a century’s creeping progress towards a bonobo humanity? – 1: this unsporting life
Having read, in Virginia Woolf’s A room of one’s own, about women and football, of all things, to the effect that women were no more allowed to play football (meaning soccer) than they were allowed to obtain a decent education, and given that Woolf’s lectures are almost a century old, it might be interesting to note the differences in women’s opportunities, and achievements, in sport but also in science, academia, business and politics, in the WEIRD world in particular (since that’s also my world), over the past 100 years or so.
Soccer first – my favourite sport. By the 1920s it was very much international (the first World Cup was in 1930, but soccer was an official Olympic sport from 1920), but of course the idea of women playing it at a serious level was barely conceivable. Fifty years on, in the 70s, it was a different story. At the beginning of that decade the first unofficial women’s world cup tournament was held in Italy, but it took another 25 years for FIFA to stage the first official tourney. The most recent one was held in 2023 here in Australia, and New Zealand, and was hailed as the biggest and best yet. Women’s soccer clearly has a bright future, though it’s very much worth noting that the total prize money pool for the 2018 FIFA World Cup was $400 million, compared to that for the women in 2019, a ‘mere’ $30 million. Of course these are eye-watering figures, but there’s obviously no excuse for awarding the men 13 times more than the women. I don’t have figures for the most recent tournaments (2022 and 2023), but I suspect the gap has narrowed a bit more, given how vocal a lot of female players and officials have been about the matter.
The one obvious sport, to me, in which women have had, historically, as much of a profile, or almost as much, as men, is tennis. Which raises a question which came to me even in my early youth – why are women’s professional tennis matches best of three sets when men’s are best of five? Does it have to do with women’s physical stamina being measurable at three compared to men’s five? Is the women’s marathon distance measured at three fifths that of men? Of course, the answer is the obvious one – women were traditionally considered to have less stamina, along with all their other limitations vis-à-vis men. But then there’s this:
From 1891 to 1901, women played best-of-five matches in the finals of the US National Championships, the predecessor for what is now known as the US Open. A lot of those finals went to five sets, but the United States National Lawn Tennis Association Council reduced the format to best-of-three sets, thinking five sets would be too strenuous a task for women.
The same site points out that this is a good excuse for awarding less prize money to women than to men, but currently the prize money for the Australian open is equal for men and women, as has been the case since 2001. Wimbledon and the French Open have had equal prize-money only since 2007, but the US Open was by a long way the first, in 1973.
So if equal pay is now the standard in elite tennis, what about equal work? It’s easy to see that in making big tournaments best of three for women, tournament organisers (and they’re apparently to blame for maintaining this format, not the players) have made a rod for women’s backs. Their excuse, apparently, is that having best of five matches for women too would be a scheduling nightmare. Just not enough hours in the day… So why not make the men’s matches best of three as well? Problem sorted? Ummm. Presumably they’ve found, or assumed, that the men’s games are a bigger drawcard, and better suited to longer, gladiatorial-style combat? It’s, mucho macho, a puzzlement.
Okay so what about golf, another internationally-watched sport with oodles of thrills and spills, and skills-per-gender equally celebrated. I won’t go into mixed play just as I haven’t mentioned mixed doubles in tennis, but of course it’s worth mentioning that in both sports the equipment used differs along gender lines, though there is individual variation too. Women in general have less upper-body strength and will tend to use lighter clubs (though with racquets there are likely complex aerodynamics involved which I won’t explore).
I’ve found a useful article, ‘How big is golf’s gender pay gap?’ on a golfing website (linked below) which unfortunately is undated (a constant source of irritation for me), but the mention of ‘the Rio Olympics this year’ dates it to 2020. Here’s a quote:
Golf has been a slow mover in the gender equality stakes, as only a year and a half ago, the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews issued their first women’s memberships. As the home of golf, St Andrews are to lead by example. But what example does it set for the next generation? And the vast gender pay gap is unavoidable, as our research shows professional male golfers can expect to earn 83% more in winnings this year than the next winner on the female tour. They play the same game, to the same level, the only difference is one chromosome, yet their trophies and achievements are worth less.
It’s a bit confusing – does it mean St Andrews should lead by example? It’s something of a personal issue for me as my mother’s family are from Fife and my brother was born in St Andrews, and I was born just across the Tay, in Dundee. Anyhoo, to claim that ‘the vast gender pay gap is unavoidable’ makes no sense. And the rest of this short article doesn’t provide any answers, or confidence in the future. It does point out that equal pay for women, in standard employment, has been achieved in many countries (though equal pay is only a part of the battle given that women alone are the child-bearers, and need to have employment scenarios that can accommodate this), so why such disparities in elite sport? The only answer I can think of is patriarchal tradition. As with may other ‘sports of kings’, golfing history is rooted in sexism (and racism). The US Masters is played every year at Augusta, Georgia, where women were first allowed to become members in 2012. The first section of a female tournament played on the Augusta course was in 2019! So much for the self-proclaimed land of freedom and opportunity. But then, Georgia is so far from New York that to call that country ‘the United States’ is a bit of a joke, at least to us outsiders.
So that’s enough of sport, or the ‘fun’ side of life, for now. I’ll look at other aspects of inequality – and matriarchal improvements – in future posts.
References
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/04/08/masters-tradition-is-rooted-racism-sexism/
On Huxley’s Island
I recently read Aldous Huxley’s Island, often with an irritation that I couldn’t quite understand, but at least with an acceptance that the human world – with its massive disparities of wealth, its exploitation of the needs and ignorance of those ‘left behind’, its violence, its lack of foresight, its over-competitiveness and its sometimes frightening dominance of the biosphere – always needs to concentrate more on how to improve itself and to relax its dominating ways. So writers like Huxley are always valuable in getting us to think about what a better human future would look like.
What I note about Huxley is that, while he seems understandably cynical about capitalist exploitation, he doesn’t much care about what I call capitalising, making a verb of the noun. Every living species capitalises on other species to survive, generally by consuming members of those species, or parts thereof. For example the bacteria (and many other parasites) within and upon the human body, can benefit us as well as themselves, or not as the case may be. In the positive case, we might call it symbiotic capitalism, and myriad examples can be found, not just in the broad sense of living entities, but in the narrow sense of human industrial or post-industrial capitalism, when effected thoughtfully and humanely.
I also like to think of capitalising in the sphere of human knowledge and science. We capitalise on our knowledge of genetics, of bacteria, of viruses, of the Earth’s atmosphere, of the theories of gravity, evolution and so forth, to effect cures, to enable space travel, and to trace our ancestry. And all of this capitalising changes us, both individually and as a species. When we’re born, for example, we have no language – so to speak. The learning of language, which is essentially imposed on us without our consent, enables us to function more effectively in the broader culture, and its lack would constitute a massive disadvantage. Try to imagine a human world without language – it’s the basis of almost all our knowledge, and of its spread around the globe.
So returning to Huxley, he invented a South Sea Island, Pala, which through the leadership of a couple of enlightened folks, has eschewed capitalism in its running dog lackey form, and embraced a chanting but ‘common-sense’ godless spiritualism, a mutual adoption society for its children, and, it seemed to me, a decided lack of individuality. All in all I suspected a top-down system – the ‘top’ being the product of Huxley’s disillusionment with the society of his day, together with his personal drug experiments, in which he presumably imagined a dissolution of the ego and a sense of more or less disembodied enlightenment which he imagined could be dispensed throughout an all-too-willing populace (the more embodied issue of sexuality isn’t really dealt with). It’s a system that hasn’t really caught on in the decades since the book was published (in 1962), but I certainly can understand Huxley’s profound reaction to the European events of the first half of the 20th century, which surely shaped his hopes for a very different and better future. What I can’t understand is the more or less magical, anti-scientific line he sometimes takes. To illustrate, I’ll focus on a key issue – medical treatment.
So the principle character of the novel – through whose eyes and mind the story unfolds – is Will Farnaby, a journalist working for a capitalist mover-and-shaker, Lord Aldehyde (aldehydes being ‘highly reactive molecules that can be cytotoxic, mutagenic and carcinogenic’, according to the USA’s NIH). He lands up on Pala by accident, injuring himself in the process, and is first treated with antibiotics by Dr Robert McPhail, after which he is ‘handed over’ to McPhail’s daughter-in-law, Susila, to apply the vis medicatrix naturae, which roughly means the body’s natural healing response, helped along by a sympathetic medium.
