Rationing life

It is painful to accept some of the facts and even more excruciating to act on those. Would you ever be able to decide who should get to live and who  shouldn’t? If you have to do that what is your criteria? Do these happen more often than we imagine?

The episode Playing God from Radiolab team is about this necessary evil in disaster situations where the number of people needed attention exceeds the resources available. Caregivers make these decisions some times using their gut feeling and some times using some predefined guidelines. They ration life, the episode and this article, sheds light on this aspect, what is happening today in these heart-wrenching circumstances and what should happen moving forward, what is considered fair vs what is discrimination. I think there is no single answer to this and probably we will never have a right answer but with more engagement from society we can get better at it if not perfect.

http://www.radiolab.org/story/playing-god/

God of Galapagos

Galapagos, an island that inspired a gentleman aka Charles Robert Darwin to soak in the nature’s splendor which ultimately lead to a theory that revolutionized the understanding of ourselves and our surroundings.

Decades after his expedition it became a hot bed for human action again. Passion for exploration has changed mankind in ways unimaginable and it constantly changes how we live, for better or for worse, along with that shared passion we have an indispensable urge for conservation of diversity and this Radiolab multi-episode piece on Galapagos takes us through that journey of how far we go to do exactly that i.e., protect, preserve. Sometimes individually and most of the times collectively as a society or as a like-minded group or as an organization, we play God. As humans many of us dream of an egalitarian society where everyone is treated equally and provided equal opportunities and we struggle to do it without incurring cost but God understands that is not a possibility, everything involves a sacrifice, you choose a gain(what you value most) and that will deduce your losses in a zero-sum game. If we are blind either willfully or ignorantly to those losses we can convince/fool ourselves into thinking that we are benefitting this world without paying a price.

Long time ago, sailors/pirates who were passing through the islands tossed the goats they were carrying in boats and picked up tortoises, because tortoises make up a better food source for longer journey than goats. Because of that activity the islands were eventually infested with non-native goats who are eating up all the vegetation in the island, this lead to a change in the ecosystem of the island causing the mist that usually gets caught up by the trees to pass right through the island, why is this important? The mist that get captured in tree leaves and branches used to drip slowly during the day which used to feed our lovely and rare species of tortoises and help them survive during dry season, with the goats flourishing in island the tortoises took a hit, that alarmed groups that care for tortoises (lets call them TG),  mostly because these rare variety tortoises live only here, no where else on the planet, but there are goats everywhere.

There are roughly a quarter million goats on these islands, there were committees, there were meetings and there was an outcome from the discussions, that’s the start of project Isabela. Isabela’s mission is to get rid of all the goats in the island to bring back our mighty tortoises, TG started shooting goats from choppers, this went on for a while but slowly goats got better at identifying the sound of chopper and they started hiding whenever they hear the noise. Then TG started capturing few goats (mostly female who are in heat) known as Judas goats, tagged them with path detection chips and let them in wild, whenever a Judas goat goes back to the herd all of them would get shot, but during this process Judas goats used to mate and get pregnant, the problem is when they are pregnant they stop to hangout with the herds and stay alone until they give birth, so its getting tough to identify the remaining herds, so they started injecting the Judas goats to be in heat but sterile and that’s how they were getting final rounds of them, when its almost at 95% eradication rate over 7 years, the local fisherman in the islands had some fight with TG on a different issue and they started putting back the goats in the islands again and killing tortoises to rebel. This issue was settled after some chaos. TG had to keep few Judas goats around just in case the problem arises again. God did it, well almost, even almighty has limitations, human stubbornness is one.

On one of the Galapagos islands, all the tortoises were extinct at least that’s what people thought for almost a century but one day a gentleman finds a single tortoise hanging out in some remote marsh and shares it with another professor, they go over to him and there he is the adorable Lonesome George, hiding from humanity. Again there is a new God, this time the goal is to revive this rare Pinta Island tortoise population, they tried everything from luring him with couple of attractive females (of course tortoises) from different island, nope George doesn’t give a dime, he didn’t care. They even tried massaging George for sperm, he is so resolute, he didn’t give in. But one day suddenly he started mating, not with just one but with both the ladies, maybe he thought we  wouldn’t leave him alone until he cooperates. TG took the eggs and took great care of them but unfortunately none of them survived, maybe that is what George wanted, to fool TG with a hope. TG couldn’t revive the Pinta species from George but surprisingly some other researcher found out there was partial Pinta DNA in other island tortoises, probably our old wandering sailors moved around different species between islands long time ago. Now there are efforts to resurrect Pinta tortoises by selective mating for these. A tough tortoise, looks like another limitation of our almighty. God must be thinking “not funny George!”.

I say this probably in all the postings but that is the right thing to do and they deserve every word of it, Radiolab team again did a fantastic job of researching and narrating this.

http://www.radiolab.org/story/galapagos/

http://www.galapagos.org/conservation/conservation/project-areas/ecosystem-restoration/project-isabela/

http://www.galapagos.org/about_galapagos/about-galapagos/lonesome-george/

 

Simple stories

We like stories, we like simple stories, often we don’t have time or access to resources to validate the merit of the story being told. We are walking, breathing pattern matching programs, we can take a nugget of news and make it a full meal, we evaluate the piece of information we receive, reach in to our vaults of memory and experience and grab the rest of the information to fill in the gaps and complete the story. In doing so sometimes and probably more than we like to admit we twist the reality, we over-estimate our predictive capacity.

