The study, published inScience Advances, results from the collaboration between a UB team led by Cedric Boeckx, ICREA professor from the Section of General Linguistics at the Department of Catalan Philology and General Linguistics, and member of the Institute of Complex Systems of the UB (UBICS), and researchers from the team led by Giuseppe Testa, lecturer at the University of Milan and the European Institute of Oncology.

An evolutionary process similar to animal domestication

The idea of human self-domestication dates back to the 19th century. It is the claim that anatomical and cognitive-behavioral hallmarks of modern humans, such as docility or a gracile physiognomy, could result from an evolutionary process bearing significant similarities to the domestication of animals.

The key role of neural crest cells

Earlier research by the team of Cedric Boeckx had found genetic similarities between humans and domesticated animals in genes. The aim of the present study was to take a step further and deliver empirical evidence focusing on neural crest cells. This is a population of migratory and pluripotent cells - able to form all the cell types in a body - that form during the development of vertebrates with great importance in development. "A mild deficit of neural crest cells has already been hypothesized to be the factor underlying animal domestication. Could it be that humans got a more prosocial cognition and a retracted face relative to other extinct humans in the course of our evolution as a result of changes affecting neural crest cells?" asks Alejandro Andirk, PhD students at the Department of Catalan Philology and General Linguistics of the UB, who took part in the study.

To test this relationship, researchers focused on Williams Syndrome disorder, a specific human neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by both craniofacial and cognitive-behavioral traits relevant to domestication. The syndrome is a neurocristopathy: a deficit of a specific cell type during embryogenesis. In this case, neural crest cells.

In this study, researchers from the team led by Giuseppe Testa used in vitro models of Williams syndrome with stem cells derived from the skin. Results showed that the BAZ1B gene -which lies in the region of the genome causing Williams Syndrome- controls neural crest cell behavior: lower levels of BAZ1B resulted in reduced neural-crest migration, and higher levels produced greater neural-crest migration.

Comparing modern human and Neanderthal genomesResearchers examined this gene in archaic and modern human genomes. "We wanted to understand if neural crest cell genetic networks were affected in human evolution compared to the Neanderthal genomes", Cedric Boeckx said.

Results showed that that BAZ1B affects a significant number of genes accumulating mutations in high frequency in all living human populations that are not found in archaic genomes currently available. "We take this to mean that BAZ1B genetic network is an important reason our face is so different when compared with our extinct relatives, the Neanderthals," Boeckx said. "In the big picture, it provides for the first time experimental validation of the neural crest-based self-domestication hypothesis," continues.An empirical way to test evolutionary claims

These results open the road to studies tackling the role of neural crest cells in prosociality and other cognitive domains but is also one of the first examples of a potential subfield to test evolutionary claims. "This research constitutes one of the first studies that uses cutting-edge empirical technologies in a clinical setting to understand how humans have evolved since the split with Neanderthals, and establishes Williams Syndrome in particular as a unique atypical neurodevelopmental window onto the evolution of our species," Boeckx concludes.

Reference: Zanella et al. 2019.Dosage analysis of the 7q11.23 Williams region identifies BAZ1B as a major human gene patterning the modern human face and underlying self-domestication. Science Advances.DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aaw7908.

This article has been republished from the following materials. Note: material may have been edited for length and content. For further information, please contact the cited source.

View post:
A Genetic Network Sheds Light on the Evolution of the Modern Human Face - Technology Networks

Josef Stalin is reputed to have said: The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic. In the hands of New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, the deaths of thousands can be a partisan bludgeon.

A number of scholars have pondered the recent rise in deaths of despair those attributed to alcoholism, suicide and drug overdoses. Krugman sees a chance to make a crude red state/blue state comparison.

I looked at states that voted for Donald Trump versus states that voted for Clinton in 2016, and calculated average life expectancy weighted by their 2016 population. In 1990, todays red and blue states had almost the same life expectancy. Since then, however, life expectancy in Clinton states has risen more or less in line with other advanced countries, compared with almost no gain in Trump country. At this point, blue-state residents can expect to live more than four years longer than their red-state counterparts.

So, vote Democrat, live four years longer?

Krugman muses that many blue states expanded Medicaid and that obesity tends to be higher in red states. Residents of blue states also have higher levels of education. Thats about the sum of his analysis, but its enough for him to declare that the conservative diagnosis of what has gone wrong in America, i.e. that the decline of traditional values has had negative effects, is dead wrong.

Sentence first, verdict afterward said the Red Queen. Comparing red states and blue states this way is facile.

First, its essential to stress that the decline in life expectancy is a nationwide phenomenon that hits all ethnic groups and both sexes. Of the states with the worst statistics West Virginia, Ohio, New Hampshire, Maine, and Vermont three are blue states, one is red, and one is purple.

It seems dubious to assume that Medicaid expansion, which happened mostly within the past five years, could have had such a dramatic effect in so short a time. Some of the states that expanded Medicaid, like Louisiana and Alaska, have some of the highest rates of premature deaths. Only 14 states have not expanded Medicaid, and they are disproportionately poorer states in the Deep South.

We do know that these deaths of despair as Princetons Anne Case and Angus Deaton dubbed them, are the result of behaviors. Unlike in poorer countries, where impure drinking water or infectious disease takes a large toll, our premature deaths arise from drug addiction, alcohol abuse, and suicide.

