OCCASIONAL REPORTS FROM THE REALM OF PARASITES

I continue to read Claude Combes' fascinating book, The Art of Being a Parasite, just now finishing chapter four ["The Profession of Host."]  Combes goes on for quite a long time about research done in Switzerland on the various ways in which the species Paris Major responds to the infestation of an endemic endoparasite of the genus plasmodium [for those of you who are really clued in, yes, this is the same genus to which belongs the parasite that causes malaria in humans.]  Parus Major is the scientific name for the Great Tit, and after spending more than an hour [it is a slow read] with the doings of the Great Tit, it occurred to me to wonder what this bird actually looks like.  Wikipedia supplied the answer.  It is a tiny multi-colored bird maybe five inches long.  All this fuss for a bird that would fit comfortably in a child's hand.   There is something truly wonderful about real science.

By the way, Combes observes that human beings are far and away the friendliest hosts for parasites, providing shelter and a meal for more parasites of every variety than any other species.  A dubious distinction.

One more nice tidbit.  For a long time, scientists thought that humans acquired some well-known parasites [a tapeworm among others] from cows and pigs back when they succeeded in domesticating them.  Not so  The ancestors of modern homo sapiens picked these buggers up on the African savanna from wild predators, and in turn gave them to their newly domesticated farm animals!  It hardly seems fair.

THE SORCERER'S APPRENTICE

Readers of a certain age [which is to say, eighty or so] may recall, as I do, the original showing of Disney's great animated feature-length film Fantasia.  One of the eight segments is described this way by Wikipedia:  "The Sorcerer's Apprentice.  Based on Goethe's 1797 poem "Der Zauberlehrling".  Mickey Mouse, the young apprentice of the sorcerer Yen Sid, attempts some of his master's magic tricks but doesn't know how to control them."

I thought of that film classic today as I contemplated the latest disarray of the Republican Party.  The Koch Brothers and their fellow sorcerers set loose the Tea Party apprentices, and now find themselves unable to tame their creation, which has gotten away from them.  The Koch Brothers make their money from oil, especially from expensive production techniques like the extraction of oil from oil sands.  The price of oil is extremely sensitive to fluctuations in the world economy, and any serious downturn weakens demand, rapidly dropping the price of crude and thereby taking enormous sums of money from the pockets of the Kochs.  It is hardly surprising therefore that they are now trying to back away as fast as they can from the reckless talk of their Apprentices, who are quite unconcerned by the prospect of a default by the U.S. Treasury.

The Disney film was intended for young audiences, what with ballet dancing hippos dressed in tiny tutus.  So the Mickey Mouse episode turns out well in the end when the Sorcerer returns and puts things to rights.  Unfortunately for all of us, Walt Disney is not directing the present fiasco.

YET AGAIN

Close readers of my entire oeuvre [if, indeed, there is anyone in the world who answers to that description] will know that one of my all-time favorite philosophical passages is the exchange in the Gorgias in which an exasperated Callicles complains, "Socrates, you always keep saying the same thing over and over again !", to which Socrates replies, "Not only that, Callicles, but on the same subjects, too."  [490E]  We are all aware that bloggers have their hobby horses, and the pressure of writing something every single day makes those emphases ever more evident.  Markos Moulitsos at The Daily Kos can be counted on to take note of local elections around the country, no matter how obscure.  Andrew Goodman seems to care principally about religion and beards.  Now, I do my best to range broadly over the universe of possible topics [leaving to one side, to be sure, Miley Cyrus and the Kardashians], but I have noticed a tendency to come back to certain subjects perhaps more than the interest of my readership warrants [I mean, does anyone except Goodman really care about beards?]

One of my lesser obsessions is the necessity, when speaking about the validity of Neo-Darwinism and related issues, of actually taking more than a cursory look at the actual science being done by real practitioners in the field.  This was the thrust of my criticism of Tom Nagel's new book, and just last Saturday, I posted a comment I had sent to my sister on the book I am reading about parasites [The Art of Being a Parasite, by Claude Combes.]

I continue to make my way very slowly through the book, which is, in fact, only 250 pages long, and on virtually every page I encounter astonishing examples of the endless adaptability of living things.  Let me give just two examples from the hundreds that Combes details.  The subject, remember, is parasites, of which there are innumerable species.  Apparently it is quite common for a parasite to go through two or even three hosts during its life cycle, moving from host to host when the second host eats the first host and the third host eats the second.  There is a parasite that starts life inside a mollusk, moves on when a fish eats the mollusk,  and completes its life journey in a bird that eats the fish.  In order to improve its chances of finding that third host [so to speak -- there is no intentionality or even knowledge here, only endless variation and natural selection], the parasite excretes a molecule that alters the expression of certain genes in the fish, with the result that the physical appearance of the fish changes, making it more likely to become the target of a bird looking for a meal. 

In another case that Combes details, a parasite makes its way into the blood stream of its first host, and in order to move on to its intermediate host, a mosquito, must be in the peripheral blood vessels near the surface of the skin, so that a bite by the mosquito has a good chance of incorporating the parasite, which will then be passed on to its final host when the mosquito bites it in turn.  But the mosquitoes in question only bite at dawn or dusk, so the parasite must migrate from the interior blood vessels to the peripheral ones at the right time of day in order to maximize its chances of making the essential leap to the mosquito.

Think for a moment about the process, carried on through innumerable life cycles of the parasite, in which random variations and mutations get selected by the mechanism Darwin first described, eventually establishing this pattern.  And remember that since there is, Nagel to the contrary notwithstanding, no teleology in nature, each intermediate change leading to the final extraordinary adaptation must itself have some differential survival value that can be selected for.