Will, it seems, is quickly won over by the beliefs and practices of the relatively new Palanese system, and makes useful enquiries, for the reader, as to its history, its success, and the threats it faces, not least from Will’s boss Lord Aldehyde. Everybody seems helpful and happy and forthcoming as to his questions, except for some members of the previous elite who hanker for the power they once had. He reads a copy of the new system’s guide book which bears the, to me, not so reassuring title Notes on what’s what, which offers some of Huxley’s own views on the human condition, e.g.
Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief.
I have no idea what to make of this, and no interest in attempting to parse such sentences. But it goes on:
Me as I think I am and me as I am in fact – sorrow, in other words, and the ending of sorrow. One third, more or less, of all the sorrow that the person I think I am must endure is unavoidable. It is the sorrow inherent in the human condition, the price we must pay for being sentient and self-conscious organisms, aspirants to liberation, but subject to the laws of nature and under orders to keep on marching, through irreversible time, through a world wholly indifferent to our well-being, towards decrepitude and the certainty of death. The remaining two-thirds of all sorrow is home-made and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary.
Island, p86
Hard to imagine this getting up as a foundational politico-social document for any real nation. Pessimism, if that’s what this is, isn’t great for nation-building, nor is too much focus on the individual ‘me’. There’s a lot more of this in Notes to what’s what, including definitions of faith (good) as opposed to belief (bad), the ‘only genuine yoga’, and other spiritual talk that goes way over my chakras. Buddha gets a good run, of course, while Paul of Tarsus gets the Nietzschean treatment, more or less. All of this I took in a spirit of agnosticism (and some of the critiques, or rather dismissals, for example of Freudianism and behaviourism, seem warranted) but what really put me off-side was a description of what might loosely be called a medical treatment.
Dr Robert McPhail’s great-grandfather, Dr Andrew, an outstanding medical physician who was travelling in the South Seas to distance himself from family and cultural-religious traditions back in Scotland, was lured to Pala by its Raja who ‘without radical surgery, it was obvious… would be dead within a couple of months. With surgery, much sooner’. This cynicism might be justified as we’re talking about a time before antibiotics, and effective anaesthesia, and perhaps even before Pasteur and Koch, but what follows makes it clear that Huxley has more than a bit of sympathy for, or allegiance to, what we would call ‘alternative medicine’. Dr Andrew ‘suddenly remembered, while he was still at Edinburgh, there had been an article in The Lancet, an article denouncing the notorious Professor Elliotson for his advocacy of animal magnetism [aka mesmerism]’. This was a bit of an ‘uh-oh’ moment for me, and I’ve since discovered that Elliotson was not only a real person, but one of the most highly regarded medical practitioners and lecturers in 19th century Britain. London-born, he received his primary training at Edinburgh University, and was soon noted for his diagnostic skills as well as his interest in unorthodox treatments, including acupuncture, mesmerism and phrenology – all of which appears to have heightened his reputation, which may be explained by the generally dire state of medical knowledge in Victorian Britain. His impact has merited a fulsome Wikipedia bio:
At his peak, he was the first President of the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society (in 1833), a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal Society, he had one of the largest private practices in London and, at his peak, was one of the pre-eminent physicians in the entire British Empire.
So, returning to Pala and Dr Andrew, this memory of Elliotson and the Lancet article came back to him. At the time of reading the article he had felt ‘a glow of orthodox approval’, but considering the dire state of the Raja’s health…. And he also felt that the man was well worth saving:
Besides being a king, the Raja was a man of intellect and the most exquisite refinement; a man, not only of deep religious convictions (any crude oaf can have deep religious convictions), but also a man of deep religious experience and spiritual insight.
These experiences and insights aren’t elaborated upon, but presumably are contained in the Notes on what’s what. So Dr Andrew performed a number of ‘those famous magnetic passes, about which he had read with so much skeptical amusement in The Lancet’, all the while laughing at the absurdity of it all. Being a novice at this treatment, it took some 200 passes to create the trance, after which he, the doctor, was drenched in sweat. And of course the Raja made a full recovery, and the rest was Palanese history.
I admit to having been intrigued by hypnotism since I was a child – nothing scrambled my nascent skepticism like watching a hypnotist clicking his fingers and having a perfectly rational-seeming subject go down on all fours and bark like a dog before a TV studio audience. However I won’t go into the pros and cons of all that here – maybe I’ll try and tackle it in another post. What Huxley was presenting were the pros of animal magnetism, Franz Mesmer’s 18th century notion that there exists a universal magnetic fluid which has a fundamental impact on our health, a thoroughly debunked theory when he wrote Island. Mesmer’s treatment involved ‘magnetic passes or sweeping movements of the hands to direct magnetic fluid to diseased parts of the patient’s body’. As we’ve seen, animal magnetism remained a popular hypothesis well into the 19th century, going on to influence the early work of Freud and the psychotherapists.
In any case, Dr Andrew’s entirely successful magnetic passes, which he performed to exhaustion while apparently remaining skeptical, proved too much for me. The Palanese world Huxley creates is an odd assortment of mysticism, group-think and stasis, as opposed to diversity and above all to progress, with all its striving and scary unknowns. There are positive elements, in my view: children would surely be better served by exposure to more adults and congeners outside the nuclear family (think bonobos again), and by an education system that is less hierarchical, but that is already happening, with the development of the internet and social media, effectively used….
Always keep on the bright side…
References
Aldous Huxley, Island, 1962 (Vintage Classics, 2005)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Elliotson
aspects of climate change – Milankovic cycles
from Wikipedia
I’m currently reading A brief history of the Earth’s climate, by Steven Earle, a Canadian geologist, who provides summaries of the various internal and external forces affecting our planetary atmosphere’s composition and temperature over its history. It’s all very sciencey, which is of course good, but not so good for dumb-funks like me, who have to put it into their own words to get a proper handle on it. So that’s why this piece is on Milankovic cycles, about which I know next to nothing.
In 1941 Milutin Milankovic completed a book entitled Canon of insolation and the ice-age problem, in which, according to Earle,
he argues how the natural variations in the shape of the Earth’s orbit around the sun and in the tilt of the Earth’s rotational axis played a critical role in the timing of glaciations over the past two million years.
A brief history of the Earth’s climate, p63
Insolation is defined as ‘the strength of sunlight shining on the various surfaces of the Earth’, bearing in mind that dark surfaces, such as the oceans and densely vegetated regions, absorb sunlight while ice and snow reflect it. Milankovic’ work went largely unrecognised in his lifetime but he was the first to ‘calculate the effects of insolation and to accurately determine the periods during which those changes would be most likely to contribute to the growth [or shrinkage] of glaciers’.
These periods have everything to do with the Earth’s eccentric (but not too eccentric) orbit, and its wobbling tilt, vis-à-vis its orbital planhydrogein isotopes in e. That orbit is elliptical, and the Sun is not at the centre, so the Earth’s distance from the Sun varies seasonally. Most people know this, I hope, but they may not know that the shape of Earth’s orbit varies over time, from slightly elliptical to even more slightly elliptical. But we’re talking about very long periods of time, many thousands of years, between the most and least elliptical orbits. When the orbit is most elliptical, the difference between the Sun at its closest and its farthest from Earth is, of course, greatest. It should be obvious, from what we know of the Sun as essentially our only heat source, that these differences will have a climatic impact.
Now to the wobbling tilt, or the Earth’s obliquity, relative to the plane of its orbit. This tilt is presently 23.5 degrees from vertical, and the degrees vary from 22.1 to 24.5 over a period of about 41,000 years. It basically defines our seasons, as the Northern Hemisphere tilts towards the Sun when the Southern Hemisphere tilts away from it, and vice versa. And the variation in that tilt, the wobble, creates greater or lesser variation between summer and winter seasons.
And now back to Milankovic. He, along with a few colleagues including Alfred Wegener of continental drift fame, made observations about the formation and growth of glaciers:
glaciers grow best at temperate latitudes – in fact at around 65 degrees north or south – and can start growing only on land.
There is in fact relatively little land at 65 degrees in the Southern Hemisphere, but plenty in the north, so that was where Milankovic focussed. He also focussed on the summer insolation, as cooler summers are more a factor in glacier growth than cold winters. As Earle explains, when the summers are cooler, there’s less melting of snow and ice, and when winters are colder, they’re also drier, and less snow falls.
So Milankovic based his cycles on three variables – eccentricity, tilt angle and tilt direction.
