Small Brain, Big Brain

 

I believe we will create a better world, – eventually. Maybe.  Call me a “depressed optimist”.  Case in point;  researchers of the 3 inch fossil Fuxianhuia protensa, (above) - English pronunciation "Fuk-swe-on-wea-pro-ten-sant" -  suggest that half a billion years ago these little buggies suffered a glitch during sexual reproduction, and begot a double genetic pairing in their proto-brains. This “double dose” of mental DNA strands gave rise to higher brain functions.  Evidently, it also gave rise to crazy.

As one Brainiac involved in this study put it, “The price of higher intelligence and more complex behaviors is more mental illness.” What this implies is that whether you are studying religion or astronomy, Descartes or Deuteronomy, you are ingesting a degree of irrationality right along with any knowledge you acquire. 

The ability to use fire allowed us to break down meat proteins, but that also bestows the ability to burn down the house you live in. And we do it all the time – ask any Trump devotee.  Music or mythology, Einstein or astrology, nothing that humans have ever invented could not also be used to destroy humanity. Why should the Internet be any different?

A decade or so ago, some idiots exploited a “hole” in the Java software system, putting, according to the United States Department of Homeland Security, one billion computers at risk.   In other words, the $8 trillion World Wide Web could be destroyed because somebody found out a way to make 50 cents of profit by blowing up the WWW.

My question is, what kind of idiot would try to make a profit from destroying all future profits?  But the answer is obvious. The same kind of idiots who blew up the world wide economic system in 1929 and again in 2007, and are trying to do it again right now. Bitcoin anyone? The same kind of idiots who are currently running the National Rifle Association, seemingly determined to convince the vast majority of Americans that the terms “gun owner” and “gun nut” are synonymous. As a famous fictional American once said, “Stupid is as stupid does”.

On the plus side, I also recently came across research from South Africa and Sweden, which reveals that the average dung beetle uses GPS in rolling up and rolling away their poop balls. But the G in this GPS does not stand for global, but for galactic. 

I should pause here long enough to thank the lowly dung beetles for their dedication, for it is through their tireless efforts at removing billions of tons of herbivore waste from the surface of the earth that you and I can walk without sinking up to our knees in cow, bison, pig, sheep and moose shit. They bury their carefully gathered and formed poop balls just after laying their eggs in them, to ensure that future generations of dung beetles have a hearty first meal to start their lives. 

We've always known that once the lady beetle gets a nice juicy ball of dung together, they climb on top and do a little dance. Entomologists assumed, that just like the money hungry billionaires, this was a dung beetle's way of saying to the universe “This ball of crap is mine!” 

But now it seems they are actually seeking to orientate themselves so they can find their way back to the burrow they have dug for their balls.  If the sun is up, they use the sun. At night they use the moon. And on moonless nights they use the Milky Way, that smear of billions of stars that runs across the night sky, which nobody thought till now that a dung beetle was even vaguely aware of.

According to Professor Marcus Bryne, from Wits University in Johannesburg, “The dung beetles don't care which direction they're going in; they just need to get away from the big fight with the other beetles at the poo pile (above).”   Don't we all.

And, you know, there appears to be a lesson here, on the relationship between Newtonian and Quantum physics. The beetles can use the Milky Way to define a straight line back to their burrows, because they are so small, and the Milky Way is so far away. 

However, a moth, using the same basic methodology, circles a porch light because they are bigger and closer to the light source. The moths think they are flying in a straight line, as long as they keep the light at an equal distance.  Sort of like cult members and Red Sox fans.  Or bundles of energy we call neutrons locked in shell around a nucleus.     

Or like a human driving down the interstate highway between Houston and Beaumont, Texas. It feels like an endless straight dull line, and it is. But it's a straight line drawn on a sphere, so it ain't straight if you look at it from far enough away.  Or to put it another way; the closer you get to an individual problem, the easier it is to become blinded  as to the problem you are actually dealing with.

But to get back to my original example, Fuxianhuia protensa - this little proto-bugy has been described as a “missing link”, or more accurately as “a mistaken link”. The problem is the little multi-legged creature, which an average human would have thoughtlessly stepped  on if they spotted it in their closet, might have been the ancestor of all bugs – all crickets, cockroaches, dung beetles, moths and honey bees. But it also might not.  Or to let Professor Nicholas Strausfeld from the University of Virginia explain it. “There has been a very long debate about the origin of insects,” he says. And that, it seems, explains everything.

See, the grand daddy of all buggies was either a crab or a sea monkey (brine shrimp if you are over the age of twelve). Crabs are crustaceans, and sea monkey's are brachiopods. Crabs have better brains than do sea monkeys. So, ancient sea monkeys were once thought to have evolved into insects, while ancient crabs evolved into everybody else. 