Media can exploit this cognitive bias of us and often they do while reporting, they build a narrative and provide facts only relevant to their narrative, leaving the rest and that makes the consumer of this less nuanced unless they explicitly seek the bits that were left. They are pitched as this simple binary good or bad deeds. This can misguide our assessment and drive us to a contrary conclusion. If we had been present with more details and a bit more of the context our opinion might be a different one. It will be a good service to ourselves and needless to say for society if we are at least more cautious when driving our broader moral/ethical conclusions from stories that we hear or read. It is a handy tool to have a degree of skepticism when you are thrown with simple A good, B bad stories. There is always a possibility of unreliable narrator with good story building capability. And sometimes it might not be authors intension to be blind to the contrary facts. He/she suffers from same biases as we do, so they look at an event and only be able to pick up the clues that fits their pre-existing notions and they ignore other signals as just the noise.

And one more time Radio lab did it for me, navigated through a story that pitched Mr. X as this terrible human with no regard to life, news media ran with that narrative and of course social media inflated it infinitely. RL team dug deep and added more details to the story, now even if your opinion about Mr. X might not take 180 degree turn, it definitely shows you why he did what he did, what was the outcome of it. I am sure the outrage wouldn’t have been the same if those details are publicized. Media pitched him as Hunter and his defense is that he is a conservationist.

Some African countries  auction away licenses to hunt the most brutal specimen in the herd and preserve wild life, usually these individuals are past their reproduction cycle, at this point these are violent and cause destruction of the young in their own community. Instead of killing these beasts themselves, the sanctuaries outsource that activity to trophy hunters for huge price tags and they use the money to expand or maintain the conservation activity.
Now is this the most ethical way for conservation is up for debate and probably it is not and there is Professor Mr. Y who is running quite the opposite operation in Kenya for elephants conservation and he is doing it successfully as well without giving out killing licenses. He argues passionately against the other method of conservation. I think he is right if we are all purely rational beings, but we are not, any sort of social change that involves defying our primal instincts from our evolutionary past will take time and probably at some point in future majority of us will be able to agree on Mr. Y’s view, until then there are two ways of achieving the conservation goal and depending on where you were born and how you were bought up, you will be doing as X or as Y.

It might be a virtue to be cautious if not always suspicious about simple stories.

http://www.radiolab.org/story/rhino-hunter/

http://www.ted.com/talks/tyler_cowen_be_suspicious_of_stories

Shed it, It’s okay

It feels natural to associate evolution with growth and assume they are positively correlated. It easier to imagine  evolution as something that is tied in with gain of a function.

But evolution seems doesn’t really care about growth in the way we perceive it, if there is a way to keep the organism alive in a simpler configuration it doesn’t shy away from muting it or even shred it. This episode of Radiolab Shrink is about this phenomenon of evolution where an organism that is fully functional and self sustainable converted to a parasite hanging out near coolers in European hospitals by shredding genetic material or by just muting the expression of many of its genes. This phenomenon is attributed to the loss of vitamin C production in our bodies as well.

It is fascinating to watch the complexity arise from the basic building blocks. A lot of science goes into understanding this, how quarks come up with different atoms, how atoms dictate this world and beyond, how a single cell develops into a full blown organism. At the same time it is beautiful to witness when things go other way. To be more effective, we can shed some blocks and still have the essentials for survival. Corporations do this ( close down projects or sub business units ) to satisfy share holders, people do this when they are in crunch to save resources. It is good to know this inclination for minimalist approach is part of nature as well and probably a refreshing view to ponder on. There will be things that we need and things that we want, sometimes we are efficient when we only keep what we need.

People good

http://www.radiolab.org/story/grays-donation/
A moving story of an 6 day old infant who didn’t survive as a single being but because of a fantastic move by his parents, he gained multiple personas all of them just incredible across different medical research labs.

When we think about life we don’t usually think at the level of individual organs, thinking at the cellular level is even further reach. To keep us alive various organs sing and dance in harmony within us. It has been meticulously put together by evolution over millennia through trial and error, rarely some of the errors leading to big leaps in the development of an organism or even leading to a new one. While we function as a higher level organism when all the pieces are in tune, when one or few of the critical pieces bail out we stop functioning and in doing so we take down the other pieces as well. But some of the other healthy pieces can function and survive if they are out in right environment, sometimes it’s another person’s body and sometimes it’s a medical research lab.

Though tiny little Mr. Gray was an identical twin at birth he had a different fate than his sibling and he managed to survive only for 6 days. When the time came for his departure his parents decided to donate his organs and tissues for research. Can only imagine how brave and kind one must be to make that decision in what’s possibly their worst moment of their life.

After couple of years of this incident his mom decided to check how their decision has impacted if it did any. In that pursuit she visited several clinics and labs where the donations were distributed. She was moved and amazed after talking to different doctors and researchers on how the cells from her baby had helped and impacted life of others. After more than 2 years some cells were still alive and contributing to research actively.

In almost every instance with very few exceptions it feels life is being taken away from a being without its consent and it leaves with helplessness, it doesn’t seem to leave a choice to the people who were concerned about it. But stories like these and people like Gray’s family replenish hope that maybe if we could change our perspective about life as not just a monolithic blob of meat with intelligence and emotions but more as a mysterious massive collection of cells which coordinate with their neighbors to keep us alive and the misbehavior of some of the rogue ones need not kill the whole being, we can still ship some of our healthy neighbors to a better sustainable environment. What greater reward can one seek than knowing that while trying to preserve part of our loved ones, we made some other loved one’s preservation a possibility.

Tip of the hat to  Radiolab  team that do an amazing job of compiling these sorts of touching stories.