Eccentricity, which varies on a 100,000-year cycle, determines the distance between Sun and Earth. A high eccentricity (a greater distance), in conjunction with tilt direction, ‘provides a greater opportunity for the Earth to be pushed from a non-glacial state to a glacial state or vice versa’ (Earle).
Tilt angle, which has a 41,000-year cycle, affects seasonal differences. ‘A lesser tilt angle leads to cooler summers and warmer winters, and that favours the growth of glaciers’.
Tilt direction, which has a 23,000-year cycle, determines which hemisphere, north or south, points to the Sun when the Earth is farthest away from it. ‘Glaciation is favoured when the Earth-Sun distance is greatest during the northern hemisphere summer, leading to cool summers with less melting’.
When Milankovic died in 1958 his insolation theories were far from being accepted by mainstream science. This was largely because, though it was known that glaciers enlarged and reduced over millennia, the timing of these ebbs and flows was much of a mystery. Better measurement techniques were required to verify the Milankovic hypotheses. These came in the sixties and seventies with sea-floor and later ice core samples, as well as measurement of isotopic variations in the history of marine mammals, and their relation to temperature, culminating in a key paper published in 1976, at the end of which the authors wrote:
It is concluded that changes in the Earth’s orbital geometry are the fundamental cause of the succession of Quarternary ice ages.
It’s important to note that these orbital changes were not the cause of the ice ages, it simply explained their timing. The cause was a period of atmospheric cooling over 50 million years until recently, geologically speaking. That atmospheric cooling I’ll (try to!) explain in a follow-up post.
From the 70s onwards, ice core samples from Greenland and Antarctica have been able to be correlated with variations in surface temperatures over 250,000 years, based on measurements of the ratios of hydrogen isotopes in the water molecules from the ice at those sites. To quote Earle:
The correlation between the temperature record and the July insolation levels is reasonably clear. The third-last interglacial, extending from 245,000 to 235,000 years ago, corresponds with a period of high insolation. The following very low insolation initiated the beginning of the second-last glacial period. That was followed by a very high insolation period (at around 220,000 years ago, which led to significant warming but wasn’t enough to break the glacial cycle. Glacial conditions then intensified over the next 90,000 years.
Another period of very high insolation, culminating at around 120,000 years ago, was able to break the cycle, leading to the second interglacial, which lasted from about 127 to 90 thousand years ago. That was followed by a similar cycle of increasingly cold climates and strong glaciation until around 20,000 years ago, when the glacial cycle was again broken by a period of strong insolation.
As Earle further points out, methane levels from the same ice cores are even more closely correlated with the insolation pattern. And there are other positive feedback processes that ‘amplify Milankovic forcing’, as Earle puts it, including carbon dioxide levels and the albedo effect of accumulated ice and snow during cooling periods.
Our recent greater understanding of Milankovic cycles allows us to predict their effect on the future climate. We’re entering a period of low ellipticity in the Earth’s orbit, meaning that insolation levels won’t vary much for the next 50,000 years. This means we will have an ‘interglacial’ climate for a long long time to come. So, no cyclical glaciation will arrive any time soon to rescue us from anthropogenic global warming. Add that to the forlorn hopes about other processes touted by climate change skeptics/deniers, such as sunspots and a sudden upsurge of vulcanism….
References
Steven Earle, A brief history of the Earth’s climate: Everyone’s guide to the science of climate change, 2021
Jeanne Julie Eleanore de Lespinasse: an open heart, a closed book?
If I were young, pretty, and very charming, I should not fail to see much art in your conduct to me; but as I am nothing of all that, I find a kindness and an honour in it which have won you rights over my soul forever.
Julie de L’Espinasse, to the Comte de Guibert, 1773
Although I managed to spend a bit of time at a university in my thirties, I think I’m largely self-educated, being reluctant to follow any course set down for me, and allergic to too much discipline, and so I’m always fascinated to hear of historical characters of a similar type – Montaigne, Rousseau and Stendhal come to mind (not that I’m comparing my ‘achievements’ to theirs!), and it’s probably not coincidental that they’re all French, though I’ve no idea what this signifies.
So the other day, finishing Aldous Huxley’s strange, well-meaning but unconvincing utopian novel Island, I wondered at the passing mention of Mlle de Lespinasse, a woman I ‘knew’ from my recent rereading of Stendhal’s Love. So here’s a couple of key passages about her from Wikipedia:
Jeanne Julie Éléonore de Lespinasse (9 November 1732 – 23 May 1776) was a French salon holder and letter writer. She held a prominent salon in Paris during the Enlightenment. She is best-known today, however, for her letters, first published in 1809, which offer compelling accounts of two tragic love affairs.
Looked down on for her poverty and illegitimate birth, Mlle de Lespinasse had an unhappy childhood marked by neglect. She acquired a basic education at a convent, but she was largely self-educated, an impressive feat given that she was later able to hold her own among France’s top intellectuals.
This second passage in particular captured my heart, so to speak. I wouldn’t say that I was neglected, or impoverished, growing up, and the term ‘illegitimate’ seems quaint if not grotesque in today’s WEIRD world, but I identify with the thrill, and much of the isolation, of self-education. I feel I’ve spent much of my life talking to myself. As for salons, today’s equivalent, if there is any, would be the meet-ups I’ve occasionally been part of, for humanists, skeptics, ‘literature-lovers’ and the like. Somehow, though, they’ve never quite worked for me. I’m not one for ‘holding forth’, and am pretty easily overwhelmed by others.
But let me focus on Mlle de Lespinasse, a rather formal title, and a rather more tragic figure. She died at 43, probably of tuberculosis, exacerbated, it seems, by an impassioned and immiserated spirit, not to mention liberal quantities of opium. One might say that she died of a broken heart. When I was a kid and first heard the notion of a broken heart, I imagined it snapping like a biscuit, and then you fell down dead. But even then it wasn’t quite so silly, it was awe-inspiring in fact, that the heart could be so brittle, so damaged by a love unrequited or rejected. Now of course, I see this sinking, this despair, this death of a highly intelligent and admired woman, confidante of the likes of d’Alembert and Condorcet, as more of a ‘feminist’ issue. In Saint-Beuve’s introduction to her life and letters, he refers to her emotionality:
But of what use is it to become clear-sighted? Did a woman’s mind, great as it may be, ever check her heart? “The mind of most women serves to strengthen their folly rather than their reason!” La Rochefoucauld says that, and Mlle. de Lespinasse proves the truth of it.
Of course this is just another patronising, patriarchal comment, from a world that largely debarred women from being movers and shakers in any political, scientific and enterprising arenas. Partnership with and encouragement of the males who dominated those arenas was all that could be hoped for. It seems that Julie de Lespinasse, along with Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein (aka Mme de Staël), her mother Suzanne Churchod (known at the time as Madame Necker), and other salonistes of their time, were all expected to play the purely nurturing role that has been woman’s lot since religio-cultural politics reduced women to vassalage, whenever that might have been – since the rise of agricultural society, at least. The notes to her published letters present a nice example of this nurturing:
In her last hours, already lying on her deathbed, she secured that of La Harpe [to L’Académie française]. “M. de La Harpe”, says Bachaumont in his Memoirs, “was one of her nurslings; by her influence she opened the doors of the Academy to him who is now its secretary. This poet was the last of those whom she enabled to enter them.”
So that would have been in 1776. The novelist Marguerite Yourcenar became the first woman elected to L’Académie française, in 1980.
So I’m currently learning more of Julie de Lespinasse, as she was known, and I’m nervous about my experience of her being filtered through the notes to her letters by “
So I’ve read the first letter in the 1809 collection, addressed to the Comte de Guibert, one of the two men who most occupied her passionate and guilt-ridden thoughts, the other being the Marquis de Mora. Obviously these weren’t your Mellors the gardener types. Guibert was an ambitious army officer, later a General, and Mora was a tubercular semi-invalid. Both were quite a bit younger than Julie (I can’t help thinking of la nouvelle Héloïse), who was forty at the time of the first letter, in 1773. It’s a bit hard to make sense of this letter, being a bit in medias res – she writes a lot of ‘him’ – Mora? – and of ‘you’, and seems almost terrified of her own thoughts – what she thinks and what she should think, as one passion rises and the other falls. Here’s how the letter ends:
But tell me, is this the tone of friendship, the tone of confidence? What is it that is drawing me?Make me know myself; aid me to recover myself in a measure; my soul is convulsed; is it you, is it your departure, what is it that persecutes me? I can no more. At this moment I have confidence in you, even to abandonment, but perhaps I shall never speak to you again of my life. Adieu, I shall see you to-morrow; possibly I shall feel embarrassed by what I have now written to you. Would to heaven that you were my friend, or that I had never known you! Do you believe me? Will you be my friend? Think of it, once only; is that too much?