But then along comes Fuxianhuia protensa, with a squiggly body and an organized brain, and a dependable dated age of 520 million years old. And that is old enough to have been the great-great-great-etcettera-granddaddy to both lines of evolution – which means that life got smarter and then found it might be more advantageous to get stupid again, just with fewer legs.

I can dig that..  Every human male comes to realize that women often prefer bastards to nice guys, and young women realize that most men prefer easy girls to smart girls.  As your father or mother might have told you at that point, “Life isn't fair”, and he or she may even have asked you, “If you ever figure out the opposite sex, let me know, will you?” 

To put it in a more gender neutral way, most people reach a point when they suspect that their brains are just getting in the way of their hormones making them happy. And it appears that sometime during the Cambrian period, the squiggly crawly things wiggling across the ocean floor first confronted that basic philosophical conundrum: bigger brains or bigger testicals and/or bigger tits? Which way will make me happy, in the long run.

At that point it now appears that the testicles and tits returned to a simpler brain and instant gratification, while the brains tried the deferred reward path. And the amazing thing is, it appears we both ended up in the same place, standing atop a our own pile of dung and looking to the Milky Way for answers to the Universe and everything or at least the chance to get laid, which is usually the same thing.

It's enough to make anybody a depressed optimist.

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FOOD FOR FUN

 

I celebrate the fifth of July, every year, because on the fifth of July in 1883 the U.S. government granted patent #278967. It was a formula of something that had never existed under the sun before, an invention that every one reading this has probably used at least once in the past year - and if you haven’t you have cheated yourself - even though their original idea was so successful it disguised the possibilities for fun.

The story begins with a pharmacist in London named Gustave Mellin. Like many other pharmacists of his day, Gustave was looking for a magic elixir that might make people healthy and which would surely make him rich. In the second half of the nineteenth century, all over Europe and America, ambitious young people were throwing chemicals into pots and kettles and selling the resultant concoctions to unsuspecting guinea pigs ....ah...customers. Some of these latter day alchemists just made people ill. A few killed people. And a very few got very rich.

It was an Atlanta pharmacist, Dr. John Pemberton, who cooked up Coke-a-Cola in his back yard in 1886. And Caleb Bradham of New Bern, North Carolina invented Pepsi Cola in his pharmacy during the summer of 1893. In Cincinnati in 1886 Robert Johnson, who had worked as a pharmacists’ apprentice, joined with his brothers James and Mead in forming Johnson and Johnson, to sell their inventions of band aids and first aid kits. 

But the guiding light for Gustave Mellin was Henri Nestle (above), a Swiss citizen who in 1867, made his reputation and his fortune by saving a premature infant with a recipe of powdered milk and ground up wheat. Nestle's formula released the proteins trapped in wheat by grinding it into a powder, and thus making them easier for the baby to digest. And, though Nestle and Mellin did not realize it yet, this also made it possible to transport the wheat and animal fat proteins over vast distances and store them for long periods.

Nestle sold his product by warning first time mothers that “impure milk is one of the chief causes of sickness among babies.” Which was absurd. Babies get sick because their immune systems aren't fully functional, yet. Or over functioning. But we're talking marketing, here, not science. And in London that other Swiss citizen, Gustav Mellin began selling his own version of Nestle's formula, which he inventively called “Mellin’s Food”.  

Mellin marketed his product with free samples, and a pseudo-scientific booklet convincing new mothers his formula was better for their babies than their own breast milk. God only knows how humans survived for the previous 2 million years without the powder.  Anyway, within a few years Mellin became Nestle’s principle competitor. And the success of Mellin attracted the attention of a young, dashing, handsome, ambitious and driven Englishman from the tiny village of Ruardean, in Gloucestershire.

James Horlick (above) began as an apprentice at the feet of the master, and what he learned from Mellin was that marketing was at least as important as the invention itself.  Probably more. But working for somebody else was no way to get rich, and in 1873 James quit his job and immigrated to America, to join his younger brother William (below) in Chicago. And James took with him a little something he had been working on.

In 1860, for the last time in history, the value of American agricultural goods was greater than the products from her factories. And amazingly this shift happened at same time that American farms were becoming the breadbasket of the world. Chief among this new bounty which was flooding the world markets was American wheat and rye. And that is why James and William Horlick had emigrated to America. See,  most of the world's capital for investment was still in England, but most of the world's cultivated plant protein was now in America. And within weeks after James arrived in Chicago the brothers set up J and W Horlicks to market their new wonder baby food, “Diastroid”.  Okay, the name needed a little work.

