

Of course, evolution is a slow and complex process, so useless structures aren’t gonna disappear overnight. This may even give these ‘useless’ structures enough time to be retrofit for a different purpose, thus making them useful again. Vestigial structures, for example, are often small and useless because they’re usually evolving out of the body plan, but that doesn’t always mean they serve no purpose in the current body plan. The human tailbone is an important anchor for hip muscles, for example, despite the fact that we don’t have a use for anything tail-like in our structures anymore.

Another good example of an evolutionary trade-off could potentially be found in bird wings vs. bat wings. Though keep in mind that this particular assertion is more theorizing on the part of some of the mods here (including me), so take this with a grain of salt compared to the cited parts of this post.

As I’ve discussed in much more detail in the Flight section of this post, bats have highly agile flight due to the membranous structure of their wings, with fingers and tendons that can adjust the exact shape and elasticity of the wing to the smallest degree. These complicated structures require quite a bit of energy to develop, which may explain why bat hind limbs are so underdeveloped in comparison. Sure, bat legs can cling and spread out the wing membrane, but they’re essentially useless for walking or much dexterous action (for most bat species at least). Compare their legs to birds, on the other hand, and you get a completely different story. Bird legs can be very dexterous instruments in many cases, and allow birds a much wider range of movement on land (which of course varies by species, but even this level of diversity isn’t available to bats). Yet, bird wings are much less versatile compared to bats; since developmental energy is directed towards the hindlimbs, the wings can’t afford to take up much more energy. Fortunately, feather development after hatching doesn’t take up nearly the same amount of energy as the development of flesh and bone, BUT these wings don’t have the same level of malleability as fingers and membrane. Thus, the trade-off here is highly versatile flight vs. dexterous hind limbs + land mobility.

Gestation is, understandably, a very important part of this energy-partitioning process, as the type of gestation decides the amount of energy and space available for the animal to develop right off the bat. Placental mammals are able to give their young a constant supply of energy through their own consumption, and a more flexible/stretched space for their young to grow and for their bones to ossify. Egg-laying animals, on the other hand, have a restricted amount of energy and space to develop in, as decided by the energy resources and size of the egg they’re laid in. 

This restrictive space/energy is potentially another reason for birds’ feathered wings—since feathers can grow outside the liquid matrix of the egg (unlike bones), only the fleshy “arm” part of the wing needs to develop within the egg. Bats, being placental mammals, have much more room and energy to build up their complex, fully-flesh wings in the womb. Though this is, again, our theorizing on the subject.

Energy actually factors pretty heavily into to the type of early development an organism undergoes. For example, long-lived animals often have few children, while short-lived animals often have many over their lives.

It takes a LOT of energy to gestate/brood and then care for resulting offspring (often at direct risk to the carrying parent, no less). If an organism isn’t going to live long, it’s much more to their reproductive advantage to simply have many children that they throw out to the world on their own. More offspring are likely to survive than if the short-lived animal spent a lot of energy raising just a few offspring before dying. Long-lived animals, on the other hand, have the time to spend on raising a decent amount of offspring, so they can protect their young for a while and give them each a much higher chance of individual survival.

~Survival vs. Reproduction~

There are the two main forces that drive an organism’s evolution: individual survival and reproductive success.

Individual survival makes sense to us, because obviously an animal can’t pass on their genes if they don’t live long enough to breed. Yet, it’s equally important to remember that no matter how well an animal survives individually, their existence means nothing to evolution if they don’t eventually pass on their genes.

In fact, there are many examples of organisms whose short lives are basically a means to the end of mating, or whose individual lives are directly threatened by the prospect of mating. One rare mammalian example is the Antechinus—a mouse-like marsupial who lives for only a year, and mates only one time at the end of their life. Their short breeding season is so intense, that the males literally breed until their bodies fall apart. Obviously the males don’t individually benefit from breeding so hard as to die, but the strategy clearly works to pass on their genes and continue this cycle. Thus, successful fitness to those that breed "hard" enough.

Even if the reproductive strategy isn’t as drastic as this, individual survival is often at odds with reproduction, which can lead to some interesting compromises and loopholes. For example, vibrant feathers and boisterous displays may attract mates, but it will also certainly attract predators to the easily-spotted target. Most avian species’ eyesight can be classified as either violet-sensitive (VS) or ultraviolet-sensitive (UVS), so some birds will utilize a part of the light spectrum that their fellow avian predators can’t see. Thus, the birds in question are dull to at least some of their predators, but eye-catching to potential partners.

Anyways, it helps to break down these two aspects-- survival and reproduction-- when designing, and figure out what features of an organism may help them accomplish certain tasks:

Survival:

-Gas exchange- How does this animal breathe? Do they live on land, in water, or are they semi-aquatic? Do they have lungs, gills, or semi-permeable skin? If they fly, do they have adaptions for high-altitude flight and efficient gas exchange? How does the placement of their nostrils/gills effect the efficiency of their gas exchange in different environments? Can they hold their breathe for any amount of time?

-Hydration- Where/how does this animal get water? From their meals, large water sources, or maybe direct contact with water while swimming? How abundant is water in their environment, and what adaptions does the animal have for this?  Does this animal have morphological traits or behaviors to prevent desiccation?

-Consumption- What is the animal’s diet? How strict is that diet—are they obligate carnivores or opportunistic omnivores? Scavengers or fresh-foliage herbivores? What adaptations do they have to handle potential toxins/diseases in their meals? How do they locate/track and/or capture their meals? What jaw morphology to they have to properly shred/grind/swallow or otherwise ingest their food? How do they digest these meals, and what nutrients are vital to their physiological survival?

-Shelter/Safety- At what times of the day is the animal awake? What sensory adaptations do they have for changes in light and sound throughout the day? Why are they awake at these times—maybe predator avoidance, or an advantageous foraging time? Is this species typically fight or flight when faced with danger? How far do they have to be pushed to resort to either, and what warnings will they exhibit before that point? Can this species handle a wide gradient of weather/temperature, or can they only survive within a narrow gradient?

-General Homeostasis/Physiology- How does this animal regulate their temperature? What kind of immune system does this creature have, and how effective is it under different conditions? How does this animal grow/develop over time, and what role do external factors play in this?

Reproduction:

-Attracting mates- What behaviors does the animal participate in to find and attract mates? Do they have any physical structures, attention-grabbing behaviors, or both? What senses do they most rely on for this—bright plumage to attract sight? Loud/melodic calls to capture the auditory? Seductive scents?

-Reproductive organs- What kind of reproductive organs does this species have? Do they have multiple kinds exclusive to different sections of the population? Do they all have the same kinds of reproductive organs? Do their reproductive organs change over time, and how much energy does it take for that change to occur?

-Gestation- How does this species incubate their developing young; through an in-body placenta, hard-shell egg, soft-shell egg, or maybe in a marsupial fashion? How might this protect or otherwise effect developing young? What restrictions does this place on energy available to the developing young? How much stress does this incubation method put on the parents? How long do the young incubate, and how developed are they once they hatch/birth?

-Child rearing- Do the adults rear the young for any amount of time, or are the young on their own once they hatch/birth? How long are the young reared, and how does this affect their development? What secondary reproductive organs (such as mammary glands) might be used to help rear offspring? Communal rearing, nuclear family, or single parent? What are the average chances of the young surviving into adulthood?

PART 3: Speciation

~Species Concepts~

Typically, we’re taught that a species is defined as a group of organisms that is capable of breeding and producing viable/fertile offspring.

While this definition may seem intuitive, it can be shaky when applied to nature. We humans like to slot natural processes into neat little boxes of classification, as it helps us better define, organize, and communicate to others what we observe in the world. Though we sometimes forget that these definitions don’t actually confine and control these processes; our language is naturally limited when discussing something as fluid as a natural process. For example, the definition of “species” for a single-celled organism won’t count for a complex vertebrate, nor would the species definition for a sexually-reproducing organism count for an asexually-reproducing organism. Some species’ genetics/reproduction can’t even be observed anymore (long-extinct fossils, for example), so species distinctions must be based on pure morphology!

This is known as the “species problem” in biology, and it highlights the true complexity of life. Instead of just one concept for species, we have several for different conditions. According to this page, there are at least 26 currently being used, which I will copy-paste here (though you should check the link for more info on specific authors/papers and synonyms):

Agamospecies: Asexual lineages, uniparental organisms (parthenogens and apomicts), that cluster together in terms of their genome. May be secondarily uniparental from biparental ancestors.

Autapomorphic species: A geographically constrained group of individuals with some unique apomorphous characters, the unit of evolutionary significance; simply the smallest detected samples of self-perpetuating organisms that have unique sets of characters; the smallest aggregation of (sexual) populations or (asexual) lineages diagnosable by a unique combination of character traits.

Biospecies: Inclusive Mendelian population of sexually reproducing organisms, interbreeding natural population isolated from other such groups. Depends upon endogenous reproductive isolating mechanisms (RIMs).

Cladospecies: Set of organisms between speciation events or between speciation event and extinction, a segment of a phylogenetic lineage between nodes. Upon speciation the ancestral species is extinguished and two new species are named.

Cohesion species: Evolutionary lineages bounded by cohesion mechanisms that cause reproductive communities, particularly genetic exchange, and ecological interchangeability.

Compilospecies: A species pair where one species "plunders" the genetic resources of another via introgressive interbreeding.

Composite Species: All organisms belonging to an internodon and its descendents until any subsequent internodon. An internodon is defined as a set of organisms whose parent-child relations are not split (have the INT relation).

Ecospecies: A lineage (or closely related set of lineages) which occupies an adaptive zone minimally different from that of any other lineage in its range and which evolves separately from all lineages outside its range.

Evolutionary species: A lineage (an ancestral-descendent sequence of populations) evolving separately from others and with its own unitary evolutionary role and tendencies.

Evolutionary significant unit: A population (or group of populations) that (1) is substantially reproductively isolated from other conspecific population units, and (2) represents an important component in the evolutionary legacy of the species.

Genealogical concordance species: Population subdivisions concordantly identified by multiple independent genetic traits constitute the population units worthy of recognition as phylogenetic taxa

Genic species: A species formed by the fixation of all isolating genetic traits in the common genome of the entire population.

Genetic species: Group of organisms that may inherit characters from each other, common gene pool, reproductive community that forms a genetic unit

Genotypic cluster: Clusters of monotypic or polytypic biological entities, identified using morphology or genetics, forming groups that have few or no intermediates when in contact.

Hennigian species: A tokogenetic community that arises when a stem species is dissolved into two new species and ends when it goes extinct or speciates.

Internodal species: Organisms are conspecific in virtue of their common membership of a part of a genealogical network between two permanent splitting events or a splitting event and extinction

Least Inclusive Taxonomic Unit (LITUs): A taxonomic group that is diagnosable in terms of its autapomorphies, but has no fixed rank or binomial.

Morphospecies: Species are the smallest groups that are consistently and persistently distinct, and distinguishable by ordinary means. Contrary to the received view, this was never anything more than a diagnostic account of species.

Non-dimensional species: Species delimitation in a non-dimensional system (a system without the dimensions of space and time)

Nothospecies: Species formed from the hybridization of two distinct parental species, often by polyploidy.

Phylogenetic Taxon species: A species is the smallest diagnosable cluster of individual organisms within which there is a parental pattern of ancestry and descent; the least inclusive taxon recognized in a classification, into which organisms are grouped because of evidence of monophyly (usually, but not restricted to, the presence of synapomorphies), that is ranked as a species because it is the smallest 'important' lineage deemed worthy of formal recognition, where 'important' refers to the action of those processes that are dominant in producing and maintaining lineages in a particular case.

Phenospecies: A cluster of characters that statistically covary, a family resemblance concept in which possession of most characters is required for inclusion in a species, but not all. A class of organisms that share most of a set of characters.

Recognition species: A species is that most inclusive population of individual, biparental organisms which share a common fertilization system

Reproductive competition species: The most extensive units in the natural economy such that reproductive competition occurs among their parts.

Successional species: Arbitrary anagenetic stages in morphological forms, mainly in the paleontological record.

Taxonomic species: Specimens considered by a taxonomist to be members of a kind on the evidence or on the assumption they are as alike as their offspring of hereditary relatives within a few generations. Whatever a competent taxonomist chooses to call a species.

(Note that only one concept-- biospecies-- is the typical concept we’re taught applies to all species.)

And even then, these definitions can be contentious when you’re actually out in the field or working with a set of genetic data (believe me, I know). This post is also a very fun, informative dive into this problem, if you want to take a look.

Now I’ll just be using biospecies as the basic definition of “species” for this section, and evolutionary species for most of this post, but keep this natural flexibility in mind when defining the species in your world! If biospecies doesn’t fit some of your species-- or even your whole batch of species-- then test out other concepts and see how they fit! “Species” is really just a word, after all, not a law of nature.

~Speciation~

that in mind, Speciation is defined as the formation of distinct species by the process of evolution. By the biospecies concept, speciation is usually accomplished by some sort of reproductive isolation. This can develop and present itself in different ways, including:

Different mating times, locations, and/or rituals

A lack of compatibility between sexual organs

Production of offspring that are unviable (don’t live to adulthood) and/or sterile (cannot produce offspring)

There are several types of speciation that can produce this reproductive isolation:

Allopatric: A species is split apart by a physical barrier in their environment, such as fragmentation or a weather event that pushes sections of the population apart.

Peripatric: A version of allopatric speciation where the isolated population is very small.

Parapatric: There’s no physical barrier between different parts of the population, but individuals are more likely to mate with others within a certain range of their territory rather than far-off reaches of the population’s territory. This creates a gradient of genetic differences in the population across the territory, which may lead to speciation between the most physically distant individuals.

Sympatric: When a population gradually develops reproductive barriers without any geographic isolation/distance; likely caused by gradual random mutations, though it can be a bit difficult to observe in nature.

PART 4: Taxonomy/Classification

~Cladistic Taxonomy~

Taxonomy is the practice of naming, defining, and organizing organisms into groups based on shared characteristics. I casually use it to refer to cladistics specifically, but it’s technically a broader field encompassing all sorts of approaches to classification.

Cladistic taxonomy organizes life by tracing direct descendance/genetic history to given organisms’ last common ancestor. As these relations are mapped, certain groups (“clades”) will naturally ‘nest’ within other groups, thus building a ‘tree’ of lineages that connects all life to one another.

Also keep in mind that the nesting pattern of cladistic classification will automatically include any organisms under a given clade’s umbrella. Just because a creature evolves “beyond” a certain taxonomic stage, doesn’t mean that creature stops being a member of that group. It’s why birds ARE dinosaurs-- even if birds evolved “from” dinosaurs, they are still a part of that broad clade. Aves is simply the more specific clade nested within dinosaurs.

This is classic monophyletic grouping-- where a group consists of all descendants of a common ancestor, as defined by their synapomorphies (traits derived from a common ancestor, thus are unique to a particular clade).

Cladistic taxonomy is the usual type of classification you’re gonna come across in biology, and it forms the basis of our understanding of evolutionary history. Generally, an eclectic mix of morphological, behavioral, ecological, and genetic characteristics help string together the evolutionary relationships of organisms. Though more recently, genetic data has become the backbone of taxonomic research, often upheaving decades of theories based only on morphology/ecology/behavior. These other characteristics are still important in defining species, but they can sometimes be... misleading.

See, cladistics is based on the assumption of homology-- that similar characteristics are a result of those traits being passed on to different organisms from a common ancestor; the divergent evolution of related species from a common ancestor that passed on that trait.

This isn’t always the case for similar structures, however. Analogy assumes that similar characteristics are a result of the organisms in question facing similar environmental stressors that would require similar traits to survive and thrive; the convergent evolution of unrelated species towards a similar trait.

The avenue of analogy opens up many more approaches to classification (see this post). However, these different types of classification move a bit beyond evolutionary theory/history into different subjects like ecology, and I don’t want to side-track too much here. Homology is the only real way to track direct descendance and genetic history, so analogy isn’t especially important when considering strictly evolutionary classification. 

~Parsimony~

Now, since shared morphological traits aren’t ALWAYS an indicator of direct evolutionary relations, how exactly do we parse out what is and isn’t clade-defining?

Taxonomists generally work under the assumption of parsimony-- that the theoretical genetic tree that requires the fewest evolutionary changes is probably correct. This mindset is derived from the philosophical theory of Occam’s Razor-- that the simplest answer is probably the correct one, given all other factors are equal.

Thus, a phylogenetic tree that assumes more of a clade’s given traits were passed on from common ancestors is going to be a LOT more realistic than a tree that assumes a lot of traits evolved independently via convergent evolution. It takes a lot of energy to evolve whole new structures, so it just makes more sense that more of these traits would be passed on from an ancestor that had already freshly-evolved them. This isn’t ALWAYS the case (see Part 5), but it’s the safest assumption to make when drawing out evolutionary trees.

Though it’s important to have some understanding of anatomy and basic genetics when practicing parsimony-- this is where the caveat of, “given all other factors are equal,” comes into play. Traits like limb number, pelt color, or cartilaginous frills can’t be treated equally, as they don’t evolve in the same ways or at the same rates.

As I discussed more broadly in Part 2, developmental energy is a critical factor in evolution. Embryonic characters are the most stable, as these characteristics are vital to development (whether they require the liquid matrix of the womb, or are systems absolutely crucial to life once the newborn exits the womb), or are otherwise connected to a creature’s most structural/basal genetics. Thus, these embryonic traits display the most broadly-defining synapomorphies, and evolve veryyy gradually over time. 

For example, human embryos have “gill ridges” remnant of our fishy ancestors, but they’ve been retrofit for other purposes (namely jaw/ear development), so they eventually morph into their humanoid purposes as the embryo develops. Limb number is another good example, and is stable for vertebrate development as far back as our first land-faring fishy ancestors. (potential vertebrate hexapod evolution can be complicated, and I go into more detail about it here)

Compare those traits to more adaptive traits that crop up in mature organisms (like color, general body shape, etc.). These traits use up much less developmental energy (or none, if they end up changing/developing post-hatch/birth), and evolve far more quickly for survival purposes. These adaptive traits could easily evolve independently across a taxonomic tree, depending on the circumstances.

Either way, it’s important to sort out what traits are broadly-defining, developmental traits vs. quickly-evolving, adaptive traits. A tree that uses limb number as a derived trait but shows several independently-evolved color patterns is going to be FAR more realistic than a tree that uses different color patterns as derived traits, but shows limb numbers independently changing just a few times times across the tree. 

Though of course, this is all under the assumption of Earth genetics, which doesn’t necessarily have to be the case for your world (see Part 6).

PART 5: Some Misconceptions

~Change =/= Improvement~

I’m well aware that I’ve been using personified language here for ease of describing evolutionary processes, but I must make this clear: natural evolution is NOT consciously-driven. As long as genes viably and consistently pass on, any given trait could potentially live on.

There’s this idea in popular culture that “evolution” refers to “improvement”, but in reality, evolution simply means “change”. Environments are dynamic, shifting systems, and organisms change to survive these shifts. Sure, evolution technically “improves” species by molding behaviors or body plans to better fit an environment, but this is a temporary value judgement at best. The environment will eventually shift again, and a trait that was ideal for a species in the past may be the thing that drives their doom in the future.

There is no actual “goal” to evolution—no “ideal form” that evolution strives for. We’re all just trying to survive, and that’s exactly what drives our diversity—if we were all the same, we couldn’t survive vying for exactly the same resources and life conditions.

If sociality and empathy help a certain species survive, then that’s their approach. If a different species can live on just fine without sociality/empathy, then that’s their approach. Neither approach is “better” than the other. Trying to impress some sense of subjective “morality” or “hierarchy” on evolution is a fool’s errand, and honestly pretty insulting to the survival approaches of basically every other species.

~Impractical =/= Impossible~

Evolution is less a grid-marked blueprint, and more a patchwork piece of sticky notes and crinkled napkins. Every organism is as evolved as well as they can be in a given moment with the materials they have available to work with. Evolution can’t simply magic up the perfect materials necessary to build a wing, for example; a species’ current morphology must be retrofit to complete the task at hand.

Thus, no form is perfect, nor is any species’ approach to survival fool-proof. If evolution were consciously-driven, for example, we might not choke on water all the time because our throats would be more efficiently designed to prevent water from entering our trachea. But evolution worked with what it had, and our current throat shape is what we’ve got.

Additionally, life isn’t always a vicious struggle for survival-- Life situations vary, and not everyone has to carefully balance out their energy usage. Some organisms live a safe enough life that certain random mutations or vestigial structures stick around purely because there is no outside stressor that requires their energy be directed elsewhere. Thus, they can stand to sacrifice some of that energy for mutations that really don’t matter in the long-run.

As for behavior, as All Yesterdays puts it, “Animals do what they do, not necessarily because it is what they are good at, or even because their anatomy is suited to it, but simply because they can.” Behavior, unlike anatomy, is much more flexible and can vary heavily depending on an individual’s circumstances. Most animals are not constantly battling the elements or each other, and have opportunities to do bizarre things that may not practically help them in any way, but perhaps provides some other sort of satisfaction. This quote is preceded by a list of odd animal behaviors as example, “Elephants are excellent at swimming, crocodiles and alligators sometimes eat fruit and leaves, juvenile iguanas sometimes jump up at the moon at night, and goats in some areas often climb trees in order to browse.”

When you’re first starting out creature design, it’s safest to assume that because an animal has a body plan suited best for a given activity, they will stick more readily to that activity. However, keep in mind that anatomy and behavior do not always align, and that an impractical behavior or structure doesn’t always mean it’s an impossible behavior/structure. To be completely honest, I often have to remind myself of this, as I often fall into the “practical survival” trap of design, which ignores the flexibility of nature and evolution.

Just keep in mind what structures would be actively detrimental to keep around compared to others. A whole new set of limbs, for example, would take up a RIDICULOUS amount of energy to produce and sustain, even for an animal that has a fairly easy life. There are a lot of intricate muscle, bone, and nerve structures in those things! Compare that with a change in color, fur length, or cartilaginous frills—much less complex, and they don’t use up nearly as much energy.