That is the question – is it too much? I try, and largely fail, to imagine receiving such a convoluted letter, from a person I admired but didn’t love, in the romantic sense. What would a bonobo do? No, that’s not a joke question – I mean of course, what would a ‘bonobo-ised’ human do? I think he would offer comfort, hugs and kisses, but not eternal, undivided devotion. That may not seem enough, but then a bonobo-ised Julie de Lespinasse wouldn’t be placing all her hopes in one individual – especially not a male.
So I may or may not continue reading these letters, and reflecting on what they reveal about human need and pain in an individual surrounded, it seems, by gifted admirers. Sad but uplifting too. It’s a privilege to ride along with someone who feels so much.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Julie_Éléonore_de_Lespinasse
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.c005633001&seq=65
the history of patriarchy in a small room.
The enemy is not men. The enemy is the concept of patriarchy, the concept of patriarchy as the way to run the world or do things.
Toni Morrison
Central Politburo – what if they were all women?
About a month ago I went to a ‘meet-up’ for a group which went under the name ‘philosopher’s corner’. The topic, from memory, was something like ‘Donald Trump and the future of US democracy’. I’ve written a number of posts on and around this topic, so I thought it might be fun, in a perverse way. Unfortunately it wasn’t as much fun as I’d hoped. There were about ten attendees, sitting at tables which more or less faced in each other in a squarish formation, something like a Square Round Table, in an out-of-the way little upstairs room. Again from memory, there were seven men to three women, but in the whole two hours’ non-stop conversation, to which I contributed my fair share, I can only recall one brief comment and one question from the female attendees. So, well over 95% of the conversation was male. I was wearing my bonobo t-shirt, featuring a large photo-portrait of said primate, with underneath the line ‘I’d rather be a bonobo’, which is only occasionally true for me, and this might have been one of those occasions. In any case nobody seemed to notice.
Not that there was any violence or even slight rowdiness in evidence, but a couple of those present did seem to sympathise with Trump’s politics (whatever they thought they were) while deploring his personal behaviour. Fortunately (more or less) the conversation drifted to other political hotspots such as Ukraine-Russia and Israel-Palestine, plus a fair slice of local Aussie politics worth pontificating about. Altogether, I don’t recall much that particularly stimulated me, especially from those who most dominated the conversation (the convenor did quite a good job of giving everyone a fair go), but the bloke immediately to my left made two separate comments that, for hopefully obvious reasons, caught my attention. First, he declared that we need a strong, male leader to deal with the world’s trouble-spots in a firm, no-nonsense way. By ‘we’ he appeared to be speaking for the WEIRD world in general. I did try to respond to this, but others jumped in before me, not to disagree with him specifically, but to turn the conversation in another direction, leaving the notion to fester. But shortly afterward, my left-hand compatriot offered another comment, or rather, a question. What’s wrong with the idea of a first nuclear strike, given the current situation? Again, nobody took up the idea, and I admit to being too stunned to offer a response. Presumably he meant on Russia, on Moscow? I took a closer look at the man – middle-aged, neatly dressed, he looked like a clerk, a public servant. The middle-class ‘man in the street’.
We need more female leadership, please please please. Above all we need it in Russia, China, North Korea, Israel, Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, Burma, Indonesia, all the places where we have it least. It’s no good saying, as has been said to me, ‘look at this, that or the other female leader, what difference did they make, some were even worse than the men’. These were all odd women out in a patriarchal world, who had to conform, more or less, to the male stereotype. It needs to be a numbers game, a world turned upside-down, with the kind of group leadership in politics, business, the law, science, even the military, that males enjoy today. And the fact is, it’s happening, if too slowly. The academic world isn’t what it was in Virginia Woolf’s time, and that’s only taken a century. Imagine the human world a thousand years from now. If we survive, and I’m sure we will, things will continue along the painfully slow track of incremental empowerment for the sex that gave birth to us all, that nourished and nurtured us in our early years, the ‘without which not’ of all humanity, and more.
That small community of primates south of the Congo River is putting us to shame. How did they manage it? Obviously it wasn’t a conscious development, and it will need to be more conscious for us. We need our patriarchy to be deflated, little by little, puncture by puncture, for the betterment not just of our own humanity, but for the biosphere that we’ve come to dominate so very disturbingly.
no references this time!
what’s on my mind, and in my brain?
The mind is certainly a very mysterious organ, I reflected,.. about which nothing whatever is known, though we depend upon it so completely.
Virginia Woolf, A room of one’s own, 1928
ah yes, it all makes sense now…
So there’s still plenty to learn about the mind, and maybe calling it the brain is only giving us a false sense of the matter (and I’m thinking of ye olde ‘what’s mind, it doesn’t matter, what’s matter, never mind’ jibe), though we’ve made great neurophysiological strides in recent decades. But having just read Virginia Woolf’s thoughts on the position of women almost a century ago, and being old enough to remember texts like ‘Women are from Venus, men are from Mars’, which sought to ‘explain’ and make the best of the pigeonholes the author presumably believed in, I’ve decided to have another quick look at the current expert views on the neurophysiological and hormonal differences between the sexes.
What I’ve found is that it’s still a contested issue. When I last reported on it, I found myself very happy to accept that there are statistical differences between male and female brains, but no categorical differences. That’s to say, both male and female brains vary widely, and it’s reasonable to say that the differences within each gender are as great as the differences between them. Another striking way to think about it is to say that, were you to hand a still living but completely disembodied human brain (just imagine!) to a trained and experienced neurologist, they’d be unable to say categorically that it was M or F.
Well, the first website I’ve come to disputes this claim. It’s from PNAS (often fondly vocalised as ‘penis’, which may or may not be relevant) and it’s a short essay with only one author, Marek Glezerman. My initial sense of it is that he misses the point, and seems disturbingly emphatic. To give an obvious example, the title of the piece is “Yes, there is a female and a male brain: Morphology versus functionality”. In his opening paragraph (but the essay only has two paragraphs), Glezerman summarises the conclusion he disagrees with, a conclusion I based my own essay on years ago:
The authors conclude that brains of women and men are not dimorphic and not categorically different, as are the genital systems of the two genders, but resemble more an overlapping mosaic of specific functional regions and therefore cannot be distinguished as male and female brains.
Reading this made me wonder, and I thought back to the night before – ahhh, the night before – when I spent time at a well-frequented pub full of individuals, male and female, well beyond the first flush of youth. It occurred to me that there wasn’t a single person there whose sex I would feel mistaken about. Many of the men, and none of the women, were balding, bearded and paunchy. Some did have breasts, I admit, that could’ve competed with the females, but I doubt if they’d have managed the same expression, so to speak. And though there was a lot of variety in the voices, it was easy enough to distinguish males from females in that characteristic. Of course there were also differences in dress, mannerisms and choice of drink, but those could be put down to ‘culture’ and dismissed. Even so there might be enough evidence on display to suggest a categorical difference – a morphological difference – traceable to the brain and hormones.
So, what did Glezerman mean, exactly, by ‘morphology versus functionality’? Well, here’s a long, but essential quote from his essay.
Whenever the terms “female brain” and “male brain” are used, the intention should be functional and not morphological, qualitative and not quantitative. Functionally, brains of women and men are indeed different. Not better, not worse, neither more nor less sophisticated, just different. The very brain cells differ chromosomally. The male brain is exposed to a completely different hormonal environment during intrauterine life than the female brain. The available scientific data as to the crucial effect of testosterone on the developing male brain is overwhelming.
Glezerman provides references for his claim about testosterone and its effects, a subject of great interest to me, but I’ll leave that for another essay. But one wonders if this isn’t a storm in a teacup. Going back to my pub reference, of course there were differences within the sexes – some males seemed more ‘feminine’ than others, whatever that may mean, and some women more ‘masculine’. This may again be a matter of hormone expression rather than personal choice, or a complex combination. I find it fascinating that male hormone levels (i.e testosterone) are dropping in the WEIRD world, a matter of concern to some, but not me…. oh, but that’s for that other essay, or did I already write that one?
