"Knight, victorian lady, Dandy gentlemen,… do you want to be cured or die?" „Where´s the difference?“ "I fear there isn´t any, except that you have to"Knight, victorian lady, Dandy gentlemen,… do you want to be cured or die?" „Where´s the difference?“ "I fear there isn´t any, except that you have to pay me for torturing you." „Please let me die naturally without extra inflicted pain." "Nope, I am sorry, that might be impossible."
Unbelievable that of all this happened, both as quackery and as conventional, taught medical practice. Everyone knows the one or other strange tale about something like bloodletting, lobotomies and medicine closer to torture until death than to a cure. But it was real and the black comedy style so-called physicians and miracle healers used to try to help their patients can in retrospective just be seen with disgust, disbelief or other emotions, depending on the readers' character. Rofl.
They tried everything to kill and harm their patients, be it from plants or animal poisons, man-made mixtures, any chemicals or obscure cures involving physics, nothing has been left out in a field that still had to become modern medicine. I mean, those freaking lunatics made, in their immense stupidity. coining the term Semmelweis reflex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semmelw... possible. In the 19th century, surgeons were stubborn as little kids and refused to wash their swift fingers before doing operations or between operations or anytime. „I will just rub the blood and pus in the napkin before eating your delicious meal honey, cause you know, the dirt makes the taste. It was a hard day, had 25 births and 12 surgeries, may you hand me a piece of cake, thanks, no, I don´t need a plate.“ It made no large difference if one searched help from a snake oil salesman or a studied physician, just good luck and a strong constitution could save one.
In the cases of tobacco, cocaine, heroin, etc. there were financial backgrounds too, because if there was an added bonus level of addictive properties, even more fabulous money money could be made than with just brewing together any strange wonder cure. Of course today, with the FDA and similar government authorities around the globe, it´s not as bad in the past, but wherever public and private interests collide, trouble and collateral long time damage is sure.
What came to my mind after finishing the book is how many unknown, well-intentioned, possibly bit lobby clean-washed mega quackeries we might have going on in the field of science, nutrition, medicine, let´s just say everywhere. As mindless and lunatic the cures of the past might have been, they were to certain extent unavoidable to partly innocent and in contrast to that, our actual problems with scientific research regarding funding, objectivity, industry interests, etc. could lead to some funny to painful to deadly surprises of much larger scale in the future, because there are much more test dummies around today in those real-life, long-time experiments going on whenever one takes a bite of a highly processed food or a fancy new pill or just moves and lives in environments filled with so many new materials, radiations, etc..
The cures of the past killed at least just the ones with the bad luck of coming in contact with the caricature of a doctor, but today nearly anyone is involved. Of course, general fraud by tricksters will stay a topic because humans are humans, but compared to institutionalized problems we´ve created ourselves it seems unimportant.
A wiki walk can be as refreshing to the mind as a walk through nature in this completely overrated real life outside books:
I ask myself in such contexts what influence meditation, mindfulness, and positive psychology might haveNothing compares to natural, self made highs.
I ask myself in such contexts what influence meditation, mindfulness, and positive psychology might have on the neurochemistry of the brain and, in this case, especially on the essential little helpers that make our emotional spectrum so manifold, wonderful, irresponsible, and prone to lunacy.
I liked the chapters Domination and Politics the most, because we tend to forget that we are mentally unstable monkey with different nuances of madness from eccentricity to bonkers and completely manipulated by the substances our body produces and how we tend to condition ourselves to react in a way that might be evolutionarily useful. In love and friendship, dopamine can do a good job, but if it enters the meta and global level, it gets tricky to world dominately.
Our brain simply loves to get high and for a long time we couldn´t get good stuff from the outer world ( it must have been terrible) when we were still stonagey and before, but we had those fine centers for own opioids, own cannabinoids, but especially the other hormones that aren´t so fancy. No matter where we look, to the love in our beds, to the digital shopping card, enemies and frenemies at work, what we love and hate about political parties, we are wired to react like animals.
Lieberman is highly entertaining, mixing the hard science with entertaining elements to make it more vivid, transporting it directly into the long term memory, except of course one is too stoned on dopamine and the data transmission affected by too much of whatever emotion. Don´t read angry, nervous, or horny, that´s not healthy for your wisdom!
Epigenetic and nature vs. nurture plays a big role here too, as anyone has a unique backpack of genes, different brain structures, and all those other things we hardly understand, so there is a huge spectrum of how much influence hormones take on ones´ lives, there is everything from lively, emotional, courageous and charismatic to me. Nothing against creativity and flow, but the love, hate, anger, and sex, meh, possibly overrated. Some beer from time to time is another story and makes me autonomous.
What to take along after reading is the already mentioned self mind control optimization and, once again, a healthier lifestyle and a better diet. Because another way I got in contact with dopamine was via sport and dietary change, massively influencing and modifying my body chemistry with interesting side effects muahaha, no it really got better, I swear!
Immortality sounds... nice. Too utopic, still, but prolonging life for spans that seem unimaginable at the moment may be a standard procedure in a notImmortality sounds... nice. Too utopic, still, but prolonging life for spans that seem unimaginable at the moment may be a standard procedure in a not so far future.
Sinclair, a professor of genetics and expert in the field of the science of aging from the Harvard medical school, summarizes the status quo of how to stay young and healthy as long as possible.
