Time is the universe seeking balance.
Explanation:
Electricity is a difference in voltage trying to equalize. Diffusion is the same phenomenon in water. Weather, flight, and the wind all stem from the same phenomenon in pressurized air. Even heat flows from hot to cold. Per the laws of thermodynamics, this sets a fixed direction for time. But it is not only a phenomenon of heat; even on a philosophical scale, this is how the universe runs.
The first and second factors are of equal importance in the psyche and the same evolutionary tendencies which support survival also support culture (and all of the baggage that comes with it). This is because for a long period in our evolution the two were identical – culture was our memetic means of survival, as things like migratory flight routes were those of geese. What’s more, you can apply the same evolutionary rules and look for the same evolutionary patterns in culture as you can in biology. Some mass movements are actually excellent examples of Fisherian runaway applied to the propagation of ideas rather than genes.
Lacking science, people had no way to explain the laws of nature or why certain consequences were associated with certain actions – nevertheless, the causes and effects themselves were understood (as I said earlier, science explains cause+effect+mechanism; mysticism explains cause+effect). It was an advantage to codify the actions that allowed people to stay alive and to integrate this deep into the psyche and the theology came along for the ride as a plausible explanation, if not a particularly grounded one. The result: religious people stayed alive, non-religious people died out. This not only created a selective pressure for religion, but convinced the religious that *the unbelievers really were being punished*, strengthening the belief in the religious population as well. (So this is a trait that’s both genetically and memetically reinforced).
The reason why additional taxes get shuffled onto the rich has little to do with who “needs” the money most. The real reason: there is an 80/20 distribution of wealth but not of votes. Therefore it is politically much safer to anger the highest-earning 20% than the bottom 80% in our winner-take-all elections.
This inequity can be solved by simply allowing people to choose how their tax dollars are spent. No taxation without representation, right? Well it follows that those who are taxed more should be better represented…
While it is true that humanity is killing off species at an alarming rate, I don’t think this trend will continue indefinitely. The previous mass extinctions were driven (or at least initiated) for the most part by external events to the ecosystem, with reductions in the sustaining energy of the ecosystem and other consequences lasting for millions of years.
The rate at which we destroy ecosystems, on the other hand, is kept in check by our own population. Unless we pass some dire tipping point and cause the destruction to spiral out of our control, we will eventually hit a population limit, beyond which the planet can’t sustain us. It’s possible that we have already passed this limit; in that case, much like the current recession was caused because people borrowed money that didn’t actually exist and corrected by a return to the amount of real money left in the economy, the human population will be forced to decline, either through some sort of saturated-ecology problem (hunger is a big one; war could also be considered a limiting factor when resources become scarce) or simply through lower birth rates. Either way, the current mass extinction will not be as dire as the previous ones because, even at a faster rate of extinction, it will last for a much shorter period of time.
If I’m wrong and Earth becomes an ecumenopolis, it would instead bode well for humanity’s continuous expansion to other planets and we would nevertheless have the room to save what species remained extant.
…Barring a runaway process which takes matters entirely out of our hands. Watch those greenhouse gases!
One of the all-cause mortality reductions of vitamin D may stem from the fact that it is synthesized from a cholesterol precursor, thus removing it from the bloodstream. Supplementing would not have this benefit.
This hypothesis is testable by following a group of sunlight-synthesized vitamin D patients and comparing them against a group which receives less sunlight exposure and supplements the difference.
There are two types of traits which people refer to as “intelligence”, and two regions of the brain with their storage infrastructure: there’s the ability to draw new insights from disparate data, mediated by inductive long-term retrieval (hippocampus) and there’s the ability to draw formal and rapid mathematical/logical conclusions from existing theorems, mediated by working memory (anterior cingulate cortex).
One treatment which would probably be fairly effective to counteract an infection with an antibiotic-resistant bacterium which causes symptoms by secreting a toxin (such as pathogenic E. Coli which releases a Shiga toxin) is to induce an immune response (via immunoglobulin) against the toxin rather than the bacterium for the duration of the traditional symptomatic period. This should alleviate the symptoms as long as treatment is followed, and when the treatment ends the underlying infection will have been fought off by the immune system. Thus patients would be technically infected (and infectious) but would not exhibit symptoms caused by the toxin.
Here’s a study which demonstrates that it is possible to induce an immune response against the Shiga toxin in mice:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC321607/
I’ve been thinking of ways to produce long-term localized immunosuppression recently in order to help people with autoimmune diseases. What I’ve dreamed up this time is a device similar to a radioactive “seed” used for prostate cancer, but delivering an inhibitor of cellular signaling (take your pick of interleukins) in direct response to a high concentration of inflammatory cytokines. By carefully controlling the dose in response to environmental conditions, it should be possible to produce a strong localized immunosuppressive response without too much of the drug entering systemic circulation.
Corticosteroids aren’t an option – one challenge is to find something that can be used long-term with few side effects.
Images have texture. Sentences have texture too. Use the keyblock approach to dynamically build n-grams. ‘Nuff said.