PNAS has a reply to Glezerman’s essay, which I’ll now focus on. And I should note how polite and civilised these scientific disputes are: far from the world of social media. This response is even shorter that Glezerman’s little essay (I’ll bet that was by design!), so I’ll reflect on it here, passage by passage.
As Marek Glezerman (1) rightly points out, there are differences between females and males in brain and behavior. Glezerman overlooks, however, the fact that such differences may be different and even opposite under different environmental conditions. That is, what is typical under some conditions in a brain composed of cells with an XX chromosomal complement residing in a body with low levels of testosterone, may be typical under other conditions in a brain composed of cells with an XY chromosomal complement residing in a body with high levels of testosterone.
Being a person who spreads himself thinly over a wide variety of intellectual topics (i.e master of none), I had to look up XX and XY (remember mate, two kisses female, one kiss male – which is surely typical). What the response (which has three authors) appears to be saying is that what is typical for a low-testosterone female in some conditions, may also be typical for a high-testosterone male under quite different conditions, in spite of the fact that one set of brain cells carries an XY chromosomal complement, while the other carries XX. Not sure if this carries the day though. But to continue:
Such “reversals” of sex effects have also been reported when the manipulation of environmental conditions was done in utero (by manipulating the dam) and the offspring were tested in adulthood (reviewed in refs. 2 and 3). These observations led to the hypothesis that brains are composed of a “mosaic” of “male” and “female” features rather than of only “male” features or only “female” features, as expected of a “male brain” and a “female brain,” respectively (2, 3)
Wasn’t sure what ‘manipulating the dam’ meant, but a dam is a dam, something that reduces or stops flow, so I suppose this was done in non-human test species? Presumably if you’re able to change hormonal conditions in utero via such methods – or by changing environmental/social conditions, as bonobos appear to have done – you will change the mosaic of behaviour. Bonobos can be quite aggressive, but it appears to be more tilted towards the male of the species. Also, the drop in male testosterone is surely due to changed conditions and expectations for males over a relatively short period – for example in the mere century since A room of one’s own was written, but even more so in the past few decades of mechanisation and anti-machismo, at least in the WEIRD world.
Our study (4) is the first to empirically test whether brains are “male” or “female” by assessing internal consistency in the degree of “maleness-femaleness” of different elements within a single brain. We found that brains with both “female-end” and “male-end” characteristics were more prevalent than brains with only “female-end” or only “male-end” characteristics. This was true for both the volume of brain regions and the strength of connections between regions (assessed in a similar way to ref. 5), in contrast to Glezerman’s assumption that “Other imaging methods might have yielded different results.”
This is claiming evidence for mosaic traits in a majority of the brains under study, both for individual regions in isolation and for brain connectivity. All I can say is that this seems eminently plausible, indeed I would’ve expected such a finding. Not sure, of course, what ‘male-end’ and ‘female-end’ characteristics are exactly. There is a question here, though, about what Glezerman meant by ‘other imaging methods’.
To corroborate our analysis of different aspects of brain structure assessed using MRI, we also analyzed brain function, as revealed in people’s behaviors, personality characteristics, preferences, and attitudes. Also here there were many more people with both “feminine” (i.e., more common in females compared with males) and “masculine” (i.e., more common in males compared with females) characteristics than people with only feminine or only masculine characteristics (4).
Behaviour, over time, can affect brain function and brain regions mightily. An obvious case is language, spoken and written, which is a behaviour that has had considerably impact on the brain, as, for example Maryanne Wolf recounts in Proust and the squid. You’d hardly expect those brain regions that have been adapted/co-opted for language production/reception to have been much affected by gender. The same would go for other skills and practices, such as mathematics. As to the different physical characteristics of males and females (my pub observations), how connected are they to our brains? They certainly have much to do with hormones, of which we have at least fifty types, many of which are connected to/stimulated into action by the pituitary gland, which is in turn stimulated by the hypothalamus, but these regions account for a minuscule proportion of the brain.
There is no doubt that sex affects the structure and function of brain cells. However, the fact that sex can affect brain cells does not necessarily entail that the form and function of brain cells are either “male” or “female” nor that the brains comprised of these cells can be divided into two distinct categories. For such claims to be true it is necessary that the effects of sex are dimorphic, resulting in the formation of distinct “male” and “female” types, as well as internally consistent (2, 3, 6).
I think what’s being said here is that just because our brain cells, indeed all our somatic cells, have either an XX or XY chromosomal complement in their nuclei, this doesn’t dictate essential expressed traits – our intelligence, our humour, our physical skills, our bodily needs, and so forth. As this essay suggests, ‘manipulating the dam’ in utero is likely to have a far greater effect on human development than gender does, unless of course you’re born into a culture in which one gender is significantly undervalued. But let’s not go too near that hornet’s nest.
So to the last lines of the reply to Glezerman:
Hopefully, future studies looking at the relations between sex and other systems in which sex differences have been documented (e.g., the immune system, the cardiovascular system) will assess both internal consistency and degree of overlap, to reveal whether the relations between sex and other systems are more similar to the relations between sex and the brain (mosaicism) or to the relations between sex and the genitalia (dimorphism).
And no doubt there will be differences, especially in relation to hormonal levels associated with the reproductive system, but also in those associated with diabetes, the heart and the circulatory system and so forth, but these are not easily predictable based solely on gender. And there’s another problem with fixating on sex differences in a hard and fast way. It’s not exactly coincidental that male supremacists are all for favouring such differences. That’s why the bonobo example needs to be known and promoted far more than is currently the case.
References
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1600791113#core-r2
What do we currently know about the differences between male and female brains in humans?
the male and female brain, revisited
on the lymphatic system and its clever cells, mostly
Activation of macrophage or B cell by T helper cell
Jacinta: So we’re focussing now on the lymphatic system, ‘clear water’ remember. A most misleading definition. So there’s this network of vessels, nodes and ducts….
Canto: What’s a node?
Jacinta: It’s a point of connection, or connections. In plants, a node is a point of branching, like with leaves.
Canto: Yeah I knew that. What’s a duct?
Jacinta: Don’t kid kid. It’s like a vessel, only, somehow different. Maybe bigger? Anyway, nodes go with lymph. There are over 500 of these lymph nodes throughout our bodies. The system does a lot of clean-up work, preserving fluid balance. It’s also much implicated in the immune system of course, and it’s involved in other stuff that’s quite hard to summarise, as you know.
Canto: Something from a reliable enough website:
The lymphatic system plays a key role in intestinal function. It assists in transporting fat, fighting infections, and removing excess fluid. Part of the gut membrane in the small intestine contains tiny finger-like protrusions called villi. Each villus contains tiny lymph capillaries, known as lacteals. These absorb fats and fat-soluble vitamins to form a milky white fluid called chyle. This fluid contains lymph and emulsified fats, or free fatty acids. It delivers nutrients indirectly when it reaches the venous blood circulation. Blood capillaries take up other nutrients directly.
Jacinta: Never heard of lacteals. Have heard of chyle, but don’t know much about it. So chyle contains lymph. But what’s lymph?
Canto: It’s a not-so-clear beige-coloured milky fluid containing lots of WBCs, especially lymphocytes, of course, and fatty stuff. Well, actually, that’s not lymph, that’s chyle. Or both… So there’s this lacteal system of the small intestine, capillaries for absorbing fats – well, actually transporting them… but we need to know what bile is, and emulsification, and lipase, and glycerides and esters, and no doubt much much more.
Jacinta: Well we’ve committed ourselves to learning about the immune system and associated processes for some ineffable effing reason, so let’s soldier on.
Canto: Okay, so bile has nothing to do with Trump, at least not in this context. Bile ducts are this network of tubes inside the liver – well actually there are intrahepatic and extrahepatic bile ducts. Bile itself is a fluid made and released by the liver, for breaking fat down into fatty acids. For ‘digesting’ fat, sort of. Not particularly relevant to the immune system, but it’s all interesting en it? And it can cause problems, such as chronic bile reflux. I suspect I’ve experienced bile reflux, though not chronically. I think it’s also called acid reflux, suggesting bile is a kind of acid.
Jacinta: Or maybe not. Here’s another one of those websites that know more than us:
Bile is composed of ingredients designed to digest fat. While it isn’t an acidic formula, it’s harsh on the sensitive linings of your stomach and esophagus. Chronic bile reflux can erode these protective linings, causing painful inflammation and, eventually, tissue damage (esophagitis).