First, what William and James needed to make their wonder food was a community with cheap property values, a ready supply of clean water, an already industrialized work force, and easy access to their raw materials (wheat and rye) and to shipping routes, to get their product to their customers. They found just what they were looking 60 miles north of Chicago, where the Root River enters Lake Michigan, in Racine, Wisconsin.

The city had been incorporated in 1848 with a population of 3,000, and by 1870 was approaching 30,000, filling up with English, Danes, Czechs, Swedes and Norwegians. The foundation of the economy was the town’s harbor and rail connections.  Early on, Fanning Mills built heavy farm equipment here, including machines to separate the wheat and barley from its chaff, the slurry of which is called a malt. That created a pool of trained factory workers and the machines they used, which attracted Jerome Case who built his heavy equipment factory there, and S.C. Johnson who established his cleaning products factory in Racine.

So, in 1877 the Horlick brothers opened their single story factory in Racine, making "Horlick's Infant and  Invalids Food" and got ready to greet success. Okay, it was a little slow in coming. Oh, the baby formula business was doing okay, but it was by now a very competitive market and not the rocket to success that James had dreamed of along the banks of the River Wye, back in England. Still, in 1883, James’ preeminence in the field of baby food had been confirmed with a new patent, thus effectively limiting their competition in America.

In 1890 James returned to England to be closer to the money, and to handle the European marketing of their slowly growing infant cuisine empire.  In 1908 Horlick’s opened a new, much larger plant in Racine (above). And they just kept plugging away, searching for that marketing angle that would make them rich beyond their wildest dreams.

They thought they had hit the mark in 1909 when explorers Robert Peary (above), Amundsen and Scott all three pick Horlick’s product to supply protein for their assaults on the North and South Poles. Overnight Horlick's was in the forefront of the "health food" craze. And it remains a popular health food item to this day. That same year, 1909, the brothers opened a new plant in New Zealand, to supply mothers and explorers down under with portable protein. But that was not the advancement that changed human life, and made the brothers filthy. filthy rich.

That revolutionary event happened a few years later, It’s unclear who did it first, but my bet is that it was the new player on the stage. They were called "soda jerks" because in the early years they were required to jerk on the levers to dispense the carbonated water that was the main ingredient of their trade - soft drinks, as opposed to hard liquor.

But some conservative Christians even objected to young men and women spending their Sunday afternoons consuming "soft drinks" and frowned on the consumption of carbonation and caffeine on "the lords day", which is why the Ice Cream Sundae was invented, and the Malted Milk Shake - shaken not carbonated.  I doubt that it was an employee of Horlick who first made the discovery of the latter, else their name would have been enshrined in company legend. Besides, after all, it was a small step and may have been taken in several places at about about the same time.

Remember the Horlick formula was a concoction of dried ground wheat chaff,  just-sprouted barley malt and powdered milk, which was then mixed in water and or fresh milk at the point of use.

So let us just accept that some unknown genius added ice cream. After all, everything tastes better with ice cream, doesn't it? Except maybe green beans. And thus was born the malted milk shake.

I doubt that most people today realize that everything “malted” can only be made under license from Horlick’s, including malted milk, malted milk balls, malted tablets or disks and malted “shakes”. Malted is a flavor that is owned. It was invented. It does not appear naturally anywhere in nature.

It started out as baby food, then became a health food before it became an unhealthy treat of magical proportions. And it gave all those soda jerks something to serve with the ice cream Sundaes they had invented, because in the conservative core of middle America carbonated water was considered too racy a drink to be served on a Sunday.

But surely, before the judgment of God, the invention of the cold, frothy and thick Malted Milk Shake will count on the plus side for humanity come the judgment day.  I refuse to believe in a God who does not love malted milk shakes.

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Pledging Allegiance

 

I hate to disappoint you, but Betsy Ross did not create the American flag. The creator was the lawyer, songwriter and author Frances Hopkinson, who, a year earlier, had signed the Declaration of Independence for New Jersey. 

We know it was Hopkinson (above) because he actually submitted two bills for his design work – the first one for about $18. But the stingy Continental Congress balked at paying that. So he lowered his price to “A quarter cask of Public Wine”; meaning, the cheap stuff. 

I think he was trying to make a point , but even then he didn’t get paid. The bureaucrats argued that Frances was already on salary, which meant they had already paid him for the design. He failed to pursue his case because he died in early May of 1791, during an epileptic seizure. But then, I don’t want to write a treatise on the vexillology of the American flag. I want to talk about the pledge of allegiance to it.