Suicide is on the rise, not just among middle-aged and older Americans, but among the young as well. Between 2007 and 2017, youth suicide increased by 56%, and suicide attempts quadrupled. The prime suspect here is social media. Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter and their competitors can induce anxiety and depression among teenagers eager for peer approval. Many spend most of their waking hours unnaturally attached to screens, which deliver pleasure but also bullying and belittling. A high-school teacher noted that the cafeteria used to be the noisiest room in the school. No longer. Its now a tableau of darting fingers and uneasy eyes.

Maybe social media is not the problem. Its probably too soon to know. Human behavior is complicated. Some states have more guns than others (which contributes to suicide deaths). Some have more access to Fentanyl.

There is no debate in the literature that the decline of two-parent families is associated with poorer outcomes for children (though divorce sometimes makes adults happier). And there is emerging evidence that loneliness another effect of family breakdown has become more of a public health problem than obesity. Men raised in fatherless homes are more prone to joblessness, drug addiction and a range of other troubles than those raised by two parents. They are also more vulnerable and damaged than their sisters who are raised in the same circumstances.

Heres the twist, and the part Krugman completely missed: Many of the people in blue states who are keeping the life expectancy figures up are actually living in a traditional way, even if they vote Democrat. The college-educated upper-third in America follows bourgeois virtues. They get an education, get a job, get married and have children, in that order. The blue states are full of them. New Mexico and Alabama, not so much.

So its Krugmans partisan point scoring, not the conservative diagnosis, thats dead wrong.

Mona Charen is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Her column is distributed nationally by the Creators Syndicate.

More:
Charen: Red death, blue health? - The Winchester Star

Now this is joyous news! Ho ho ho!

Two of the biggest US earthquake faults might be linked:Provocative analysis of sea-floor cores suggests that quakes on the Cascadia fault off California can trigger tremors on the San Andreas.

But its not as if geological or seismic factors can affect human life in any significant way!

How a volcanic eruption helped create modern Scotland

***

Some quotations fromTim Keller,Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Skeptical:

The declaration that science is the only arbiter of truth is not itself a scientific finding. It is a belief. (35)

Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov sarcastically summarized the ethical reasoning of secular humanism like this: Man descended from apes, therefore we must love one another. The second clause does not follow from the first. If it was natural for the strong to eat the weak in the past, why arent people allowed to do it now? . . . Given the secular view of the universe, the conclusion of love or social justice is no more logical than the conclusion to hate or destroy. These two sets of beliefsin a thoroughgoing scientific materialism and in a liberal humanismsimply do not fit with one another. Each set of beliefs is evidence against the other. Many would call this a deeply incoherent view of the world. (4243)

The humanistic moral values of secularism are not the deliverances of scientific reasoning, but have come down to us from older times . . . they have a theological history. And modern people hold them by faith alone. (43).

If you say you dont believe in God but you do believe in the rights of every person and the requirement to care for all the weak and the poor, then you are still holding on to Christian beliefs, whether you will admit it or not. Why, for example, should you look at loveandaggressionboth parts of life, both rooted in our human natureand choose one as good and reject one as bad? They are both part of life. Where do you get a standard to do that? If there is no God or supernatural realm, it doesnt exist. (4748)

While there can be moralfeelingswithout God, it doesnt appear that there can be moralobligation. (178)

A moral judgment about something can never be made apart from an examination of its given purpose. . . . How, then, can we tell if a human being is good or bad? Only if we know our purpose, what human life isfor. If you dont know the answer to that, then you can never determine good and bad human behavior. (18687)

If your premise that there is no God leads most naturally to conclusions you know are not truethat moral obligation, beauty and meaning, the significance of love, our consciousness of being a self are illusionsthen why not change the premise? (227)

See the rest here:
Is science the only arbiter of truth? - Patheos

Stable democracies have long been tied to the cultural values of citizens. But the stability of democracies worldwide could be vulnerable if certain cultural values decline,according to anew studypublished inNature Human Behavior.

The findings by researchers from the United States and New Zealand are based on an analysis of survey data from nearly 500,000 individuals from 109 countries.

Damian Ruck, lead author on the study and postdoctoral research fellow in UTs Department of Anthropology, worked withAlex Bentley, professor of anthropology, Luke Matthews from the policy research think tank RAND, and University of Auckland psychologists Quentin Atkinson and Thanos Kyritsis to examine historical changes in countries with varying political systems over 100 years.

It is often taken for granted that democratic culture will just follow once democratic institutions have been installed, said Ruck. But when looking at the data we see cultural values, such as openness and tolerance, precede both economic development and democratization.

Where confidence in institutions such as the government and the media is low, democracy tends to be unstable. In the study, some Western nations were among those with multi-decade declines in institutional confidence.

Despite the declines in institutional confidence and growing nationalism in some Western nations, the study found a global trend toward greater openness and tolerance.

During the last century, the world has become vastly more connected, Ruck said. More of us are exposed to people with different backgrounds and lifestyles, which encourages openness and tolerance, and is good news for the future of democracy.