Anyway, I’m not sure how we got from chyle to bile.
Canto: Right, back to chyle and lymph. Have you heard of lymphoedema? That’s a blockage of the lymphatic system, which causes tissue swelling, mostly in the arms and legs but possibly just about everywhere.
Jacinta: Yes, and things fall apart, the centre doesn’t hold. So let’s get back to lymph nodes and the cells they contain. Within lymph nodes there are germinal centres containing a lot of B cells, or B lymphocytes. These have receptors (B cell receptors) on their membranes which are IgD antibodies, all of which have different binding domains, due to genetic recombination, which allows them to deal with differently structured antigens. Once binding occurs, signals are sent to the lymphocyte’s nucleus, resulting in what’s called receptor-mediated endocytosis. The signalling response creates pseudopods and/or clathrins which pull the membrane inside.
Canto: Ok, sorry to be boringly predicable, what are clathrins?
Jacinta: They’re proteins, very ‘clever’ proteins, as so many of them are. They mediate endocytosis, which is essentially the surrounding and cutting off of extracellular material within the cell, creating a vesicle, called an endosome I think, which might be transported to further action sites. So this is happening within the B lymphocyte. We have this B cell receptor bound to a foreign antigen, and chromosome 6 of this cell then can produce a molecule (MHC2) to ‘fit’ the antigen and fuse it to the cell membrane. This has the effect of activating the B cell, carrying an MHC2 antigen-carrying molecule on its surface, and IgD antibodies. Of course I haven’t explained how the clathrins actually carry out this transformation, because I can’t but I believe it’s all been worked out.
Canto: Yes of course, and now our lymphocyte is an antigen-presenting cell. There are three types of such cells – B lymphocytes, macrophages and dendritic cells. However, the lymphocytes still need to proliferate to be effective, and this requires a stimulus. And so enter the macrophages. These have MHC2 molecules on their surface, bound to a specific foreign antigen, and they also have MHC1 surface molecules bound to a self antigen (as do all nucleated cells). The macrophage presents this MHC2 molecule with its antigen to a type of T cell, described as a’naive’ (i.e. non-specific) T helper cell. These helper cells will have, somewhere on their surface, specific protein molecules, called CD4, that ‘fit’ with the MHC2 molecules, and other specific molecules (T cell receptors) that fit with the foreign antigen. Specific TCRs fit with specific antigens. It’s all a matter of geometry, sort of.
Jacinta: These different types of TCRs are a product of genetic recombination, which involves RAG1 and RAG2 genes, and I can only guess that the R stands for recombination… Now these helper cells have CD3 signalling molecules inside (they send signals to the nucleus), and a molecule called CD28 on their surface. The macrophage has a protein, B7, which interacts with the CD28, and this protein interaction, called a co-stimulation reaction, sends a secondary signal to the nucleus – as opposed to the first, primary signal. This is known as co-stimulation.
Canto: So next, the macrophage starts secreting a molecule called interleukin-1, which binds to a specific receptor on the T helper cell, which results in a third signal to the nucleus, and activation of the T cell. The cell’s genes now produce interleukin-2, which can be secreted and will then bind to a receptor, as an ‘autocrine’, resulting in genes secreting another cytocrine, interleukin-4, and then interleukin-5. With all this, the T helper cell moves to another stage, becoming either a T helper 1 cell (stimulated by interleukin 12) or a T helper 2 cell (stimulated by interleukin 4). So, focussing on the T helper 2, it has activated interleukins 2,4 and 5, the latter two of which are especially important, after these cells have started dividing. That’s when those cytokines are produced.
Jacinta: We might be learning something. Now to the proliferation of the B lymphocyte. Interleukin 4 activates the B lymphocyte to start turning on genes for its proliferation – called clonal expansion. And they will have receptors (BCRs) specific to the foreign antigen. They’ll also have MHC2 surface molecules with exposed foreign antigens. They’re now ‘immuno-competent’ cells, and then, through the medium of interleukin 5, they will start differentiating. Some of these new types of cells are called plasma cells, which have a very prominent rough endoplasmic reticulum (RER), others are called memory B cells. Interleukin 5 and 6 stimulate plasma cells to produce and secrete antibodies specific to particular foreign antigens – or, rather, having variable regions that can adapt to and bind to those antigens.
Canto: And these antigens might be on the surface of bacteria, or not as the case may be. If they can bind to all the antigens on the bacterial (or viral) surface they can render it ineffective (neutralisation). Binding to freely circulating antigens can, however, cause problems. Such binding creates a precipitation reaction and this can be deposited in tissue resulting in a type 3 hypersensitivity. Don’t ask.
Jacinta: This is what United Staters call getting into the weeds, maybe. So that’s surely enough for now.
do bonobos have families – and should humans have them?
‘We all belong… to an MAC – a Mutual Adoption Club. Every MAC consists of anything from 15 to 25 assorted couples. Newly elected brides and bridegrooms, old timers with growing children, grandparents and great-grandparents – everybody in the club adopts everyone else. Besides our own blood relations, we have our quota of deputy mothers, deputy fathers, deputy aunts and uncles, deputy brothers and sisters, deputy babies and toddlers and teenagers’.
Susila, in Island, by Aldous Huxley, 1962
Bonobo mum with adopted child
I’ve mentioned how, in childhood, I perused a book called Children of the Dream, which looked at a different way of rearing children, in which they had a variety of adults and older kids to learn from, and they could gravitate towards some and away from others according to their inclinations. I was hungry for ideas like this as I felt trapped in an embattled family situation and yearned for both freedom and some kind of instruction or sponsorship that would promote my development in the most positive way. I was five when our smallish nuclear family (2 adults, 3 kids) moved from Scotland to the other side of the globe, so I had no experience of an extended family. And we lived together within a brick construction divided into compartments for eating, watching TV, sleeping and reading, washing our clothes, washing ourselves and defecating, surrounded by some land on which we could grow grass, various plants, or nothing much.
Twenty-five or so years later, I learned about bonobos, our closest living relatives, equally with chimpanzees. The lifestyles of these two other types of ape provided a fascinating contrast, while both types provided an equally fascinating contrast with H sapiens.
Returning to my childhood, I gradually learned that, outside of my family, which was female-dominant, the human world was dominated by the males. They were the headmasters, the bosses, the political leaders and so forth. We kids were, rather suddenly, sent to Sunday school where we were taught about our Father who was in heaven, but also everywhere else, who made us and made the world and loved us and watched over us constantly, and whose son died for our sins on a wooden cross long ago. None of this made any sense to me, and it seemed of a part with Santa Claus and the tooth fairy, only the adults who told us these stories took it all so seriously that I felt no inclination to question them. I was a timid child, but also skeptical before I knew the word.
Much later, I came to wonder more about this religious double act of the Father and Son, and about the Church as it existed before the Protestant Reformation, with its history of male Popes, and its male Cardinals, male Archbishops, male Bishops and male Priests. And of course I learned about the history of male political leaders, generals, dictators, monarchs and emperors, and the tiny sprinkling of females among them, and it all stuck me as very odd and sad. And a bit stupid. And then, again, bonobos.
We are, of course, the only mammals who build our own structures for our nuclear families to live in. In doing so we have in a sense, ‘naturalised’ the nuclear family. And this happened not so long ago in the history of H Sapiens, which goes back to around 315,000 years ago according to the findings from Jebel Irhoud in present-day Morocco.
The term ‘housing’ isn’t so easy to define. If we think of purpose-built structures for living in, what about termite mounds or bee-hives? And before these human structures we imagine cave dwelling, but just how many caves are there dotted about the place? It’s likely that our first domiciles combined natural shelter and human ingenuity, using wood, bones, skins and such. Fireplaces would probably have featured. But it surely wasn’t just families in the modern sense that built or used these sites. Think again of bonobos:
Bonobos live in fission-fusion social groups where a large community of individuals separate into smaller groups, or parties, of variable size and composition. These “unit-groups” range from lone individuals to groups of 20 or more bonobos (Badrian et al. 1984; White 1988, 1996).
The size of human groups would have evolved over time – not too big, not too small, and quite likely having flexible fission-fusion lifestyles for much of human history. This also reduces inbreeding, as even chimps/bonobos have come to realise (unlike the Habsburgs).
