It’s genetics and game theory. Extant species, with a few notable exceptions (think degenerate obligatory parasites), have a reservoir of adaptability to handle extremes in environment, including such extremes as war, famine, pestilince and religion.

At least I think the 4th horseman is religion, I forget.

The point is, almost all the outliers of human behavior are expressions of the possibilities inherent in the human genome. They are there because some time in the last 500 million years or so, they (or their precursor behaviours) worked. They allowed survival.

The real question is how to we keep rampant republicanism in check? If roughly 1/3 of the population expresses the republican gene, how is it that the other 2/3rds of us are so ineffective at combatting this unfortunate genetic trait?

Jake

I always meant to post on this vivid article from the New Yorker on CCD:

Van Engelsdorp, who is thirty-seven, has a bearish build, thinning blond hair, and deep-set blue eyes. He lives in the woods about thirty miles west of Harrisburg, in a one-room cabin with an unheated porch that he sleeps on year-round. Like many people who started to hear from Hackenberg last fall, van Engelsdorp wasn’t initially very concerned. He figured that the problem had to do with mites or—much the same thing—with one of the many diseases, like deformed-wing virus, that the mites transmit. (The fact that Hackenberg hadn’t found any dead bees was odd, but sick honeybees often leave the hive to expire.) What convinced him otherwise was slicing up some bees that Hackenberg brought from Florida.

Normally, if you cut open a bee its innards, viewed under a microscope, will appear white. Hackenberg’s bees were filled with black scar tissue. They seemed to be suffering not so much from any particular ailment as from just about every ailment. “There was just so much wrong with them,” van Engelsdorp recalled. “And there weren’t any mites.”

After more beekeepers began reporting problems, van Engelsdorp started travelling around the country, collecting samples. Some he preserved in alcohol, for his own lab; others he put on dry ice, to be sent out for more sophisticated molecular tests. (Soon, he was so overwhelmed by samples that he had to hire an assistant, whose job consists entirely of conducting bee autopsies.) When the molecular tests were performed, by entomologists at Penn State, they con-firmed van Engelsdorp’s initial impression. The bees were infected with just about every bee virus known, including deformed-wing virus, sac-brood virus, and black-queen-cell virus, and also by various fungi and bacteria. In addition, genetic analysis revealed the presence of new pathogens, never before sequenced. Such was the level of infection that van Engelsdorp and other researchers concluded that the bees’ immune systems had collapsed. It was as if an insect version of AIDS were sweeping through the hives.

Makes you think….

One could think of the separation of powers, with “ambition counteracting ambition,” as our Republic’s immune system. The only question is if the Republicans have compromised it so greatly that recovery will not be possible…

We. Are. Going. To. Die. We must restore hope in the world. We must bring forth a new way of living that can sustain the world. Or else it is not just us who will die but everyone. What have we got to lose? Go forth and Fight!—Xan

with an if and a trail of dots.

Friday afternoon, I’m weary and not up to solving the whole (R) versus (D) - or is there any versus to speak of? - problem, just wanted to contribute some good news to lighten everyone’s heart a bit.

Honeybees have a disease, and they will survive. Made my day.

We can come back to the human genetic behavioral variance selection issue later if you like, tomorrow perhaps when I’m rested. Until then, though, what makes you think only 1/3 are carriers? Between authoritarian/violence leaders and followers it appears to me to be a whole lot more that that.

Sorry to read about your friend, been there, everyone gets hurt, on and on and on. So sad, especially the poor little children.

And I am glad about the bees - but it makes you wonder why it was suddenly ok to import bees from another continent. I mean, it’s not like the last bee import from Africa worked out so well.

The children. They always pay.

Jake

I am and too literal and lacking in subtlety and a whole long list of inadequacies, alas.

Assume there was money to be made from importing the bees, there will be a Republican involved somewhere along the line.

Pity for the children but do try and keep a little distance, tough I know. I went and fell in love with and married my abused lady friend and there’s a long nightmare of a story involving lots of lawyers, guns and money. No way to know in the end if it made anything better for anyone compared to however else it may have gone without my involvement, although I did get a loving daughter out of the deal. Be careful for yourself in this mess, too.

I know that from past experience. Although to paraphrase something I can’t quite remember, experience means that I when I make a mistake I made before, I recognize it. :)

Jake