At the moment, the way to a longer life is a pretty hard one, focussing on some elemental and prooven elements: Workout for both strength and endurance. Have a happy relationship and a social network of few, close, real, true friends. Tricky. Rarely eat until you are replete, calory restriction, fasting, detoxication, time-restricted eating, and a healthy diet are some of the most important factors because they can slow the aging process. Other factors are nice too, but those are the ones that don´t just boost your happiness and immune system, but really let you get old slower. Not just each cigarette shortens your life, but each extra snack too. Pets aren´t a bad idea. Find fulfillment in work, but a work-life balance too. Perfect sleeping cycle between 7 and 9 hours with or without power naps, but one between 15 to 30 minutes might be recommended. No orgies, drugs, very small doses of alcohol and sugar, no getting fat and untrained. Curiosity, trying new things, always searching for something new and different, brain training, puzzles, foreign languages, self-reflection, life-long learning. Mindfulness. Be happy and resistant to stress, be conscious, meditate. Control of emotions and thoughts Etc.
There is a huge and completely unnecessary exposition and anecdote problem in Sinclair´s writing, a prime example of very clever and competent people who don´t take the time to invest in creative writing and science communication skills, not to speak of show, don´t tell. Instead of driveling about the organization, unimportant parts of research, himself, and even some completely irrelevant things, he could have used these dry, boring knowledge as exposition by including it in stories, not making it an appendix one asks why it´s there, because readers want the science of aging, not the boredom of bureaucracy that let´s one feel immortal by slowing time to zero. That´s especially a missed chance because there are so many sciences and knowledge around this topic of, well, dying later, that dozens of books could be written about it from the perspectives of different fields.
By simply avoiding this inflation with the help of a professional science writer, cutting aways at least half of the redundancy and empty narrative calories and pimping the rest, as many of the leading science nonfiction writers use to do, he could have made a solid 5 star and presented his knowledge in a much more appealing way. When people write autobiographies, they should name, and not camouflage, their mindchild.
The hard truth is, until a probable wonder cure may make one immortal, the only way to possibly live until this point is to live the very hard life of an always hungry, happy, curious, positive, etc., ascetic. Good genes might be helpful too and in understanding those might lie one of the first medical applications, first in adding them in vitro fertilization processes to create long-living humans and later possibly in adult ones too or even create new longevity genes. To pimp telomeres so much that they last forever and youth never goes is more of a long-term perspective.
The book is dealing with the history and future of antibiotics and developing cures against multiresistant monsters, especially the experiences of McCThe book is dealing with the history and future of antibiotics and developing cures against multiresistant monsters, especially the experiences of McCarthy himself, his patients, the ethics and functioning of clinical trials, Big Pharma, and how bureaucracy makes it difficult to develop new cures. It´s one of the very few works dealing with this topic and reaching a larger audience, as antibiotic resistance and superbugs are, for understandable reasons, topics no politician wants the public to worry about too much because of the very negative interconnection and correlations to the economy and subsidy models that helped to breed the problem over the last decades.
I´ve been searching for books dealing with this topic for a while now and it says a lot that there is a cloak of silence surrounding the problem, except of books that use a more personal and autobiographical writing style such as https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3.... Maybe I´ll read it, but it seems to be a bit too less specific to correspond to my reading habits, with its main focus on the persons and anecdotes and lesser on the science behind the cure.
Because many different social and societal problems are fused in this coming mega crisis of infested health care systems and hospitals, dust infecting people just talking a walk, small cuts that can kill again, etc., publishers and newspapers dreaded to publish and talk about the real scope of the problem, but finally, the time seems to have come to openly share the facts.
Feeding vast amounts of antibiotics and many other drugs and chemicals to livestock to push growth and not let them die in the horrible conditions they are forced to suffer through a short life until they are butchered and their flesh spreads contamination and is so filled with antibiotics that it has influences on the human body, prescribing far too many antibiotics to humans who have viral infections or don´t need them, people not taking all of their antibiotics, and no interest in research for new antibiotics are the reasons for why humankind will enter the postantibiotic era, when each little infection or injury could be deadly, again. The logical consequence of hyperinflationary floating the whole planet with one of the previously mightiest and best weapons against germs for profit maximization.
It´s not the only field with a similar, coming, and completely unnecessary and avoidable catastrophe, it´s the same with the climate, the second category of multiresistant bugs, fungi, and microorganisms humankind is breeding by using more and more potent pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides in agriculture, ecocide and pollution, etc. It´s not pessimistic to say that we are traveling towards a multi disaster era, because we are fighting an unwinnable arms race against evolution and nature itself by trying to be smarter and cleverer, tinkering around with tools flora and fauna had hundreds of millions of years and microorganisms billions of years to optimize.
I am a techno optimist, but I deem it impossible to find enough cures and new drugs, not to speak of a sustainable economic and political system that doesn´t include self- destruction buttons made out of pure greed and worshipping the almighty mister mammon.
As a doctor, McCarthy has to have an optimistic outlook to stay motivated and have a positive effect on his patients and although bacteriophages, nano-, and biotechnology promise breakthroughs that could heal, only the richer people in the wealthy nations will be able to pay for the treatments while the rest of the world's population stays a breeding ground for the unnecessarily unleashed demons.
Pandemics recur, just as history repeats itself, and it´s all simply a question of how much can be learned from it and how far technology has marched Pandemics recur, just as history repeats itself, and it´s all simply a question of how much can be learned from it and how far technology has marched on.
They were at war, so they couldn´t tell that there were outbreaks, only the neutral Spain could say it without the danger of demotivating the population. Today there are mostly just trade wars anymore, but the rules have stayed the same and looking at the potential immense economical damage, the intuition of those trying to hide outbreaks was right.