What I’m really getting at, though, is when did we, as kids, come to recognise and acknowledge that we had one father, one mother, and the odd sibling? And that we belonged to this grouping, were in effect ‘owned’ by it? In spite of the great service the internet has provided for us over the past few decades, I can’t find any clear answer to this question – unsurprisingly, I suppose. Neither chimps nor bonobos are monogamous, but of course they live in ‘troops’, with the mother as principal care-giver, but with plenty of other adults or adolescents to help out, siblings or no. This is especially the case in bonobo society, which can, at a stretch, be seen as one big Mutual Adoption Club. The difference of course is that the bonobo way developed naturally, it simply evolved, whereas the ways of the Kibbutzim and Huxley’s MAC have a seemingly top-down artificiality about them. Interestingly, we’re having the same problem with our own gender issues, with a ‘natural’ understanding, based on neurology and the study of history, not to mention a multitude of writings such as Woolf’s A room of one’s own and Beauvoir’s The second sex, that women have been intellectually undervalued for millennia, together with a more artificial quota system for women/girls in STEM, or women in government. In any case, with the gradual receding of patriarchal religious systems (very gradual in some places), and obvious successes of women in science, business and politics, as well as the much more publicised behaviour of men behaving badly, re warfare, political machinations, capitalist exploitation and the like, it seems inevitable, to me at least, that we will gradually, in a two steps forward, one step back fashion, evolve into a female-dominant human culture (remembering that that there’s no gender equality among any of the social mammals – gender inequality isn’t just the norm, it’s universal). It seems to me unproblematic that the gender that brings humans into the world should be the ones in charge – with a little help from their friends.
As for the compartmented nuclear family thing – who knows? Change is a constant, and we now accept same-sex marriages, no-fault divorce, single parentage and the like, all in the last few decades. Our society has also become more child-focussed, just as we’ve reduced family sizes. No more corporal punishment in schools (too late for me, sadly), no more ‘bastards’, and more government assistance in terms of subsidies, childcare centres, maternity leave and so on. The concept of family itself has been altered and extended, and evolution is a never-ending story…
References
Aldous Huxley, Island, 1962
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibbutz (note especially the subsections ‘children’ and ‘child rearing’)
https://phys.org/news/2021-03-female-wild-bonobos-infants-social.html
more baffling immune system stuff
1RH2 Recombinant Human Interferon Alpha 2b – evidemment
Jacinta: We’ve been mostly educating ourselves via the NinjaNerd YouTube series on immunology, which seems very comprehensive and yet comprehensible, for beginners, and then going to other websites for details. Now getting back to cluster differentiation (CD), a commonly used immunological term. Here’s a useful definition:
The cluster of differentiation (CD) is a protocol used for the identification and investigation of cell surface molecules present on leukocytes. CD molecules often act as receptors or ligands important to the function of immune cells.
Canto: That’s useful indeed. Each CD – 4 or 8 or 25 – represents a cluster of differentiation. Differentiated from other clusters. So back to T regulatory cells, which would be differentiated into those cells that predominantly have CD4 or CD8 molecules, as well as TCRs. All to help suppress auto-immune diseases in particular.
Jacinta: So we have these T regulatory cells, as well as helper and cytotoxic T cells, all created in the thymus essentially, and then they’re distributed to the lymphoid organs – the lymph node locations include ‘the groin, armpit, behind the ears, back of the head, sides of the neck and under the jaw and chin‘. There’s also the spleen and its sinusoidal capillaries, where T cells form a surrounding layer known as the ‘periarteriolar lymphoid sheath’ (PALS), more commonly known as white pulp. A large number of T regulatory cells however remain in a thymus region known as the thymic (Hassal’s) corpuscles. They’re also distributed throughout the body – the tonsils, the respiratory tract and so on. All originating from the red bone marrow.
Canto: Well I’m still a little confused about the difference between the innate and adaptive immune systems and whether there really is any clear distinction between them (I suspect not). My own distinction so far is that the innate system is quick and not very specific and well-attuned, and the adaptive is – everything else.
Jacinta: Well, a bacterial antigen releases endotoxins which causes a massive release of inflammatory cytokines, got that?
Canto: Not particularly. Get this:
Endotoxins (lipopolysaccharides, LPS) are agents of pathogenicity of Gram-negative bacteria, implicated in the development of Gram-negative shock. Endotoxin reacts with lipopolysaccharide-sensitive cells producing endogenous mediators such as tumour necrosis factor alpha (TNFα).
That was my first stop in trying to find out what endotoxins are. Needless to say, it’s meaningless to me. Though I know that ‘endo’ means ‘from within’ as opposed to ‘exo’… I think.
Jacinta; If you look that up you’ll find it’s horribly complex. Okay the bacteria release toxins which release cytokines in reaction. There are many different kinds of cytokines, including histamines, prostaglandins and leukotrienes. Amongst other things these cytokines will impact smooth muscle cells causing vasodilation, increasing blood flow causing heat and redness. Cytokines will also contract endothelial cells, causing fluid leakage and permeability, affecting pain receptors. Bradykinins are also involved in vasodilation and increased blood flow. All this induces swelling and pain. Broadly, the four signs of inflammation are: swelling, pain, heat and redness. That answers a basic exam question. Joint immobility is a fifth sign in some extreme cases.
Canto: I’m looking at a different video, “introduction to the immune system”, because I think we need to stay on the ground floor for a while. I also think looking at language might help. For example, ‘cytokines’ feature heavily, and I was thinking that they were like some kinds of proteins or enzymes, something sub-cellular that could whizz about the body, but then I noticed that white blood cells were called leukocytes, and there were lymphocytes and phagocytes… cells! Like, complex organisms. And ‘kine’, apart from being about cattle, is where our word ‘kind’ came from, as in Kinds of Minds. So ‘cytokines’, methinks, are just the vast array of cells relating to the immune system.
Jacinta: Yes, this is good – a phagocyte is an ‘eating cell’. A lymphocyte is a type of WBC that’s involved in the immune system. T cells are lymphocytes, as are B cells. So, yes, they’re complex, gene-containing thingumies, all of them, and lymphocytes are so called because the lymph system is full of them. But note that ‘cyte’ just means ‘cell’, not necessarily of the white or immune kind.
Canto: So starting again at the beginning, with the innate and adaptive systems. So the innate system is what often causes pains and fevers, that redness and itchiness and raised temperature mentioned before – inflammation. Because of the release of cytokines, as you’ve explained.
Jacinta: Ah but here’s where it becomes confusing and unhelpful. On a website designed, I think, for high school biology students I found this:
Cytokines…. are a broad category of small proteins that are important in cell signaling. They are released by cells and affect the behavior of other cells. Cytokines include interferons, interleukins, lymphokines, and tumor necrosis factor.
So it looks like you were right in the first place. It is confusing though. Interferons are proteins, as are interleukins, and ScienceDirect, which is generally reliable, says this:
Cytokines, chemokines, and lymphokines are multifunctional immunoregulatory proteins secreted by cells of the immune system.
So we’ve both been confused, and maybe looking at language origins might confuse us more. Best just to accept what the biochemists say.
Canto: So, are we starting again, again? Let’s look at some of the cytokine types. Interferons are as mentioned, signalling proteins. But what, exactly, is meant by signalling, and what exactly is a protein? A chain of amino acids, je crois. So, signalling – that’s about sending and receiving and responding to signs of change:
Individual cells often receive many signals simultaneously, and they then integrate the information they receive into a unified action plan. But cells aren’t just targets. They also send out messages to other cells both near and far.
So far, so obvious. These signals are essentially chemical. Even neurotransmission reduces down to the chemical level. But we’ll stick with pathogens and immunity. Receivers of signals are generally called receptors, and immune-system cells often, but not always, have receptors within or sticking out of the cell membrane.
Jacinta: Interferons are so-called because they interfere with viruses and such. We’ve actually been able to create them in the lab since the 80s for treating some cancers:
Interferons are the frontline defenders in your body. A variety of cells, including white blood cells, produce interferons in response to infection and other stimuli, like cancer cells. They initiate signaling cascades by stimulating the infected cells and those nearby to produce cytokines.
Canto: But are they the frontline defenders? And they’re cytokines themselves, as aforementioned. Cytokine seems a pretty broad term.
Jacinta: Our refined or not-so-refined new definition – cytokines are types of stuff created by a variety of cells as an immune response to pathogens. As to interferons, don’t worry about it.