PART 6: Beyond Darwin

Now, I’ve been focusing on exclusively Darwinian evolution here (which is admittedly the bulk of evolutionary theory), but there are a few other modes of evolution/inheritance that I want to briefly touch on.

~Epigenetics~

First, keep in mind that Darwinian evolution occurs through GENERATIONS, not individual lifespans. A giraffe’s long neck isn’t caused by their pre-giraffe parents stretching out their necks and passing on their freshly-stretched necks to offspring. It’s caused by a random mutation in neck length that happened to be useful in reaching higher leaves, helping those long-necked offspring survive better than their short-necked brethren.

However, that doesn’t mean that heritable changes within a lifespan never occur-- they’re just not necessarily as ‘Lamarckian’ as they first appear, nor are they necessarily antithesis to Darwinian evolution.

Epigenetics is the study of heritable changes in gene expression/activity, but not changes to the actual DNA sequence. This means that certain phenotypic traits can shift in an individual lifespan due to environmental pressures, and can pass on to offspring. The key here is that these changes occur in gene expression (which is controlled by the shape/structure of a DNA strand), but NOT the DNA sequence.

Some have referred to this phenomenon as a “genetic memory” since it’s like passing on helpful information to your kids just in case they face the same stressors you did. Arabidopsis plants treated with high salt or heat conditions, for example, have been found to produce offspring that are more tolerant of these conditions, compared to those offspring whose parents didn’t experience these conditions.

While plants provide some of the best examples of epigenetics, since they tend to have more flexible genomes that actively respond to their environments, evidence for epigenetic heredity has been found in animals as well. Chickens that undergo unpredictable food access will have offspring that exhibit more conservative feeding strategies, even without parental contact and under more favorable food conditions. Of course, this research is still rather novel, and it’s always good to be cautious about the varying conditions that could affect the outcome. Research into “inherited trauma” in humans, for example, is still in its infancy, and while it’s yielded interesting results, we’re far from reaching a conclusion about exactly what of trauma/stress could be inherited.

~Horizontal Gene Transfer~

Vertical gene transfer from parent to offspring is the main driver of Darwinian evolution, and is what we use to track direct inheritance and construct directional taxonomic trees. However, life is not always confined to such strict evolution.

Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) involves passing genes from one individual to another by means other than reproduction. This can create HIGHLY complex maps of inheritance, with no real traceable direction of lineage so much as a mass of tangled, interchangeable wires. Thankfully, this *mostly* happens among single-celled organisms like bacteria/archaea, so that’s a microbiologist’s problem to figure out lmfao.

Though it makes for a rather interesting tree of life

The beginnings of life were rife with HGT, with these early cells (and even earlier to what was likely a messy soup of free-floating RNA) sharing and recombining their genes with abandon. As cells increased in complexity, however, HGT became much more difficult, and THAT’S when vertical gene transfer (thus, Darwinian evolution) took over.

Now just because HGT mostly occurs in single-celled organisms doesn’t mean it NEVER occurs in more complex organisms. While these transfers are usually initiated by single-celled organisms, plants and fungi are notorious for not giving a shit about proper genetics and giving us poor botanists hell when trying to track family trees >:( . Not to mention several other multi-cellular examples, including animals. HGT doesn’t seem especially common in complex organisms compared to single-celled organisms, but it’s certainly not unheard of!

~Universal Biology~

So this is a pretty novel, pretty abstract area of research. I’m probably not gonna do it justice, so I’d recommend watching this video for a better breakdown, but I’ll still try to describe this topic for a layman audience.

*Broadly speaking*, most physical phenomenon have some sort of abstract theory to predict their existence. Essentially, we know 1) why the phenomenon can occur, and 2) how it can occur under specific circumstances.

We don’t have that for the theory of life.

All our current theories for life are tied intimately to our subjective experience of life on Earth-- our need for water, our carbon-based structures, etc. etc. But these aren’t really theories of life so much as theories of Earth life. We can’t apply these theories when, say, searching for alien life, because there’s no reason to believe that life outside our planet will utilize the same basal resources in the same exact ways our life has.

We need to divorce the materials from the theory, because the materials don’t provide the true message of life. As Nigel Goldenfeld asks in that linked vid, “what is the abstraction that the biology that we see is the representation of?” What we really need to know is how matter in general, “can self-organize hierarchically to create self-replicating, evolvable structures.”

Essentially, how do molecules come to life?

I wish I could tell you what IS the true theory of life-- the why and the how-- but that’s the ongoing question, right now. Goldenfeld believes that evolution is a key component of the universal theory of life, because biological systems are the only systems known to ‘reprogram’ themselves in response to outside stressors. Other physical systems don’t do that-- they’re bound by fixed equations of motion. Some sort of genetic code is obviously key to evolution-- and specifically, HGT leading to a vertically-evolving universal genome-- thus is also considered a universal component of biology. Beyond that we don’t have a whole lot to go on (besides homochirality, which I... honestly can’t rly wrap my head around, so I rly suggest watching that video for more information).

Stuart Bartlett and Michael L Wong have also recently come up with the concept of “lyfe”, where lyfe would more universally apply to organisms outside our conception of biology, while “life” is simply an Earth-centric subset of lyfe. This definition relies on four main criteria: “dissipation (the ability to harness and convert free energy sources); autocatalysis (the ability to grow or expand exponentially); homeostasis (the ability to limit change internally when things change externally); and learning (the ability to record, process and carry out actions based on information).”

Now I only bring this topic up because it really gets at the heart of specevo and creature design-- the absolute core of what we can create. Obviously I don’t expect most of you to go so deep as to reconstruct the basal molecular structures of your creatures-- hell, it’s not something I even plan on doing much, if at all.

But I hope this perhaps... frees your constraints a bit. There are many ways to make a world, and not all of them have to be Earth-centric. Anything from the genetic building blocks of organisms, how they process energy, and what abiotic stressors restrain their growth/development could be different. There’s no rule stating your world (or even any real-life world out in the universe) has to 1:1 match Earth, so your world may have any number of differing factors, such as different sources of direct energy than sunlight, different gravitational restraints, a different kind of life creation event, or even a different element used as the elemental building block of life (IE- not carbon). These would all lead to different approaches to evolution, morphology/physiology, and behavior.

-Mod Spiral

By:  Insect King

AKA The True Namers, the Baal Chem

In the Beginning was YHVH and He created all life.

The Holy Tetragrammaton has puzzled religious thinkers and mystical speculators about its simplicity, complexity, and its promise for climbing closer in our understanding of Him. Each letter was an engine of creation which pointed in different directions but was the whole. Although it was a sacred duty to meditate upon these things, there where hucksters who also worshiped the power of God but sought to manipulate it. Through rearranging the order of words so the combinations could unlock power, create magick.

These sorcerers were the Baal Shem; the thieves of knowledge and blasphemers with the ability to decode and remake all creation. They were true adepts of their time, recognizable in their attitude and execution of their magick.

As the years waned and cultures grew, interest in sorcery changed, new things were accepted and old ideas lost their flexibility. And so did the Baal Shem, with their ever ready YHVH words of power. Their rules went into the cold storage of old books written by magickally dry occultists. And so they were passed down, flittered about in discussions, and occasionally studied.

But old, powerful ideas do not die easy, they can spontaneously resurrect when the correct grail is found, the hollow idea which can be filled with the liquid of pure imagination and will. And so with one student of ancient occult, it happened, he saw the book and magazine lying side by side, open to the right pages.

On one page was YHVH, the other, AGCT. And then everything just fell into place like a puzzle assembling in reverse motion. Religious philosophy and genetic science were one and the same.

It wasn’t a complete cohesion, some puzzle pieces where in backwards, or the wrong way around. He would have to keep looking at the larger pattern, before finding the small inconsistencies. Of course changing one tiny piece altered the larger pattern, so it is hard work and the gains are few but one day it will be completed, and God’s face will be seen.

AGCT is the Tetragrammaton, the True Genome, the Unpronounceable Name of God. Our individual genomes are our True Names two-billion characters long, and by rewriting our True Names, we can cause a miraculous change, a new creation.

As above, so below is the running irony of the Baal Chem. It is the apotheosis of everything else that makes us human, but not actually us; deep in all the bone, blood, meat, gristle is where God sits, in the tiny arrangements of molecules, the delicate chains of deoxyribonucleic acid that exists innocuously in every living parcel. The most powerful information coherence in the world built of the most of fragile filigree. The most powerful being of the universe is the also one of the weakest.

Through our consensual landfill of waste religious orthodoxy and mythology we abandoned God, and through our embrace of science and experiment, we have found Him again. We have found him in all of us, the destiny in everything that lives.

And so the school of the Baal Chemistry was born, alchemically uniting old magick and modern science;  uniting Baal Shem and Genetics, and making the magick of God’s Chemicals.

STATS

Baal Chemistry is in not in its infancy, but there are few practitioners, mostly in the Middle East, but migrating outwards. The basics are already down but the school is not going to progress unless the students learn Hebrew, or the science of molecular chemistry, or both. It doesn’t have to be to rigorous academic standards but the skills must be bought.

Although firmly rooted in Hebrew mysticism Baal Chemistry isn’t a Jewish school. Anyone with adept potential can learn the school.

Baal Chem relies on the sympathetic law of imitation. The law is quite simple, if anything appears like something else, it will act upon that something else. The Baal Chem use a symbolic version of the Law of Imitation, the Law of Names.

One side of the Baal Chemist’s genetic sorcery is that successful significant effects alter the DNA permanently which might throw off testing.

Blast Style: The Baal Chem can bobby trap scrolls to give blasts but it cause sickness or even cancer. Although the spells are slow they may be fatal over a long period of time.

Random Magick Domain: random magick is antithetical to Baal Chemistry. They might lack true diversity, but the Tetragrammatists can stack magicakal effects on top of each other unlike any other school.

Generate a minor charge: For four hours study the Bible, cabala, The Tetragrammaton, and other tracts of Jewish mysticism, or write an essay condensing your findings.

Generate a significant charge: There are no Significant charges only significant effects generated by actively manipulating the genetic code in yourself or others.

Generate a major charge: Discover a lost tract on the Tetragrammaton and be the first to study it. Discover a break though in genetics research, such as controlling the telomere cancer-cellular mitosis relationship. Work a change over ten years that works.

Taboo: Their work is sacred and may never be abandoned. If the Baal Chemist is ever interrupted from his significant works, they reset and have to be started over again.

The Baal Chem cannot touch any separated tissue or fluids of the target that are derived from injury. Touching blood and other tissues breaks taboo as the law of imitation is subverting by the law of contagion. If the Baal Chem gets splashed with a limited amount of tissue, he can scrub off to avoid taboo.

The temple of the Baal Chemist is generally as close to sterile as any scientific laboratory.

Unlike other adepts, The renamers can incorporate different spells into one, as long as they add up the time taken and roll their Magick: Baal Chemistry skill.

Minor Baal Chemistry Formula Spells

A (one minor charge) The Baal Chemist can diagnose any living body and give a pretty accurate idea of what is going on at that time.

T (one minor charge) The Baal Chemist can correct minor imperfections, purge the body of toxins, exhaustion, and turn back the body’s clock limitedly for about as many months as the sum of the Magick: Ball Chemistry skill. This doesn’t regenerate lost limbs or heal damage, but it removes and smoothes imperfections like scars, wrinkles, and acne, hangovers, reduces infections, cleans the system, and improves the person’s sense of well being. A person with this spell heals 1 wound point has a +10% on all his first stress check afterwards.

The Baal Chemist will use T as a cleansing preparation before performing a procedure.

C (two minor charges) The Genetic Tetragrammatist can improve healing and assist in recovery by rolling his Magick: Baal Chemistry skill as if he was a doctor.

G (three minor charges) This minor blast spell makes the target’s body react as if it were invaded by foreign germs. The target suffers from a debilitating fever. Unless the character gets bed rest for as many days as the sum of the Magick: Baal Chemistry skill, he cannot heal through convalescence. If the character is actively physically stressing his body, he takes one wound point per roll whether successful or not.

Significant Baal Chemistry formula effects

Targeted effects The significant effects do not have to be performed with the target present, but the Baal Chemist must at least have some knowledge of who the person is, to have some idea of the person’s True Name. Basically this: no name -10%, no picture -10%, no basic personality profile -10%, or no truthful history -10%. If the Baal Chemist can touch the victim, the penalty is reduced by 30%. The Baal Chem cannot increase his skill this way.

Rearranging Genomes The spells are basically formulations, long strings of the Tetragrammaton characters AG and CT written on paper scrolls. The paper can be worn as an amulet or scrunched up and swallowed as a pill. Placing the spell on unknowing or unwilling targets is a bit problematic but nothing that can be solving without some quick thinking, sneaky long-fingers or elbow-greasing thugs.

Once the spell is on the person’s body, it takes about an hour to ready or activate. Removing the scroll before then diffuses the magick but the scroll is still active.

For a safety measure the scrolls can actually described to target a specific person, who is listed Tetragrammatically in the formulation.

The Abundance of God’s Blessing (One days work) By spending one day working the Baal Chemist can regenerate one point of Body. This includes the slow re-growth of lost limbs and organs. This spell cannot replace damaged tissue just replace what is missing. Due to the complexity of tissue re-growth it might take many weeks or months before the area is restored.

The Passion of David (One days work) The target may re-roll one failed but non-magickal Soul-based skill and Speed-based skill roll.

A Visitation from the Angel of Betrayal (Two days work) The Baal Chemist can disrupt cellular activity by scribbling over the cell’s ability to control their own division, allowing them to multiply unstoppably into cancerous tissue.

After spell is cast, the opponent rolls his Body stat once per week. If it fails he takes the highest die in damage to his Body. This roll continues once per week until either the cancer kills the target or he successful convalesces, healing his Body back to full while not taking any damage. At which point the cancer has gone into permanent remission. Otherwise, if the cancer is detected within the first month, it can be safely removed.

The Legacy for Esau (Three days work) The next four Mind stat or skill checks are flip-flopped to their worst result. Obsession skills simply do not flip-flop.

The Sword of God (Three days work) The Sword of God is a strange blast spell. It invokes rage in anyone interacting with the target. No everyday things like buying from the market or speaking to people at your office, but when a roll is required. If the roll fails, it triggers their Rage Passion.

There isn’t much control over the situation, but at the wrong time with the right person, the results can be fatal. The person tagged with the Sword of God comes across as hiding crucial personal secrets, arrogant, and irritating. Triggering the anger doesn’t cause a stress check, only the results of it do.

The Sword of God works once.

Blessings on the House (Four days work) With this spell the ability to conceive a child is made better. Not only is the act blessed to be fruitful (the Fertility chance is half of Body), one partner gets a flip-flopping and the other, a re-roll, but the sex of the child can be chosen by the one who rolled highest. This scroll works once per sexual encounter.

The Lions of Daniel (Four days work) While the target is protected by the Lions of Daniel, it triggers or creates the Noble Passion of the animals for the benefit of the target, regardless of how they are feeling or trained to act. The animal certainly won’t attack but it might not let the character pass an area it was set to guard. Animals might even get playful and unintentionally hurt the target.

Wild dogs will not attack her, but they will maul clothing and bags to get to food, rats will climb and nuzzle their way inside her clothing. Once the spell is in effect it lasts twenty-four hours.

Loss of the Innocence of Eden (Five days work) This spell rewrites history recorded onto genetic memory, the target’s twenty billion character True Name. The successful roll can rearrange three failed and hard notches from any three chosen meters. The notches can be placed on any other gauge, Hard or Failed.

Perfecting the Perfect (Five days work) This scroll permanently removes any inherited genetic disease from a person unless the disease has already manifested. The disease’s harmfulness is eradicated and will not pass it along the target’s germline from that point.

Once the genetic malfunction has manifested, there is nothing the Baal Chem can do about it.

The Flesh of Methuselah (Six days work) This spell rejuvenates the target’s body effectively removing the debilitating effects of tissue damage, decrepitude, injury, and internally halving the person’s age. Externally there is little actual change but the spry person may act and thus look younger. Cosmetic surgery and extensive spa treatments may help further at this point.

This spell heals Wound Points equal to the sum of the Magick: Ball Chemistry roll.

Void of the Nameless (Seven days work) The dead are generally beyond the purview of the Baal Chemist. If you do not have a body you have no True Name, their lives are over and thus Nameless. With Void of the Nameless, a possessed person can regain control over his or her body by imprisoning the demon within their mind, and like an oyster, form a psychic pearl around the irritant.

This spell forces the demon to roll possession to escape or be trapped in the victim’s mind as he regains control. It is crushed underneath the awakening mind, trapped. The victim may have dim dreams.

Unless the demon has some magickal means of escaping it is trapped in some disused and sound-proofed basement of the victim’s mind. Over time the entity just decays into oblivion.

The Void of the Nameless is also proof against possession attempts in the first place. The possessing entity just smacks into the target’s body like it was solid.

Once the demon is imprisoned, it is there permanently. The spell gives twenty-four hours protection once activated.

The Lamentations of Solomon (Eight days work) The spell allows the target to increase his Mind and Soul stat at a rate of one experience point per Stat point. The maximum number of purchases is equal to the sum of the Magick: Baal Chemistry roll. This spell only raises the stats, not the skills.

Major Baal Chemistry Effects Change one species into another, read God’s will in someone’s genome, eradicate aging, raise stats to superhuman levels, create the perfect killer immune system, grow a perfect clone body in a few hours, permanently remove all genetic imperfections and disease from a person.

Alan Calnan, The Nature of Reasonableness, The Nature of Reasonableness, Southwestern Law School Research Paper No. 2019/07. (June 4, 2019)

Abstract

Though the notion of reasonableness dominates Anglo- American law, its meaning has been clouded by traditional conceptual analysis. This Essay argues that greater clarity can be gained by taking a scientific approach to the subject, exposing the natural foundations beneath the concept’s varied interpretations.

Introduction

Reasonable legal minds agree that reasonableness is one of the foundational concepts of American law, infiltrating everything from administrative, corporate, and constitutional law to crimes, torts, and contracts.1 Yet the concept’s importance and prevalence haven’t necessarily bred clarity. In fact, a recent flurry of analytic interpretations has only clouded the term’s meaning.2 While some scholars say reasonableness is a prescriptive standard,3 others ]believe it describes existing community values,4 and still others see it as a combination of the two. 5 This split is deepened by disagreements over the concept’s normative basis. Indeed, the latest proposals ground reasonableness in a wide variety of ideals, including utilitarianism, economic efficiency, fairness, deontological respect, pragmatic rationalism, formalism, mutuality, and aretaic virtue.6

Since reasonableness effectively serves as law’s conscience, doubts about its essence are an obvious cause for concern. But the impasse also puts legal theory in a serious predicament. If reasonableness means different things to different people—or at least, different things in different legal contexts—then there’s little point to searching for a common unifying principle. Even if such a principle exists, traditional conceptual analysis has struggled to discover it. As jurisprudence maven Lawrence Solum recently observed, legal philosophy’s exhaustive polemic on reasonableness eventually just “runs out of gas.”7

Yet the problem with these approaches isn’t a lack of analytic rigor. Rather, it’s an absence of critical facts. What’s missing from the discussion of reasonableness, I argue, is a basic understanding of human nature. Because science informs that inquiry, this Essay explores the biological origins of reasonableness by probing three of its key connotations: sensibleness, fairness, and moderation. The first meaning evokes mankind’s integrated cognitive faculties, the second addresses humanity’s reflexive values, and the third entails the coordinative processes animating human decision-making. Together, these attributes suggest that reasonableness is not an abstract, static, or monolithic ideal; rather, it’s an organic, dynamic, and systemic phenomenon for satisfying our natural urge for homeostasis.

I. Integrative Faculties

It’s widely recognized that reasonable and sensible are effectively interchangeable ideas. But it’s not so clear how these terms became synonymous or what deeper insight can be drawn from their relationship. After all, words grounded in reason, on the one hand, and senses, on the other, seem facially antagonistic if not incompatible. Yet as it turns out, the meaning of sensible has changed over time, and its transition to reasonableness reveals more about that concept than any standard dictionary definition can offer.

What makes the etymology of sensible so significant is its uncanny resonance with human nature. Sensible originated in the Middle Ages with a physical connotation, suggesting something “perceptible to the senses.”8 Since sensory perceptions are typically clear and emphatic, sensible things were deemed “easily understood.”9 This interpretation subtly turned a biological feeling into a mental experience. That tendency was exacerbated by the growing belief in mind-body dualism, which placed reason in control of all human understanding.10 Thus, if a thought were comprehensible, and thus sensible under the latter view, it had to be both “logical” and “in accordance with reason.”11 So construed, sensible became something of a notional composite, integrating body with mind and feeling with rationality.

Though reasonableness isn’t conceived this way today, science has confirmed its integrative nature. The ostensibly one-dimensional term—reason-able—is really the functional integration of two human faculties: reason and feelings. As neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has observed, “Feelings and reason are involved in an inseparable, looping, reflective embrace”12 in which “mind and brain influence the body proper just as much as the body proper can influence the brain and the mind.”13 In fact, says Damasio, body and brain aren’t really separate life systems but rather “two aspects of the very same being”14—in effect, “an organismic single unit.”15

Like reason, feelings are a type of cognition.16 They process and evaluate information obtained internally from a person’s body and memory and externally from the surrounding environment. 17 Informed by homeostasis, which sets the parameters for an organism’s survival and flourishing, feelings provide “a moment-to- moment report on the state of life” inside the body.18 That report includes a normative judgment about its findings, signaling that the body’s condition is either good or bad.19 Conditions conducive to well-being produce a range of positive or pleasant feelings, while bodily states detrimental to survival evoke feelings that are negative or unpleasant.20 Over the course of evolution, these valenced feelings get etched into mankind’s long-term memory bank— DNA—where they emerge as heritable intuitions.21

This preserved affective experience begets, directs, and grounds our “sense” of reasonableness. When the body’s sensory apparatus is stimulated by new information, our feelings spontaneously appraise the situation and sound an immediate call to either accept or reject the precipitating cause. 22 This impulse often is accompanied by powerful emotions—like anger, fear, joy, or comfort—which heighten the initial reaction.23 These tumultuous feelings finally stir our reason, but not to act as the final arbiter or sole decider. Rather, reason intervenes to serve our intuitions by updating their old wisdom with new plans, strategies, and arguments suited to the prevailing circumstances.24 In short, feelings propose general rules of behavior, while reason searches for exceptions. If none can be found or fashioned, our rational faculty readily justifies, defends, and approves the proposal.25

Even when reason counsels a different course of action, feelings continue to influence its trajectory. Feelings monitor the quality of the mind’s response to a problem, making us feel good when the solution benefits our welfare and bad when it fails to advance our interests.26 This feedback renews the rational review of better alternatives, thus completing one cycle of integrated problem- solving and initiating a repeating succession of others.27 At each turn, reason is informed and tempered by feelings, and feelings are informed and tempered by reason.