__

CONTACT:

Brian Canever (865-974-0937,bcanever@utk.edu)

Read the original post:
Study: The Cultural Foundations of Modern Democracies - Tennessee Today

THIS IS HAPPINESSBy Niall Williams

One of the unwritten tenets of the local poetics was that a story must never arrive at a point, or risk conclusion, says Noel Crowe, known as Noe, in the Irish writer Niall Williamss latest novel. And because in Faha time was the only thing people could afford, all stories were long, all storytellers took their, and your, and anyone elses, time, and all gave it up willingly, understanding that tales of anything as aberrant and contrary as human behavior had to be so long that they wouldnt, and in fact couldnt, be finished this side of the grave, and only for the fire going out and the birds of dawn singing might be continuing still.

While this passage is about Noes grandfathers oral storytelling practices, it also serves as an apt description of This Is Happiness. Williams has painted a lush, wandering portrait of Faha, a village back in time in County Clare, Ireland, a place also featured in his previous novel, History of the Rain, which was longlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize. History of the Rain is powerfully narrated by a young, bedridden woman who tells stories of her dead fathers life while devouring the books in his library. In this new work, the narrator, Noe, is a 78-year-old man looking back roughly 60 years to the spring of 1958, when he dropped out of the seminary after his mothers death and, full of fear and unprocessed grief, went to live with his grandparents in Faha, where hed spent time as a child. This Is Happiness is as full of detours and backward glances as it is of forward motion and as befits a novel narrated by an old man who comments that as you get toward the end, you revisit the beginning is centrally preoccupied with time itself.

Faha, as we encounter it in 1958, is a forgotten elsewhere, a place where everything has to be invented firsthand and all needs met locally. The tour Noe gives us of the town is full of pleasures: a digression on traveling encyclopedia salesmen; illuminating, often comic descriptions of the social intricacies of church and pub culture; the chemists shop with its once flood-swollen and now lifted-in-places linoleum. Even the cows get some gorgeous lines: In the fields the cattle, made slow-witted by the rain, lifted their rapt and empty faces, heavy loops of spittle hanging, as though they ate watery light.

At times, the novel reads almost like an ethnographic study of a village on the cusp of change, calling to mind John Bergers wonderful fictional trilogy Into Their Labors, set in the French Alps on the eve of industrialization. At the start of the novel, theres only one phone outside the village limits, and its in Noes grandparents home. His grandmother ritualistically prepares stationery and blotting paper to write letters to relations from County Kerry to America. The book is full of both cheerful and fatalistic waiting, whether in line at church or for a letter to arrive or for the rain to stop (or start again). As 21st-century readers, we are invited to lower ourselves into a slower kind of time; we regularly leave the central characters frozen in mid-speech to take a peek at something else.

What through-lines do emerge involve three intersecting plots: the Rural Electrification Schemes bringing of electricity to the town; the arrival of a stranger, Christy McMahon, who hopes to right a wrong from his past; and the awakening of Noes romantic desires, as played out through his hopeless crushes on all three daughters of the local doctor. We witness the brittle frailties and dogged strengths of Noe and Christy, men at very different stages of their lives who nevertheless have each others backs.

Where the books digressions sometimes bog down are in its more self-reflective moments: Noe the storyteller defending himself against charges (but whose?) of sentimentality and holding forth on the relationship between story and truth, the real and the imagined, and the enriching merits of the arts. Disarmingly, Noe is aware of his own flaws, telling us he was nicknamed Know-All as a child. Oh, just shut up and take me back to Faha, I wanted to interject at times. But I couldnt and wouldnt; hes too sweet a fellow, not to mention my elder (and a fictional character). Be kind, he admonishes the reader directly at one point, and its a testament to this bighearted novel that I felt duly chastened, almost like a member of the clan.

Read more:
Once Upon a Time in Ireland - The New York Times

Whether its your grandpas nose, your mothers eyes, or the chin the entire family share, humans depend on facial features to tell one another apart, to read emotions and intent, and to communicate with others. But why we share these features, and not others, has long remained a mystery.

Now, a new study published this week in Science Advances suggests the reason our human faces look like they do is due to a long history of accumulated genetic mutations.

Its likely this is no biological accident. The finding supports the theory of self-domestication, which is the idea that ancient people chose to mate with more docile partners and used facial appearance as clues as to who was the least aggressive.

The study argues that mutations associated with gene BAZ1B which is present in all animals drove the human face to have slimmer features than our ancient hominid peers, Neanderthals and Denisovans. It may also have played a role in the development of cooperative societies, the study suggests.

Ancient humans who carried a mutated BAZ1B gene were selected as mates more often, the study suggests passing these mutations through the population.

BAZ1B mutations affect human behavior as well as the development of craniofacial features the gene is linked to Williams syndrome, a genetic condition characterized by an highly social disposition.

The modern human face acquired its shape as an instance of mild neurocristopathy when something is off with the development of an embryos neural crest the study suggests.

The neural crest gives rise to some of the bodys most crucial cells, including those that eventually make up the craniofacial bones. The neural crest has also been linked to animal domestication, the authors tell Inverse. That led them to examine how BAZ1B in the human neural crest affects our body.

Previous work involving individuals with Williams syndrome shows that they tend to have softer facial features compared to the general population, as well as friendly dispositions. Stem cells harvested from these individuals revealed they either had duplicated or deleted BAZ1B genes, indicating that it plays a crucial role in facial features.

The researchers then examined the genotypes of one Denisovan and two Neanderthals to see how BAZ1B was expressed as compared to modern humans who do not have Williams syndrome. In the modern human sample, a subgroup of the genes regulated by BAZ1B 40 percent of the genes expressed by human neural-crest stem cells had fixed mutations in their regulatory regions, according to the study.

This suggests that BAZ1B genes play a powerful role in the evolution of the modern human face and the tendency for sociability generally found across our societies. While it may not seem it all the time, scientists generally consider us a domesticated species we co-operate and interact socially.

The findings jibe with past research suggesting Neanderthals and Denisovans dont have genes linked to domestication in humans indicating that something happened in the course of human evolution to make us more social.

While the study does add to the evidence for the self-domestication theory, it is important to consider it context of the theorys origins. The theorys first proponent, Johann Blumenbach, infamously invented the word Caucasian and placed them at the top of a hierarchical pyramid of races. These findings do not mean that facial traits can be used to define an individuals aggressiveness or any other characteristics, the authors say. Thats just the racist and sexist pseudoscience of physiognomy.

The self-domestication theory that we support claims that there might have been a process of self-selection that was based on the selection of less aggressive individuals, indirectly selecting those who had a reduced neural crest production, the team explained to Inverse in an emailed statement. The self-domestication assumptions do not refer to single individuals, but to the entire humankind.

Conditions like Williams syndrome are rare examples in which facial traits can help diagnose the condition. But personality is much more the byproduct of our interactions and environment.

In our evolutionary past, its possible that our ancestors unknowingly selected mates based on certain traits, and that led us to look distinctly human. But facial features can come in all shapes and sizes studies suggest that the wide variety of features we see today are a result of evolutionary pressure to make individuals recognizable as, well, individuals.

Abstract:

We undertook a functional dissection of chromatin remodeler BAZ1B in neural crest (NC) stem cells (NCSCs) from a uniquely informative cohort of typical and atypical patients harboring 7q11.23 copy number variants. Our results reveal a key contribution of BAZ1B to NCSC in vitro induction and migration, coupled with a crucial involvement in NC-specific transcriptional circuits and distal regulation. By intersecting our experimental data with new paleogenetic analyses comparing modern and archaic humans, we found a modern-specific enrichment for regulatory changes both in BAZ1B and its experimentally defined downstream targets, thereby providing the first empirical validation of the human self-domestication hypothesis and positioning BAZ1B as a master regulator of the modern human face. In so doing, we provide experimental evidence that the craniofacial and cognitive/ behavioral phenotypes caused by alterations of the Williams-Beuren syndrome critical region can serve as a powerful entry point into the evolution of the modern human face and prosociality.

See the article here:
"Self-domestication" may have led to the modern human face - Inverse

The choice to have children is not just a prudential or pragmatic decision, nor can it be justified by appealing to what comes naturally.

By: Christine Overall

I suspect that most people eventually ask themselves the question Why have children? at least once or twice during their lives. In contemporary Western culture, it ironically appears that one needs to have reasons not to have children, but no reasons are required to have them. People who are childless are frequently and rudely criticized and called to account for their situation. One woman who wrote about her decision not to procreate was denounced as bitter, selfish, un-sisterly, unnatural, evil. It is assumed that if individuals do not have children, it is because they are infertile, they are too selfish, or they have just not yet gotten around to it. In any case, they owe their interlocutor an explanation. They cannot merely have decided not to procreate. In contrast, no one says to a newly pregnant woman or the proud father of a newborn, Why did you choose to have that child? What are your reasons? The choice to procreate is not regarded as needing any thought or justification.

Indeed, the philosopher Rosalind Hursthouse says, Just as a special context is needed to make sense of What do you want to have health (or knowledge, or pleasure or virtue) for? so is one needed to make sense of What do you want to have children for?. Unions are blessed not cursed with issue; those who have children are favoured by fortune; the childless are unfortunate; to be unable to have children is a lack, a privation, a misfortune. In other words, Hursthouse thinks it does not make sense, outside of special contexts, to inquire into the motives or reasons for having children. This view suggests that having children is the default position; not having children is what requires explanation and justification.

These implicit assumptions are the opposite of what they ought to be. The so-called burden of proof or what I would call the burden of justification should rest primarily on those who choose to have children. That is, the choice to have children calls for more careful justification and reasoning than the choice not to have children simply because in the former case a new and vulnerable human being is brought into existence whose future may be at risk.

The lack of acknowledgment that childbearing can be a moral choice may be due to its assimilation to other processes thought to be normal parts of human life like the phenomena of falling in love or being sexually attracted to another person. These aspects of human life are often regarded as the product of drives or instincts not amenable to ethical evaluation. For example, philosopher James Lenman claims that asking why we want children is foolish, for it is partly just because were programmed that way much as we are for sex. Some people, women in particular, believe that there is a biological clock inside them that generates a deep drive to have a child. It appears to be more than a simple desire to have a child; it is felt more like a biological force and is therefore very compelling. This drive is sometimes explained in evolutionary terms: Our very biological constitution determines that we bear children. The popular press likes to refer to the existence of a supposed mommy gene. Biologist Lonnie Aarssen writes about an apparently nongendered parenting drive, which he describes as an explicit desire to have children in the future and which involves an anticipated experience of contemporaneous pleasure derived directly from real-time parenthood per se.

There are many urges apparently arising from our biological nature that we nonetheless should choose not to act upon or at least be very careful about acting upon.

The questions we should ask are whether such a desire is either immune to or incapable of analysis and why this desire, unlike virtually all others, should not be subject to ethical assessment. There are many urges apparently arising from our biological nature that we nonetheless should choose not to act upon or at least be very careful about acting upon. Even if Aarssen is correct in postulating a parenting drive, such a drive would not be an adequate reason for the choice to have a child. Naturalness alone is not a justification for action, for it is still reasonable to ask whether human beings should give in to their supposed parenting drive or resist it. Besides, the alleged naturalness of the biological clock is belied by those growing numbers of women who apparently do not experience it or do not experience it strongly enough to act upon it. As psychologist Leta S. Hollingworth wisely noted almost a century ago, There could be no better proof of the insufficiency of maternal instinct as a guaranty of population than the drastic laws which we have against birth control, abortion, infanticide, and infant desertion.

After all, human beings are thoroughly social entities. Our sheer survival means we have been socialized; we live not as individual islands, entire of ourselves, in John Donnes words, but as a part of the main, an acculturated segment of the whole that is humanity. Because we are social beings, we do not just see the world; we instead see the world as we have learned to see it and as we sometimes choose to see it. All human behavior (except perhaps simple reflex actions, such as the movement of the leg in response to a hammer tap on the knee) is a reaction to the world as perceived. Once past the age of early infancy, we do not just respond like automatons to inner promptings. Instead, what and how we perceive and feel are at least in part a function of our experience and our learning. In seeing, hearing, tasting, feeling, or smelling something, we are engaged in a process of interpretation, a process that we have gradually learned as part of our socialization into our particular culture.

The inevitability of interpretation applies to our inner as well as our external environment. For example, if I experience a certain fluttering in my midsection, I may variously interpret it as anxiety, fear, anticipation, happiness, or just the need for a snack. Whatever inner promptings we may experience, they always already contain a social message, and they are always already open to reinterpretation. This description applies to the desire to have a child. Because of the inevitability of interpretation, it does not make sense to blame or credit instinct as the source of behaviors such as having children.

If we fail to acknowledge that the decision whether to have children is a real choice that has ethical import, then we are treating childbearing as an unavoidable fate and a mere expression of biological destiny. Instead of seeing having children as something that women do, we will continue to see it as something that simply happens to women or as something that is merely natural. But whatever our biological inclinations may be, we do have some control over our fertility, and the rapidly declining birthrate in most parts of the world is evidence of that fact.

If we fail to acknowledge that the decision whether to have children is a real choice that has ethical import, then we are treating childbearing as an unavoidable fate and a mere expression of biological destiny.

But there are many things about having children that one cannot know until one actually has them. It might therefore be argued that one cannot know what a childless life will be like until one commits to living it. Given the unknowability of the outcomes of a decision to have a child or not have a child, it may seem unfair to elevate the decision to the level of ethics.

However, many significant ethical decisions are similar to this particular decision: We cannot know or know well all the possible outcomes of the choices we consider. Some things do just have to be experienced. Nonetheless, the indeterminate results of human freedom do not relieve us of the responsibility to consider carefully the moral aspects of our decisions. Moreover, although our own experiences of and reactions to having a child or remaining childless may be difficult to predict, it is possible to observe the effects on other people who have made those decisions. We are surrounded by people who have had children or have chosen not to. As with many important life decisions, we can learn something about the nature of the choices by observing others who have already made them. So the difficulty of making the choice whether to have a child or not and the unknowability of the outcome in ones own case do not preclude seeing procreation as an ethical decision.

Nevertheless, it might be objected that the question whether to reproduce or not is merely prudential, not ethical that it is like other major life decisions, such as whom to marry (or whether to marry), where to live, what career to choose, and so on. These decisions affect primarily the choosers welfare; hence, they are not inherently ethical issues.

But virtually every area of human life has ethical dimensions, including seemingly pragmatic choices of what to eat, what form of transportation to use, how to heat or cool ones home, and so on. We can no longer assume that so-called private life is only personal and therefore in principle immune to ethical examination. Questions about choosing whether to have children are of course prudential in part; that is, they are in part practical in nature, and they are concerned about what is or is not in ones own interests. But they are also ethical questions, for they are about whether to bring a person (in some cases more than one person) into existence and that person cannot, by the very nature of the situation, give consent to being brought into existence. Such questions therefore profoundly affect the well-being both of existing persons (the potential parents, siblings, grandparents, and all the other people with whom the future child may interact) and of potential persons.

Children are both vulnerable and dependent; they will have a lifelong emotional interdependence with their parents. Procreation decisions are about whether to take on responsibility for a new life or new lives. Questions about choosing to procreate are also closely tied to how we define our own lives and how we interact with our social and physical environments.

These decisions also have profound implications for the community or communities in which we live. Philosopher Mianna Lotz argues, There exists a (generally unacknowledged) distinctly collective interest in procreation being undertaken with a seriousness, intent and purposiveness that reflects and expresses concern or regard for the moral community itself, understood at its broadest level as comprising both moral agents and moral subjects. This collective interest requires us to relinquish our relatively recent yet now widespread preoccupation with procreation as principally, even exclusively, a private and individual matter. Questions of procreative morality are not posed exclusively within the sphere of private individual morality or the procreatorchild relationship, but always fall also within the scope of collective morality.

When it comes to choosing whether to have children or not, there is a moral right and wrong to the choice, or at least a moral better and worse.

Lotz suggests several possible explanations of why our specific reasons for procreating matter morally. One possibility is that our reasons are predictive of the quality of parenting, and derivatively of the quality of life or welfare of the future child. However, Lotz says, the empirical information available does not suggest much of a connection between procreative motivations and parenting capacity. Instead, factors such as parental mental ill health, domestic violence, alcohol and drug misuse, and socioeconomic deprivation better predict bad parenting, including the abuse and neglect of children.

But notice that some of these factors might in certain cases also affect parental motivations. For example, a woman who is the target of domestic violence might want to have a child because of the illusion that doing so will eliminate the abuse. Or a woman who is addicted to alcohol might think that having a child will somehow help her to stop drinking. Because children generally do not solve their parents problems, the implausibility of these reasons suggests that a motive for procreation might in some cases predict potential problems in how the child is treated. That is, some parental motivations might be indirect predictors of bad parenting. (In my book, I argue that at least one motivation for parenting the quest for a savior sibling for an existing child who is ill does have a substantial effect on how the new baby will be treated.) More generally, we cannot be indifferent to the potential implications of procreative motives for parenting behavior.

A more plausible explanation, Lotz says, for why our reasons for having children matter lies in what children express: the meaning or message (whether it is intended or not) that is conveyed by ones procreative motivation, whether it is conveyed to family members, to people outside the family, or even to the child herself. I agree that our procreative motivations may have this signaling effect. And even if this particular effect is small, our motives for procreating (or not) remain morally significant for the other reasons I have suggested. When it comes to choosing whether to have children or not, there is a moral right and wrong to the choice, or at least a moral better and worse.

Although choosing to have children or not to have children may involve many feelings, motives, impulses, memories, and emotions, it can and should also be a subject for careful reflection. Whereas in the past procreation was not a matter to which womens will or ideas or decisional capacity had much application, now it is something that women can potentially control, that they can make truly their own. As Lori Leibovich points out in her book Maybe Baby, Couples can opt out of parenthood, women can have children into their fifties, single women can procreate on their own, and gays and lesbians can start families or not. All of the old rules about childbearing no longer apply. Moreover, the decision whether to have a biologically related child or not is one that may be made repeatedly over a period of years. Many women (and men) do not simply choose once and for all whether to become parents; rather, they make decisions about their life goals and parenting plans on several occasions, including during pregnancy itself.

As philosopher Diana Tietjens Meyers observes, When asked why they want or dont want to have children, most people are flummoxed. Highly articulate individuals lose their fluency, grope for words, and stumble around, seizing on incompatible explanations and multiplying justifications. On its face, choosing whether to have children may not seem like the sort of decision that is deserving or even capable of analysis. That doesnt mean it isnt.

Christine Overall is Professor Emerita of Philosophy and University Research Chair in the Department of Philosophy at Queens University, Kingston, Ontario. She is the author of, among other books, Why Have Children?, from which this article is adapted.

Read the rest here:
Why Choosing to Have Children Is an Ethical Issue - The MIT Press Reader

Soumya Balasubramanya and David Stifel

In an era of climate change, countries in the MENA region are increasingly prone to droughts facing 4c increase in future with 50% increase in the chance of drought. Moreover, in the absence of reduced green house gas emissions, droughts are expected to result in losses of 14% of regional GDP by 2050. To better understand the risk factors and the effects of drought in the region, IWMI conducted a survey of 400 commercial fruit farms in Jordan, one the most water-scarce countries in the world. Jordan is heavily dependent on groundwater, which is being rapidly depleted (~1 meter per year), and frequent droughts are increasing this dependence. The IWMI survey finds that of the almost 60% of the farms that faced severe water shortages in the last 10 years, 84% experienced production losses, 57% lost income, and 60% reduced the areas that they cultivated in order to cope with water shortages.

Farmers in the MENA region are being encouraged to adopt water-saving technologies such as drip systems, pressure-compensating pipes, and soil moisture sensors to not only adapt to drought conditions, but to also reduce groundwater depletion and improve its quality by reducing the need to extract water. These are important strategies that are necessary to reduce groundwater use, but they are unlikely to work on their own. IWMIs study in Jordan finds that 90% of farms already use drip systems, and that a majority of these are new. Yet, groundwater depletion continues apace. While the use of pressure-compensating pipes and soil sensors is low and can be increased, evidence suggest that the real problem is irrigation-related behaviors, practices and beliefs about groundwater.

In terms of behaviors, the IWMI study finds that a significant share of Jordanian farmers over-irrigate their crops. Similar to what is observed in other MENA countries, 25% of Jordanian farmers who faced severe water shortages irrigated their trees daily to reduce the risk of crop failure, compared to 14% of farms that had not faced such shortages. Moreover, a third of farmers reported that they irrigated when they felt the need to. Paradoxically, watering fruit trees every day or at improper times during the crop cycle reduces yields, and thus incomes. In order to address these behaviors, authorities need to design and deliver quality irrigation advisory services for farmers and seize the potential of the increased availability of water data and big data tools to catalyze change.

In terms of beliefs, farmers in the IWMI study, especially those who had yet to experience severe water shortages, are generally unaware of groundwater systems and how human behavior contributes to the depletion of groundwater. Farmers who had faced severe water shortages in the previous decade believe that there is only a 58% chance that groundwater levels will fall in the next five years, and a 61% chance that their farm incomes will be lower in the near future. Farmers who had yet to experience such shortages are even less aware. They believe that there is only a 35% chance that groundwater levels will rapidly fall, and a 37% chance that their farm incomes will be lower. These beliefs about groundwater are not particular to Jordan, and have been observed in other MENA countries. Authorities need to provide nudges to sensitize farmers to the links between groundwater use and depletion, and between groundwater use and pumping costs and incomes and shift from centralise to decentralise water management and governance

These results indicate that adopting water-saving technology is not enough on its own to stem groundwater depletion in the MENA region. Publicly-supported programs that provide irrigation advisory services and informational nudges that correct perceptions and beliefs are needed as well. Since farmers in the IWMI study rely on other farmers for agronomic information, and since farmers with large holdings (60+ hectares) who have faced severe water shortages view government agencies as trusted sources of information, these latter farmers may serve as a point of entry as lead-farmers who can share facts and information on improved practices to others in their networks.

Soumya Balasubramanya is Research Group Leader in Economics at the International Water Management InstituteCGIAR. David Stifel is Professor of Economics at Lafayette College, and currently a Sabbatical Research Fellow at the International Water Management InstituteCGIAR.

This publication was made possible partly through the support of the Office of Science and Technology, Bureau for the Middle East, U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), under the terms of Award No. AID-ME-IO-15-003. Additional support came from Mercy Corps Jordan, through their USAID-funded program Water Innovations Technologies (Cooperative Agreement #AID-278-A-17-00002, CFDA # 98.001 between USAID and Mercy Corps Jordan).

The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. Agency for International Development, or of Mercy Corps Jordan.

Read this article:
Change in behaviour needed for improved drought management in Jordan and the MENA region - Jordan - ReliefWeb

This color-coded map shows global surface temperature anomalies. Higher-than-normal temperatures are shown in red, and lower-than-normal temperatures are shown in blue.

The computer models used over the past five decades to predict the impact of future global warming have turned out to be very accurate so far, a new study has found.

Climate scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and NASA evaluated climate models from the early 1970s into the late 2000s to see how well they predicted the actual global mean surface temperature, based on levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

They also looked at how well the models matched the relationship between warming and changes in levels of greenhouse gases.

Of the 17 climate projections examined, 14 effectively matched observations after they were published, according to the study published Wednesday in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

(MORE: Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions Projected to Set Another Record This Year)

Estimating how much greenhouse gas will be emitted in the future is difficult because it involves human behavior, how well the economy is doing and government policy. Rolling back emission regulations on new cars, for example, adds more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

"We did not focus on how well their crystal ball predicted future emissions of greenhouse gases, because that is a question for economists and energy modelers, not climate scientists," Zeke Hausfather, a UC Berkeley doctoral student and lead author of the study, said in a news release. "It is impossible to know exactly what human emissions will be in the future. Physics we can understand, it is a deterministic system; Future emissions depend on human systems, which are not necessarily deterministic."

So, according to Gizmodo's Earther blog, the researchers put the actual amount of global greenhouse emissions into the models to see if they would accurately predict global temperature rise since the models were created.

That found the models were quite accurate.

"The earliest models were so skillful because the fundamental science behind the greenhouse effect and global warming is well established and fairly straightforward," Henri Drake, a co-author of the study and an MIT doctoral student, told Mashable.

"The real message is that the warming we have experienced is pretty much exactly what climate models predicted it would be as much as 30 years ago," Hausfather said. "This really gives us more confidence that today's models are getting things largely right as well."

The Weather Companys primary journalistic mission is to report on breaking weather news, the environment and the importance of science to our lives. This story does not necessarily represent the position of our parent company, IBM.

See the article here:
Nailed It: Early Climate Models Have Accurately Predicted Effects of Global Warming, Study Finds - The Weather Channel

Within the next 30 years, the number of Americans living with Alzheimers Disease will likely grow by an estimated 240 percent. By the end of that 30-year mark, the disease and other dementias will cost the United States nearly $1.1 trillion. In seniors, it kills more patients than breast cancer and prostate cancer combined. Every 65 seconds, a person in the U.S. develops Alzheimers, according to the Alzheimers Association. But how has research into this disease changed over the years, how has the University shaped this research and where is it leading to now?

Over the past ten years, there have been significant advances made in the understanding of and approach to a disease that currently has no cure. This past September, the University received the largest federal grant in its history to research care for Alzheimers disease as part of this effort.

Alzheimers disease, or what may be more accurately referred to as a syndrome because its cause is unknown, is a form of dementia a mental condition characterized by issues in cognitive functioning and difficulties with daily activities.

Early treatments for Alzheimers Disease

There are at least two distinctions of AD: clinical and pathological. Clinical syndrome AD specifically refers to individuals with symptoms of dementia. In contrast, pathological Alzheimers refers to the phenomena of amyloid plaques and tau neurofibrillary tangles in the brain, both characterized by buildups of their respective proteins. Traditionally, pathological AD is identified post-mortem, or after death; but over the past ten years, two newer techniques that can identify pathological AD in living people have been created: PET scans and lumbar punctures. In recent years, researchers have begun exploring a third and more accessible test a blood screen.

More recently, people have also associated mutations in three specific genes as predictors of AD. But in an article published this year in Nature, Assistant Professor of Opthalmology Joseph Arboleda-Velasquez at Harvard Medical School and his group showed that there may be a mutation that can delay the progression of AD.

Over the years, the way people have thought about the underlying pathology of AD has evolved. In the 1990s, people believed that it was caused by a deficiency in neurotransmission how nerves communicate in the brain. Then, researchers began thinking that it was amyloid plaques that caused the disease, and that these plaques would build up for years before an individual was finally diagnosed. In a clinical trial known as the A4 study, coordinated at the University of Southern California, researchers tested an anti-amyloid therapy, but it failed clinically. Scientists have theorized that perhaps this failure was caused because the patients were treated too late to counteract the disease.

The last decade in research at Brown and the greater University community

Brian Ott, professor of neurology at the University and director of the Alzheimers Disease and Memory Disorders Center, managed a clinical site used for the testing of Tacran, the first drug to clinically succeed for Alzheimers treatment. Tacran targeted the deficiencies in neurotransmission, one of the early hypothesized causes of AD. All of a sudden, people saw Alzheimers as something that was treatable, Ott said. Unfortunately, Tacran has since been found to be toxic to the liver.

Ott also conducted clinical trials for Memantine, which is the last Alzheimers drug to have been approved by the FDA in the last 16 years. Memantine blocks NMDA, a receptor found in nerve cells. While Memantine appears to be safe for human use, it only targets explicit symptoms of dementia and does not actually prevent the diseases progression. Memantine is one of only two types of currently approved treatments.

Earlier this year, Ott and his team collaborated with the lab run by William Heindel, professor of cognitive, linguistic and psychological sciences at the University, in a large, controlled clinical trial. Their research showed that transcranial magnetic stimulation, which uses magnetic fields to stimulate neurons and is often used to treat depression, could potentially also treat dementia.

Currently, TMS is approved for the treatment of Alzheimers disease in various countries in Europe and Asia but not the U.S., Ott said.

In 2013, University researchers began clinical trials for the drug Aducanumab at the Rhode Island and Butler Hospitals in coordination with biotechnology company Biogen. Named the EMERGE clinical trials, these tests administered high doses of anti-amyloid treatment, similar to the A4 trials. Aducanumab is being submitted to the FDA in 2020 for approval for what may be the first disease-modifying Alzheimers treatment since 2003. But scientists remain wary, given that only one of their two clinical trials showed success.

Recent advances in improving Alzheimers care

Stephen Salloway, professor of neurology and psychiatry and human behavior at Alpert Medical School and director and establisher of the Memory and Aging program at Butler Hospital, has conducted more than 100 clinical trials on AD and related disorders. The cost of care for Alzheimers is already greater than that of cancer and heart diseases, taking to account formal and informal costs, Salloway said.

About four years ago, Salloways program became the first to perform an infusion using an antibody that targeted beta amyloid to try to prevent AD. Unfortunately, the clinical trial was not successful, but it does have implications for future research.

At the community level, Salloway and his program are organizing prevention swab parties all around the state. These swab parties allow people to swab their cheeks; the research team can then use genetic tests to identify Alzheimers risk genes. If someone tests positive for any of the risk genes, they become eligible to participate in research studies.

In 2011, Ott received a grant from the National Institutes of Health to start the Rhode Island Alzheimers Prevention Registry. Families can sign up for these registries, and they are sent monthly newsletters and announcements for recruitment to prevention-related studies. Butler Hospital also has a prevention registry run by Salloway that allows people to sign up for studies and receive updates on current research. These registries are important venues to reach out to the public, Salloway said.

More recently, the Carney Institute of Brain Science has made it a greater priority for the University to study diseases like Alzheimers. With increased funding, the Institute has been able to recruit more faculty, including Yu-Wen Alvin Huang, assistant professor of molecular biology, cell biology and biochemistry. Huang came from a Stanford Nobel Laureate lab and is developing a chip brain model to study AD signaling pathways. This year, the University also opened the Institute for Translational Neuroscience, which aims for scientists who work in clinical and lab settings to work together on brain disease-oriented research.

Largest federal grant in University history

This past September, the University was awarded a $53 million grant for Alzheimers research, which will be co-led by Vincent Mor, professor of health services, policy and practice. Mor conducts his public health research in nursing homes where 70 percent of his research population has dementia. Over the past ten years, he has seen dementia research generally move from observational work to more intervention-based studies.

In an early project, Mor examined whether there was a relationship between the amount of money spent to fund nursing homes and the self-reported experiences of their residents. The study showed that more money correlated to a decrease in self-reported negative experiences.

In an ongoing project, Mor has been studying music and memory in an effort to create personalized music for people with advanced stages of Alzheimers. He hopes these programs can be implemented in nursing home settings to reduce treating patients with antipsychotic drugs. As a public health professional, Mor explains that just as public health focuses on the population, we focus on the population of people with dementia. When we have that information, we can identify things that work for the (entire) population, not just a handful of subjects.

The $53 million grant will fund projects across the country like the one completed by Mor and his team in nursing homes.

The notion that you can take existing, large administrative data collected by providers and turn it into a data system to test outcomes in a large population base is being used more in the field, Mor said.

Read more:
The last 10 years in Alzheimer's research: No cure, but care improves - The Brown Daily Herald