The influence of such pandemics on human, primate, mammal, and rodent evolution must have been immense, as wiping out huge parts of the population or even the whole population until extinction, and might have happened many times. Without samples and more advanced technology to detect virus DNA and RNA in archeology, or to find the right fossils, it will long stay unclear how massive the impact on the development of higher life forms on the planet might have been.
The differences between 1920 and 2020 are so immense that it takes time to realize how real and ever more realistic this danger is, because we tend to believe that it can´t get so bad: Medicine was very primitive, but we didn´t really come so much closer to a solution in preventing outbreaks and finding cures. They didn´t have cars, planes, anything to spread it worldwide or just in a nation with such a speed as today. No freeways, just trains and some roads with horses on them. As long as the horses didn't get it, the spread was very slow. Fewer people having not so much contact with another. Just telephones to communicate, nothing to coordinate the efforts of a state or even a whole continent.
A large question is what population group is most affected and if, when the virus has found its prime target, it won´t mutate again and switch the victim again.
The book is not just about the Spanish flu, but also about the doctors and researches that tried to deal with it with methods that seem medieval compared to nowadays standards and by mixing the historical facts with these protagonists, it becomes very vivid for a nonfiction title. It has a bit much redundancy and it would be a five star if the author had put more focus on not repeating himself and telling very similar stories, wildly jumping between geography, personal stories, and the medicine of those days, making it all a bit blurry and unnecessary complicated to follow.
Even if nowadays governments wouldn´t be incompetent, the human factor alone is highly disturbing. Just some people who are immune to rudimentary hygiene rules and logical arguments are enough, and guess what one little piglet that refuses to wash hands, sneeze in the crook of the arm, etc. could do for spreading diseases. Not to speak of antisocial psychos who do it on purpose, try to get it, and spread it.
We didn´t write our own history, nature in the form of plagues did a lot of it and it would be arrogant and dangerous to believe that we are now so highly advanced and have so much fancy technology (and it´s a techno optimist who is saying that) that we are invulnerable, as if we already had nanobots patrolling each body and sending signals to produce individualized vaccines as soon as any invader is detected. But we aren´t there and the incompetence, arrogance, and idiocy of the Western governments will cost many lives now and in the future, until technology will eradicate the last plagues, what is just a question of time, not of if.
There might even be already the potential for producing and developing new vaccines, testing methods, and preventive measures. But the pharma companies make no money with developing cures for plagues that might never occur and the state has no interest in investing in protecting its citizens, although this could even be seen as military research where a bit of money is invested in general. Why it´s even not possible to produce enough test kits or establish a global network of testing stations that monitor the world or to have intelligent plans for pandemics or to listen to experts or to not worsen the situation with polemics and fake news or to quarantine early enough or… but, as said, the politicians are like: „Lalalala…..ignoring experts…..yada yada yada…. Stupid decision stupid decision stupid decision“, while unnecessary piles of corpses are exponentially growing.
Smallpox and anthrax are just the 2 main protagonists of this novel, but there are many others out there, some unknown or still to evolve.
One has toSmallpox and anthrax are just the 2 main protagonists of this novel, but there are many others out there, some unknown or still to evolve.
One has to look at the potential quantity (not quality lol, they nearly killed themselves because of incompetence) of the Soviet biowarfare program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioprep... and extrapolate the potential to now and the future to understand the sheer dimension of it.
Much of the research has the potential to cure all illnesses, as especially viruses are so mighty tools that they could be genetically engineered brainwashed and used to be good instead of evil, and pharmaceutical companies are at this end of the spectrum, doing the opposite of what secret biological warfare research is trying to achieve. I do think that it´s more possible that the military will find cures earlier, as the budget, especially in a country like China, is circumstantial and the results don´t have to be economic so that all approaches can be tried. As long as it kills better, of course, but a side effect and collateral benefit could be cures we aren´t able to imagine. Of course, it would fall under military secrecy, but there is not much difference to the commercial studies that are as secret as possible too due to industrial espionage. It also sounds better and is easier to explain that a company found a cure than to admit that a cure for cancer was accidentally found while trying to breed an influenza rabies hybrid. General: „Didn´t I tell you to develop killers, not cures? Bad scientist, bad, shame on you wasting our governments´ money for this!“
It´s the huge variety of possible options in producing biological agents that make them even scarier. The intuitively most logical form, an active virus that can be directly released, seems horrible, but is less dangerous as the alternatives that could be used as timebombs. Microbes are pretty tough and they can wait, sleep, get active again, and with biological engineering, in the mix this means that one could produce something that is completely harmless when it´s cold, dry, and dark, but activates when hot, wet, and bright. The possibilities to use this are endless, as it wouldn´t even have to be exactly coordinated, it would be enough to just wait for spring and summer, for the day to come and the sun to shine or for the weather to change and, let´s say, pluvial period to set in. Anthrax was just the beginning.
If the agent is unknown and thereby undetectable or a mighty state spreads such agents with the help of foreign intelligence services, special forces and secret agents, there could be thousands and more clusters distributed in neuralgic points of the enemies´ infrastructure until the conditions are perfect and the trade war or real war can begin. It could, of course, be fully automated too, using living agents or by generating the right breeding conditions in small or tiny, miniaturized machines that activate at the same time, breed until trillions of active killers are waiting to be released and open the gates at the same time.
Nobody knows how much of this is still fiction and how much real military mind and plan games and simulations, but I do believe in the human creativity to kill as many others as possible and would subjectively say that anything possible in this regard will be done.