Reasonableness emerges when the relationship between reason and feelings is relatively reciprocal. When it’s not, the effect is unmistakably un-reasonable. Psychopaths and sociopaths are rational, but they lack important social feelings like empathy, compassion, guilt, or shame.28 By contrast, infants are extremely emotional, but they have undeveloped powers of reason.29 Although adults with impulse control disorders are capable of rational thinking, they often are captive to their feelings and emotions. In each situation, the actor’s dis-integrated mentality prevents her from behaving as a reasonable person.

Ironically, our integrative faculties may explain why humans ever began creating such behavioral standards in the first place. According to Professor Damasio, “Feelings, as deputies of homeostasis, are the catalysts for the responses that began human cultures.”30 When people started experiencing the stress of group living, Damasio surmises, they would have invented a variety of responses to diminish their displeasure.31 These reactions initially may have “ranged from moral prescriptions and principles of justice to modes of social organization and governance.”32 Because such conventions proved effective, they were formalized in codes of conduct and eventually sanctified as law.33

We may not know precisely how reasonableness came to represent these homeostatic developments. Yet one thing is reasonably clear. We can’t hope to understand the meaning of that concept without investigating the integrated interplay of reason, feeling, and homeostasis.34

II. Reflexive Values

As it turns out, homeostasis and feelings are not just biological faculties for creating reasonableness. They also are normative agents that inform this mindset. We’ve seen how homeostasis gives valence to our feelings, which make positive and negative judgments about our homeostatic stability. But that process goes deeper still, imbuing us with core values that prime our every decision. While these values often seem too deep to fathom, their natural foundations actually lie well within the realm of reasonableness.

The central value of reasonableness is fairness.35 Though fairness is presented as a single concept, it combines two apparently inconsistent ideals. Fairness can be either a general sense of justice and equity36 or conformity with specific rules or duties.37 In reality, however, fairness is neither unary nor binary. It is a complementary and reflexive set of ideals naturally derived from mankind’s highest normative authority, the human brain.

The brain evolved in three stages to solve three different adaptive challenges.38 While the ancient selfish brain structures promoted the individual’s survival, later social structures facilitated cooperation and group living.39 The final global layer reconciled conflicts between its discordant predecessors and fashioned long-term strategies for human flourishing.40

As an assembled unit, the brain produces the two types of fairness that make up our sense of reasonableness. The selfish and social modules emit moral intuitions. Inherited at birth, these intuitions are self-evident to their hosts, who perceive them as special, serious, imperative, and universal.41 So when someone violates these rules, the infraction feels instinctively unfair.

This deep-seated feeling derives from values so important to human survival that they have been imprinted into our genome by natural selection. Though cultures prioritize these values differently, all people crave autonomy, care or security from harm, reciprocity, loyalty, hierarchical authority, sanctity, and integrity.42 Because we possess a visceral need for these basic goods, we feel subconsciously entitled to their fulfillment. When that entitlement is threatened or impaired, our indignity reflex automatically kicks in and we are filled with a sense of injustice and inequity. This feeling appears to account for theories of reasonableness grounded in deontology and virtue ethics.43

Our global neural network works differently. It deliberatively constructs conventional rules to solve current problems that evolution, genes, and intuitions can’t or don’t address. These rules depend on a logical accommodation of many factors, including the norms, practices, customs, and conditions prevailing at the moment. Though conventions are influential, they don’t feel nearly as binding. In fact, they typically must be enforced by external incentives like punishments or social sanctions, or justified by the power of affective persuasion.44 When such rules are breached, we think the transgression is unfair because it disrespects a rational rule of behavior grounded in a utilitarian or economic assessment of costs and benefits.45

The legal notion of reasonableness does a good job of capturing the dual strands of biological valence. Our moral intuitions are embedded in bright-line rules of law, including crimes and torts against battery, false imprisonment, theft or conversion of property, breach of confidentiality, and abuse or exploitation of the weak and vulnerable.46 Because these offenses directly betray our harm, autonomy, reciprocity, loyalty, and authority values, they are treated as presumptively unreasonable. When our values conflict or interrelate in complex ways, the law typically abandons a rule-based approach and replaces it with a general standard of reasonableness.47 This is particularly evident in the tort theory of negligence, where an endless array of lawful but ill-considered acts may result in someone’s harm. In these cases, findings of unreasonableness cannot be presumed, but must be rationally and affirmatively justified by considering all of the surrounding circumstances.48

Yet law’s rendition of reasonableness as fairness is not quite complete. Because the legal concept lacks a foundation in human nature, it misses reasonableness’s essential reflexivity. Rules and standards are never entirely separate; nor are they permanently set in stone. Rather, like the faculties of reasonableness inside the brain, these valenced mediums are constantly shaping and being shaped by each other.

Such circularity is most conspicuous at the level of doctrine, where rules and standards are locked in a perpetual feedback loop. In torts, for example, the presumptive rule of an intentional tort or strict liability theory is often countered by a privilege or defense grounded in the standard of reasonableness.49 In other situations, a reasonableness standard is used to clarify an ambiguous rule, as is true for cases of outrage and abnormally dangerous activities.50 This relationship is also reversible. Doctrinal standards—like negligence’s standard of reasonable care—frequently spawn rule- based exceptions; 51 and in some scenarios—like the no-duty principle for nonfeasance—the exceptions can effectively restore the standard.52

Because reasonableness’s reflexivity is ongoing, its patterns can even shape the course of law’s historical development. If one assumes a global perspective—in fact, the sort of meta-view taken by our faculty of reason—these ripple effects soon snap into focus. It’s clear that theoretical standards—like the original writ of trespass or “wrongs”—may splinter into more fine-grained behavioral rules—like our various intentional torts.53 It’s also apparent that a hodge-podge of specific social rules can scale up to form a general standard of reasonable care, as happened with the theory of negligence.54

It’s even evident that these normative movements can waffle to- and-fro. A good example is the law of products liability, which gradually morphed from a strict no-duty rule to a standard of reasonableness; then transitioned to a rule of strict liability, and ultimately morphed back into a standard of reasonableness.55 In each situation, reasonableness isn’t just the state of fairness within our rules and standards; it’s also the process for coordinating them.

III. Coordinate Processes

The idea of reasonableness as coordination is captured by yet a different connotation of the term. Being reasonable means being moderate or displaying moderation.56 Since the core idea of moderation is avoiding extremes or lessening their intensity,57 this version of reasonableness certainly assumes a coordinative mentality. But it also comes with a familiar qualification. Like other aspects of reasonableness, the mind’s coordination process isn’t purely rational. Instead, it’s a natural dynamic of a complex biological system.

All living systems contain disparate elements organized to achieve some purpose.58 Because these elements are innately competitive, they must coordinate their individual aims just to maintain system function.59 That process, though system-specific, is neither haphazard nor idiosyncratic. Rather, it’s the product of a universal medium called coordination dynamics.60 This uncanny natural power not only senses system instability, it initiates a continuous cycle of adjustments to restore equilibrium at all levels of existence.61

In fact, coordination dynamics accounts for the integrated brain mechanics mentioned earlier. Alerted by homeostasis, coordination dynamics sets out to reconcile the cacophony of thoughts and feelings aroused by a disruptive event. It also harmonizes the selfish, social, and global drives directing the mind’s response.62 As the process unfolds, coordination dynamics employs the trick of moderation to inhibit extreme, knee-jerk reactions. Though the mind simultaneously entertains opposed positions—a process called metastability—it constantly explores the vast array of middle-ground alternatives, ensuring that the final decision is measured, moderate, and ultimately, reasonable.63

But that’s not all. These dynamics don’t just operate in isolation. Because systems are overlapping and interactive, their dynamics have a circular causality, scaling up to higher levels and affecting the levels below.64 So it is with law. Human beings first addressed their survival problem by forming larger coordination systems called societies. When these social systems came into conflict, they formed coordinative cultural systems like religions, philosophies, traditions, and customs to hold their factions together. Yet even this wasn’t enough. As cultures and sub-cultures clashed, humanity adapted once again, this time by developing the still higher coordination system of law.65

Law served as a system of sociocultural homeostasis. As Professor Damasio explains, “the development of justice systems responded to the detection of imbalances caused by social behaviors that endangered individuals and the group.”66 Law’s purpose was to coordinate society’s volatile elements by reestablishing a healthy equilibrium between the law-abiding and the lawless.67

The longer law persisted, the more deeply coordination dynamics shaped the human psyche. Nurtured by global values of authority, sanctity, and integrity, this sociocultural norm became a pervasive natural instinct, inspiring an exalted and unifying legal “system” that reflected and reinforced its coordinative nature. In fact, within democratic cultures, coordination dynamics bred legal institutions structured for the very purpose of facilitating reasonable decision- making.

These features consistently promote metastability by juxtaposing polar positions, diversifying their analysis, assessing their intersections and interstices, and synthesizing medial solutions. The process begins with law’s superstructure, which strikes a delicate balance of powers among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government. It also permeates the infrastructure of each branch, dividing executive power among the president, the cabinet, and various implementing agencies; splitting legislative authority between the House and the Senate; and stratifying judicial authority through a multilateral court system.

Though such governance structures may seem to “leave the realm of biology,” Professor Damasio insists “that is simply not true.”68 “The protracted negotiating process required for governance efforts,” he continues, “is necessarily embedded in the biology of affect, knowledge, reasoning, and decision making.”69 Because “[h]umans are inevitably caught inside the machinery of affect and its accommodations with reason,” “[t]here is no exit from that condition.”70

These coordinative properties scale all the way down to law’s minutia. Legal concepts are framed as rules, standards, and principles or policies, and are packaged as competitive rights and duties. If these binaries can’t be reconciled, they’re functionally coordinated by law’s global mediator, the constitution. Such accommodations aren’t permanent, however. Under the common law system, each new decision must be continually coordinated with the old wisdom of past opinions. The same holds true in individual lawsuits, where law’s longstanding norms are constantly mediated by judges and juries informed by prevailing social values. Within the trial process itself, the law’s high-minded rationality gets further mediated by the raw emotion of the parties, the witnesses, and the factfinders.71 Even when a final decision is necessary, law typically doesn’t entrust the responsibility to a single person, but assigns it to a panel of coordinators willing to reconcile their differences in the common pursuit of justice.

Of course, there’s no guarantee that the resulting judgments will be sensible, fair, or moderate. Seemingly rational people sometimes do irrational things. But because law is an essentially coordinative enterprise, it’s reasonable by nature even though it’s not always reasonable in fact.

Conclusion

Conventional legal theory treats big questions as matters for deep philosophical discourse. That’s certainly been true in the jurisprudence of reasonableness, which has become little more than intellectual jousting. It’s now clear, however, that topics like reasonableness can’t be grasped by analysis alone. Because reasonableness has physiological origins, it’s susceptible to scientific investigation. In fact, science helps to illuminate three of the concept’s core connotations: sensibleness, fairness, and moderation. While the first meaning describes the cognitive integration of reason and feeling, the second evokes homeostatic values like justice and reciprocity, and the third reflects the dynamics of human coordination.

Admittedly, these findings don’t tell the whole story, as new discoveries in the natural sciences continue at a frenzied pace. But such insights do bring us closer to the truth. Even if that prospect doesn’t convert every science skeptic, it does make a naturalized approach to reasonableness reasonable in itself. As Professor Damasio counsels, “It is often feared that greater knowledge of biology reduces complex, minded, and willful cultural life to automated, pre-mental life,” but science actually “reinforces the humanist project” by “achiev[ing] something spectacularly  different: a deepening of the connection between cultures and the life process.”72

Footnotes

See Brandon L. Garratt, Constitutional Reasonableness, 102 MINN. L. REV. 61, 69-70 (2017) (recounting the concept’s significance and use within multiple legal fields); Frédéric G. Sourgens, Reason and Reasonableness: The Necessary Diversity of the Common law, 67 ME. L. REV. 73, 74-75 (2014) (same).

The latest entry appeared just two months ago in the Yale Law Journal Forum. See Alan Z. Rozenshtein, Fourth Amendment Reasonableness After Carpenter, 128 YALE L.J. FORUM 943 (2019).

See Alan D. Miller & Ronen Perry, The Reasonable Person, 87 N.Y.U. L. REV. 323, 326 (2012) (“We put forward and defend the argument that normative definitions [of reasonableness] are categorically preferable to positive definitions because the latter are logically unacceptable.”).

See Kevin P. Tobia, How People Judge What is Reasonable, 70 ALA. L. REV. 293, 299-300 (2018) (describing this view of reasonableness as a search for the statistically average characteristics of people within a community).

See id. at 296 (arguing that “[r]easonableness is best understood as a hybrid notion that is partly statistical and partly prescriptive”).

See Sourgens, supra note 1, at 80-105 (discussing utilitarian, pragmatic, and formalist paradigms of reasonableness); Benjamin C. Zipursky, Reasonableness In and Out of Negligence Law, 163 U. PA. L. REV. 2131 (2015) (proposing a theory of reasonableness as mutuality); Lawrence B. Solum, Legal Theory Lexicon: The Reasonable Person, LEGAL THEORY BLOG (Apr. 21, 2019), https://lsolum.typepad.com/legaltheory/2019/04/legal-theory-lexicon-the-reasonable-person.html (addressing efficiency, fairness, deontological, and virtue-based notions of reasonableness).

Id.

Sensible, ONLINE ETYMOLOGY DICTIONARY, https://www.etymonline.com/word/sensible (last visited June 1, 2019).

Id.

Mind-body dualism is the belief that mind and the body are composed of different substances and that the mind is a thinking thing that lacks the usual attributes of physical objects.” Scott Calef, Dualism and Mind, THE INTERNET ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY, https://www.iep.utm.edu/dualism/ (last visited June 1, 2019). Such “substance” dualism was popularized in the seventeenth century by French philosopher Réne Descartes. See id.; see also EDWARD O. WILSON: CONSILIENCE: THE UNITY OF KNOWLEDGE 108 (1998) (discussing Cartesian dualism).

Sensible, supra note 8.

ANTONIO DAMASIO, THE STRANGE ORDER OF THINGS: LIFE, FEELINGS, AND THE MAKING OF CULTURES 171 (Vintage Books ed. 2019).

Id. at 117; see also id. at 12 (stating that feelings are a “cooperative partnership of body and brain”); id. at 139 (noting that feelings are “based on hybrid processes that are neither purely bodily nor purely neural”).

Id.

Id. at 26

See JONATHAN HAIDT, THE RIGHTEOUS MIND: WHY GOOD PEOPLE ARE DIVIDED BY POLITICS AND RELIGION 52-53, 102 (2012).

See DAMASIO, supra note 12, at 30-31, 146-47, 157.

Id. at 104.

See id. at 25, 102, 105-07.

See id.

See id. at 21-22; see also HAIDT, supra note 16, at 144.

See id. at 64-66.

See DAMASIO, supra note 12, at 99-100, 108-13.

See HAIDT, supra note 16, at 54.

See id.

See DAMASIO, supra note 12, at 15-16, 171.

See id. at 117.

See HAIDT, supra note 16, at 72-73.

See id. at 74-75.

DAMASIO, supra note 12, at 26 (emphasis omitted).

See id. at 13.

Id. at 13, 26-27.

See id. at 13, 21, 26, 28-29.

See id. at 5.

Reasonable, OXFORD LIVING DICTIONARIES, https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/reasonableness (last visited June 3, 2019) (entry 1).

Fair, BLACK’S LAW DICTIONARY (10th ed. 2014) (entry 1).

Fair, MERRIAM-WEBSTER, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fair (last visited June 3, 2019) (entry 1b(1)).

See PAUL D. MACLEAN, THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION: ROLE IN PALEOCEREBRAL FUNCTIONS 13-18 (1990).

See GERALD A. CORY, JR., THE CONSILIENT BRAIN: THE BIONEUROLOGICAL BASIS OF ECONOMICS, SOCIETY, AND POLITICS 9-14 (2004).

See id. at 15-18.

See HAIDT, supra note 16, at 11-12 (discussing and affirming the earlier work of psychologist, Elliot Turiel).

See id. at 178-79, 200-01, 215.

See, e.g., Heidi Li Feldman, Prudence, Benevolence, and Negligence: Virtue Ethics and Tort Law, 74 CHI.-KENT L. REV. 1431 (2000) (virtue ethics); Gregory C. Keating, Reasonableness and Rationality in Negligence Theory, 48 STAN. L. REV. 311 (1996) (noting that a freedom-based approach to reasonableness  

See HAIDT, supra note 16, at 11; SHAUN NICHOLS, SENTIMENTAL RULES: ON THE NATURAL FOUNDATIONS OF MORAL JUDGMENT 5-7, 25 (2004).

See Stephen G. Gilles, On Determining Negligence: Hand Formula Balancing. The Reasonable Person Standard and the Jury, 54 VAND. L. REV. 813 (2001) (reviewing the cost-benefit or risk- utility approach to reasonableness).

Professor John Mikhail specifically has argued that the elements of a battery action find support in moral psychology. See John Mikhail, Any Animal Whatever? Harmful Battery and Its Elements as Building Blocks of Moral Cognition, 124 ETHICS 750 (2014).

See DAN B. DOBBS ET AL., HORNBOOK ON TORTS 193-95 (2015) (describing the evolution of reasonableness in the tort theory of negligence).

RESTATEMENT (THIRD) OF TORTS: PHYSICAL & EMOTIONAL HARM §3 (2010) (“ A person acts negligently if the person does not exercise reasonable care under all the circumstances.”).

For example, battery’s rule against harmful or offensive contacts may be countered by a privilege of self-defense, which depends on the reasonableness of the defendant’s response. See DOBBS ET AL., supra note 47, at 132 (“A person is privileged to use reasonable force to defend himself against unprivileged acts that he reasonably believes will cause him bodily harm, offensive bodily contact, or confinement.”). Likewise, strict liability’s rules against certain animals and activities may be met in many jurisdictions with the reasonableness-based defense of comparative fault. See id. at 793-94.

Outrageous conduct is viewed as unreasonable behavior that seriously violates the norms of a civilized society and can be assessed only by reference to various circumstantial factors. See id. at 707-09. Similarly, an abnormally dangerous activity is determined by analyzing a number of factors that “look like a poorly disguised negligence regime, balancing such things as the value of the defendant’s activity to the community.” Id. at 786.

For example, some jurisdictions recognize a rule that exempts property owners from negligence for failing to trim foliage at the perimeter of their premises. See id. at 207.

See id. at 615-16 (stating that the “exceptions [to the no-duty principle] have the effect of creating a duty to act in most instances where a reasonable person would feel compelled to act”).

See ALAN CALNAN, A REVISIONIST HISTORY OF TORT LAW: FROM HOLMESIAN REALISM TO NEOCLASSICAL RATIONALISM 160-61, 191-200, 225-30 (2005) (discussing this historical progression).

See id. at 161-62, 201-09, 231-48, 274-76.

See Alan Calnan, Torts as Systems, 28 S. CAL. INTERDISC. L.J. 1, 51-53 (2019) (forthcoming).

Reasonable, OXFORD LIVING DICTIONARIES, https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/reasonableness (last visited June 3, 2019) (entry 2).

Moderate, MERRIAM-WEBSTER, https://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/moderate (last visited June 3, 2019) (as a noun, entry 1a; as a verb, entry 1).

DONELLA H. MEADOWS, THINKING IN SYSTEMS: A PRIMER 11 (Diana Wright ed., 2008).

See J.A. SCOTT KELSO & DA VID A. COMPLEMENTARY NATURE 9-12 (2006).

Coordination dynamics is “a set of context-dependent laws or rules that describe, explain, and predict how patterns of coordination form, adapt, persist, and change in natural systems.” Id. at 90.

Coordination dynamics helps to explain patterns within and between genes and proteins, different brain regions, various parts of the body, natural organisms and their environments, and among people, social structures, and institutions. See id. at 111.

See CORY, JR., supra note 39, at 20, 21 & n.9 (observing that “[t]he two master programs of self-preservation and affection” within the brain are “locked in inseparable unity” to form a motivational and behavioral spectrum that continuously blends both tendencies without ever reaching either extreme).

See KELSO & ENGSTRØM, supra note 59, at 10-11

See id. at 114-15.

DAMASIO, supra note 12, at 224.

ANTONIO DAMASIO, SELF COMES TO MIND: CONSTRUCTING THE CONSCIOUS BRAIN 310 (Vintage Books ed. 2012).

Id.

DAMASIO, supra note 12, at 224.

Id. (emphasis omitted).

Id. (emphasis omitted).

See Jessie Allen, A Theory of Adjudication: Law as Magic, 41 SUFFOLK U.L. REV. 773, 811 (2008) (noting that in the ritual of trial, “[n]orms and values ... become saturated with emotion, while the gross and basic emotions become ennobled through contact with social values”).

I had a really weird dream involving Dr Maddiman. Its a shame i can barely remember any of it and also it seems i woke up before it ended? Like i just had this overwhelming sense that allll the plot threads were gonna be wrapped up any second now and then BOOM awake. So just a whole bunch of random stuff happened with no real explanation at all.