Canto: Too late, I’m worried. Here’s another quote:
More than twenty distinct IFN [interferon] genes and proteins have been identified in animals, including humans. They are typically divided among three classes: Type I IFN, Type II IFN, and Type III IFN. IFNs belonging to all three classes are important for fighting viral infections and for the regulation of the immune system.
Should we just devote the rest of our lives to interferons and forget the rest?
Jacinta: Everything’s connected to everything else. And we shouldn’t despair – we’ve learned much about the lymphatic system, for example, that we didn’t know before.
Canto: We didn’t know anything before. But yes I’m encouraged. And getting back to language, lymph is apparently Latin for ‘clear water’, which is a good start for thinking about lymphatic fluid, even if it’s anything but clear.
Jacinta: Like sea or river water I suppose. The more you look… Blame all those pesky microscopes and such. Anyway, one video describes the lymphatic system as having three main functions: 1) returning fluid to the heart: 2) helping large molecules (hormones and lipids) enter the blood: 3) immune surveillance.
Canto: Okay let’s look at all that in a bit more detail next time.
stuff on the immune system 2: T cells, mostly
It’s still early days, but gene-therapy modifications of bone marrow stem cells may be the solution to many haematological malignancies
Peter Doherty, An insider’s plague year
something like…
Canto: So we’re going to try and educate ourselves with the help of all these videos out there on the immune system, with hopefully occasional references to the SARS-Cov2 coronavirus. And we’re not going to reference all these videos and websites because it’s just too time consuming and nobody else is going to read this stuff, it’s just for ourselves, mostly much.
Jacinta So in a vid about T-cell development (and they’re a product of the adaptive immune system) we hear that T-cells are produced in the red bone marrow. Why red?
Canto: Bone marrow comes in 2 types:
Red bone marrow contains blood stem cells that can become red blood cells, white blood cells, or platelets. Yellow bone marrow is made mostly of fat and contains stem cells that can become cartilage, fat, or bone cells.
Jacinta: So it’s not about red bones. So stem cells are like stems, green shoots that can develop into all sorts of different plants?
Canto: Yes and so you can imagine the potential, if we can induce them to specialise in ways that we want. Homo deus and all that. My brief research tells me that they’re found all around the body, not just the marrow. But it doesn’t tell me how they came into being. And there are apparently different types, as in ‘blood stem cells’. So these particular cells are pushed out into the world via sinusoidal capillaries…
Jacinta: Capillaries are the narrowest of blood vessels, I know that much…
Sinusoid capillaries allow for the exchange of large molecules, even cells. They’re able to do this because they have many larger gaps in their capillary wall, in addition to pores and small gaps. The surrounding basement membrane is also incomplete with openings in many places.
Canto: I must say that the number of high-quality, comprehensive videos on immunology, e.g. on YouTube, is such a boon. The comments say it all, ‘if only I had this info available when I was doing my PhD’ etc etc. So back to T cells. They move, I think as precursor T cells, to the thymus, via those capillaries. The thymus is a small gland near the top of the lungs (in the thoracic cavity) which is an essential component of the lymphatic system, itself a part of our general immune system.
Jacinta: It’s described as a primary lymphoid organ – at last I’m going to find out more about lymph! I hope. So the thymus is where T cells develop, and the red bone marrow, another primary lymphoid organ, is where B cells develop.
Canto: And B cells are a ‘type of white blood cell that makes infection-fighting proteins called antibodies’. Whereas T cells fight infections more directly as well as doing a lot of signalling…
Jacinta: Interesting thing about the thymus – it functions mostly through early childhood and adolescence, after which it atrophies, its tissues becoming fibrous and non-functional. So its role in T cell maturation occurs in our early years.
Canto: The thymus secretes different types of chemokines, or chemotactic agents (thymosin, thymotaxin, thymopoetin and thymic factors) which are somehow able to pull these undeveloped T cells in the right direction. This process is called chemotaxis.
Jacinta: A chemical taxi system, how cute. So we mentioned the two primary lymphoid organs, and there are secondary lymphoid organs – the lymph nodes (found in a number of bodily locations) and the spleen (on your left side, just around the bottom of your rib-cage). Just on chemokines – we’ve heard of cytokines, and the worrisome ‘cytokine storm’ that was oft-mentioned during the Covid period. Chemokines are a subset of these cytokines, which are –
‘an exceptionally large and diverse group of pro- or anti-inflammatory factors that are grouped into families based upon their structural homology or that of their receptors. Chemokines are a group of secreted proteins within the cytokine family whose generic function is to induce cell migration’.
Canto: So now we’re looking at these precursor T cells arriving at the thymus. So the thymus has a heap of thymic, epithelial cells which secrete the above-mentioned chemokines, which stimulate certain genes within the T cells to produce two enzymes (proteins), RAG1 and RAG2 (RAG stands for recombination activating gene – the genes encode the proteins). These are types of recombinase…
Jacinta: Think of genetic recombination, or mixing:
Recombinases are a family of enzymes having functional roles in homologous and site-specific recombination. It’s an event in organisms that involves DNA breakage, strand exchange between homologous segments, and ligation of DNA segments using DNA ligase.
Canto: So in this T cell context the gene ‘shuffling’, as it might be called, produces different protein types to deal with different antigen types. For example they produce T cell receptors (TCRs) designed to recognise and ‘receive’ differently-shaped antigens.
Jacinta: So getting back to those chemokines, they’re inducing other genetic activity to produce CD (cluster differentiation) proteins, of which there are various conformations, such as CD4 and CD8. These proteins form on the outside of the T cells, where they, hopefully, bind to MHC (major histocompatibility complex) proteins on the thymic cells. And of course there’s always more complexity – ‘a human typically expresses six different MHC class I molecules and eight different MHC class II molecules on his or her cells’. For now just think MHC-1 and MHC-2. Recognition of the appropriate MHC molecules by the CD4 and 8 proteins is called ‘positive selection’. If positive selection doesn’t happen the T cells will die (apoptosis).
Canto: The next step, assuming T cell survival, has to do with the previously-mentioned TCRs. The MHC molecules on the thymic cells carry a ‘self peptide’, and just to show how complex and relatively recent our immunological knowledge is, here’s a quote from a Pub-Med abstract from late 2001:
Twenty years ago, antigenic and self peptides presented by MHC molecules were absent from the immunological scene. While foreign peptides could be assayed by immune reactions, self peptides, as elusive and invisible as they were at the time, were bound to have an immunological role. How self peptides are selected and presented by MHC molecules, and how self MHC-peptide complexes are seen or not seen by T cells raised multiple questions particularly related to MHC restriction, alloreactivity, positive and negative selection, the nature of tumor antigens and tolerance.
So, if we could imagine ourselves as upper-class kids who entered university in the late 70s, (instead of working in factories or bludging off the dole as we were doing), none of this would’ve been known to anyone and we could’ve helped make the breakthrough…
Jacinta: Woulda-coulda-shoulda. Back again to those T cell receptors (TCRs), which apparently are not supposed to recognise or connect with the thymic cells’ self or antigenic peptides, as that would lead to auto-immune complications. So they’re ‘designed’ for that purpose, so that they don’t recognise those peptides, and don’t connect with them. This is called negative selection. If for some reason recognition does occur, apoptosis will result. That process occurs by the release of FAS (aka APO-1 or CD95 – don’t ask) from the thymic cell to a receptor in the T cell.
Canto: So, up to this point, if the T cell has come through alive, it’s TCR-positive, CD4 positive and CD8 positive. Its CD4 molecule may interact fortuitously with the thymic cell’s MHC2 (but the CD8 doesn’t interact with MHC1). In that case, there will be gene up-regulation of the cell’s CD4 molecules and down-regulation of CD8. That’s to say, CD4s will increase and CD8s will reduce, and it will present other TCRs. This turns it into a ‘T helper cell’. On the other hand, if the cell’s CD8s connect with the MHC1, there will be up-regulation of CD8, down-regulation of CD4, converting it into a cytotoxic T cell. Some of these helper and cytotoxic T cells can further develop into T regulatory cells, aka T suppressor cells, important for auto-immune disease suppression. This is promoted by molecules such as CD25 and interleukin 2.
Jacinta: Ok that’s enough head-spinning for one post, except perhaps just to say that interleukin 2 is ‘a protein that regulates the activities of white blood cells (leukocytes, often lymphocytes) that are responsible for immunity’. And we might find out more about what ‘cluster differentiation’ actually means….
Reference
This almost all comes from one video: