What mole rat sperm teaches us about sharing

Ed Yong at the Not Exactly Rocket Science Blog today brings us reporting of a study that found that naked mole rats have runty, misshapen sperm that can't swim.

Naked mole rats, as I am sure everybody knows, live underground in such inappropriate conditions for mammals that their skin has evolved not to feel pain and they sustain constant near-suffocation. Also they are blind. Basically they are just pouches of cells with legs and heads and no faces. They live underground in East Africa in tunnels, like ants. The naked mole rat's sperm it turns out is a raisin to most species's grapes, and doesn't even have its genetic material packaged correctly sometimes, and is borderline incapable of movement (only 15% of mole rat sperm cells in the study had a tail motor built well enough to enable swimming). Yong explains why this is unique among animals:

Van der Horst thinks that the rodent’s odd social structure is responsible for its malformed sperm. In many other animals, females mate with many males, or can store sperm inside their bodies. In these cases, the sperm do battle inside the female’s body for fertilisation rights. This “sperm competition” is the norm in the animal kingdom, and it has driven the evolution of longer and ever more elaborate sperm.

[...]But the naked mole rat has no sperm competition at all. In any single colony, with around 40 to 90 individuals, the only ones that can reproduce are the queen and her male consort (with a couple of possible affairs on the side). With such fixed fates, there is no reason for the other males to compete for mating rights, and no reason to have Olympic-level sperm.

--Which is the part that interested me the most. Life is inconceivably diverse, but within all that variation there is a general rule that competition rules. Cooperation is not widespread: even within colony-forming animals the runts are unlikely to mate and the elders are left for the some other species's meal; we know all this from Lion King. (The naked mole rat does employ competition among females of the species to replace the only birthing member of the colony, the queen, upon death; but as with ants losing the race to become a reproducing member of the colony probably does not exclude one's genes from regeneration: the sterile portion of the ant colony can influence the gene pool by allocating the best quality nuturing to closer-related offspring of the fertile caste; which is just a guess I am making.)

The mole rat, by staking territory in the most undesirable environment possible, has exempted itself from one of the most universal rules of biology. Thought of in human terms, the naked mole rat is the fictional dwarf society living underground: mining, getting dirty, bur minus the mustaches, and plus eating its own poop. Mole rat colonies will find a huge tuber and nibble on it over a period of years; but young mole rats diet on the feces of their caretakers until they can digest their own food (the naked mole rat's common lifespan is almost 30 years).

There is something of the mythological in the naked mole rat's non-competitive squalor. It is living proof of a communal utopian society that most animals can't stop squirming a shiv into their brother's lungs long enough to even dream of. It seems cut from the same ideas of sharing and equality that power all sorts of our Western tropes and stereotypes, from the slothly dream futures of the mid-20th century where robots would enable us to be sedentary and we could wrap virtual reality visors around our eyes; to the recurring Protestant work-ethic fantasy of the noble savage, whose life is both phyiscally harsh and emotionally untroubled. Normally these contradictory ideas only find their home in the anachronistic fantasy societies of fiction, short furry people who live in caves or treehouses, and forgo competitive systems like capitalism and democracy in favor of sharing and senioriarchy (but also have fantastic technology or riches). That the mole rat actually embodies these contradictory ideas in a workable way is proof of its not belonging to the same rules that govern most of life on Earth.

Funnily enough, the other species to occupy this same rare sphere of social organization, of hierarchical work-sharing replacing open reproductive competition, also live in tunnels: ants, termites, and some wasps and bees. So, it's something about tunnels. Perhaps tunnels are both in biology and in fiction a substitute for stable, authoritarian government: a structure that provides relative security from outside threats, that nourishes the favored and the worker caste alike, but limits freedom and pleasure.

Bus vomiter

Yesterday a young man two feet away from me vomited and made me lose my iPod Touch.

He was at the seat in front of me (and I was in the sideways seat, so facing the direction he turned to go stomach-suprise in). He covered it with his hand like a cough, I think that was a bad decision.

This was on the bus, and it happened right as the bus was stopping. So without even wiping his hand he just ran off the bus. Then the bus driver just started driving! Here was the thing that made me lose my iPod Touch, because I had been reading it at the time, and set it down without realizing as I jumped to the front of the bus to tell the driver "Hey a dude vomited." Now that I was at the front of the bus, I wasn't going to walk back. That would have been pretty weird. I mean the rest of the people in the back were just sitting there but it was all sliding around, it wasn't a good place to be. The bus driver kept going for two more stops before leaving his seat. I left since I was with my bike and didn't need to wait. I did not perceive that I was missing my iPod Touch until just before going to bed.

(I realize that leaving my seat just to tell the bus driver about vomit was a questionable action. I could have instead yelled this information to the driver from where I was, and not lost my iPod Touch. But I don't believe in yelling in public. If a person starts yelling in public, whatever the reason, really they are just a doctor's note away from being an official crazy person. I don't want to become a crazy person. I stand by my choices.)

What I reflected on during the pleasant bike-ride home, was how un-upset the vomiting man made me. It was clear why: he was a handsome young dude. I really sympathized with him, and hoped he was well soon. Maybe he has super-tragic cancer! When a handsome person vomits, you just assume they have a really good reason, and that it isn't a product of poor life decisions. I bet if I were a girl and that guy vomited on me, I would have given him my phone number. Maybe he needs a sad wife to watch him die of tragic Young Man Cancer.

Whereas, if that had been some old dude with wrinkles and stuff, I imagine I would have been really more worried and upset about being 10% vomited on.

Wherever you are vomiting handsome dude, I hope you don't have cancer.

Is America Like Libya or Egypt?

In my internet circles I have read complaints about the claims of some Occupy protesters that this movement is inspired or bears a relationship with the Arab Spring. The complaint is that it is absurd to compare the difficulties facing the American people with those faced by the citizens of Egypt or Libya.

For most Americans, such a comparison is definitely weird. Most Americans are not deprived of free speech, political organizing, and voting rights via a 30-year long state of emergency declaration, as Egypt's people were. Most Americans also don't have to worry about ending up in a secret prison without trial, as 5000 - 10000 of Egypt's people were in the year before the revolution.

But most Americans is not the same as all Americans! Invoking the injustices of Egypt and Libya, whatever its flaws as good messaging, can only be called a crazy idea if you forget that America contains lots of people, and not all of them are white twenty year-olds.

For some more comparisons,

The population of Libya is 6.5 million.

The prison population of the United States is 2.3 million, with an additional 4.9 million on parole or probation, and an additional 40 million out of the justice system but still holding criminal records that prevent employment for which they would otherwise be eligible, or limit their access to government assistance, or legally forbid them from voting in many states*. The United States has something like two Libyas-worth of disenfranchised citizens who will never break out of poverty.

Back to the original 2.3 million actually in jail:

905,000 are black.
475,000 are Hispanic.

500,000 are awaiting trial at any given moment. The United States has a rolling population of .5 million untried prisoners at all times.

Out of the 1.5 million in state and federal prison, 12ish percent, 180,000 people, are there for pot. The percentage within local jails and the parole/probation population is harder to find out.


Of course, this isn't largely what the white kids in the 99% are protesting. They're protesting inequality. Clearly America's inequality problem should never be compared to Egypt or Libya.

(One more tidbit: The population of Egypt, 80 million, is 43% urban. Of all Egyptians, 30% enroll in some amount of post-secondary education, 15% graduate. 2/3rds of the population of Egypt is under 30. The median age of Egypt is 24.)



*All states except Maine and Vermont take away voting rights upon felony conviction. 2,000,000 Americans who have completed applicable prison and parole sentences are ineligible to vote due to prior convictions. Millions more fail to re-register to vote after becoming eligible due to confusion over their state's re-registration laws.
-Source for prison population statistics: Wikipedia
-Source for post-prison and disenfranchisement statistics: ACLU: Voting With A Criminal Record - Executive Summary

Nesat

Scene on bank of Marikina river east of Manilla, Philippines during Typhoon Nesat, Sept 27, Noel Celis, AFP/Getty


Scene on shore in Navatos, Philippines after Typhoon Nesat, Sept 28, Aaron Favila, Associated Press

Whatever the next stage of integration between humans and tech brings, it will bring it to the developing world before the first world.

(So I've been having some free time recently, why don't I get in my six blog posts for the year.)

Here is news:

In Mexico, demand is rising at a healthy pace for radio 'locator' implants as a protection against kidnapping. The company featured in the article, ''Xega," says sales have gone up 40% in the last two years.

And, their executive notes, "Thirty percent of our clients arrive after someone in their family has already experienced a kidnapping"...

Awareness of the RFID implants is promoted by heavy media coverage in Mexico, spiked by a high-profile incident in which famous political figure "Boss Diego" Fernandez de Cevallos experienced surgery mid-kidnapping to take his implant out of his arm.

Mexico is under-appreciated as a behavioral future-frontier-scape. What I think is significant about this trend is that the break-down of law and order is driving an embrace of weird tech by the middle class. When truly human-transformative tech suddenly drops into reality, should we look to the fringe and unstable societies to field-test the future while the G8 world is still sending weathermen out to bake cookies on sidewalks? I bet yes.

What is not significant about this trend is the tech itself. Because as the article continues on to mention, actually the tech doesn't really work. The implant signal is very weak and useful only if the subscriber has their companion GPS transmitter on their person.

Nobody has made an actual GPS beacon with always-on performance that could fit in a body without taking out a kidney first. Without the transmitter, the implants being sold in Mexico now wouldn't make it out of most basements, which is probably where kidnapped people will end up.