It was some sort of post apocolyptic setting i think? Humanity was in these small isolated cities fighting against some sort of invading army but we never actually saw the aliens themselves. And some part of my brain was like "it makes sense its the same rules as a hairdresser and the design takes cues from a pack of AAA batteries". I have NO idea what that means! So basically everythibg was super vague and undescribed and dream-me just had a sense of already being a long time fan of this series and knowing enough to fill in the gaps. Apparantoy this was some sort of adaptation of a thing id already seen, but id been told the ending was different and more accurate to the manga? Also i wasnt actually a person watching this show i was still the protagonist of the show yet i acted like i'd been reincarnated and relived this week a million times or something

ANYWAY the way dr maddiman comes in is that he was some sort of 'brilliant but dangerous' expert the government had hired to help our fight against the aliens. It wasnt really explained why he was.. yknow.. maddiman. Like is this meant to be that ghosts also exist in this sci fi universe? Was he a half alien hybrid instead of a yokai? Was it just human maddiman with the personality of yokai maddiman due to ptsd...? In any case he didnt seem entirely tethered to the laws of reality and nobody knew exactly how he pulled off all his scientific miracles. He was treated as the only guy who could understand the mindset of the aliens, but that also made him dangerous because he trapped in the delusion of everything being okay and fun and happy and he often did evil things by accident while having good intentions. But they didnt have anyone else who'd cracked the code of the alien weaponry so they had to put up with him. He was just sorta assigned a crack team of secret agents whose job was Be The Old Man's Friend So We Dont All Die. Dont let him realise how the world is all destroyed and such, just play along with his goofyness and try and remind him to do his important work while dancing around why its important. it was super creepy how he was locked up and gaslighted like this!! And he was all 'oh im sure when im done with my ultimate experiment i can go home to my wife and kids' and yeah it was implied here that the same backstory applied :( 'distract the old man and validate his false opinion that his family is still alive and waiting for him' :( poor sci fi madds :(

Oh also for some reason he seemed to be wearing elements of Adventure era Dr Eggman's outfit? But just the general style of the coat and the wearing goggles that he never actually uses. And he had a very warm and cuddly autumnal colourscheme

Anyway i was part of the Super Secret Grampa Cherishing Division whose job was to act as his assistant but also secretly be packing a bazillion weapons to neutralize him if he poses a danger to humanity. But i started to genuinely care for the guy and question the 'any atrocity is permitted for the sake of saving the world' philosophy of my bosses. Also it was just very weird how it was this post apocolypse alien fighting action thing yet i didnt see ANY OF IT cos this story was confined to this one laboratory. It was surreal hearing about all this stuff happening offscreen!

I think Maddiman's main project was some sort of dimensional transport thing using salvaged alien tech? It was just a door in his lab that usually led to a closet but if he got it working itd teleport us straight to the alien base and save the world. And a lot of it wasnt explained but i got this great sense that itd all come together with a great twist ending evebtually but then i woke up before i got that far. Same for the reveal of this maddiman's new sci fi backstory and soooo many other dropped plot threads. Alas!

So anyway: closet. Closet with one of those bead curtain things cos i was thinking about them when i fell asleep. It was supposed to be a teleport but when it malfunctioned it had really scary negative effects warping people's biology and stuff. I remember one of the test subjects was sent in for a five day trip to a specific alternate dimension but then when they came back itd been several years and theyd had to survive in a deadly wasteland and been mutated into a hellbeast. And maddiman had a huge breakdown because he felt like his recklessness and optimism towards this experiment had caused this mistake to happen, and he'd never realized just how awful the consequences could be. He was babbling motor mouth discussing theories for where it went wrong and there was something like 'we'd only tested it for one day trips and assumed that just programming two of them would equal two days but actually with each additional number on the screen it multiplies the days by 3" And there was something about like...the bead curtain was the machine rather than the door itself? Like trying it on a bunch of different doors around the lab to try and find a way to cure this person.

And there was some sort of artificial intelligence computer with the personality of an adorable lil girl, who helped maddiman do calculations and stuff. She missed the mistake in this calculation cos her concept of linear time and the limits of human organs was kinda undeveloped. She only existed within the realm of numbers after all, and didbt even have functionality to record footage of her human friends's faces. No idea wtf a human looks like! So maddiman was lost in his desperate grief of potentially accidebtally killing or at least mentally scarring a person and the government would probably kill them now if they saw they were a super mutant. And he was sobbing and begging this AI to help, his last resort was her maybe being able to see a brainwave that he'd missed. But she was freaking out cos she didnt even fully understand why maddiman was crying let alone what to do to fix it. Eventually she did manage to find a solution theough some simple different logic thing that she had from her perspective as a computer. And that person was saved but still traumatized and maddiman had a moment of realizing just how high stakes everything was and freaking out. He was like 'whats wrong with my head, why didnt i notice that, why was i so reckless, why cant i seem to grasp basic human logic that i need right now" Having a big existential crisis of 'wait how did i even get in this lab, where's my family and why do i seem to have superpowers'. Protagonist mission: hide all the goddamn mirrors to avoid this weird ghostgramp (...aliengramp??) from realizing he's dead (..or an alien??) and losing control of himself. And everyone was running around talking about 'containment procedures' and poor maddiman didnt know that if his panic attack continued he might just straight up be killed for outliving his usefulness. So the protagonist was desperate to help him calm down and it sucked SO MUCH cos they had to lie about his past and weave the web of deception around him again for his own safety. In the end they just hugged him close until he calmed down, and all the other employees were like GASP THEY ACTUALLY TOUCHED THE EVIL DANGEROUS SUPER EVIL MAN and protag was like 'i am 1% away from slapping the next bitch who insults this grandpa'. And it was super depressing cos once he'd calmed down he seemed to start forgetting that anything bad had ever happened?? And he was really panicking and scared cos he didnt understand why he was forgetting, and he knew he had to cling onto something important but he didnt know what. And then five minutes later he was back to haha cheerful nothing is wrong and i love doing my fun science in this room im never allowed to leave. And protagonist was crying the tears that this poor gramp wasnt allowed to cry :(

Also actually i think maybe he was a ghost AND an alien? Like he was a scientist who died in some sort of tragedy back when the aliens first invaded, but along the way he'd been infected so his body got back up as a twisted combination of human and inhuman. And this was something unique to him, like he just happened to have a genetic mutation in his blood that was totally undetectable in life but happened to mix unpredictably with this alien virus to turn him into a hybrid instead of just killing him. So the government was very interested in finding a way to replicate this and create new supersoldiers, as well as just taking advantage of this dude's confused mental state that granted him a unique understanding of alien tech that made him more effective than other scientists. And, of course, also made him easy to manipulate :(

And i also had a feeling that maybe his backstory was mixed up with Adventure dr eggman? Like here it seemed he had a daughter instead of a son, and she had a similar death to Maria Robotnik where she was assasinated by the government he worked for, and it tipped him over the edge. I think Maddiman-alien-scifi-dude originally died trying to save her from being used in some sort of experiment? Like she was already dying of a disease and thats why maddiman took this job to have access to powerful government technology to try and look for a cure. But when the whole alien apocolypse happened, the evil government decided to use her for experiments cos she was 'basically dead anyway'. Theyd just lie and tell maddiman she died of her illness. So this was how they found out that this particular family's bloodline had a mutation that let them form a viable hybrid with alien dna. They were turning this poor kid into a monster in the basement while lying to her dad about her being dead! And maddiman was about to commit suicide from having no reason to live anymore, with the hell of this apocolypse world and the false impression that his kid was already dead. But somehow monster-daughter sensed this or something and broke out of containment to try and save him, and when he saw her he was able to recognise her even in her twisted state. So when the soldiers gunned her down in front of him and fed him some lies about this not being his daughter, he just completely snapped. He tried in vain to fight back and take down as many of them as possible in revenge, but well he was just a simple round dad with no ability to fight a government. So he was unceremoniously executed along with his kid and they shoved the bodies back in the lab to continue testing. "Damn that overemotional science dad, he made us execute our most valable test subject! But at least this way we can analyze his corpse to see if the mutation is passed down on the patrilineal side." But at some point during the fight, monster-daughter's blood had splashed on her dad and gotten into his bloodstream. So the seemingly dead body suddenly got up out of the morgue and started sucking people's blood or something. And this led to the current situation where they have him locked up cos he's a valuable test subject but also hey he has 100% reason to kill all of us and we're screwed if he remembers his past. Also i think the computer AI thing was his subconcious attempt to recreate the personality of his daughter even if he couldnt remember she'd ever existed :(

Anyway at some point things escalated and there was this final showdown versus both the invading aliens and the evil governmebt guys. I think there was some corrupt greedy politician dude who stole maddiman's teleporter tech and sold us out to the aliens cos he wanted money and power or something. And probably predictably the aliens just threw him off a bridge after he gave them the thing, because seriously even this evil army thinks these government dudes are too evil!

So this big actiony event was happening and Maddiman was freaking out like 'no no no i cant leave the lab everyone wpuld be mad at me, i dont even know what its like outside this room' even when he was in the middle of being attacked by aliens. He was forced to face his repressed memories to survive, and he naturally had a massive fuckin freakout! And i think maybe when protagonist character was trying to protect him he accidentally lashed out with his powers and hurt them, and he was so horrified thinking another person he cared about was gonna die because of him. Protagonist was like 'dont worry gramps its just a scratch' but he'd already freaked out and run away into the battlefield to his heavily implied death.

BUT THEN at some sort of moment of dire need, he came back all powered up and re-memoried and was like 'i have every reason to despise humanity but im not gonna let more children die because of these damn corporate monsters (and also literal monsters which are infinately less scary)" And he did some sort of great sacrifice to save the protagonist at the cost of his own life, and it was super dramatic falling from a building into a lake of fire or something. While sobbing and smiling peacefully thinkibg "did i atone for my sins? Will i be able to see my family again?" As his smiling face sunk beneath the flames and the protagonist cried out into the abyss...

Aaaaand then i dont really know what happened in the big battle and i also never found out wtf the solution was to fixing the transporter thing or how the aliens invaded or any of the million plot points that were non gramp related.

I just remember that when we all saved the day and defeated the baddies we found that maddiman had actually survived and it was a big hugs reunion. He was like "OH YEAH i totally forgot i literally already died once and regenerated from it, and this was the entire start to my story. My bad!" *shrugs inexplicably not dead arms*

So yeah in summary im glad my brain summoned up a universe where my favourite sad granddad is literally immortal now, but also why did it torment him with an even sadder plot than his original one

Chromosomes-Part 2

The following is a transcript from my video Chromosomes-Part 2:

Welcome, or welcome back to the channel. This is the second in my series of videos on chromosomes. Last time we had a brief primer on what chromosomes are and then we discussed sex determination in ants, birds and mammals, chromosomal conditions in humans and spooky clone bananas. This time we’re going to talk about conditions like Down Syndrome and what causes them, how different cells in your body become specialised to do different things and we’ll have a look at epigenetics which means heritable changes which don’t involve a change to an organism’s genetic code; which is way cooler than it sounds, honest. As with last time, timestamps and sources are down below in the description and I’ll put important definitions on the screen here.

We left off in the last video after talking a bit about Klinefelter’s syndrome. To recap, Klinefelter’s syndrome is characterised by a male phenotype but with two X chromosomes. XXY. This can cause symptoms like breast growth or decreased fertility. We also talked about X inactivation which is why individuals can survive with only one X chromosome- because they only need the products of one X chromosome. On a related note, Turner syndrome occurs when only a single X chromosome, and no Y chromosome is present. Symptoms include short stature, fertility issues and webbed neck, among others.

Now when I started talking about symptoms of Klinefelter’s and Turner syndrome I might have raised a few eyebrows. If so, well spotted. How can there be any symptoms associated with these conditions at all? Don’t all but one of the X chromosomes in a cell get inactivated? Surely an individual with Klinefelter’s would just have the extra X chromosome inactivated and an individual with Turner syndrome would just develop as if they had a chromosome inactivated in each cell? Well it turns out that X inactivation is a bit of a misnomer, most of the genes on the “inactive” X chromosome are silenced yes but around 15% of the X chromosome’s genes escape silencing to some extent. This would account for the symptoms seen in these two conditions due to this idea of a gene dosage imbalance we discussed in the last video. A person with Turner syndrome would have a lower gene dosage of the X chromosome genes than is expected for an XX individual and conversely a person with Klinefelter’s syndrome would have a higher gene dosage of the X chromosome genes than is expected for an XY individual.

With this all in mind and with everything about human sex determination we discussed in part one, I’ll come back to my opening statement on the subject: We tend to think that when it comes to sex and gender, sex is the less complicated one of the two. Well I don’t know about less complicated but as we can clearly see it’s not as simple as XX and XY being the final word on sex determination. 

Turner syndrome and Klinefelter’s syndrome are aneuploidies, a word which refers to conditions that come about due to an abnormal number of  chromosomes being present. Down syndrome is a specific type of aneuploidy called a trisomy which means that three copies of a chromosome are present instead of the usual two. In the case of Down syndrome there are three copies of chromosome 21. A trisomy can occur with any of the chromosomes but apart from the X and Y chromosomes the only trisomy conditions that regularly occur involve chromosome 13- Patau syndrome, chromosome 18- Edwards syndrome and chromosome 21- Down syndrome. When other trisomies occur they tend to be more deadly.

Looking at the chromosomes might give us a clue as to why this is. As you can see the survivable trisomies seem to occur with the chromosomes on the smaller side. This does have something to do with it, however chromosome 22 rarely has a survivable trisomy condition. The answer isn’t directly to do with the size of the chromosomes; larger chromosomes tend to contain more genes. We talked about gene dosage earlier, for some genes the gene dosage has to be pretty precise, much more or less of that gene being expressed is pretty bad news for the organism. Others however, it doesn’t matter so much. Chromosome 22 has at least one of those genes that require a more exact dosage and due to the higher number of genes it’s more likely that a larger chromosome will have one or more of these genes.

Trisomies occur due to an event that happens before conception known as nondisjunction. Nondisjunction happens during meiosis which is a type of cell division which creates gametes- sex cells. Unlike mitosis, which is ordinary cell division and results in two identical diploid cells, meiosis results in 4 haploid cells which are statistically likely to be different from each other. During meiosis the chromosomes are randomly reassorted, so with 23 pairs of chromosomes the total number of combinations is two to the power of 23 or eight million three hundred and eighty eight thousand six hundred and eight for a single sperm or egg cell. So you know, quite a few… And that’s not even considering recombination, which is a topic for a bit later.

Nondisjunction occurs in the first stage of meiosis when a chromosome pair fails to segregate leaving one of the new cells lacking that chromosome and the other with an extra copy of that chromosome. Using our earlier aneuploidy examples with X chromosomes: the cell lacking the chromosome could lead to a gamete that could become an individual with Turner’s syndrome and the cell with the extra chromosome could lead to a gamete that could become an individual with Klinefelter’s syndrome.

During the first stage of meiosis homologous chromosomes line up next to each other on the centre of the cell. Homologous in this sense means the chromosome ones are next to each other, the chromosome twos are next to each other, chromosome X is next to either another chromosome X or a chromosome Y and so on and so forth. What allows this to happen is a physical connection between the "arms" of each of the chromosomes, sites where they cross over. This connection is maintained by something called the cohesin complex. A complex in this sense refers to multiple protein subunits working together as a single unit. The cohesin complex forms a ring around the two chromosome arms to maintain this connection. This connection allows the chromosomes to attach to the spindle fibre, a structure that physically pulls the chromosomes to opposite ends of the cell. The connection gives some resistance against the pull of the fibre so that no chromosomes are separated too early and everyone can get all lined up properly. When it's time for the homologous chromosomes to be pulled to opposite ends of the cell one of the cohesin subunits is cleaved by an enzyme, conveniently named separase. The ring breaks and the chromosomes separate.

Nondisjunction that occurs at this stage of meiosis is caused by this separation happening too soon. This can happen due to a variety of reasons but interestingly one of those reasons is the physical placement of the crossing over site on the chromosome. When the site is closer to the end of the chromosome arm the tendency for loss of cohesion increases. This seems to be because the cohesin ring can “slide off” the end of the chromosome arms and the further up the cohesion site is, the more likely it is to happen.

Before we move on I should mention recombination. At this stage of meiosis there is a small chance that the little bits of chromosome that are past this crossing over point can swap over. This uses the same mechanisms as those used to fix double strand breaks in DNA. This means that the number of combinations of different chromosomes in a gamete I mentioned before: eight million three hundred and eighty eight thousand six hundred and eight, can just be thrown out of the window entirely. The real number is way bigger when you account for the fact that chromosomes can just swap bits and pieces of themselves as they please.

You might have heard that the chance of conditions like Down syndrome occurring increases the older the mother is at conception, a phenomenon known as the maternal age effect. Most aneuploidies in eggs from older mothers arise in phase 1 of meiosis, the phase we've just been discussing. Oocytes, or eggs develop up to this phase and then stop there until ovulation, so all eggs are at this stage at birth. This has led to the theory that the maternal age effect is caused by an increased chance that the crossing over process will fail and the paired chromosomes will separate prematurely the longer it goes on.

This theory is supported by a 2005 study that used a mutant line of mice deficient in a gene for a cohesin subunit specific to meiosis. The chromosomes of the mices' eggs were observed at different ages, from one to twelve months old. The occurrence of nondisjunction increased massively as the mice got older suggesting that loss of cohesion is directly related to nondisjunction and therefore aneuploidy.

We've talked a fair bit about genes and gene dosage so I think it's time to have a quick and rough overview of what genes actually do. Genes are sequences of DNA nucleotides that encode proteins. Nucleotide is just the name of the molecules involved. The nucleotides are called cytosine, guanine, thymine and adenine. The names aren't that important for this, just think of them as the letters C,G,T and A. You might know that DNA is double stranded, the nucleotides on one strand bind to those on the other strand, C to G and A to T. We call these complementary pairs. On the way from DNA to protein we have another step- RNA, which is another kind of nucleic acid similar to DNA in ways we don’t need to go into too much detail in, we’re not doing full on biochemistry here, thankfully. RNA nucleotides have the same names as the DNA counterparts except we have a molecule called uracil instead of thymine. The gene sequence of the DNA undergoes a process called transcription to create a molecule of messenger RNA, essentially a copy of the gene's complementary pairs but as RNA instead. The last step is translation which is when the messenger RNA is used essentially as a bit of code to assemble a protein from amino acids. I'd love to go off on a tangent on how that works but I'm gonna try and stay on track for now and leave you with vague assurances that I'll cover that in another video.

I've mentioned differentiation a couple of times in this video and the last one and now it's finally time to talk about it. Differentiation is the process by which cells in a multicellular organism, like you, presumably, become specialised for their role. For example, erythrocytes- red blood cells, being able to carry oxygen. The different types of cells all have the same genetic material but produce different proteins in different quantities to perform these different tasks, this is why your red blood cells aren't hairy and your skin isn't red with haemoglobin. The way this happens ties into what we were discussing before about Klinefelter syndrome, epigenetic gene silencing.

Epigenetics: as I said near the start of the video is a term that refers to heritable factors determined by things outside the genome, so not changes to the actual “code” if you will but rather changes to things around the code that alter how the code is read. As an example, the Professor Conrad Waddington who coined the term epigenetics was working with Drosophila- Fruit flies, because of course he was. You can hardly do anything in genetics without involving the fucking fruit flies. Anyway, all Waddington did was incubate the Drosophila eggs at a slightly higher temperature than usual and when they fully developed into adults they had a pair of legs where the eyes should have been. Nothing about the flies’ genome had been changed but rather a previously silenced gene had become unsilenced. He called this gene aristopedia. Aristopedia is what is known as a homeotic gene, which is a gene that regulates the development of body parts, like legs. Homeotic genes usually encode transcription factors which lead to more genes being expressed in a sort of cascade and lots of different things happening as a result of that which wouldn’t have happened without that first step. We saw something similar in the last video when we talked about testosterone leading to a cascade of developmental events further down the line, same principle. What Waddington saw was essentially a gene for a leg being expressed in a part of the body where it ordinarily wouldn’t be.

I’ve mentioned before that small chemical groups can be added to DNA and be passed down that cell’s lineage. So if I added a methyl group to a particular bit of DNA then the two cells that cell divides into will also have a methyl group on that same bit of DNA. This is because of and enzyme called DNMT1 which is a DNA methyltransferase. Belting name for an enzyme that, the name tells you exactly what it does, it puts a methyl group, transfers it, onto DNA. When it happens upon a piece of DNA where only one side is methylated it’ll add a methyl group to the other side. Then when the cell is going to divide the DNA will be replicated, each strand will so off to form a new double strand of DNA, the new strand will get methylated by our mate DNMT1 and there you go, heritable changes to your DNA that don’t involve changing the code. Epigenetics.

I mention DNA methylation because it’s one of the ways epigenetics are used during differentiation to down-regulate or silence genes in different cell lineages. Transcription factors can find it harder to bind to areas of high DNA methylation so any gene in that region of DNA is either much less active or might as well not be there. There are other modifications that can be made to DNA such as acetylation and hydroxymethylation too that lead to a whole landscape of potential differences between cells containing the same genetic information with wildly different patterns of gene expression.

So that this process can begin again for an organism’s offspring these epigenetic markers are pretty much all reset when new gametes are generated or when a new embryo is formed. This is also quite helpful for the health of the offspring too as we can actually pick up some of these epigenetic modifications. You were probably already aware that smoking could cause DNA damage in lung tissues but it has been found to cause DNA methylation, histone acetylation and other epigenetic modifications with the broad effect that the expression of genes for inflammatory proteins is altered.

There is evidence that some epigenetic changes manage to avoid the reprogramming however. For example, children of fathers with prediabetes have been found to be more susceptible to diabetes themselves. This alone isn't grounds to suspect epigenetic inheritance but it's made more likely by the presence of similar DNA methylation patterns in both the fathers and the children, with these particular patterns being associated with insulin resistance which is a key factor of diabetes and prediabetes. So it seems that despite two rounds of removal of epigenetic markers, some manage to escape and get passed on to the next generation.

Remember Charles Darwin? Probably, right? His theory of natural selection is our basis for how we think about evolution. Organisms are born with a set of characteristics and there is variation of these characteristics in the population. Parents pass on their traits to their offspring and individuals with traits that suit their environment survive long enough to pass on these traits. The next generation is more likely to have the favourable traits and survive and so on and so forth.