You see, the pledge was written as a sales gimmick to sell flags. This is pretty big business today, considering about 100 million American flags are currently sold every year. That’s enough profit to justify the formation of the “Flag Makers Association of America”, a lobby group required because American-made American flags are 30% more expensive than Chinese-made American flags. 

But I digress again because my point is that faith in capitalism requires a certain amount of rationalization, and profiting from the symbol of our nation is just another raison d'être. But that particular apolgia was part of the job description for another Frances.

In 1892 Frances Bellamy (above), who was a fired Baptist minister, was working as the publicity director for a Boston magazine called “The Youth’s Companion”.  He was also responsible for planning the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s “discovery” of America,  for the National Education Association. And since the magazine had a nice side business going,  selling American flags to schools (their goal was to have one in every classroom),  Frances thought that a pledge for this special occasion would be an inexpensive way to increase the sale of flags. After all, you can’t pledge allegiance to the flag unless you have a flag.

His pledge, published in the 8 September, 1892 issue of the magazine (above), was just 23 words long and could be recited in less than 15 seconds - about the attention span of the average eight year old child. (And a 70 something year old man.)  And it originally went like this -  “I pledge allegiance to my flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”  On 29 October that pledge was first recited in American classrooms,  and at the opening of the Chicago Columbia Exposition. Like the Gettysburg address, Bellamy’s pledge was eloquent in its simplicity. But even Frances could not resist tampering with perfection. He added an unfortunate salute.

Well, it was called the Bellamy Salute, but he did not invent it. It was the brainstorm of  James Upham, junior editor of "The Youth’s Companion".  But it was Frances who laid out instructions for what I would call "a salute too far".  They read. “…At the words, “to my Flag,” the right hand is extended gracefully, palm upward, toward the Flag, and remains in this gesture till the end of the affirmation.” Forty years later the extended arm salute would be preempted by Adolf Hitler, and thereafter tactfully dropped from the American pledge.

Not that people ever stopped trying to improve upon the pledge. In 1923 the America Legion, then made up mostly of veterans of World War One, the Spanish American War, and the Philippines Insurrection, decided that the phrase “my flag” was too open to interpretation. So they added an entire phrase, so there would be no confusion about what country we were talking about. The pledge now began, "I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America.” I guess calling it "my country" was too ambiguous.

In 1940, with a World War once again looming, the Hughes' Supreme Court (above) ruled that even Jehovah’s Witnesses could be required to stand at attention and recite the pledge in school, which the Witnesses had argued violated their faith.  On 22 June, 1943 Congress made the pledge the official pledge of allegiance to America - by law.  Because of that new law, the Supreme Court reversed itself, and the "lawful" pledge could no longer be compulsory for Jehovah Witnesses.

Then in 1951 the Knights of Columbus decided the words “Under God” were desperately needed in the pledge, and on “Flag Day”, 14  June, 1954, Congress made that addition official, as well.  The oath now officially reads “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all”. The pledge was now 31 words long. And to be honest with you, I don’t think the longer version is any clearer. As a kid I always thought it was God that was indivisible, not the country. The pledge became something closer to the old joke about a camel being a horse designed by a committee.

Consider the oath, just as a piece of language. If the oath were to stop after the word “stands” we would have a simple sentence (“I pledge allegiance to the flag) with two modifying phrases (“of the United States of America”, and, “and to the Republic for which it stands”.) In this case the Republic is the modifier of the flag, which makes sense because the original intent was to sell flags; remember? Not the republic.

But that was not good enough for all those who honestly wanted to improve on the oath, to make it clearer, and avoid confusion and misunderstandings. I'm not sure how many misunderstandings there were, but you know what they say about cooks and broths - the more the better. Right? And this  kind of thinking produced four modifying prepositional phrases on top of the two we already had – making six in all.  How do six modifying phrases make anything clearer?

Besides, is love of country really that complicated? Does more detail actually make things clearer, or more confusing? It sounds as if those seeking more detail, are looking for an iron clad contract they can sue somebody over. Isn’t it enough if your lover says “I love you”?  Does adding a pre-nup increase or decrease your odds of ending up in divorce court?

I guess the basic question is, are you looking for an affirmation of love, or an affirmation of suspicion, giving your heart, or getting protection against having your heart broken? Because, you can’t have both, particularly when you are talking about love of a democracy, which is meaningless unless it is shared with others.  You can't force people into heaven. And you can't force them to love the same country you do. Not just the same trees and rivers and ideals. Nobody else is going to love your memories of what those trees, rivers and ideals mean to you.  Somethings you just have to a love that you share, on faith. Sometimes that's the whole point.

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