text:
Posts Tagged 'evolution'
Pinning down meiosis: sperm, mainly
the reassortment of DNA during meiosis 1
Canto: Not very long ago I was reading Carl Zimmer's book She has her mother's laugh, and he was explaining meiosis. It was exciting, because I think I understood it. Being a regular science reader I'd read about meiosis and mitosis before but I could never remember, or perhaps I never clearly knew, the difference. But this time was different, and I thought 'Yes!', or maybe 'Eureka!' sounds better, because not only did I get it, or thought I did, but I thought 'this is a new weapon against those who say they don't believe in evolution'. There's a fellow-teacher at my college who actually says this, but I've never really confronted her on it, apart from some mutterings.
Jacinta: So please explain yourself. Meiosis and mitosis are about cell division aren't they?
Canto: Well I can't explain myself, but at the time I thought 'here'a new one-word response to those who say they don't believe in evolution'. The other one-word responses being 'genes', 'genetics', 'genomics' and other variants. Well okay, I can give a partial explanation. Most everyone believes in evolution, that's why they use smart phones rather than the earlier types of mobile phones or landlines or whatever. That's why they use dishwashers and modern washing machines and modern computers, and drive modern cars instead of a horse-and-carriage, because evolution just means progressive development. What my fellow-teacher really should be saying is she doesn't believe in the Darwin-Wallace theory of natural selection from random variation, but she doesn't say that because I strongly suspect she doesn't have a clue what that means.
Jacinta: Right, so she doesn't believe in the particular theory…
Canto: Which is proven by genes, the essential mechanism of random variation, which of course Darwin was completely unaware of. And by meiosis, another essential source of variety.
Jacinta: So, meiosis. It's quite complex. Zimmer gives a brief explanation as you say, and there's also a number of videos, from Khan Academy, Crash Course Biology and others, so let's try to describe it for ourselves, with emphasis on variety or variation, which is the essential thing.
Canto: Mitosis, and hopefully I now will never forget this, is the cell division and replication that goes on in our bodies at every moment, and which enables us to grow from a foetus to a strapping lad or lassie, to heal wounds and even to have multiple times more neurons than old fatty Frump, maybe. It occurs among the somatic cells, and it essentially does it by replicating cells exactly, like replacing or adding to like.
Jacinta: But not exactly, otherwise we'd just be a growing blob of undifferentiated body cells, not liver, brain, blood, skin and other cells. That takes epigenetics, as I recall. Mitotically-created cells are identical as to chromosomes, but not as to expression. But anyway, meiosis. That's how our germ cells are replicated.
Canto: Egg and sperm cells, together known as gametes. Khan Academy begins its article on meiosis with this:
… meiosis in humans is a division process that takes us from a diploid cell—one with two sets of chromosomes—to haploid cells—ones with a single set of chromosomes. In humans, the haploid cells made in meiosis are sperm and eggs. When a sperm and an egg join in fertilization, the two haploid sets of chromosomes form a complete diploid set: a new genome.
All fine, though this division process is damn complicated as we'll discover. But what interested me in Zimmer's account was this, and I'll quote it at length, because it's what got me excited about variation:
In men, meiosis takes place within a labyrinth of tubes coiled within the testicles. The tube walls are lined with sperm precursor cells, each carrying two copies of each chromosome, one from the man's mother, the other from his father. When these cells divide, they copy all their DNA, so that now they have four copies of each chromosome. Rather than drawing apart from each other, however, the chromosomes stay together. A maternal and paternal copy of each chromosome line up alongside each other. Proteins descend on them and slice the chromosomes, making cuts at precisely the same spots.
As the cells repair these self inflicted wounds, a remarkable exchange can take place. A piece of DNA from one chromosome may get moved to the same position in the other, its own place taken by its counterpart. This molecular surgery cannot be rushed. All told, a cell may need three weeks to finish meiosis. Once it's done, its chromosomes pull away from each other. The cell then divides twice, to make four new sperm cells. Each of the four cells inherits a single copy of all 23 chromosomes. But each sperm cell contains a different assembly of DNA.
Think of this last line – each sperm cell contains a different assembly of DNA.
Jacinta: Yes, and there can be up to a billion sperm cells released in each ejaculate, but who's counting? And are they all different?
Canto: Apparently so. Even the Daily Mail says so, so it must be true. And when you think of it, if there weren't differences, each offspring born from that man's sperm would be a clone…
Jacinta: Not necessarily – what about the egg cells?
Canto: Yes, I believe it's the same meiosis process with them, though not quite. Anyway, there's the same mixing of chromosomes, so the chances of any two egg cells, or I should say their chromosomal complement, being identical is extremely small.