Scientists like Combes are like old vaudeville comedians.  "You liked that story?  I've got a million of them!"  And so he does.  To be sure, he arranges them thematically, illustrating them with splendid drawings, but down deep Combes, like many research scientists, is a connoisseur of the minutiae of the endless variety of species adaptations.  I think of him as having the same sort of sensibility as the great American historian Leon Litwack, whose brilliant book, Been in the Storm so Long, is an endless feast of individual detailed accounts of the responses of former slaves to the experience of liberation.

By all means argue about the Big Questions -- Is Neo-Darwinism Dead?  But before you do, immerse yourself in books like the Combes and really taste, savor, enjoy the diversity of living things.  And when you come to make your arguments, pair every theoretical claim with some specific examples and see whether those claims sound as plausible in the presence of Nautilus snails, nematode worms, or parasitic Microphallus trematodes [yes, Microphallus means what you think it means, although inasmuch as we are talking about little buggers a centimeter or two in length, it is a little hard to imagine what a Macrophallus could possibly be.]

MOVIE NEWS

Susie and I saw Gravity last weekend, the new Sandra Bullock George Clooney movie, and enjoyed it [it is really a bravura solo performance by Bullock, although Clooney is, as always, charming.]  I will assume everyone knows what it is about.  I was very amused to read that a number of critics have caviled at some minor violations of scientific fact in the movie [two big ones:  the space capsule Bullock and Clooney are working on is hit by debris from a broken up communications satellite, even though in the real world those two orbit at very different heights above the earth; and when Clooney lets go of Bullock, thereby condemning himself to death but allowing her to save herself, he acts as though the line she is loosely tethered to won't withstand the tug of her pulling him toward her, even though in space, the slightest pull of her fingers would move him in her direction.]

What amused me was that these are the same reviewers who routinely take seriously, and ask us to take seriously also, movies about vampires and the walking dead, not to mention movies about honest patriotic politicians.  I mean, really!

Anyway, it is a fun movie -- not very deep.  We saw it in 3-D, which adds virtually nothing so far as I could see save for three bucks per ticket to the price.

A PROPOS BRAD DE LONG

I first encountered Brad De Long at the ill-fated fiftieth anniversary for Social Studies at Harvard, where I broke a lance, as they say, in the matter of honoring the odious Martin Peretz [regular readers may recall my discussion of that affair.]  De Long was on the program. 

CONFIRMATION

Jerry Fresia, who comments on this blog from time to time, sent me this link to a first-rate piece by Joan Walsh along the lines of my explanation of why the Tea Partiers hate Obama so hysterically.  She goes back as far as the Southern Strategy that elected Nixon and Reagan and the Bushes.  I recommend it as a supplement to my historical account.

TAKEN TO THE WOODSHED

The distinguished Berkeley economist and active blogger Brad De Long took me to task on his blog two days ago.   [I actually have De Long's blog bookmarked, but I discovered this while idly Googling myself at 5:30 this morning.]  Here is the beginning of his entry:

"Robert Paul Wolff on Paul Samuelson on Karl Marx: Thursday Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot-Bang-Query-Bang-Query Weblogging

Robert Paul Wolff:

Eventually, it became possible for the shallow and vulgar technicians of the neoclassical synthesis to dismiss Marx entirely as an economist, trivialising him, in Paul Samuelson’s famous jibe, as a “minor post-Ricardian” and an “autodidact.”

Anybody think that Robert Paul Wolff actually read Paul Samuelson's AEA Presidential Address, and set out to fairly summarize its view of Marx to his readers? Anybody? Anybody? Bueller?"

I think I get the Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot part [that, I assume, is a clever way of writing WTF, which, for those of you even more clueless than I, is modern shorthand for "what the fuck."]  But maybe somebody can help me out with Bang-Query-Bang-Query.

First things first.  De Long is dead right.  I had never  read the AEA address from which my quote came until this morning -- De Long reproduces it, or at least a lengthy segment of it, right after the above.  Indeed, the only extended thing I have ever read by Samuelson is his famous textbook, and that in whichever edition was current in 1954 when I was a traveling student in Oxford, England.  So, full points to De Long.  I promise not to snark at any more neo-classical icons without first checking my sources.

By the way, I did not start the snarking.  Here is Samuelson, near the end of the segment of the speech reproduced by De Long:  "So far I have been talking about Marx as an economist. And I have been doing my best, subject to truth, to find some merit in him. (You may recall Emerson's neighbor in Concord: when he died the minister tried to find something to say at the funeral eulogy and ended up with, "Well, he was good at laying fires.")"

Let him who is without sin, and all that.

De Long concludes his brief roasting of me with these words: 

"I find it ironic that everything RPW wrote about Marx's economics was anticipatorily refuted by Samuelson in the sentence:

he did not labor over a labor theory of value in order to give us moderns scope to use matrix theory on the "transformation" problem."

Well, that does not come close to representing accurately what I have to say about Marx, but I am not in the same league with Samuelson, so I cannot expect De Long to do due diligence on me in the way I should have done on Samuelson.

De Long's Wikipedia entry describes him as a neo-liberal, and lists Milton Friedman among others as influences on him.  I ought not to be too surprised that he casts a basilisk eye on Marx.

I am delighted and rather surprised that De Long said anything at all about what I have written on Marx [and why now, for heaven's sake?].  As they say in show business, so long as he spelled my name right.