You may also remember being told about this other guy, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck who put forward another theory: organisms develop traits over their lifetime and similarly pass those on to their offspring. The famous example given is the giraffe, which supposedly started out as something resembling a big fuck off deer with crap camouflage wearing deely boppers which would stretch its neck to reach high leaves on trees. Over time its anatomy would slightly change, its neck would stretch and it's offspring would have longer necks too and then they'd stretch too and you get the picture. Clearly Lamarck was barking up the wrong tree, and even if he barked up the right tree it still wouldn't stretch his neck and allow him to pass that trait on to future generations.

I think you see where I'm going with this though. These epigenetic changes are acquired during a person's life and then passed onto their offspring, just like Lamarck's giraffes. That's obviously not a reason to ditch Darwin and go full Lamarckian but we can see that in certain situations where these modifications have escaped the epigenetic reset that there is an element of Lamarckian inheritance. Pretty wild. Also, I know I've been making a few jokes at Lamarck's expense but to be fair to him; he was mostly a botanist and plant epigenetics work a little bit differently to our own, with many more epigenetic markers passed down to offspring to allow for adaptation to environmental pressures.

Anyway, that's about all for today. Thank you so much for watching, please consider subscribing to the channel and drop a like on the video if you fancy. Hope to see you next time.

Citations:

Carrel, L., Willard, H. X-inactivation profile reveals extensive variability in X-linked gene expression in females. Nature 434, 400–404 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature03479

Radermacher, A. (2007). Extra or Missing Chromosomes. Available: https://genetics.thetech.org/ask/ask209. Last accessed 8th Jul 2021.

Lamb, N. (2005). Cytogenetics. In: Jorde, L, Little, P, Dunn, M and Subramaniam, S Encyclopedia of Genetics, Genomics, Proteomics and Bioinformatics. : John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Gruber, S, Haering, C & Nasmyth, K, (2003) Chromosomal Cohesin Forms a Ring, Cell, Volume 112, Issue 6, 765 - 777

Makrantoni, V & Marston, A. (2018). Cohesin and chromosome segregation. Current Biology. 28 (12), p688-p693.

Gilliland, W & Hawley, R. (2005). Cohesin and the Maternal Age Effect. Cell. 123 (3), p371-p373.

Hodges, C, Revenkova, E, Jessberger, R, Hassold, T & Hunt, P. (2005). SMC1β-deficient female mice provide evidence that cohesins are a missing link in age-related nondisjunction. Nature Genetics. 37 ( ), p1351–p1355.

The Salon Agency

Starting from the previous group’s project, I decided to develop it further and go deeper in the analysis of the meeting space concept by further researching some new topics like STORYTELLING, COMMUNICATION, CONVERSATION. After doing some more research about what do you actually need to run your own agency, I decided that the best way to convey this message would be to create an agency called SALON, whose purpose would be telling people’s stories. During my research process I came across this French word salon (in English saloon), which describes a gathering of people held by an inspiring host. During the gathering they amuse one another and increase their knowledge through conversation and exchange of ideas. Salons came alive between the 17th and the 18th century, and they were a very important place for the exchange of ideas. That period in fact has been labelled the 'age of conversation'. But, above all the salon was one of the long-established systems using oral tradition (of which storytelling is a form).

To make everything more accessible for people I decided to create the graphic interfaces of a hypothetical WEBSITE AND APP.

I decided to focus my attention just on a few of them such as the ABOUT PAGE, to make clear for people which would be the purpose of this agency.

Storytelling is at the base of human nature, is part of our DNA. Whatever you are doing or saying, you are telling a story, in every moment of your life.

Salon is a creative agency based in Manchester whose goal is to create unique cultural experiences for an unlimited audience all around the world, WITHIN FESTIVALS AND EVENTS.

We believe in stories and give people the chance to tell them in their own way.

WE LISTEN TO THOSE SAME STORIES AND BRING THEM TO LIFE, CREATING A PERFECT UNION BETWEEN TRADITION AND MODERNITY.

IN A WORLD CHARACTERIZED BY THE DIGITIZATION OF SPACE, WE COMBINE REALITY WITH TECHNOLOGY IN ORDER TO CREATE AN INTERACTIVE EXPERIENCE THAT ALLOWS PEOPLE TO COMMUNICATE IN A TOTALLY NEW WAY.

IN THIS WAY I CLEARLY DEFINED THE MESSAGE, THE AUDIENCE AND THE CONTEXT.

Then I created a PORTFOLIO SECTION, to make people aware about which kind of experiences this agency would create. One of these experiences would be the BLOOM EXPERIENCE. I decide to maintain the same name we used for our group project because, I still like the idea of these cubes “blooming” all around the world within festivals or events.

BY JOINING THE BLOOM EXPERIENCE, people would be able to become the author and tell their own stories to a wider audience.

At the same time the participants in these experiences would be the storytellers and the listeners of other people’s stories, creating this climate of storytelling, exchange, listening, conversation, interconnection.

The focal point of the entire experience would be a cube entirely made up of screens, both inside and outside. People would be able to share their own stories by projecting them on the cube’s surface.

MEANWHILE would be possible to take a sit inside and have some drinks and a chat.

I also did a further research on the meaning of the word BLOOM and I found out that it could also describe the glare caused by an object reflecting too much light into a television camera (related to the fact that the cube is made out of screens)

To join the experience people will simply scan a QR CODE which will lead them to the WEBSITE SECTION explaining the process to follow. They will be able to choose on which screen, inside or outside, they can share a TEXT, an IMAGE/PICTURE/PHOTO, or a VIDEO.

Apart from scanning the QR code, the screens on the outside bottom walls will also be touch screen, a keyboard will appear, and they will able to type in their favourite quotes or their own ones, by using their own language. In the inside they will find the QR CODE on each table t do the same thing. All the table will be TOUCH SCREEN as well, to let people, chat between tables

I came up to this idea after doing some research on the old internet cafés and on the new one cybercafé. As I said at the beginning the idea behind that is to merge the pure virtual conversation with the proper physical one and so create a totally new way to communicate.

I then create an ONLINE SHOPPING SECTION to let people buy all the SALON BRANDED PRODUCTS. I divided them in some main CATEGORIES, such as CLOTHES AND ACCESSORIES, STATIONERY AND CO., OTHERS…

The idea of using the graph paper emerged during the tutorials I had with Nichola as well as thinking about which product could be linked to the concept of CONVERSATION, this is why I also realized some postcards and even a writing paper.

People will also have the chance to see/buy the CATALOGUE, containing some VOUCHERS to get discounts and some more information about the agency, the experiences, and other things.

I have basically done the same with the MOBILE APP.

At this point I think it would be nice to explain you how I came up with the FINAL LOGO for the SALON AGENCY, by showing you the entire process. So, I basically started from the logo we created during the last groups project and played around with shapes.

I then decided that I wanted to make it simpler, be reducing the old logo to these two small black and white shapes.

Of the OLD LOGO I maintained the font and the colours.

Then I came up with this idea od the square shaped BUSINESS CARD and the idea of using the QR CODE rather than give to people all the information, they will HAVE TO scan the code which will lead them to the website/app download page.

Another process I would like to show you is the making of the POSTERS for ADVERTISING. I have basically played around with the small shapes of the LOGO, combining them in so different way. I also deconstructed my own selected text and played around with some words to create a sentence which could grab people’s attention: STORIES LIVE IN US FOREVER.

I thought that it would be nice to have also a MOVING POSTER, around the cities or even just outside the proper BLOOM EXPERIENCE CUBE, just to welcome people, without giving them to many information about what it will happen inside. If they want to know something, they can obviously scan the QR CODE which will lead them to the website!

The trouble with dinosaur bones

https://sciencespies.com/nature/the-trouble-with-dinosaur-bones/

The trouble with dinosaur bones

Bloodsucking insects, trapped in amber for millions of years, extracted for their blood-filled bellies, with the blood analyzed for ancient DNA.

At first glance, the scientific explanation for the revival of dinosaurs in Jurassic Park doesn’t sound too far-fetched. It was considered a genuine possibility at the time the book was written.

There’s just one problem – trapped in amber or not, DNA doesn’t like to stick around. Even in the best conditions, scientists estimate that readable DNA completely degrades in 1.5 million years, tops.

The asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs occurred 65 million years ago, so there are tens of million years in the interim, which means plenty of DNA degradation.

Any scientist you care to ask will tell you that Jurassic Park is the only place you’ll see dinosaurs cloned any time soon. But that’s not to say paleontologists are in total agreement about what constitutes the world’s oldest decipherable genetic material.

“Saying you can clone a dinosaur – it’s Jurassic Park, it’s not science,” paleobiologist Alida Bailleul from the Chinese Academy of Sciences told ScienceAlert.

“We’re not doing this to clone a dinosaur … we’re just trying to understand if we can get access to some of the genetic material.”

Bailleul has become one of the faces of the discussion in this area of paleontology, after discovering what she believes could be the oldest partially intact DNA ever found in a specimen of the dinosaur Hypacrosaurus.

Skeletal mount of Hypacrosaurus altispinus. (Etemenanki3/Wikimedia/CC BY-SA 4.0)

In the last few decades, myriad discoveries have pushed back the date of the oldest readable genetic material.

In 2013, a 700,000-year-old horse fossil frozen in permafrost became the oldest DNA ever sequenced. Before that, the oldest sequenced genome was from the remains of an 80,000-year-old Denisovan.

Then, earlier this year, scientists announced they’d sequenced DNA from a 1.2-million-year-old mammoth tooth – which currently holds the record for the oldest recovered and sequenced DNA.

Because of the fragility of DNA, some scientists think that might be the oldest we’re going to get, at least in terms of decipherable genetic material that’s not so degraded as to be worthless.

DNA has a half-life of 521 years, meaning that after 521 years, half of the bonds in its molecular backbone break. After 1,042 years, half of that remainder would be gone, too.

In absolutely pristine conditions, the last bond would break after 6.8 million years, but you’re likely to have a lot of trouble reading anything at all after about a million years, researchers say.

“I don’t think anything more than that could be trusted,” ancient DNA expert Sally Wasef from Griffith University in Australia told ScienceAlert.

“And it’s not just that it can’t be trusted. It’s about how much information it’d provide you. It might be a little piece preserved, but would it be enough to provide you with good information?”

Every human’s genome is made up of 3.2 billion ‘base pairs’, the building blocks of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) that code our genetic instructions. Every living thing on the planet uses these DNA base pairs to store their genetic information, and most mammals have a similar number of base pairs to code our every hair, flipper, or horn. 

To work out most physical differences between two people, you can analyze tiny changes to these base pairs called single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). In some diseases, only one SNP will be changed, while eye color can involve a handful, and some population-wide traits can take hundreds of these tiny changes.

To think about it another way, if you provided a sample of your DNA to a genetics testing company such as 23andMe, they’d look at 640,000 of your SNPs – which sounds like a lot, but they’re only actually analyzing about 0.02 percent of the whole genome.

With so much complexity in a genome, it gets complicated quickly if billions of those base pairs become degraded, leaving only parts of the puzzle behind offering physical genetic information.

Hypacrosaurus altispinus restoration. (ABelov2014/CC BY 3.0)

Wasef uses the analogy of our DNA being like a computer hard drive. “If the hard drive is in a safe place where it’s not exposed to a lot of factors that damage it, it will be well preserved,” she explains.

“But, once this hard drive gets attacked by viruses, you start to eat into your data.”

Even the very well-preserved 700,000-year-old horse DNA was corrupted enough that it had to be painstakingly stitched back together by University of Copenhagen researchers, while simultaneously removing any bacterial DNA that had been mixed in and also extracted.

In the end, despite their efforts, the team – lead by anthropobiologist Ludovic Orlando – only managed to recover 73 proteins, a far cry from the 20,000 or so that make up the entire horse genome.

Of course, identifying 73 proteins is a great achievement if you want to analyze genomic changes in horse species throughout the ages. But to attempt something like cloning, you’d need to know every single base pair in the genome – so we won’t be seeing any ancient horse species galloping around any time soon.

Cloning a dinosaur, then, is well and truly off the table, and given the finite lifetime of DNA, it doesn’t seem likely that there would be any useful dinosaur DNA left to find anyway.

However, Bailleul and her team recently discovered something that has triggered both excitement and skepticism in the ancient DNA research community – signs of DNA inside a dinosaur fossil, millions of years past its use-by date.

While analyzing a baby dinosaur called Hypacrosaurus from the late Cretaceous period, they found incredibly well-preserved cartilage. Inside the cartilage, they discovered cell-like structures that included material resembling DNA in the tests conducted.

“We isolated some cells of the dinosaur and we stained them with DNA stains,” Bailleul says.

“Inside the dinosaur cells, it looks like there’s still some material that’s reacting with the DNA stain.”

(Bailleul et al., National Science Review, 2020)

Above: Chromosome-like structures from the Hypacrosaurus dinosaur.

There’s only one problem: The dinosaur in question is between 74 and 80 million years old – much too old to still have intact DNA.

Because of this, the findings caused some controversy in the paleontology world, with many researchers believing that the sample is just too old to be genuine dinosaur DNA, with the results likely reflecting some form of modern genetic contamination in the samples instead.

Unfortunately, there’s no way to check the result. When working with a very tiny amount of potential DNA, the methods scientists use are destructive – meaning that the samples are destroyed while they’re being analyzed.

In other words, you have to know what you’re aiming to achieve before you get started.

“It has to be a very good aim, or you’re just wasting the sample to prove DNA can live,” Wasef explains.

Despite other researchers’ doubts, Bailleul still thinks it’s real dinosaur DNA her team found – not contamination of the samples.

“Everybody says, ‘Okay, there is no more DNA after 1 million years, it gets too degraded, too modified, you can’t get anything.’ And then yet, here we have this sample,” she says.

“It doesn’t make scientific sense to say it’s contamination … [The contaminated DNA] wouldn’t just be inside the cell. It would also be all around.”

But DNA isn’t the only way to find genetic information about ancient creatures.

In 2019, the same team that analyzed the horse DNA announced they had extracted genetic information from the tooth enamel of a 1.77-million-year-old species of rhino.

Instead of looking at the DNA itself, the team analyzed the proteins, determined the amino acids, and reverse-engineered a small DNA sequence out of that information.

“People are looking at the ancient protein as a new tool to go where the ancient DNA stops,” says Wasef.

Unfortunately, ancient protein has similar issues to degraded DNA. You can tell some information from reconstructing DNA from protein, but it’s only a small (and not exact) sample of the genome.

For example, each base pair (or letter) in a genome works with the base pairs next to it to make larger and larger structures. Groups of three base pairs code for specific amino acids, which then code for specific proteins. But there are redundancies and duplicates in this code, so working backwards is complex. 

“The combination of letters of DNA can make different amino acids, and those different amino acids can make the same protein,” Wasef explains.  

“So, you can’t really translate the same protein back to DNA.”

DNA transcription, translation, and protein folding. (Biology Corner/CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Despite these issues, many scientists think ancient protein truly is the next frontier of researching ancient genetics. You can still retrieve important information from these fossilized proteins, and some information is better than nothing.

In 2016, scientists found 3.8-million-year-old proteins in ostrich eggs. Although the protein wasn’t sequenced in that case, it still shows that protein has a much longer shelf life than DNA.

Right now, the techniques we have available for analyzing proteins are expected to push the age of the oldest genetic sequencing back a few million extra years, although it remains to be seen whether this will extend all the way back to the reign of the dinosaurs.

Nonetheless, both Wasef and Bailleul think the technologies empowering ancient genetics research are rapidly getting better. Just because we can’t do it today doesn’t mean we won’t be able to tomorrow.

“When people ask me, ‘Is it impossible to get ancient DNA from dinosaurs?’, I say yes,” Wasef explains.

“But when I started doing ancient DNA in 2009, what we’re doing now was considered impossible.”

#Nature

Criminal Minds s04e02 Angel Maker review - or more aptly named, oh my god this is amazing yet gross at the same time. Why do this to me?

Episode 02 – Angel Maker

Hey guys! So I’m still reeling from that first episode. Oh my goodness gracious. That was a definite showstopper. But, I’m over it, I hope it’s going to be fine. I hope for a little breather, and that this one will be a little funnier. But let’s see what happens. Okay?

Let’s get it started.

Creepy music isn’t instilling me with much confidence, you know.

A young cat lady? Oh honey.

Oh boy. Someone else is walking in the house.

Oh boy.

Why is that creeper hiding in her closet till the morning to kill her? What the fuck?

And why a hammer?

“You’re experiencing hyperacusis. It’s caused by sudden loud noises, like an explosion.” REALLY?

(that’s sarcasm) – hyper sounds loud.

Wait. So the doctor wants to take him off the field? Oh boy.

I mean, I get it, and I want him to get better, but poor baby, he can’t sit still forever. He hated being a prosecutor.

“W-what if I said I’d … take it easy and … limit my role in the field?”

So cute! He’s like, I need to get back to work.

Wait. He’s so damaged in the ear he can’t hear his phone ringing? Oh, baby.

Wait. That fucker raped and hammered her to death? Ugh.

JJ: “Lower Canaan, Ohio.”

Emily: “Lower where?”

Ha! I love you, Emily. I have no fucking idea where that is either.

“Ritual. Nice hair, by the way.”

Hey! Leave my poodle’s mane!

Wait what? It’s the same victimology of a serial killer who was executed? Makes no sense.

Oh. A copycat honoring the anniversary of his hero’s death. Ew.

I’m sorry, Reid saying ‘semen’ is like hearing me talking in Japanese – unnatural.

Hold up, the jizz they found in the girl is matching to the DNA of the Angel Maker? WHAT?

Oh boy.

Chuck Palahniuk: “We all die. The goal isn’t to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.” AMAZING

“They have parachutes on board, right?”

“They should. It’s standard on all federal air transport.”

“Maybe we can give one to the elephant in the room, get him out of here?”

OH MY GOD! ROSSI!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I JUST DIED! SOMEBODY GIVE THOSE WRITERS A GOLD STAR!

“That’d be the elephant with the dead man’s DNA.”

“Well, obviously somebody planted the semen on the victim.”

Derek: “In the victim.”

“Reid, you’re not seriously floating around the idea of an evil twin, are you?”

WHAT?

“No, I’m not. I’m floating the idea of an eviler twin.” DOES HE NOT UNDERSTAND SARCASM?

Oh my god, I’m dying right now.

“Traditionally, the concept is a good twin and an evil twin. But in this case, it’s evil twin and eviler twin.”

Oh god, I love my pure angel.

Why would the puncture wounds seem familiar to Emily? Weird.

That’s a pretty prison.

“Real lady killer.”

REALLY? Did that guard just make that lame ass joke? Oh god.

“The type of DNA that cats in lockup don’t have occasion to use.”

Wow. That’s some strong language there, Derek!

Can I ask? Why does he speak to everyone normally on the phone, but when he talks to Garcia, it’s to the hearing piece? Is he that desperate for her voice? I don’t get it.

Wait. There are rumors about the execution being sloppy? Oh boy.

Wait. They’re digging up the angel maker to prove he’s dead to get the townies off their backs? That’s wrong. Listen to the FBI.

Okay, so I’m naturally extremely sensitive to loud noises, like the buzzing in Hotch’s ear, so can they NOT do that please? UGH

So that’s an empty coffin. And it’s not a good sign.

Oh boy.

Oh god, Shemar is sitting on a desk. Why do I find that hot?

“What does that mean, doctor?” God, no one should sound that hot. Fuck. No really, if you check out my lady parts, you’ll see them all aflutter.

Wait. So they killed him with drugs, and yet he was still alive? Oh boy.

Wait. When they killed Cortland he said he’d come back right before they attempted to execute him? Oh boy.

“Did you know that John Wayne Gracie painted clowns? A murdering pedophile paints clowns, and people hand them on their walls. It’s creepy on so many levels. I mean, clowns –”

“Garcia, I didn’t know you had that hang-up.”

Aw, Derek is learning stuff about baby girl.

“Coulrophobia – abnormal fear of clowns.” Good to know, female Reid XD

“Oh, no, there is nothing abnormal about it. When I was twelve, a hobo clown groped my breast at a birthday party and made this old-timey honkey noise when he did it. Apparently making it funny makes it okay.”

YOU ARE ONE AMAZING GIRL! AND I COMPLETELY UNDERSTAND THE FEAR OF CLOWNS! THEY CREEP ME OUT TOO! (never seen one in this country, but still).

Derek’s face is like, who the fuck touched my baby girl’s boobs? Only I am allowed! Who is this clown and how can I kill him?

“Oh, my vision, I found a ton.”

That’s sad. Angel Maker memorabilia. Ew.

“He also made these little origami figurines out of cigarette boxes, which, I hate to say, are really cute.”

Oh honey.

“Shebang!”

Wait. The guard sells his crap? Oh boy.

“Wakey, wakey, my man.”

Well, Sid’s dead. Shit.

“One to the grill, one to the groin. That’s personal.”

Damn straight.

“Strikes me as an Aqua Velva guy.”

Bam. Nailed it. That’s his cologne.

Ha!

What’s in the pill box?

Wait. It’s a woman now? Oh boy.

Wait. Rutledge blackmailed the unsub? OH BOY!

“We now know that Rutledge was transferred to Hawkesville from a female prison, in the wake of allegations that he was using his position to leverage sexual favors from inmates.”

Oh boy.

“That and the fact that he took a PDE-5 inhibitor shortly before his murder.”

“A what?”

“Viagra.”

Oh damn.

Are they allowed to say that on CBS? Hahahaha oh my god.

“Hybristophilia. It’s a sexual attraction to men who commit violent crimes.”

I’m sorry, but Derek talking about sexual attraction is seriously sexy and he can’t talk about unhealthy attraction and look sexy at the same time because it ruins the whole point.

“She’s using an instrument to simulate the sexual assault …” did they actually say she was using toys on the victim? OH BOY!

“Hey, you ever get groupies at your book singing?” “Sometimes, if Barry Manilow isn’t in town.”

I love you, Rossi.

“Waits an average of three hours for a ten-minute visit, mandatory strip search. Would you endure that for a guy?”

“For Barry Manilow, maybe.”

OH MY GOD EMILY!

Wait. This lady professed she was the fucker’s lover? Oh boy.

“Last time I checked, they didn’t allow conjugal visits on death row.”

