My eggs are safe in the tower but the gate stays open.

Have you ever wondered why our scrotiferous friends, the male part of me, have such a hard time when their duplicities of jewels are subject to attacks?

It's no secret any more, it was me. I keep my eggs safe, deep inside of me, but still the gate is open, there must be access at all times so this entrance proves vulnerable to attack. How may I make myself better at defending this gate? Should I evolve a pain like his? Would You?

There we have it. We evolved his eggs to hang out at the gate so we can check who's good at defending the gate so we can make daughters in his mould, so good will they be at defending their gates.

If you haven't hit your man in the googles yet, you must still be on your first few dates ;)

Mamasatya
(Eggs, *Ehgs, Ecks, Ex-) X

Hypertrophy Hypothesis of Autism put to the Test.

A hypothesis must be testable to qualify as a hypothesis. Then it must be tested, failing falsification many times in many different ways, before being accepted as a 'Theory'.

This is why your theory about vaccines gets laughed at, while your hypothesis about vaccines gets you hummed at.

The most common version of the Hypertrophy Hypothesis of Autism states that the epigenetic changes that are required to produce an autistic individual are acquired over one or more generations where the following conditions are satisfied:

1) The mother's food was very regular.
2) The mother's food was fully nutritious.
3) The mother never genuinely believed that starvation was an option for her family.

In order to test this part of the hypothesis, we would need to find two populations, as similar in ancestry as possible, where one population had suffered considerable periods of widespread starvation but the other had not.

Planet earth, with all it's separate nation states and laws, provides a huge laboratory rich with data. If only we can work out how to mine it...

Last year, a South Korean study found an estimate for the autism rate within their country by screening large numbers of children. The criteria for 'autism' were very loose so the research gave us a figure of approximately 2.5% of South Korean children having some form of autism.

If we sent the same team to North Korea, to perform the same testing on North Korean children, the Hypertrophy Hypothesis makes the following prediction:

Autism rates in the North will be significantly lower than autism rates in the South, even after adjusting for all other known risk factors.

Getting permission to do the research may be a bit of a problem. However, if the autism rate is likely to be lower than the South's, then the North might be just interested...



PS. Still hung up on the 'Neanderthal Hypothesis of Autism'? There's a test for that too. In the meantime, find me 100 full-blood ethnic south Africans with Autism and we can say *goodnight darling* to the Neanderthal story.

Rats, Agriculture and the Industrial Revolution

What would happen if an artificial community of rats was manipulated to give a changing pattern of 'role distribution' over time such that it mimicked the human race's changing patterns?

For the sake of simplicity, let us say that one human generation = 100 rat generations.

Initially, at T-10,000 years (~500 human generations, about 50 years in rat timescales) we have 100% wild type rats.

As the generations pass, some rats will begin to take the role of 'farmers' and the rest will remain wild. The farmer rats will have an electronic tag fitted which will allow their environment to be controlled in respect of that particular rat.

All rats will be able to 'forage' for a slightly inadequate amount of food, but the bulk of their food will only appear when the 'farmer' rats have done enough 'work'.
Farmer rats will release food upon having delivered a certain amount of work. These rats will be able to eat only the food released by their own work, in addition to the small amount available for foraging. Wild type rats will still be able to forage, they will also have access to food released by all the 'farmers'!

The proportion of 'farmers' will increase from 0 to 90% until we get to T-200 years when we will introduce a third role, the 'worker rat'. The worker rat will not be able to work for food or forage for food. Worker rats will enjoy a life of leisure but will be dependent on  'farmer' rats for food. Wild rats will still be able to forage and take food from both other kinds of rat.

Throughout the experiment, rat populations will be allowed to follow the same rate of increase as human populations did over the relative timescales. Whenever populations get 5% bigger than they should be, food supplies are constricted for one generation and excess rats are removed at random, sacrificed, and examined at the molecular level.

That's the basic outline anyway. The purpose of the experiment is to look for neurological changes that might give us clues as to whether or not the changing role structure of the human race could be responsible for the development of psychiatric disorders such as autism, adhd, sociopathy and related.