How large such facilities might be is another question I keep asking myself, are it just normal labs with secrecy and soldiers around or is it going in the resident evil and horror direction with huge underground hives or prohibited areas where everyone breathing in the wrong direction or taking a picture from miles away gets shot. And, of course, human testing to see how it works and in what dimension it´s done, if it´s right next to the labs or if they take the risk to transport the new creations to the torture chambers of a black site. It could look like this: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph... https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...
One just has to look at what has been revealed about disturbing human subject research and I didn´t even mention combining it with breeding Übersoldiers that are resistant to the biological warfare agent that kills everyone and are quicker, smarter, stronger, and much sexier than the average G.I. Joe.
I am no biologist or physician and can´t say how useful it is to keep probes of smallpox and other monsters we might be able to exterminate except of probes, and if we would have the ethical obligation to destroy everything. On the one hand, there is the possibility of a terrorist attack or a lab accident (or a scientist going bonkers) killing million, on the other hand, it could be positively used in the future in medicine and life sciences in ways we can´t even imagine. As genetic engineering accelerates, the vicious elements could become angels of longer life and cures instead of death, as they are so mighty that annihilating this potential forever seems questionable.
I guess biological warfare programs will definitively be continued in space, be it in habitats, space stations, or on planets with or without atmosphere, as those destinations are just too perfect for such endeavors to not create solarpox. Also a great first contact scenario if it´s as far away from the earth as possible and the first place aliens come to visit, in the style of: Alien: „Is this a secret and highly illegal bioweapon program to exterminate all or just certain parts of your own species with ethnic bioweapons? Are you all space nazis praising eugenics?“ We: „No, no, this is a misunderstanding. We do important medical research here to cure…let´s see…damn.“ Alien: „Well, keep trying exterminating yourselves, if you aren´t successful, we´ll visit again in a few hundred years if you are mature enough for the galactic community and all the technologies we wanted to bring to help with your evolution.“ We: „No, let us explain..“ Alien: „Are those probes of extraterrestrial microorganisms you are adding to the deadly mix back there?“ We: „We didn´t know it were your probes that…“ Alien: „Bye.“
Hager shows how huge the impact of some chemicals and elements on human history has been.
If the opium poppy would have preferred other areas to grow oHager shows how huge the impact of some chemicals and elements on human history has been.
If the opium poppy would have preferred other areas to grow or would have been more of a weed that grows everywhere, much between total global sedation or a new balance of power for the ones controlling the growing areas could have arisen.
Vaccination would have been, even with very primitive technology, been possible and a country with people immune to a virus like smallpox that is actively spreading it, as part of biological warfare tactics, would have had an immense advantage.
Getting antibiotics in the form of cultivating fungi and perfecting the method over centuries without any modern technology might have led to an all-natural approach to world domination thanks to gangrene free soldiers that are quickly back on the battlefield.
Other drugs such as statins and Viagra might have no Big History (ical) impact, but a positive one on the health and joy of both patients and big pharma, a behemoth Hager has some things to say about, such as risking the health of millions of people by just developing towards the most profitable drugs and ignoring other, often more important research in fields such as antibiotics or vaccinations or cheap generics or…
I like mind games, hypothesis, uchronias, alternative realities and it are ideas, technologies, and chemicals that formed, often in union with crazy coincidences, human history. Just imagine for instance:
Mongols with poisons so potent that a tiny cut by an arrowhead can immediately kill. Any evil empire as the only one with antibiotics or a similar important medical technique. Ancient Rome or another ancient empire controlling the opium trade and using it as a weapon as the Brits did. A much earlier development of the technologies necessary to produce something in high quantities and quality. Etc.
The emperor or god king was nothing without the herbal women and alchemists.
Summer is quite similar to Heinrichs´ book about winter https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2... and I want to especially mention the amazing language Summer is quite similar to Heinrichs´ book about winter https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2... and I want to especially mention the amazing language and love for nature that´s filling each page of this magnificent work. As it´s often the case with the lucky ones who have made their passion their profession, it´s not just the detailed description of the research, but the epic language and poetic choosing of the right words to describe all those impressions.
In comparison to his book winter world, there is so much to explore, so much we don´t know, just bits of information of certain animals of some climates. What there´s going on in all habitats, climate zones, and especially in the thresholds and borderlines, where the climates and species change, interact, and interbreed, would be a lifelong voyage of discovery for million of biologists. Not even to talk about detailed exploring of one animal group, just all the interconnections, symbiosis, and ecosystems around there.
Personally, I would prefer the summer trip, but I would possibly have no more time for reading and writing as during winter, because I could stay observing at night too and get, again and as so often, far too less sleep. Another fact is, that instead of the starvation, hunger, and shortage of winter, summer is filled with love, joy, and happiness (for alpha predators animals). And survival of the fittest, brutal selection, deadly territorial disputes and mating battles,...
Anecdote time, there is one big problem with summer. No matter if lying in a beach chair or, personal favorite, going out in wild nature to hang a hammock between two trees, preferable somewhere with a great panorama onto the mountains or next to a small creek, the problems start immediately. Instead of being able to read hundreds of pages in one sitting, the amazing environments makes one distracted, one watches birds, insects, clouds, and worst of all, an evil little seductive voice wants one to go on a hike, swimming, explore the woods apart the paths, follow riverbeds, collect whatever one finds, fruits, berries, mushrooms possibly even as food, treasures, etc.. Damn nature with its fauna and flora and epic moments.
A compromise can be audiobooks, podcasts, or, if there really is no other option, conversations with humans while exploring the wonders of nature.