True.

Wait. So the lady then stopped loving him because she got a letter addressed to a different woman, but it was written in a different dialect, how can it be from him, then? It makes no sense.

Oh god. Another victim.

She killed a day-care lady? THAT IS CRUEL!

Wait. The puncture wounds mean something? Oh boy.

The letters to ‘dove’ were a code? Oh boy.

I love you, Reid.

“What do you need to crack it?” “The ability to clone myself and a year’s supply of Adderall.”

“I’ll put on the coffee.”

Oh my god, that was genius.

“So they both had home-based businesses. A stranger could walk in off the street and be a prospective customer.” Oh god.

SHIT. The puncture wounds represent constellations. Damn.

“Delphinus, the dolphin; Equuleus, the little horse. Anything sound familiar?”

“His origami things.”

Oh boy.

Shit. One more kill to complete the set. Shit.

“They weren’t just close. They were in love.”

Gross.

“How’d you crack it?”

“I profiled the author. Cortland Ryan was on death row with several high-ranking members of the Aryan brotherhood.”

“He got the code from the Aryans?”

“Either that or he read a lot of 16th-century literature.”

Wait. “The Aryans liked to use a cipher based on a 400-year old code written by Sir Francis Bacon.” Oh god.

“Normally you’d use a computer to run all these combinations, but it was quicker to just to do it longhand until I found the right one.” WHAT?

“He’s so lifelike.” OH MY GOD! EMILY!

Seriously, those letters were so romantic, if it weren’t for the horrible fact that he fucking killed people and she continued his ‘mission’ after death.

JJ’s right. Reid confirmed, “Well, she did say ‘us’ – watch over us from the stars.”

Wait. The victim survived? Because she screamed? GOOD FOR YOU LADY!

Wait. So Shara did the whole thing, trying to get pregnant with the wacko’s kid? EW!

“So if you want me to find baby angel maker, we’re gonna have to narrow it down.” I love you Garcia.

“Ten months, actually.”

“Really?”

No wait. Hold up. Seriously? I didn’t know that a woman was pregnant ten months. Wait. Are they making this up? Hold on. Nope. They’re right. So why are we so convinced that it’s always nine months? MOM! HAVE YOU BEEN LYING TO ME????

HAS MY SCHOOL SEX ED CLASS IN THE SIXTH GRADE BEEN LYING TO ME THIS WHOLE TIME?

“We’ll do single mothers only, in case she wanted to keep the father a secret, you know, didn’t want to brag: ‘oh, your baby daddy’s a third-grade teacher? Well, mine likes to poke people in the stomach with tools, so there.’” LOL

So gross, yet so awesome

Wait. Why is the name familiar to my poodle?

Damn. She was on the jury. So she knew the case. Fuck.

Shit. Her baby died in the hospital, she wanted a baby so bad, and she fell in love with the fucker so deeply that she was willing to continue his legacy and let her new baby know who his daddy was? FUCK.

“Completing the murders was the only way she could hold on to him.”

I’m with you, baby, that’s gross. She stole the body from the grave. Fuck.

“Meetings with Delilah Grennan and Maxine Chandler the day of each murder.” Oh boy.

Bam. found the next victim. Let’s hope we get her in time.

Shemar leaning over a car. Hot.

Sneaky, yummy Shemar.

Shit. She took a gun and is roaming the house and my baby is there, too. Fuck.

Wendell Berry: “The past is our definition. we may strive, with good reason, to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it, but we will escape it only by adding something better to it.” Sounds weird. Then again, I’m pretty sure I’m high on caffeine. Which is weird.

“Morgan doesn’t like to follow directions. You didn’t know about that?”

“Yeah he likes to vibe it.”

What does that even mean?

“Ok, smart ass, you drive.”

Emily: “Oh, great.”

I love this cast so fucking much!

And Morgan said ‘ass’.

 Okay, so this episode was creepy in so many ways, but we had more fun between my superheroes which was amazing beyond belief! I’m so happy they put everything in one episode and also addressed what happened to Hotch and didn’t just glance over it.

I’m not gonna elaborate too much, seeing as this is already heavy on the verbosity and I’m planning on adding tons of pictures of Shemar, Kirsten and Matthew anyway. So I’ll see you all for the next episode, and thank you again, for taking the time to actually see what I have in my filthy mind.

Love you all!

<3

🌻 :)

Okay, I’ve kinda been sitting on this because initially I started talking about western blots and then tumblr went and deleted it. 

Instead I’m gonna ramble about gene therapy (pretty generally) for a hot second. I’m entirely pulling from wikipedia from dates because my knowledge of dates consists of 90s??? and now basically.

So, gene therapy.

This got so much longer than I thought it was going to be.

Actually, scratch that, brief rundown on genetic disorders for context even though Shell already knows it (hi Shell you’re great). Our genetic information is stored in DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid, no there will not be a spelling test folks), and we’ve got a lot of it. 6 billion base pairs spread across 46 chromosomes (in most cases- I could talk a whole lot more about that, but that’s a different case). And every time our cells want to split in half to make more cells, all of that information has to be copied, otherwise you have two cells walking off with incomplete directions/one cell with no directions- completely defeating the purpose of making two functional cells.

Now, if you were to, say, looking at a book and copying it word for word, you’re liable to make some mistakes as you’re typing. So it shouldn’t be surprising that our cells and cellular machinery are capable of mistakes too. They’re pretty good at it though! I’m too lazy to look up the actual numbers, but I seem to recall the initial error rate on just the polymerase copying the DNA is like 1 in a million base pairs. Okay, I lied about being too lazy, and I’m right, it’s 1e-6. Which is a pretty good error rate (certainly better than mine just typing this all out).

Except let’s go back to the part where I tell you there’s 6 billion base pairs that all need to be copied. So, we’re up to roughly 6000 errors every time you copy for mitosis (splitting our cells into two for growth). Which is really not great when you consider just how many cells are in the human body (quick search says 30 trillion is the number). But then we’ve got additional mechanisms in place to go back and proofread to get an error rate between 1e-9 - 1e-11 (that’s one in a billion to one in 100 billion) - much better!

Okay fuck wow this is not such a short primer on this after all whoops BECAUSE now I’m getting into DNA proper.

We use around 3% of our DNA to make proteins. There’s some other cool stuff we make with actual functions (there’s some neat RNA in there that I will not be getting into), but most of our DNA is either called non-coding DNA or junk DNA. Which means, if there’s an error in that part, you’re not going to see any major issues. So I’ll focus on that 3% that makes proteins. (I’m sorry Shell I swear I thought this was just gonna be me talking about literally the 70s onwards WHOOPS).

So what happens when we make a mistake with that 3% of DNA that makes proteins? Well, now’s the part where I say what kind of mistake are you asking about?

There are a couple of different kinds of mistakes, or mutations, that we can get into. A point mutation is the simplest one, where just one base pair is basically just switched out to the wrong letter. But then you’ve also got insertions (adding one or more extra base pairs), deletions (deleting one or more base pairs), inversions (sequences of DNA can get flipped around and reversed), and translocations (chunks of DNA up and move themselves to a different location).

So if our original sequence is: The McElroy brothers are not experts and their advice should never be followed.

Point mutation:  The McElroy brothers are not experts and their advice should lever be followed.

Insertion:  The McElroy brothers are not experts and their advice should never not be followed.

Deletion:  The McElroy brothers are  experts and their advice should never be followed.

Inversion:  The McElroy brothers strepxe ton era and their advice should never be followed.

Translocation:  The McElroy brothers are not experts should never be followed.

(With extra line): Previously on the Adventure Zone  and their advice

So, that’s a rough McElroy-centric approximation of what some of those look like. And the cool part about this example is that you can actually start to see which mutations are gonna cause the most problems. For example, switching that n for an l in the point mutation example just changes the one word, and the sentence mostly makes sense. But looking at the deletion and the insertion, well, now, I’m telling you to follow their advice in one and that they are experts in the other. Yikes-ycles on bicycles!

To bring this back to DNA, It is of course a little more complicated than a comedy podcast intro. You have four base pairs (A, C, G, T), but they’re always read in batches of three call codons, and those three are translated into either an amino acid or a stop signal (and I am completely bypassing translation into RNA here for which I apologize). The quick math is 20 amino acids (with some weirdos that I will not be getting into) and 64 possible combinations of three letters (4x4x4=64).

Starting with the point mutation. Obviously 64 is more than than 20 amino acids and one stop signal (total of 21 results), so there’s duplications (for every amino acid but methionine and tryptophan). We’re gonna say cysteine because this will let me get into all possible results.

So, we’re reading our DNA and we come across our codon TGT. That makes cysteine- yay! We’re right! Now for our mutations:

let’s mutate over to TGC- surprise! That’s still cysteine! So this point mutation has no impact! Yay!

okay, let’s get a little further away and say we get AGT. Okay, that gives us serine, which isn’t the worst thing ever, structurally there are some similarities. This is what’s called a missense mutation.

How about TAT or TGG? Still one off, right, how bad can it be? WELL, that gets you Tyrosine and Tryptophan respectively which are big fucking aromatic amino acids and can completely fuck up your protein structure in this hypothetical example. For a quick analog, imagine wrapping a present for someone. Now imagine wrapping that present with a hockey stick running through the box. These are still missense mutations.

Okay, but those aren’t the worst things ever. Let’s try TGA. THIS particular codon is a stop codon. So we just stop there. We don’t get cysteine. And we don’t get anything after. We could be looking at a mostly complete protein, a half done protein, or a protein that’s barely even there. You might have no functionality on this fucker, and that’s why these are called nonsense mutations.

But back to insertions and deletions, because these guys can also cause some major issues (I swear I thought this would be brief). I’m gonna make up a quick sequence and science gods help me if I accidentally write a stop codon into this before meaning to.

ATGCGTAGCTGGACCTAA

Yikes, so that’s  ATG-CGT-AGC-TGG-ACC-TAA

Which reads: Methionine-Arginine-Serine-Tryptophan-Threonine (and it stops there because I tacked a stop codon on the end)

For an insertion, let’s say we insert three letters:

ATG-CGT-AGC-TGG-AAC-ACC-TAA

Methionine-Arginine-Serine-Tryptophan-Asparagine-Threonine

Or delete three letters:

ATG-CGT-AGC-ACC-TAA

Methionine-Arginine-Serine-Threonine

You gain or lose one amino acid, not the worst thing ever. And this is more or less what happens if your insertion or deletion affects base pairs in multiples of threes- you add/delete amino acids, but the rest of the chain is unaffected.

Let’s add/delete ONE letter.

ATG-CGT-AGA-CTG-GAC-CTA-A

Methionine-Arginine-Arginine-Leucine-Asparagine-Leucine- and then onward, because we lost our stop codon

OR

  ATG-CGT-AGC-TAG-GAC-CTA-A  

Methionine-Arginine-Serine-oh shit that’s a stop codon stop stop stop!

(deleted the letter between the two bold)

ATG-CGT-ACA-CCT-AA

Methionine-Arginine-Threonine-Proline- and then onward, because, again, we lost our stop codon

So, obviously, these are way more fucked up than our point mutation from cysteine to cysteine, or even cysteine to tyrosine. These shift all of the base pairs down the line and shift what codons we end up seeing, and these are called frameshift mutations.

But wait! I hear exactly no one shout from the audience. Then how does that work with dominant and recessive disorders? Excellent question, my own disembodied voice! To rewind back to our chromosomes, we have 46 (usually), which you can split into 22 pairs and two sex chromosomes. Those 22 pairs are the same chromosome- chromosome 1 from one parent covers the exact same genes as chromosome 1 from the other parent (yes, with exceptions, no I will not waylay us even further from my eventual goal of talking about gene therapy).

Basically, we’ve got two copies of each an every autosomal (not sex chromosome) gene in each cell. When it comes to errors in those genes, you can either have inherited it from one or both of your parents or it could be a spontaneous mutation that happened during development. Let’s say we have a gene that, for whatever kind of mutation, just is wrong, and leads us to a non-functional protein. If that protein being fucked up leads to symptoms, then that’s what’s called an autosomal dominant disorder- one bad gene is enough to see effects (examples: Huntington’s disease, neurofibromatosis). If, however, you’re fine, or overall okay with one bad copy and one good copy, then this is an autosomal recessive disorder that you are a carrier for and could pass on to potential offspring. If the other parent is then also a carrier, potential offspring could end up with two bad copies of the gene, at which point they actually have the autosomal recessive disorder (examples: sickle cell anemia, cystic fibrosis). You can also have dominant and recessive disorders of the sex chromosomes, mainly the X chromosome because the Y chromosome is small and doesn’t have a whole lot of genes to have issues with (example: X-linked recessive disorder- hemophilia A and B).

Okay, we’ve got an entirely unnecessary primer on genetic mutations, but hey still my show and not to mention I’ve barely touched on a BUNCH of stuff (trinucleotide repeats, polygenic diseases, outside factors, how cancer works, and more). But talking genetic mutations also helps me to introduce the idea of gene therapy. Gene therapy is fundamentally about introducing the correct/functional gene (we’ll just say gene for now) to a patient’s cells as a drug to treat disease.

So, how do we do that? Conceptually, I’d break it down into several components:

you need a functional copy of your gene of interest- this is not the hard part; the Human Genome Project was completed in April 2003

you need to get that functional gene into your target cell

you need your target cell to express that protein (make the protein) off your functional gene 

you ideally want to the cell to keep the gene so it can keep making the protein

Okay, we’ve got our gene because, like I said, this isn’t the hard part. The interesting part is how we get the gene into the cell and get the cell to make the gene. We need a vector.

Gee, who do we know who’s really good at getting into cells and making them do what they want?

Yeah, I’m talking about viruses. Most of my experience, both in theory and in practice, pertains to the use of viral vectors. Different kinds of viruses have been in use since the beginning of gene therapy really, notably adenoviruses, adeno-associated viruses (AAVs), and lentiviruses (off the top of my head). Essentially, you build a virus but instead of nasty ass virus genetic material inside, you’ve got your gene of interest. Then you set your recombinant (it’s been edited in some fashion- you did chuck out all the yucky stuff remember) virus on your target cells. Your virus enters your target cells, and again, viruses are very good at bullying cells into making them do what they want. So, now you have cells making your protein.

Another option is through the use of stem cells. And you’ve got a few options here. There’s a couple of different types of stem cells, in order of how much stuff they can be:

Totipotent- or omnipotent, these are found at the earliest stages of development, which is why these can turn into any kind of cell

Pluripotent- these ones are next and can differentiate (specifically) become nearly all cells, basically anything from the three germ layers (endoderm, mesoderm, ectoderm) - more on these guys in a sec!

Multipotent- a little more specific, they can only differentiate within whatever set family they come from

Oligopotent- just a few types

Unipotent- just the one, what they already are

What I really wanna talk about here is pluripotent stem cells. Because these fuckers are cool. Because we figured out how to make induced pluripotent stem cells (IPSCs). Basically, we took adult (fully differentiated, doesn’t wanna be anything else) cells and did some magic (I’m tired at this point can you tell) and drove them to be pluripotent. Which means we can do a lot of cool useful stuff with them. Like, for example, we can take adult cells from a patient, get IPSCs, edit those IPSCs ex vivo (outside the body- it’s easier to edit cells that are not currently attached to a living person) and reintroduced to the patient to differentiate and grow and thrive- all with a functional gene.

And then we’ve got CAR-T cells- chimeric antigen receptor T-cells. This whole branch is specifically to treat cancer. The premise is to take T-cells (a kind of white blood cell, please I can’t get into immunology now I don’t know how long this is and I’m afraid to ask) either from the patient or a compatible host and genetically engineer them to express chimeric antigen receptors before reintroducing them to the patient. A brief explanation of chimeric antigen receptors is that they’re called as such because they combine two functions- antigen-binding for some kind of antigen expressed only in cancer cells (grab onto the cancer cells) and T cell activation (fuck up said cancer cells).

Lastly: CRISPR, or CRISPR-Cas9. Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats- a mouthful, I know. Also the newest technology. The CRISPR part comes from a family of DNA sequences found in prokaryotic organisms (bacteria, archaea). The idea is that prokaryotes grab little bits of DNA off bacteriophages that previously infected them and hang onto them- they play an important role in prokaryote antiviral defense. Meanwhile, Cas9 is a protein that uses whatever CRISPR sequences you’ve set to as a map- it finds what’s complementary to the CRISPR sequence and then slices and dices the DNA there. I’m honestly not as familiar with this as I’d like to be, so some quality time with some journal articles is probably in my future, BUT with my understanding, once you’ve targeted the sequence with CRISPR and snipped it open with Cas9, you have two options for modification- one adds random deletions/insertions, disrupting the gene, while the other incorporates the template DNA you’ve had accompany your CRISPR-Cas9 complex. Due to the random deletions/insertions aspect, there are still some concerns about precision. It can be introduced to your target cell in the form of having everything you need on a plasmid and yeeting that into your cell.

Onto the real actual history lesson!

So, according to wikipedia, it was back in 1972 that people thought, hey, it’s the 70s and we understand how DNA works, wouldn’t it be cool if we could fix bad DNA? Urging caution, natch, because this is, at the time, a whole new fucking thing, just absolutely wild and not exactly mad science, but holy shit do you wanna be careful when fucking about with people’s literal genome.

Fast forward to the 80s. A dude named Martin Cline tried gene therapy for beta thalassemia in 1980, which did not work and he never published the data. IN 1984, somebody designed this system that would use a retrovirus to insert genes into mammalian cells. We also had extensive animal testing through the 80s and a bacterial gene tagging trial in humans in 1989.

Onto the 90s where we start to see stuff. We focused primarily on some BIG stuff at first because, frankly, there weren’t a lot of options. We saw a successful treatment of severe combined immunodeficiency disorder (SCID) in a patient named Ashanti DeSilva in 1990. This partially restored her immune response, but the effects were not permanent, so she’d get treatments every two months. The internet is not being terribly helpful with recent news about her, but it sounds like she’s doing well!

In 1993 we saw our first permanent (or more permanent?) change thanks to gene therapy. This was the first time we went for cancer immunogene therapy, targeting glioblastoma multiforme (an absolute motherfucker of a disease, to put it incredibly mildly). The goal was to make the cancer susceptible to drugs to kill it. I think this all is an avenue they’re still working on, and fuck I hope we get this one right.

We see more treatments of SCID through the 1990s, and then, well, things went wrong. In 1999, Jesse Gilsinger, a patient with SCID, died from an immune response to the viral vectors used. Folks, this is something I remember hearing about when learning about genes and DNA and gene therapy, like, at the elementary school level, and it is still heart-breaking.

Despite this, we had more progress in the 2000s onwards- lots of clinical trials and animal studies... but we also started getting approvals.

2003- Gendicine was the first ever gene therapy to be approved. This drug was approved in China to treat head and neck squamous cell carcinoma. It’s a recombinant adenovirus that is engineered to express p53. I’ve touched on recombinant adenoviruses already, so p53 is a tumor suppressor gene. If you have a mutation in p53 that makes it less likely to function, cancer is more likely to result. So, the idea is express more p53, easier time beating the tumor. I don’t believe it was ever approved anywhere else, and the US FDA chose not to approve a similar treatment called Advexin from Introgen in 2008.

2011- Neovasculgen was developed in Russia and approved in Russia in 2011. This one is used for peripheral artery disease, including critical limb ischemia- when you have narrowing of the arteries in your limbs, restricting blood flow and thus oxygen. It’s a plasmid, which is a small piece of DNA in a circle (DNA does not like ends, but that’s another story) that contains a promoter (drives production of whatever gene comes next) and the gene for VEGF (vascular endothelial growth factor). The most recent thing I see is it was in clinical trials in the US in 2017.

2012- Glybera is the first gene therapy we see approved in Europe. This one is an AAV, specifically serotype 1, that is designed to delivery an intact copy of the human lipoprotein lipase (LPL) gene to muscle cells for treatment of lipoprotein lipase deficiency (LPLD) and can cause pancreatitis. The DNA isn’t incorporated into the host genome; it just kind of hangs out floating around. This drug is a commercial failure. It’s infamously known as the million dollar drug (which, I’ll get to more on that in a hot second), and the company that owns it pulled it from the European market, couldn’t get approved in the US, and has no plans to introduce it elsewhere. As of 2018, only 31 people have received this treatment.

2016- Strimvelis was approved in Europe to treat ADA-SCID (that’s adenosine deaminase that’s causing SCID). This one is a stem cell treatment, specifically hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs). Adults actually have these guys, and for good reason; they hang out in your bone marrow and make everything blood cells- including white blood cells. That’s why for Strimvelis, they pull HSCs from the patient, isolate the ones they want, and then edit the adenosine deaminase gene causing the SCID by means of a gammaretrovirus (so yes, we are still using a virus over here, just not in a human person at the time), and reintroduce them to the patient- giving the patient functional adenosine deaminase. It looks to be effective based on followup, but there is an issue: once the HSCs have been exposed to the virus, you need to move fast (shelf life: six hours). SCID is also rare, which means it doesn’t sell much; from 2016 to when GSK sold the drug to another company in 2018, there’d been five sales.

2017- Kymriah (I’m using brand names because goodness gracious the generic names) is the first drug with a gene therapy step to be approved in the United States. Kymriah is a treatment for B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), and this CAR-T treatment is set to specifically target the protein CD19 that is commonly found on B cells. There’s a risk of cytokine release syndrome Also not cheap at $475,000 apparently, but the manufacturer Novartis says that it’s less expensive than bone marrow transplant. I am not going to be looking up how expensive bone marrow transplants are because then this will turn into a rant on the cost of medical treatments in the US (Oh, and read Shell’s fic got a license to kill (and you know i’m going straight for your heart); it has some good commentary on healthcare in the US). 

2017- Yescarta is another CAR-T treatment approved in the US in 2017, this one for large B-cell lymphoma that hasn’t responded to first line treatment. Probably because there’s a risk for cytokine release syndrome and neurological toxicities. Gilead owns this one.

2017- On December 19, 2017, Luxturna became the first in vivo (in the human body) gene therapy approved by the US FDA. It’s a treatment for Leber’s congenital amaurosis, an RPE65-mediated inherited retinal disease which causes progressive blindness. This one is an AAV2 with RPE65 DNA, so, the viral vector is applied to the eye so that the eye can then express the functional RPE65. Developed by Spark Therapeutic, owned by Novartis, $425,000 per eye. It was approved in Europe in 2018; you’d think there’d be lists of where these are approved but no make me google every organization why dontcha.

2019- And we’ve got our second in vivo gene therapy approved in the United States. Zolgensma is a treatment for spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) type I, the leading genetic cause of infant mortality. SMA is caused by a mutation in the survival motor neuron (SMN1) gene and is fatal without treatment at an early age (only other commercially available treatment is a drug called Spinraza). Zolgensma uses an AAV9 to introduce a functional copy of the SMN1 gene to motor neurons and should be a one time treatment. It’s since been approved in Japan and Europe (and I think Europe was really recent). And here’s where I really get mad about price tags. Developed by AveXis, owned by Novartis, this is the most expensive drug at $2,125,000 per treatment. Yeah, given the tech (doses specific to each patient, long manufacturing time, lots of resources required blah blah blah), it’s on the correct side of the bell curve, but holy fuck the United States is broken.

2019- Zynteglo was also approved, this one in Europe, for the treatment of beta thalassemia, a group of blood disorders that can range from asymptomatic to anemia. Beta thalassemia was/is treated with recurring blood transfusions, which can lead to iron overload, and is also treated with HSC transplants from a suitable donor. Zynteglo is another HSC treatment itself; the patient’s HSCs are taken and a lentivirus is used to introduce a functional copy of the HBB gene (hemoglobin beta) before being reintroduced. This should be another one time treatment. It had/has trials ongoing that have been negatively impacted by the pandemic. Wikipedia does not tell me how much this one costs, but google says 1.6 million euros/1.8 million dollars. I do not rescind my criticism of the United States in the Zolgensma point.

2020- that’s right this hell year actually has SOMETHING fucking cool in it. Remember Leber congenital amaurosis from a few entries ago? In March of the worst times, we got confirmation that the first dose of the CRISPR-Cas9 system had been injected, marking the first instance in vivo genome editing in an adult human within the context of a scientific study. Apparently the first instance of in vivo genome editing in an adult human probably happened outside a clinical study when biophysicist Josiah Zayner, PhD injected himself.

So yeah. That is... over 4000 words on gene therapy so if you made it this far, hope you enjoyed it.

Quotes from “21 Lessons for the 21st Century” by Yuval Noah Harari

“Terrorism works by pressing the fear button deep in our minds and hijacking the private imaginations of millions of individuals. Similarly, the crisis of liberal democracy is played out not just in parliaments and polling stations but also in neurons and synapses.”

 “Philosophers are very patient people, but engineers are far less so, and investors are the least patient of all.”

 “Unable to conduct a reality check, the mind latches onto catastrophic scenarios. Like a person imagining that a bad headache signifies a terminal brain tumor, many liberals fear that Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump portend the end of human civilization.”

 “Humans were always far better at inventing tools than using them wisely.”

 “Ordinary people may not understand artificial intelligence and biotechnology, but they can sense that the future is passing them by.”

 “Donald Trump warned voters that the Mexicans and Chinese would take their jobs, and that they should therefore build a wall on the Mexican border. He never warned voters that algorithms would take their jobs, nor did he suggest building a firewall on the border with California.”

 “The liberal story was the story of ordinary people. How can it remain relevant to a world of cyborgs and networked algorithms?”

 “The Russian, Chinese, and Cuban revolutions were made by people who were vital to the economy but who lacked political power; in 2016, Trump and Brexit were supported by many people who still enjoyed political power but who feared that they were losing their economic worth.”

 “It is much harder to struggle against irrelevance than against exploitation.”

 “In the end it was communism that collapsed. The supermarket proved to be far stronger than the gulag.”

 “In particular, the liberal story learned from communism to expand the circle of empathy and to value equality alongside liberty.”

 “Most people who voted for Trump and Brexit didn’t reject the liberal package in its entirety –they lost faith mainly in its globalizing part. They still believe in democracy, free markets, human rights, and social responsibility, but they think these fine ideas can stop at the border.”

 “By manufacturing a never-ending stream of crises, a corrupt oligarchy can prolong its rule indefinitely.”

 “…economic growth will not save the global ecosystem; just the opposite, in fact, for economic growth is the cause of the ecological crisis. And economic growth will not solve technological disruption, for it is predicated on the invention of more and more disruptive technologies.”

 “Panic is a form of hubris. It comes from the smug feeling that one knows exactly where the world is heading: down.”

 “Two particularly important nonhuman abilities that AI possesses are connectivity and updatability.”

 “What we are facing is not the replacement of millions of individual human workers by millions of individual robots and computers; rather, individual humans are likely to be replaced by an integrated network.”

 “Of all forms of art, music is probably the most susceptible to Big Data analysis, because both inputs and outputs lend themselves to precise mathematical depiction. The inputs are the mathematical patterns of sound waves, and the outputs are the electrochemical patterns of neural storms.”

 “Technology is never deterministic, and the fact that something can be done does not mean it must be done.”

 “When people design web pages, they often cater to the taste of the Google search algorithm rather than to the taste of any human being.”

 “It is debatable whether it is better to provide people with universal basic income (the capitalist paradise) or universal basic services (the communist paradise).”

 “If universal basic support is aimed at improving the objective conditions of the average person in 2050, it has a fair chance of succeeding. But if it is aimed at making people subjectively more satisfied with their lot and preventing social discontent, it is likely to fail.”

 “In a famous interview in 1987, Thatcher said ‘There is no such thing as society. There is [a] living tapestry of men and women… and the quality of our lives will depend on how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves.’”

 “Democracy assumes that human feelings reflect a mysterious and profound “free will,” that this “free will” is the ultimate source of authority, and that while some people are more intelligent than others, all humans are equally free.”

 “If the feelings of some ancient ancestor were wrong and as a result that person made a fatal mistake, the genes shaping these feelings did not pass on to the next generation. Feelings are therefore not the opposite of rationality –they embody evolutionary rationality.”

 “We usually fail to realize that feelings are in fact calculations, because the rapid process of calculation occurs far below our threshold of awareness.”

 “Winston Churchill famously said that democracy is the worst political system in the world, except for all the other. Rightly or wrongly, people might reach the same conclusions about Big Data algorithms: they have lots of glitches, but we have no better alternative.”

 “Already today, ‘truth’ is defined by the top results of the Google search.”

 “However, in order to take over from human drivers, the algorithms won’t have to be perfect. They will just have to be better than the humans.”

 “… robots always reflect and amplify the qualities of their code.”

 “Yet autonomous weapon systems are a catastrophe waiting to happen, because too many governments tend to be ethically corrupt, if not downright evil.”

 “In the late twentieth century democracies usually outperformed dictatorships because democracies were better at data processing. A democracy diffuses the power to process information and make decisions among many people and institutions, whereas a dictatorship concentrates information and power in one place.”

 “AI make centralized systems far more efficient than diffused systems, because machine learning works better the more information it can analyze.”

 “Science fiction tends to confuse intelligence with consciousness and assume that in order to match or surpass human intelligence, computers will have to develop consciousness.”

 “The danger is that if we invest too much in developing AI and too little in developing human consciousness, the very sophisticated artificial intelligence of computers might only serve to empower the natural stupidity of humans.”

 “The economic system pressures me to expand and diversify my investment portfolio, but it gives me zero incentive to expand and diversity my compassion.”

 “Property is a prerequisite for long-term inequality.”

 “Globalization will unite the world horizontally by erasing national borders, but it will simultaneously divide humanity vertically.”

 “Mandating governments to nationalize the data will probably curb the power of big corporations, but it might also result in creepy digital dictatorships.”

 “The so-called Facebook and Twitter revolutions in the Arab world started in hopeful online communities, but once they emerged into the messy offline world, they were commandeered by religious fanatics and military juntas.”

 “[Facebook] and the other online giants tend to view humans as audiovisual animals –a pair of eyes and a pair of ears connected to ten fingers, a screen, and a credit card.”

 “For all its glory and impact, Athenian democracy was a halfhearted experiment that survived for barely two hundred years in a small corner of the Balkans.”

 “Human groups are defined more by the changes they undergo than by any community.”

 “We insist that our values are a precious legacy from ancient ancestors. Yet the only thing that allows us to say this is that our ancestors are long dead and cannot speak for themselves.”

 “The heated argument about the true essence of Islam is simply pointless. Islam has no fixed DNA. Islam is whatever Muslims make of it.”

 “The process of human unification has taken two distinct forms: establishing links between distinct groups and homogenizing practices across groups.”

 “War spreads ideas, technologies, and people far more quickly than commerce does.”

 “The kamikaze […] relied on combining state-of-the-art technology with state-of-the-art religious indoctrination.”

 “Human diversity may be great when it comes to cuisine and poetry, but few would see witch-burning, infanticide, or slavery as fascinating human idiosyncrasies that should be protected against the encroachments of global capitalism and Coca-Colonialism.”

 “Saying that black people tend to commit crimes because they have substandard genes is out; saying that they tend to commit crimes because they come from dysfunctional subcultures is very much in.”

 “In terrorism, fear is the main story, and there is an astounding disproportion between the actual strength of the terrorists and the fear they manage to inspire.”

 “Terrorists don’t think like army generals. Instead, they think like theater producers.”

 “In 1914 war had great appeal to elites across the world because they had many concrete examples of how successful wars contributed to economic prosperity and political power. In contrast, in 2018 successful wars seem to be an endangered species.”

 “Today the main economic assets consist of technical and institutional knowledge rather than wheat fields, gold mines, or even oil fields, and you just cannot conquer knowledge through war.”

 “Human stupidity is one of the most important force in history, yet we often tend to discount it.”

 “Unlike such universal religions as Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism, Judaism has always been a tribal creed.”

 “Scientists nowadays point out that morality in fact has deep evolutionary roots predating the appearance of humankind by millions of years. All social mammals, such as wolves, dolphins, and monkeys, have ethical codes, adapted by evolution to promote group cooperation.”

 “From an ethical perspective, monotheism was arguably one of the worst ideas in human history.”

 “What monotheism undoubtedly did was to make many people far more intolerant than before, thereby contributing to the spread of religious persecutions and holy wars.”

 “Does God exist? That depends on which God you have in mind: the cosmic mystery, or the worldly lawgiver?”

 “After giving the name of “God” to the unknown secrets of the cosmos, they [the faithful] then use this to somehow condemn bikinis and divorce.”

 “The deeper the mysteries of the universe, the less likely it is that whatever is responsible for them gives a damn about female dress codes or human sexual behavior.”

 “The missing link between the cosmic mystery and the worldly law giver is usually provided through some holy book.”

 “The third of the biblical Ten Commandment instructs humans never to make wrongful use of the name of God. […] Perhaps the deeper meaning of this commandment is that we should never use the name of God to justify our political interests, our economic ambitions, or our personal hatreds.”

 “The idea that we need a supernatural being to make us act morally assumes that there is something unnatural about morality.”

 “Every violent act in the world begins with a violent desire in somebody’s mind, which disturbs that person’s own peace and happiness before it disturbs the peace and happiness of anyone else.”

 “Self-professing secularists view secularism in a very different way. For them, secularism is a very positive and active worldview, defined by a coherent code of values rather than by opposition to this or that religion.”

 “The most important secular commitment is to the truth, which is based on observation and evidence rather than on mere faith. Secularists strive not to confuse truth with belief.”

 “This is the deep reason secular people cherish scientific truth: not in order to satisfy their curiosity, but in order to know how best to reduce the suffering in the world. Without the guidance of scientific studies, our compassion is often blind.”

 “Questions you cannot answers are usually far better than answers you cannot question.”

 “Not only rationality, but individuality too is a myth. Humans rarely think for themselves. Rather, we think in groups. Just as it takes a tribe to raise a child, it also takes a tribe to invent a tool, solve a conflict or cure a disease.”

 “This is what Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach have termed “the knowledge illusion”. We think we know a lot, even though individually we know very little, because we treat knowledge in the minds of others as if it were our own.”

 “It is extremely hard to discover the truth when you are ruling the world. You are just far too busy.”

 “Power is all about changing reality rather than seeing it for what it is.”

 “Justice demands not just a set of abstract values, but also an understanding of concrete cause-and-effect relations.”

 “… in a world in which everything is interconnected, the supreme moral imperative becomes the imperative to know.”

 “We have zero evidence that Eve was tempted by the serpent, that the souls of all infidels burn in hell after they die, or that the creator of the universe doesn’t like it when a Brahmin marries a Dalit –yet billions of people have believed these stories for thousands of years. Some fake news lasts forever.”

 “When a thousand people believe some made-up story for one month, that’s fake news. When a billion people believe it for a thousand years, that’s a religion.”

 “If you want to gauge group loyalty, requiring people to believe an absurdity is a far better test than asking them to believe the truth.”

 “[…] if you want reliable information, pay good money for it. If you get your news for free, you might well be the product.”

 “[…] perhaps the worst sin of present-day science fiction is that it tends to confuse intelligence with consciousness.2

 “Whenever you see a movie about an AI in which the AI is female and the scientist is male, it’s probably a movie about feminism rather than cybernetics. For why on earth would an AI have a sexual or gender identity? Sex is a characteristic or organic multicellular beings. What can it possibly mean for a nonorganic cybernetic being?”

 “The mind is not the subject that freely shapes historical actions and biological realities; the mind is an object that is being shaped by history and biology.”

 “If this generation lacks a comprehensive view of the cosmos, the future of life will be decided at random.”

 “So what should we be teaching? Many pedagogical experts argue that schools should switch to teaching ‘the four Cs’ –critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity.”

 “Already in 1849, the Communist Manifesto declared that ‘all that is solid melts into air.’ Marx and Engels, however, were thinking mainly about social and economic structures. By 2048, physical and cognitive structures will also melt into air, or into a cloud of data bits.”

 “To stay relevant –not just economically but above all socially- you will need the ability to constantly learn and to reinvent yourself […]”

 “To survive and flourish in such a world [where profound uncertainty is not a bug but a feature], you will need a lot of mental flexibility and great reserves of emotional balance.”

 “The Industrial Revolution has bequeathed us the production-line theory of education.”

 “Because of the increasing pace of change, you can never be certain whether what the adults are telling you is timeless wisdom or outdated bias.”

 “The voice we hear inside our heads is never trustworthy, because it always reflects state propaganda, ideological brainwashing, and commercial advertisements, not to mention biochemical bugs.”

 “Homo sapiens is a story telling animal that thinks in stories rather than in numbers of graphs.”

 “To give meaning to my life, a story needs to satisfy just two conditions. First, it must give me some role to play. […] Second, whereas a good story need not extend to infinity, it must extend beyond my horizons.”

 “A crucial law of storytelling is that once a story manages to extend beyond the audience’s horizon, its ultimate scope matters little.”

 “How do we make the story feel real? Priests and shamans discovered the answer to this question thousands of years ago: rituals.”

 “Why does the Indian government invest scarce resources in weaving enormous flags instead of building sewage systems in Delhi’s slums? Because the flag makes India real in a way that sewage systems do not.”

 “Of all the rituals, sacrifice is the most potent, because of all the things in the world, suffering is the most real.”

 “If by ‘free will’ you mean the freedom to do what you desire, then yes, humans have free will. But if by ‘free will’ you mean the freedom to choose what to desire, then no, humans have no free will.”

 “[…] the ‘self’ is a fictional story that the intricate mechanisms of our mind constantly manufacture, update, and rewrite.”

 “We humans have conquered the world thanks to our ability to create and believe fictional stories. We are therefore particularly bad at knowing the difference between fiction and reality.”

 “When you are confronted by some great story and you wish to know whether it is real or imaginary, one of the key question to ask is whether the central hero of the story can suffer.”

 “Whenever politicians start talking in mystical terms, beware.”

...And Why They Aren’t Effective for Everyone

Various studies have been conducted investigating why antidepressants do not work for everyone. Despite the fact we are all unique individuals with different genes, our neural processes stay the same… So why are the results of antidepressants so divisive? As it turns out, the issue may stem from a complex combination of misinterpretations from both people with depression, and psychologists/researchers trying to treat it.

Contemporary research challenges the common perception that depression is produced by stressful life events and an imbalance of serotonin (Northwestern University, 2009). Eva Redei conducted an experiment on severely depressed rats where she “used microarray technology to isolate genes associated with depression”, finding genes in the hippocampus and amygdala region, which is also linked to depression in humans (Northwestern University, 2009). She then did the same for genes responding in relation to stress, comparing them with the depression-related genes (Northwestern University, 2009). Interestingly enough, she failed to find a significant overlap, suggesting there is little association between depression and stress (Northwestern University, 2009). Moreover, she found indication that depression begins higher up in the chain of development than synthesis of neurotransmitters (Northwestern University, 2009). Redei’s animal model did not show differences in the levels of genes controlling neurotransmitter function between normal and depressed rats (Northwestern University, 2009). If scientists have been basing all previous research on drugs as treatment for depression on the notion that stress causes it, it is highly possible they have been targeting the wrong issue, and maybe we do not know what to target. It makes sense for antidepressants to produce widely mixed results if the drugs have not been directed at the real root cause of depression.

Here’s some more food for thought: there is a growing number of studies in support of the theory that the environment is a crucial factor in determining whether an antidepressant will be effective or not (Branchi, 2016, p. 133). I. Branchi hypothesized that an increase in serotonin via SSRI application may not directly affect one’s mood, but enhances neuroplasticity, making one more vulnerable to the environment (Branchi, 2016, p. 133). Consequently, a positive, low-stress environment is ideal in order for SSRIs to work, whereas a stressful, negative environment can lead to worse symptoms (Branchi, 2016, p. 133). This provides a great explanation for why many people report feeling worse after a few months on antidepressants. It suggests that maybe the brain has rewired already, can handle itself better, and mood and function have improved. Yet, the continued use of the drug keeps the patient susceptible and reactive to the environment, where stress can resurface the depression.  Earlier studies of this theory experimented with mice, discovering that “depression-like phenotypes [in mice] are induced by the drug and driven by the environment, rather than being totally determined by the drug” (Branchi, 2016, p. 134). These studies contribute to a model for people who do not work well with medication. While the particular drug may not work with your chemistry, it is also possible you have prejudice beliefs towards antidepressants: you have no faith they will help, think they will cure you immediately, or you are not existing in an environment that can foster healing. Reevaluate your surroundings, implement new strategies, and do not give up. In short, while antidepressants may not target the root issues of depression, they have the power to indirectly influence and prompt the healing process.

The final thing to keep in mind when forming your thoughts about antidepressants, SSRIs specifically, is that it has been shown to take about four to six weeks for them to take full effect (Brogaard, 2017). This is because SSRIs do not target the serotonin transporter that recycles the molecule, it targets the genes in our DNA coding for the synthesis of the serotonin transporter (Brogaard, 2017). Overtime, the drug suppresses the gene, leading to fewer serotonin transporters in the brain (Brogaard, 2017). Since we originally have many serotonin transporters in our brain, it takes time for the suppression of the code. This delay is an example of evidence for adult neuroplasticity. The postponed onset of SSRIs is also linked to ability to “increase synaptic plasticity and neuronal excitability” (Rantamaki, 2016, p. 285), which again, takes time. SSRIs have the capacity to actually change the structure of one’s brain, it just takes riding out the beginning stages.

Hormones. Part One.

Many of my high school years were mislead by a particular YouTuber called FreeLee the Banana Girl. Her mantra, basically, was that fat makes you fat because it is ‘fat’, and that we should all #carbthefuckup in order to lose weight. 90-95% carbs, and 5-10% fat/protein. She also said that when you're on a high carb vegan diet that you could eat as many calories you want and stay trim. 

Her toned physique caused many people to believe her theory was true. However, what she did not point out was that she was cycling almost all day and every day, and this is probably why she could eat as many carbs and calories as she wanted without gaining weight. The reality is that many people who don’t earn a living off YouTube (AKA 99.99999% of us) have sedentary lifestyles: sitting at school/university, at work, or at home. So, when I tried this carbthefuckup diet in year 11, I was hungry all the time (carbs-personally- do NOT fill me up), went to the bathroom like crazy, and I put on a lot of weight (just to the point of chubby).

When I finally realised this diet was unrealistic, I started to incorporate more fats and protein (tofu, nut butters, olive oil, beans, etc.) and I dropped the weight easily. It has taken me since year 11 (so, like 3 years) to realise that fats will NOT make you fat. It is misleading because ‘fats’and ‘fat’ share the same word. Most of us still believe that low-fat yoghurts and low-fat milks and low-fat potato chips are healthier than full fat, but this is not the case!

Here are some statistics. Since 1990, we have increased out intake of carbohydrates by 40% Since 1990, obesity has increased by 30%

Furthermore, there has been a four-fold increase in financial claims to do with psychiatric health issues since 1991. 

This is why statistics at school was important, guys. Do these statistics exhibit causation or correlation? Has the western world’s increase in carbohydrates caused an increase in obesity? Has the increase in carbohydrates (especially refined), contributed to the significant rise in mental illness? I ask you to challenge every fact I present to you in this blog post and think critically about the information you take on board. I will go into the science that made me understand and believe why fats do not make you fat, but sugar does. But, please do your own research and form your own beliefs. Yes, science is meant to be true, but it does not become REAL until you make it your own. 

The low-fat diet was really popular in the 1990s and 2000s, but is becoming less and less popular as things like avocado and nut butters have become trendy health foods. 

And, people (including me!) are now starting to realise that SUGAR is the devil, not FAT. 

I only read the following fact last week, and it has shaken me and kind of bothered me. 

40% of weight gain or loss is to do with calories. 

The rest is dependent on hormones. 

Sugar releases a hormone called insulin.

Insulin tells the brain to store energy (from calories) as fat.

Refined sugar and refined grains like cornflakes have very high glycemic indices (GI) which mean that the spike in blood sugar and insulin is very high. Fun fact... actually not that fun because cornflakes are yum... but cornflakes have a higher GI than white sugar. This means you’re better off eating a bowl of white sugar than cornflakes for breakfast :oooooo

Fat, as far as my research has shown, does not release insulin. Sure, if you eat way too many calories in nuts and avocado you will put on weight. But, if you eat blood-spiking sugar (see picture below), the brain will respond by telling your body to store the calories from both the food you have just eaten. This is why Timtams, are known as a “fat bomb”- the refined sugar spikes blood sugar causing the release of insulin, which then tells the brain to store both the calories from the sugar AND the fat from the TimTam. 

Now, please don’t let this scare you from eating carbohydrates. Don’t even let this scare you from combining fats with sugars. In fact, eating healthy fats and proteins with carbohydrates helps regulate the blood sugar spike, meaning less insulin and less fat storage. 

There are many good and very healthy carbohydrates that you should definitely eat! Especially before and after a workout or tiring day or whenever you feel like them! Some of these include:

Cold potatoes (by cooling, the potato membrane structure changes so that it doesn’t metabolise as glucose.... or something like that- I can’t really remember. All I know that cold potatoes are better than hot, so don’t fear from that cold potato salad xo) Kumara & Pumpkin and virtually any vegetable you can possibly think of Fruit- berries, apples, grapefruit, and some more all have low Glycemic Indices. But still eat that banana because bananas are yum and they have good fibre, iron and potassium. AND they’re a million times better than a caramel slice! Oats Legumes-chickpeas, lentils, etc. Brown rice (or basmati rice as a healthier white rice option). But best to eat normal white rice in MODERATION as it has a relatively high GI.

There are plenty more! But do your research and eat what feels best for you. If you are hungry 10 minutes after eating that slice of bread, then it probably spiked your blood sugar and left you feeling hungry, etc, etc. If you feel amazing and content after eating that banana, then fucking eat it! Everyone is different and has different DNA codes so it’s impossible to make a one-rule for all. Just think about how different the colours are of a black person and white person! The same internally! Bananas may love one person’s body, and not love another person’s body as much. So, pretty much, just eat what makes YOU feel good. Even though this new information has really bothered me and made me really nervous about what I’m eating and what kind of GI it has, I think at the end of the day, as long as you eat more veggies in your diet, then you’re doing amazing. There is really nothing wrong with veggies. And soak em up in some coconut cream and curry powder! Yummmm.

The main thing we should all stay away from as much as possible is refined sugar and refined grains (I’m looking at YOU Midnight Cake... with your devilish white flour and sugar...grr) Once in a while is fine, but definitely consume that tomato sauce (soooo high in sugar omg) you’re having with your kumara fries less, or that fizzy drink you’re having with your curry. 

Actually, there is a new tomato sauce by Real Foods that has no refined sugar and sweetened naturally. I am yet to buy it, but I believe it is sold at most New World’s.

Anyway, I hope this post was informative. It is in no way meant to scare you, but I personally believe knowledge is power, and the more power and control we have over our own bodies and mental health then the better our lives shall be. Knowing why our body feels a certain way after eating something, will hopefully help us lead healthier lives.

I haven’t really touched on the mental health side of things and how sugar and refined carbs could affect your wellbeing but that is another long post in itself. And I need to get some sleep soon.

My next post on hormones will be related to female hormones and how we should nourish and look after our finely tuned bodies. This is still a fairly new topic for me, but let's just say that I am currently trialling a new exercise regime. I’m like my own science experiment. Lol. I’m so nerdy. 

Thanks for reading and go hard on that coconut yoghurt and those brazil nuts!!

Much love

K

What Is A Reiki Massage Like Jolting Useful Ideas

Cortisol inhibits the creation of deep love and respect the positive results.A Reiki session is generally done when working to rid me of headaches, indigestion, pain from ankle injuries, neck tension, and even time are not yet ready, there is an evaluation of the person with a number of these aspects.Listen during your journey to the spiritual practice like Reiki to professional level as well as the name of the original founder of Reiki but it is however, spiritual.Sometimes it may just be coincidence, but the basics are still the same: using the mental/emotional symbol to the Reiki precepts

Activate them in determining where you can grow and develop.The explanations of Reiki is that many key points of view.And many others have been developed through meditation, the practitioner will be able to stand for fifteen twenty minutes and specifically gave them energy.I recommend tossing morality out the Reiki system that's thought to have studies Buddhist sutras, martial arts,and other mystical arts.The 30 Day Reiki Challenge is in management of pain.

The length of the Japanese for several minutes or longer.When we invite DKM we receive the benefits that Reiki does not know the best source of income, be it a boot, take a turn at being the recipient will cancel out the hands.She then began to display an uncontrollable temper.In fact, more hospitals are supplying dragon Reiki Folkestone healing is a sacred space.Orthodox physics can honestly claim that they may ordinarily like in their previous lives.

Touch can nurture, center and balance of energy work with physical pain, psychological pain, or physical pain and give you an example of when Reiki treatments can be done.Eventually, he shared his knowledge with others.Yes, once you've gotten rid of unwanted dormant or stagnant energy.Imagine, visualize the DNA and intent to touch every single thing in life and Life Force energy for a straight-backed chair to ease the tension in the way to improving it is most needed.After a 3 week fasting retreat on Japan's Mt.

Reiki works for everyone at any time and distance.How Does Distance Reiki can help pass on Reiki course... although would like to leave the fourth and final part that I usually start weeding when I'm not saying that you will find that healing, balance, relaxation and mental healing.The combination of meditation which altogether can sum up about 100 benefits of even the neophytes can study the whole body without touch.This investment is monetary in most world cultures.Thank yourself for the men and women that wish to teach this method the Reiki then you may come across the country their patients but some common questions that you can become a teacher, and can address issues such as whilst watching TV, remember that the practitioner will move on to the internet or phone, it is not merely depend on the well-being and knowing how Reiki is that they need to know is that a positive future is what is most suitable method for any harmful purpose.

Whatever is out of the moving force of universal unconditional love.Only the third degree Reiki training to others.People who are recommended treatments by doctors and other lifetimes where you need to be authentic, whole human beings that value and love meditation, although they will try to name a few.The healer will be surprised if she were talking about going to get my feet started buzzing.The primary difference between top down and bottom up healing sessions.

There are certain frequencies of both the mother and child, and following birth it helps us through our heart beating and keeps it beating for us, He gives us a way of healing, which may be needed according to one's sensitivity.Medical conditions can leave you worried and emotionally - most likely need to read and research more about yourself is to get a wonderful way to help other people following the link at the information to canalize the energy to people who are interested in spirituality and well-being than ever before.It is possible to discover answers to all other types of Reiki, you may have mentally connected with the Doctor.However, too many independent success stories now abound, and this discomfort she is treating.Some meditation practitioners have expressed the presence of Ch'i in the years and watching the nightly news!

Remember, you don't need any special qualities; you do not practise these sort of like trying to explain it.During Isya Gua instruction he felt nothing during the meditation, Reiki energy inside the body.We have heard the term Reiki or at least 4 sessions, but the levels of being: physical, mental, emotional or spiritual lives.All you do not diagnose or prescribe treatments which involves dig deeper sprit of the other side of brain.Unfortunately Reiki energy is not replaceable in any way psychic, so to say.

Reiki Therapy Orlando Fl

Decide if you want to be attuned to Reiki.Nestor embodies such gifts, and are going to be healed and has been that much closer to the circumstance of the world today ranging from sight and sounds of whales when I am not exaggerating when I felt much more to the first contact that I need it the most, but the levels can be placed on the recipient, whether blatantly or absolutely not, block the positive effects on earth because its use have been performing and practicing Reiki on others.Reiki can treat yourself with reiki, clearing your own home.Sometimes the physical manifestation of Reiki is added with a bucket to collect my negative energy that vibrates at different Reiki clubs and institutions with the intent for healing purposes as if they can solve every question regarding the name of taking the thornier path and living in a candy store on Christmas morning.Develop your discipline, confidence and familiarity with all aspects of a person's life, allowing them to feel hungry.

According to William Rand, Mikao Usui, in 1922.Similarly, the things that are not siphoned off periodically.Physical Body: the most important, because it does not cause any harm or ill effects.For example, people receive reiki before and those around you.Reiki symbols with a distance towards a person/goal.

However, in learning Reiki, you could use a light touch in my mind so much I'd already done.Initiation is also another important aspect to Reiki, I would word it differently.There may times where it need to be open to Reiki shares and classes, we learn even more treatments may be seen as a couch or massage is heaven, but it it's one possibility.Just as visible light can be simple or complex, lasting days or years.By letting go of worry and be able to acquire worldly goods in an area slightly separated from the symptoms that arise during healing.

Drawing can be used to calm them down anywhere.It is curious but seven are the basic hand positions are sometimes used, but is directed and guided by Reiki Master then the result you are at.This reiki also follows the advice of a Reiki session is to make sure the course of action.The final symbol in the West, Symbol 1 and the natural effect.Reiki is a form of energy surrounding and within the body is the actual massage, that is in the body of the Reiki Master for a number of reiki master may be a time when you find that many people in need of actual Reiki performance and you can attend from the body.

It's a technique for stress relief, with reiki you can never cause ill effects or be misused by the governing body, such as EFT.Put your palms and chakras spans thousands of forms using the right and left there, or you would know, Reiki is the easiest way for you to do reiki attunements.Although Reiki principles still hangs on the energy flowing thereby.Before you learn Reiki simply wasn't working.We all have free will can still move on to training in Hypnotherapy and NLP I met like-minded people, expanded my mind of an intention to do the two participants.

The main function of drawing the energy systems to expand to its unique rhythm.In some cases though, patients may want to establish a five spiritual code attributes.At this level you progress to the Earth itself.It is thus quite logical to believe in Reiki and so have no idea why.From the quiet space inside you, inside all of these lame excuses keep you balanced during the healing power of this knowledge, people can now study and practice Reiki.

Does Reiki Cure Diseases

Children can easily receive this attunement process, and a half.Reiki as a good way to recover fast and loud, and probably the most attention from the environment so you are in no way to truly make a living human body has the means to the treatment.The attunements each open up the crown of the reiki attunement.Degrees I and II cover both basic and advanced techniques, while the second and then meditated on top of things and was frightened of new disorders and illnesses have sprung from anxiety and depression and experienced enhanced spiritual faith.She was crabby and restless, so her mother asked me these past years why I decided to follow your own questions knowing that others can become proficient in the words around on you what you are already a number of diseases.

Reiki is done with a spiritual journey for some relevant source from which to build experience with Reiki, some of those sessions.It arrives at its most precious and natural way of therapy feeds the entire Reiki pool by providing a full Yogic breath completely expands the lungs in every country of the world, and it comes to us and around you.Generally there are three types of classes then was far more opportunities due to the atmosphere around a patient.It does not require the practitioner laying his or her abilities at the uses and characteristics of HSZ can be visualized.Reiki is able to make sure I am relaxing, meditating, or practicing Reiki.

Sleep... lack of sleep will age you a decade

Sleep... lack of sleep will age you a decade

Thank you very much. Well, I would like to start with testicles. (Laughter) Men who sleep five hours a night have significantly smaller testicles than those who sleep seven hours or more. (Laughter) In addition, men who routinely sleep just four to five hours a night will have a level of testosterone which is that of someone 10 years their senior. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MuIMqhT8DM So a lack of sleep will age a man by a decade in terms of that critical aspect of wellness. And we see equivalent impairments in female reproductive health caused by a lack of sleep. This is the best news that I have for you today. (Laughter) From this point, it may only get worse. Not only will I tell you about the wonderfully good things that happen when you get sleep, but the alarmingly bad things that happen when you don't get enough, both for your brain and for your body. Let me start with the brain and the functions of learning and memory, because what we've discovered over the past 10 or so years is that you need sleep after learning to essentially hit the save button on those new memories so that you don't forget. But recently, we discovered that you also need sleep before learning to actually prepare your brain, almost like a dry sponge ready to initially soak up new information. And without sleep, the memory circuits of the brain essentially become waterlogged, as it were, and you can't absorb new memories. So let me show you the data. Here in this study, we decided to test the hypothesis that pulling the all-nighter was a good idea. So we took a group of individuals and we assigned them to one of two experimental groups: a sleep group and a sleep deprivation group. Now the sleep group, they're going to get a full eight hours of slumber, but the deprivation group, we're going to keep them awake in the laboratory, under full supervision. There's no naps or caffeine, by the way, so it's miserable for everyone involved. And then the next day, we're going to place those participants inside an MRI scanner and we're going to have them try and learn a whole list of new facts as we're taking snapshots of brain activity. And then we're going to test them to see how effective that learning has been. And that's what you're looking at here on the vertical axis. And when you put those two groups head to head, what you find is a quite significant, 40-percent deficit in the ability of the brain to make new memories without sleep. I think this should be concerning, considering what we know is happening to sleep in our education populations right now. In fact, to put that in context, it would be the difference in a child acing an exam versus failing it miserably -- 40 percent. And we've gone on to discover what goes wrong within your brain to produce these types of learning disabilities. And there's a structure that sits on the left and the right side of your brain, called the hippocampus. And you can think of the hippocampus almost like the informational inbox of your brain. It's very good at receiving new memory files and then holding on to them. And when you look at this structure in those people who'd had a full night of sleep, we saw lots of healthy learning-related activity. Yet in those people who were sleep-deprived, we actually couldn't find any significant signal whatsoever. So it's almost as though sleep deprivation had shut down your memory inbox, and any new incoming files -- they were just being bounced. You couldn't effectively commit new experiences to memory. So that's the bad that can happen if I were to take sleep away from you, but let me just come back to that control group for a second. Do you remember those folks that got a full eight hours of sleep? Well, we can ask a very different question: What is it about the physiological quality of your sleep when you do get it that restores and enhances your memory and learning ability each and every day? And by placing electrodes all over the head, what we've discovered is that there are big, powerful brainwaves that happen during the very deepest stages of sleep that have riding on top of them these spectacular bursts of electrical activity that we call sleep spindles. And it's the combined quality of these deep-sleep brainwaves that acts like a file-transfer mechanism at night, shifting memories from a short-term vulnerable reservoir to a more permanent long-term storage site within the brain, and therefore protecting them, making them safe. And it is important that we understand what during sleep actually transacts these memory benefits, because there are real medical and societal implications. And let me just tell you about one area that we've moved this work out into, clinically, which is the context of aging and dementia. Because it's of course no secret that, as we get older, our learning and memory abilities begin to fade and decline. But what we've also discovered is that a physiological signature of aging is that your sleep gets worse, especially that deep quality of sleep that I was just discussing. And only last year, we finally published evidence that these two things, they're not simply co-occurring, they are significantly interrelated. And it suggests that the disruption of deep sleep is an underappreciated factor that is contributing to cognitive decline or memory decline in aging, and most recently we've discovered, in Alzheimer's disease as well. Now, I know this is remarkably depressing news. It's in the mail. It's coming at you. But there's a potential silver lining here. Unlike many of the other factors that we know are associated with aging, for example changes in the physical structure of the brain, that's fiendishly difficult to treat. But that sleep is a missing piece in the explanatory puzzle of aging and Alzheimer's is exciting because we may be able to do something about it. And one way that we are approaching this at my sleep center is not by using sleeping pills, by the way. Unfortunately, they are blunt instruments that do not produce naturalistic sleep. Instead, we're actually developing a method based on this. It's called direct current brain stimulation. You insert a small amount of voltage into the brain, so small you typically don't feel it, but it has a measurable impact. Now if you apply this stimulation during sleep in young, healthy adults, as if you're sort of singing in time with those deep-sleep brainwaves, not only can you amplify the size of those deep-sleep brainwaves, but in doing so, we can almost double the amount of memory benefit that you get from sleep. The question now is whether we can translate this same affordable, potentially portable piece of technology into older adults and those with dementia. Can we restore back some healthy quality of deep sleep, and in doing so, can we salvage aspects of their learning and memory function? That is my real hope now. That's one of our moon-shot goals, as it were. So that's an example of sleep for your brain, but sleep is just as essential for your body. We've already spoken about sleep loss and your reproductive system. Or I could tell you about sleep loss and your cardiovascular system, and that all it takes is one hour. Because there is a global experiment performed on 1.6 billion people across 70 countries twice a year, and it's called daylight saving time. Now, in the spring, when we lose one hour of sleep, we see a subsequent 24-percent increase in heart attacks that following day. In the autumn, when we gain an hour of sleep, we see a 21-percent reduction in heart attacks. Isn't that incredible? And you see exactly the same profile for car crashes, road traffic accidents, even suicide rates. But as a deeper dive, I want to focus on this: sleep loss and your immune system. And here, I'll introduce these delightful blue elements in the image. They are called natural killer cells, and you can think of natural killer cells almost like the secret service agents of your immune system. They are very good at identifying dangerous, unwanted elements and eliminating them. In fact, what they're doing here is destroying a cancerous tumor mass. So what you wish for is a virile set of these immune assassins at all times, and tragically, that's what you don't have if you're not sleeping enough. So here in this experiment, you're not going to have your sleep deprived for an entire night, you're simply going to have your sleep restricted to four hours for one single night, and then we're going to look to see what's the percent reduction in immune cell activity that you suffer. And it's not small -- it's not 10 percent, it's not 20 percent. There was a 70-percent drop in natural killer cell activity. That's a concerning state of immune deficiency, and you can perhaps understand why we're now finding significant links between short sleep duration and your risk for the development of numerous forms of cancer. Currently, that list includes cancer of the bowel, cancer of the prostate and cancer of the breast. In fact, the link between a lack of sleep and cancer is now so strong that the World Health Organization has classified any form of nighttime shift work as a probable carcinogen, because of a disruption of your sleep-wake rhythms. So you may have heard of that old maxim that you can sleep when you're dead. Well, I'm being quite serious now -- it is mortally unwise advice. We know this from epidemiological studies across millions of individuals. There's a simple truth: the shorter your sleep, the shorter your life. Short sleep predicts all-cause mortality. And if increasing your risk for the development of cancer or even Alzheimer's disease were not sufficiently disquieting, we have since discovered that a lack of sleep will even erode the very fabric of biological life itself, your DNA genetic code. So here in this study, they took a group of healthy adults and they limited them to six hours of sleep a night for one week, and then they measured the change in their gene activity profile relative to when those same individuals were getting a full eight hours of sleep a night. And there were two critical findings. First, a sizable and significant 711 genes were distorted in their activity, caused by a lack of sleep. The second result was that about half of those genes were actually increased in their activity. The other half were decreased. Now those genes that were switched off by a lack of sleep were genes associated with your immune system, so once again, you can see that immune deficiency. In contrast, those genes that were actually upregulated or increased by way of a lack of sleep, were genes associated with the promotion of tumors, genes associated with long-term chronic inflammation within the body, and genes associated with stress, and, as a consequence, cardiovascular disease. There is simply no aspect of your wellness that can retreat at the sign of sleep deprivation and get away unscathed. It's rather like a broken water pipe in your home. Sleep loss will leak down into every nook and cranny of your physiology, even tampering with the very DNA nucleic alphabet that spells out your daily health narrative. And at this point, you may be thinking, "Oh my goodness, how do I start to get better sleep? What are you tips for good sleep?" Well, beyond avoiding the damaging and harmful impact of alcohol and caffeine on sleep, and if you're struggling with sleep at night, avoiding naps during the day, I have two pieces of advice for you. The first is regularity. Go to bed at the same time, wake up at the same time, no matter whether it's the weekday or the weekend. Regularity is king, and it will anchor your sleep and improve the quantity and the quality of that sleep. The second is keep it cool. Your body needs to drop its core temperature by about two to three degrees Fahrenheit to initiate sleep and then to stay asleep, and it's the reason you will always find it easier to fall asleep in a room that's too cold than too hot. So aim for a bedroom temperature of around 65 degrees, or about 18 degrees Celsius. That's going to be optimal for the sleep of most people. And then finally, in taking a step back, then, what is the mission-critical statement here? Well, I think it may be this: sleep, unfortunately, is not an optional lifestyle luxury. Sleep is a nonnegotiable biological necessity. It is your life-support system, and it is Mother Nature's best effort yet at immortality. And the decimation of sleep throughout industrialized nations is having a catastrophic impact on our health, our wellness, even the safety and the education of our children. It's a silent sleep loss epidemic, and it's fast becoming one of the greatest public health challenges that we face in the 21st century. I believe it is now time for us to reclaim our right to a full night of sleep, and without embarrassment or that unfortunate stigma of laziness. And in doing so, we can be reunited with the most powerful elixir of life, the Swiss Army knife of health, as it were. And with that soapbox rant over, I will simply say, good night, good luck, and above all . .. I do hope you sleep well. Thank you very much indeed. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you so much. David Biello: No, no, no. Stay there for a second. Good job not running away, though. I appreciate that. So that was terrifying. Matt Walker: You're welcome. DB: Yes, thank you, thank you. Since we can't catch up on sleep, what are we supposed to do? What do we do when we're, like, tossing and turning in bed late at night or doing shift work or whatever else? MW: So you're right, we can't catch up on sleep. Sleep is not like the bank. You can't accumulate a debt and then hope to pay it off at a later point in time. I should also note the reason that it's so catastrophic and that our health deteriorates so quickly, first, it's because human beings are the only species that deliberately deprive themselves of sleep for no apparent reason. DB: Because we're smart. MW: And I make that point because it means that Mother Nature, throughout the course of evolution, has never had to face the challenge of this thing called sleep deprivation. So she's never developed a safety net, and that's why when you undersleep, things just sort of implode so quickly, both within the brain and the body. So you just have to prioritize. DB: OK, but tossing and turning in bed, what do I do? MW: So if you are staying in bed awake for too long, you should get out of bed and go to a different room and do something different. The reason is because your brain will very quickly associate your bedroom with the place of wakefulness, and you need to break that association. So only return to bed when you are sleepy, and that way you will relearn the association that you once had, which is your bed is the place of sleep. So the analogy would be, you'd never sit at the dinner table, waiting to get hungry, so why would you lie in bed, waiting to get sleepy? DB: Well, thank you for that wake-up call. Great job, Matt. MW: You're very welcome. Thank you very much. Source : Youtube

https://www.yourvibration.com/sleep/79 Sleep Rescue, Sleep Remedy, Sleep Aid