Some Sense

Some may sense that the human race is under some population pressure, and that infectious disease is one option for population reduction.

If this was the case, with a small leap of imagination, the child could receive instructions, in utero, to develop a better immune system and a more analytical mind along with a disconnect from normal sociability (and a slightly larger head).

The mother could later be inclined to fight against disease control methods. Even going so far as to become unfathomably passionately vocal against immunisation or anything else that so much as resembles sensible infection control methodologies.

A poor lady's response to a population crisis may be to try to outrun the pack by having more offspring. A rich lady's options are somewhat less obvious. When the morality of the day forbids the generation of dozens of kids of one's own, then what can one legally do to reduce the size of the surrounding population by way of compensation?

It's not called a human race for nothing, and all forms of locomotion including cheating and sabotage are not only permissible but inevitable under Hobs law.

Hyper-nutrition as a driver for ASD

When you were an egg in your mummy's tummy when your grandmother was pregnant with your mother, your great-great grandmother, your great-grandmother, and your grandmother all sang a song to your mother, and that song was taught to your great-great grandmother by your great-great-great-great grandmother, you heard it, and it's encoding onto your 'junk dna' was reinforced. That song spanned six generations of women, sometimes it can span as many as ten generations.

Nothing new here, just a slightly more politically correct hypothesis for a possible 'cause' of autism than the one presented in the previous post.

Looking at this, this and now this, along with the baffling set of demographic correlates for ASD, one finds it hard to ignore the possibility that these correlates are all compatible with a streamlining of the diet, maybe over a small number of generations, giving rise to exploratory evolutionary changes in the human race.

The only thing that autistic people have in common is the triad of social impairments, which could be a fundamental requirement for exploratory evolution. As for the rest of the differences we find from one autistic individual to the next, there seems to be no end to the variation. As if mother nature is telling the human race to let it's hair down and find a new trend!

the 32 times table

We are at Zero now, we always will be but that's outside the scope of this post. The first 9* are easy, the other 23** will need more research ;)

1. last year - It was all inside!
2. three years ago - Something more inside? 
3. seven years ago - CIA admits, no imminent WMD threat. Cats + Dogs = Legal
4. nineteen ninety six - JS
5. nineteen eighty - RA
6. nineteen forty eight - Human Race Guaranteed Saved.
7. eighteen eighty four - Great grandparents courting.
8. seventeen fifty six - Little Ice Age. Jacobites Evolve.
9. fifteen hundred - Renaissance
10. nine hundred and ninety two...
11. -35 What time is it?
12. -2080 Rama and Law?
13. -6180 Farming and Counting, English Channel, Cannibal Weather.
14. -14370 Japanese rope-worship. Uk Art. Fe Fi Fo Fum.
15. -30750 The Gower Chief and The Czech Venus 
16. -63500 Judgement Day and maybe running away from teeth.
17. -129000 Fire for fewer fur, or fewer fur calls for more fire?
18. -260000 A story of two peoples: The Lions and The Bears, Their Unexplained Habits.
19. -520000 Art is here,
20. -1,050,000 Monkey reaches maximum size.
21. -2,100,000 What is here, Eating Elephants first invented.
22. -4,200,000 Bye Chimps :)
23. -8,400,000 Isn't it cool that we split from the Oggs and the Pans at ~2^23?
24. -17,000,000 Gibbons goodbye!
25. -33,500,000 Cats and Pigs Rule, Mammals re-enter the water to avoid big teeth.
26. -67,000,000 Dragons slain, 'Monkey' claims responsibility. 
27. -135,000,000 Here be Dragons
28. -270,000,000 Fish leave water to avoid bigger fishes' teeth.
29. -535,000,000 - Eyes first invented, backbones invented
30. one quarter ago - Males invented 
31. half ago - Nail Bars invented
32. one ago - Females invented

* Nine for mortal men, doomed to die

** that's 3 for the elven kings, 20 for the elven queens. well what?