Of course, nobody really knows exactly, so that all research can just be based on assumptions, theories, hypothesis,... that are mixed with actual braOf course, nobody really knows exactly, so that all research can just be based on assumptions, theories, hypothesis,... that are mixed with actual brain science, evolutionary psychology and well, large field studies. Just in theory, because no scientist gets the millions of funding to base her/his ideas on hard, provable facts so that we doubtfully enter the minefield of subjective assumptions.
The subject is fascinating both in humans and animals and how it may evolve in the future with our senses changing and how women's´ minds and their ability to select and choose may develop in combination with AR, VR, genetic testing ("Give me your probe or leave, I won´t waste time dating someone who is a potential horrible genetic match." "Yes, Ma´am." "Don´t call me that and where are you going?" "You said you wanted a sample of..." Not that, you perv idiot, just a saliva sample." "Oh, I see. Well, then..." "Not anymore!") and bio-digital fusion, is interesting.
Most of the book focuses on animal behavior and concludes that it have always been the females who made a species successful in preventing catastrophes by choosing carefully and mindfully. That might have been one of many reasons that evolution pimped brains and upgraded males, but Miller should have clearly differentiated that is was one of many, unknown driving forces and that is is impossible to name a clear favorite. To define horniness as the only motivation for art, science, charity, humor, interest in upbringing, humanities, everything, seems very far-fetched and I would say that many give a f*** (hoho, wordplay alert) and are just interested in the subject itself, not the groupies.
There are some funny theories, not related to this book but worth mentioning in this context, about that nature might tend to make more experiments with the intelligence of males because it might get fatal when women where, well, as dumb as some men. I don´t know any numbers and this is so close to gender racism that there might never be any long-term studies done, but I love the picture of a kind of Gaia entity who orchestrates all evolutions and thinks: "Doesn´t matter if many of the males are too stupid to survive, they aren´t important for the survival of the species, so I will instead fix the minimum intelligence for women to avoid problems." To get highly subjective, I have really met much more stupid men than women and about the same amount of both species, so maybe there is really something behind it, who knows, duh, "look, primary and secondary sexual characteristics, beer, sports and hordes of befriended males with lovely group dynamics, must go, it hardly ever ends in small disasters or world wars if we do that."
To take everything with a grain of salt and to not criticize authors who dare to risk to make hypotheses that could become true is important in this case. The problem might be that there are inherent dangers if one of those ideas gets too much media or even public attention and is misused or misinterpreted for one´s own agenda.
It´s ingenious by Miller to interpret models of society, politics, and economics depending on his thesis, and mind games integrating evolutionary biology and psychology in sociology and history could be played much more often than just the isolated historical, psychological or political interpretations alone. It also shows how unscientific especially political theory and economics are, how weak the foundations must be that it is so easy to reliably question and reinterpret them without the possibility to negate it. An expert can cherrypick parts of those theories and built whatever she/he wants out of them, make epic battle disses or praises. Try to do this with an engine or in medicine, it will explode or kill the patient.
It´s so funny that we eliminated natural selection and that now everybody is lying even more, because an ape or primitive human couldn´t fake smartness, success, etc. or get detailed tutorials by nasty pick-up artists and immoral personal coaches. No wonder women had to develop defense mechanisms against so much deception, falsehood, and virility. The best and most valid security for a women might be, as mentioned, gene tests, as long as males don´t have the option to manipulate their saliva, blood, etc. to seem fitter, but the evolutionary arms race of males trying to fake and delude women into mating may go on forever until we evolve into entities. And it might even continue then when it comes to creating new AIs. Why does anything in my reviews has to evolve to transhuman, superhuman, immortal status...
I am highly biased and tend to jay to evolutionary and to meh at psychology, but try to stay objective. I truly don´t write far too wordy and adjectively reviews to seem smart and attractive to potential female mating partners. Damn it, Miller debunked me. Sigh. By the way, now that it doesn´t matter anymore, I am a 35 year old Austrian...
I know that it´s totally wrong to be amused or even laugh while reading books with such topics, but the author does such a great, entertaining, sciencI know that it´s totally wrong to be amused or even laugh while reading books with such topics, but the author does such a great, entertaining, science-education job by combining the worst nightmares of plague history with wit and satire that it´s difficult to stay serious.
The key element here is Big History and that makes it an eyeopener because the medical books are just talking about the strange cures, the history books about the consequences on politics and warfare, the biology books about how the critters scuttle from victim to victim, but nobody puzzled the elements together until know.
It was a combination of ignorance, stupidity, prudery, faith,... that made the illnesses even worse, because by combining stupid or no healing options with ostracizing, stigmatizing and persecuting the suffering humans, it got spread wider than necessary. The narrative arc of each described illness shows all of those aspects, the ideologies that fostered the wrong ideas and the brave doctors and scientists who tried to find real cures instead while facing scorn and occupational problems.
One thing must be said about the inventors of freaking crazy theories about how and why who suffers from what, they were pretty creative. Just as right out of a maniac group brainstorming session, those academic trained, teaching, elite professors saw the damage they caused as science and cure and although some of them might certainly have been frauds, many might have believed that they are doing something Hippocratic instead of sadistic and worsening everything.
Pandemics and infectious diseases had a huge impact on human history, art, and probably even genetic development, because eliminating large parts of the gene pool and just leaving the fittest or luckiest with random mutations or even build-in resistance survive, changes the composition of a population forever. If the black death hadn´t wiped out large parts of Europe's population, we might still live in a theocracy; if the peoples of the Americas would have been immune to smallpox and other European diseases, colonialization would have been impossible and there would be no US today. Instead, the tribes could have built huge ships to sail to Europe to bring us their plagues on purpose or accidentally and helped our ancestors to find the path close to extinction and we would live in reservations now. There are plenty of possible uchronia settings.
The worst case of mismanagement in the 20th century was the reaction to the coming AIDS epidemic that could have been prevented, but instead, Reagan and, in general, many conservative politicians did everything to make it worse and let it escalate. If it would have been a rich, straight, white man´s disease, it would have been cured. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesti... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesti... He was such a loveable person.
The only difference to today may be that it were just restricted minds and sheer stupidity and not financial interests (or disinterests in finding cures for diseases nobody in the industrialized, rich countries gets or new antibiotics or cheap generics or...) that torpedoed and deferred progress in medical research. And doctors and scientists don´t get witch-hunted and burned any more if they have the nasty habit of getting pesky and just have to fear the loss of funding, license, job, reputation, and respect.
It´s just a question of the competence of government and international institutions (sadly no joke); the severity of the new mutation of the virus; herd immunity and vaccination rates and how quickly new vaccines can be developed, mass-produced, and distributed; if it may become a too close, not just platonic friend of the yearly flu epidemic and similar, seasonal epidemics or multidrug-resistant germs or biological warfare agents someone let lying around anywhere (looking at you, certain country with terrible military security measures), or...; how quickly it´s discovered and how far it has already spread, if it´s a zoonosis, where it breaks out, how contagious and deadly it is,... and sheer luck or bad luck how bad that future, coming pandemics will get.
Of course, all of our behavior, interactions with family, friends, and colleagues, love life,… is based on old primate group dynamics and Wright showsOf course, all of our behavior, interactions with family, friends, and colleagues, love life,… is based on old primate group dynamics and Wright shows all aspects of our existence under this aspect, including Darwinism and many great speculations about how the past could have shaped the present and how unaware we tend to be regarding our roots because of our ever so big, fancy brains.
Women and men The main motivations of male and female animal and human courtship behavior and its different short and long time motivations are described in witty and thought-provoking detail and one might find oneself with the one or the other „That´s it.“ while reading.
Birth of ethics and moral It´s such a tricky question to say at which stage of development an animal has the intelligence and empathy to be able to anticipate the feelings of other gang members and if morality should be seen as an element that is just possible under those requirements. As long as instincts, no higher thinking and cruel, but for the survival of the pack essential, group dynamics are the driving forces of the brain, talking about true evil spirit and all higher emotions, in general, would be a bit far-fetched.
Chimp dictator vs bonobo hippies But in chimps and in us, there are so many examples of thresholds, conflicting biological and sociological structures, and close to impossible to solve mind games. For instance, the chimps organized their society like a dictatorship, which enabled them to fight wars against other groups of chimps and to keep the population docile. That´s the reason why the peaceful bonobos have no chance against chimps, just as a pacifistic state has no chance against a warmongering god-emperor.
Technology changes the game forever But as soon as culture, technology, and civilization kick in, the old structures of power that enable the rise to world domination become dysfunctional and do more harm to the whole state than a change to democratic, fair, and sustainable government and economy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_D... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_H... Those states build their inner stability, education, welfare systems,… on the softy ideas of fairness, collegiality, sharing, and morality instead of technocratic or sick ideologic principles. It seems, as if there is an emancipated, progressive, open-minded government, the people are, gosh, happy!
Wrights progressivity rocks Wright has written 3 of the, highly subjective, most inspiring, and important books I´ve ever read and I couldn´t choose which one to prefer; the description of the origins of faith in the evolution of god in The Evolution of God, one of the best descriptions of how to build a better society in Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment or this marvel of showing how primitive we are thanks to the core of our physiology and it´s hairy history.
What would we be without our cognitive biases producing replication crisis The dark side of evolutionary biology/psychology is that other biased journalists, authors, politicians,… can easily use it to make their papers, ideologies, economic five-year-plan, fit to whatever they want, entering the realm of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replica.... That´s a huge problem of many fields of science, but the worst collateral damage is the deliberate misinterpretations of authors who clearly define their ideas as theories, which brings entire fields of knowledge in disrepute, culminating in the danger of nobody daring to publish new, interesting hypothesis.
Utilitarianism in forms like in Scandinavia is nice, but if the selfless genes are unable to perform right because of the negative, epigenetic pressure in failed states and dictatorships. Nothing can help except to rebuild those societies from the scratch.
To know that one does not know how not just even a tiny part of the body works is the first step to getting interested in exploring each fascinating, To know that one does not know how not just even a tiny part of the body works is the first step to getting interested in exploring each fascinating, inner landscape.
From up to down, inside to outside, young to old, organ to nerve and so on goes the journey trough our miraculous wonder of nature whose amazing eyes are just sending this information to the brain of the reader.
Many myths about the body are shown and design flaws described, but after billion years of evolution, that´s no wonder. We deliberately build in design flaws in everything we create and call it planned obsolescence and what is an appendix or other useless extra bonus parts compared to that.
We really don´t understand anything in detail as shown in many great examples and the cool thing is that we once again stand in front of an ocean of lack of knowledge with that stereotypical hand full of sand and much that we believe to know about our body today might turn out to be completely different or even wrong.
Especially because of the tininess we still have to explore and to discover areas of nano and quanta. Take physics, we don´t know anything, so what could this say about a system as complex as the human body in a world we hardly understand? Photosynthesis in plants seems to do it´s work with something creepy that just can be explained with some kind of not understood quanta phenomena teleportation stuff and, in some rare cases, we are more complex than vegetables.
The most interesting implication of hidden dept comes for the mind, brain, conscience and ego. When over 1 billion copies of this book could be stored in an area of the cerebral cortex the size of a grain of sand, there is pretty much space for unknown programs running in the background, possibly with programming and instructions from wherever and whomever.
Because we don´t understand, we should treat the body as good as possible with a diet of things and thoughts of which we know that they are not harmful
Like all of Bryson´s books, it an entertaining and great read, integrating history, medical science and vivid examples that stay in mind and easily find a way to a long term memory whose functioning we don´t understand to associate it with a brain we know nothing about and a mind that,... well, you get the meaning.
It´s better and more informative than biology education and in my imagination I see books like this in a close future with much more data, pictures, animations, links of different grade of difficulty for each kind of reader, VR, AR and the integration of the reading audience, probably with a kinda collective reading live streams while using different kinds of technologies or just old school reading.
It´s interesting, if one gets a score of over 90 percent or even, let´s just say, hm 98,8 percent, the person would say that this is close to absoluteIt´s interesting, if one gets a score of over 90 percent or even, let´s just say, hm 98,8 percent, the person would say that this is close to absolute. No matter if it is a test, a comparison or whatever. But as soon as it goes like "You know, those missing 1,2 percent are the difference between you and a sh$§trhowing chimpanzee, the person goes like WTF and so on. So, as I always say, we are naked apes and each emotional and brain reaction that is explored in monkeys gives deep insights into our collective and individual nature. The knowledge could lead to a better social design from international organizations to small villages with just a hand full of houses.
Checklists are great, so let´s put monkeys vs humans on a kind of partner finding match list with the same interest. Violent without reason against the own people which harms the whole society? Check. Manipulate and lie around anything that comes just a mile close so some sexy time? Done. The tendency to despotism, genocide and determination wars? Getting closer to a full match. Same emotional reactions concerning love, fear, hate, etc? Got it, monkey owned. Excuse me, but could someone please explain the difference to me again? I mean, even the throwing sh$3 thing seems to be matching, be it verbally or in some rare cases, ahem.
Both the neurological and social development are so closely related that the functioning systems kept growing inside our heads and got probably a little bit modified regarding impulse control, subtleness and intelligence, but nature didn´t change much in this running system. Take away food, shelter and punishment and we are again where we were millions of years ago, extremely dangerous group raiders with an integrated attitude to madness. This is especially funny, because there are no lesser intelligent animals, especially biological very similar mammals, that have the same rate of lunatics that naturally occur because something like a human brain can´t be constructed or civilized without some damage. When there are millions of rabbits, deer, mice or cows, their behavioral anomalies are so few compared to when one puts a few million people together in one place.
One implication is, that like bonobos and chimpanzees, human society has different attitudes depending on the social structure. And as both humans and monkeys keep evolving, many new variants may grow out of the few concepts with the main difference that humans could form an environment for many experiments and plentiful family and social structures instead of the few monocultures we see today. With each acceptable ideology, that doesn´t include harming, discriminating or erasing other groups, many experiments would be possible with volunteer groups of environmentalists, futurists, etc. that want to try out something new. How to prevent them from going the way of sects and extremists might be a tricky topic, but at least the indoctrinated way of how to live would fall apart.
A huge misuse of anthropomorphism has been the tendency to think that we great humans should project our superior properties onto other, "lower" animals instead of considering that it might be that many animals are much smarter, complex and emotional than we thought or wanted to think. Just because human communication got overcomplicated with language, mimics and stuff that doesn´t mean that communications that are based on smell, varying sounds or just hormones aren´t as good, effective and a sign of higher intelligence instead of just instincts, as thought for a long time. With the help of neuroscience and biological markers, the truth can be shown. Tragically, the bad and wrong science of the past was used to discriminate animals and other humans that were both deemed inferior.
The work is primarily focused on apes, but let´s think about other animals, for instance, pigs, cows and chicken or, if they are on the dinner table and the imagination is too irritating, dolphins, octopi, crows, well, anything that has the intelligence and/ or social life to feel. And here comes the cornucopia of ethical, philosophical and sociological questions regarding both our connection to and behavior regarding many animals. Let´s say a scientist would find out or has already found out a long time ago that especially the tortured animals in the meat factories have not just more complex feelings and higher intelligence than supposed but understand the whole context of their situation at each moment.
The work of this outstanding author should be read and spread by everybody, because it opens new, interdisciplinary fields of both natural sciences and humanities and leads to a better understanding of both real and human nature and could help to stop repeating the construction errors and behaving like aggressive alpha males after a few million years of a wild, human adolescence and become adult and wise instead.
Finally, let´s try a self-test that is prooving all theories right. Look, I made this funny, for the sake of your mental sanity censored, list of emotions that would completely control me with full intensity if I wouldn´t be such a highly developed, smart super-duper alpha predator (meditation and mindfulness really help a tiny little bit): bored, stressed, happy, hungry, evil, scared, tired, excited, hungry again, dishonest, sensitive,...
A wiki walk can be as refreshing to the mind as a walk through nature in this completely overrated real-life outside books:
Death. The grim reaper. The big nothing. The great leveler. And so on, or no, precisely not, or still? Puh, getting philosophical in here, so put out Death. The grim reaper. The big nothing. The great leveler. And so on, or no, precisely not, or still? Puh, getting philosophical in here, so put out all your thoughts...
Come, little kitty cat, tasty eyeballs are served. No matter if it is a dog, cat, weasel, reptile (I am not sure regarding their eating behavior), if time and hunger are combined and carrion acceptable for the animal, well... At least one lives on in his pet, except it gets a food poisoning from rotten flesh which would be an unfunny, black comedy trope, but owner and pet would be at least united in death. Who thinks this is already too heavy probably shouldn´t read this book.
I like horror, humor and science and this book has everything in it. The wit often comes just from the constellations of topics, from questions an adult wouldn´t dare to ask. So the philosophy that is still in kids and gets lost more and more with the ages, jumps from each side because the questions may seem trivial, but have hidden depths. And children aren´t as constrained, onesided, indoctrinated and socially normed as adults so that they still have an open and healthy attitude towards the topic.
Out of the context of this book, but it would make an interesting question for the author: In space flight, the question of how to deal with the deceased, if there are still any, will be a topic too. All the ingredients might be too precious to waste them and many of the extraction procedures to get as much out of it as possible might not work well without gravity or lesser gravity than on earth, may take to long, be too energy expensive or just not economic.
The book is a great example of how the knowledge of an expert can be broken down to interesting, short, funny, intelligent and catchy pieces and how much death can show the living how do be thankful for each day, enjoy each moment, be kind to each other, yada yada yada, boring! Carpe diemality.
The endeavor and motivation of the author to talk about death openly is very important because it weakens faith and makes people realize how short and fragile life is and to probably awaken more awareness and mindfulness. As already said, kids are the perfect breeding ground for healthy, normal thinking and talking about death and in this case, the old saying "Give them to us when they are still young and they belong us forever" gets a positive connotation. Instead of NIMBY https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIMBY, they ask why not the whole family is buried there.
Instead, death has become a taboo, especially in Western society, where it is avoided to speak about it or to change something about how society has been instrumentalized and normed in any way around a topic that anyone should be interested in, because, you know...
A biomedical, microbiological and terrifying trip to tiny superpredators and some thoughts about how they may evolve and be (mis)used.
The suffering oA biomedical, microbiological and terrifying trip to tiny superpredators and some thoughts about how they may evolve and be (mis)used.
The suffering of the populations of these countries is as unbelievable and the courage of the help workers who had to fight against fake news denying the existence of ebola, people stealing infected family members from hospitals and the tradition of rinsing the bodies of the deceased to bathe in the same water. Tragic cases of misleading cultural norms that made the epidemic longer, larger and more dangerous. The mistrust in western doctors is whereas something based on colonial crimes.
This outbreak was just the biggest one in human history until now and the question of what the future will bring is one of the most disturbing aspects the reading of this book implements in the mind of the reader.
One know´s those overachievers who to do much too well in a too short period while all others are still procrastinating. Well, Ebola is such a case. In monkeys, it is still not too hardcore to self-destruct by killing the whole population, but as soon as the pandemic spillover scenario takes place, it gets nasty really quick.
The cytokine storm, the liquefication of inner organs and the unbelievable amount of produced viruses make it a killer with the same potential as smallpox as a biological agent for warfare. Even without further, natural evolution of the virus, it is already incredibly dangerous.
To say that highly developed countries may be immune to problems with outbreaks like that is seld-deceit and denial of reality. Take one of the fast-growing megacities, a neuralgic point like an airport, rail station or city center and think of the average apocalypse movie. There is no argument against that and just because it still didn´t happen doesn´t mean that it won´t happen. Just a normal outbreak could kill hundreds of thousands until it´s under control, but let´s say it is in combination with a natural disaster like a hurricane or a large terrorist attack on infrastructure that is combined with an attack with biological weapons like Lassa fever, Ebola, a super Flu, a pandemic, smallpox, etc. in New York, Mumbai, London, Berlin, Beijing, Paris,... In such a setting millions will die and reverse quarantine won´t help anything.
Another option for biological warfare is to simply infect refugees and sent them to the country one wants to harm. Or, more subtle, use highly skilled, brainwashed agents that work in important companies and government agencies, infect themselves all at the same time with an ethnic bioweapon like ebolapox, spread the virus before the first symptoms could give the hint and hide so that nobody is alarmed by their death. A smaller country could even be invaded after such a first strike because the soldiers wouldn't have to fear contagion if they are already vaccinated against the used agent or the ethnic bioweapon is so sophisticated that just humans living in the enemy country get infected.
Genetic engineering will be the best solution and the worst problem at the same time. For medicine, vaccines are just the first step. Viruses, bacteria and especially phages have the potential for individualized medicine, self-healing applications, drug transport inside the body and as allies of the human body against other invaders. They are so highly developed that science can learn endless things and probably find cures for many diseases that are still seen as incurable.
On the other, darker side terrorists could add resistance to heat and cold, even acid or disinfectants and, the worst thing, the ability to survive outside human bodies long enough, to fly trough air over vast distances to new hosts. To make viruses more potent, contagious and more difficult to detect, especially if the amount needed to provoke an outbreak gets smaller and smaller and completely new viruses are created whose genetic fingerprint is still unknown and undetectable.
And there is nature that has already produced too great working killer like the Spanish flu. Nothing is more attractive to dangerous microorganisms than to adapt better and better to the most attractive prey and well, that seems to be the human species. We are an especially great place for experiments because we tend to fly from climate zone to climate zone and that´s a great acclimation exercise and a nice, free world cruise at the same time for those nasty little monsters.
It will be an endless chess game between nature and different fractions of human society who try to cure or kill all other people.
Mario the lone bookwolf
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