Jacinta: So, meiosis – I've been trying to pin it all down, but I don't feel I've succeeded. Here goes, anyway. Meiosis is a special type of reproduction, confined only to our germ cells, the sperm and egg cells. The gametes. The haploid cells. As opposed to the diploid cells which make up all the somatic or body cells we have. That's to say, those cells reproduce differently from diploid, somatic cells. But before I try to explain the complex process of their reproduction, what about their production? Where do these haploid cells come from? Now I might answer glibly that the egg cells, also called oocytes, come from the ovaries, and the spermatozoa come from the testes, but that's not really my question.
Canto: In fact I'm not even sure if you've got it right so far. The egg cell is called an ovum. An oocyte is a precursor egg cell I think. I'm not sure if it matters much, but we're looking at the production of these gametes. Presumably the kinds of gametes we produce depends on our gender, which is determined at conception? Of course, in these gender-bending days, who knows.
Jacinta: Oh dear. Let's try not to get confused. Assume an embryo or foetus is straightforwardly male or female, or potentially so. I seem to recall that males only start producing sperm at puberty, whereas females produce all their egg cells before that, and only have a fixed number, and egg cells are quite huge in comparison to sperm, and even compared to your average somatic cells – though some neurons have super-long axons. When females reach the stage of menstruation, that's when they start releasing eggs.
Canto: Okay in the above quote from Zimmer, sperm precursor cells are mentioned. They're also called spermatocytes, and the labyrinth of coiled tubes he also mentions are the seminiferous tubules. This is where the meiosis happens, in males. There are two types of spermatocyte, primary and secondary. The primary spermatocytes are diploid, and the secondary, formed after the first meiosis process (meiosis 1), are haploid.
Jacinta: To possibly confuse matters further, there's a multi-stage process happening in those seminiferous tubules, a process called spermatogenesis. It starts with the spermatogonia (and maybe we'll leave the spermatogonium's existence for another post), which are processed into primary spermatocytes, then into secondary spermatocytes, then into spermatids, then to sperm.
Canto: Yes, so the first step you mention is mitotic, with diploid cells creating diploid cells, the primary spermatocytes…
Jacinta: And mitosis has those four steps or phases – PMAT, as students recall it; prophase, metaphase, anaphase and telophase, while meiosis has the same but in two parts, PMAT for meiosis 1 and PMAT for meiosis 2. So as we've already pointed out, this double-doubling process has a final result of four new cells. Now, before meiosis 1, the cells go through interphase, but I won't detail that here. In prophase 1, chromosomes are brought together in pairs, called homologues. Their alleles are aligned together, but then this more or less random 'crossing over' occurs, presumably with the aid of some busy little proteins, which mixes the chromosomes up. Each homologue pair can have many of these crossovers. More mixing happens during metaphase 1, when homologue pairs, with their crossings-over, line up randomly at the metaphase plate. I'm not pretending to fully understand all this, but the main point is that the variety we find in the final product, the sperm cells, is brought about essentially during prophase and metaphase in meiosis 1 of the double cycle.
Canto: It does get me more interested in understanding meiosis more fundamentally though, as well as mitosis. The phases and the processes that bring them about, the proteins, the chromatin, the centromeres, the metaphase plate, and of course oogenesis, polar bodies and much much more.
Jacinta: Yes – I think meiosis does point to a lot of the variation in the world of organisms, but it would be hard to get those who 'don't believe in evolution' to think about this and its relevance. They tend not to listen to explanations or to want to make connections.
Canto: You can give up on them or keep plugging away with the 'what about this?' or 'can you explain that?' Or demonstrate to them directly or indirectly, the results of those powerful explanations, in medicine, in astronomy, in our technology, and in our human relations.
She has her mother's laugh: the powers, perversions and potential of heredity, by Carl Zimmer, 2018
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meiosis
https://www.khanacademy.org/science/biology/cellular-molecular-biology/meiosis/a/phases-of-meiosis
https://www.yourgenome.org/facts/what-is-meiosis#:~:text=Meiosis%20is%20a%20process%20where,to%20form%20four%20daughter%20cells.
Posted in chromosomes, DNA, genetics, meiosis
Tagged with evolution, genetics, germ cells, meiosis, mitosis, sperm
the second law of thermodynamics – some preliminary thoughts
the essential battle – to be more effectively productive than consumptive
Early on in his book Enlightenment Now, Steven Pinker makes much of the second law of thermodynamics, aka the law of entropy, as something way more than an ordinary law of physics, citing others who've claimed the same thing, including Arthur Eddington, C P Snow and Peter Atkins. Soaring rhetoric about pinnacles and 'without which nought' tend to be employed, tempting dilettantes come moi to wonder, if it's so effing over-arching why is it only the second law?
So the first law of T is about conservation of energy, the third is about the impossibility of dropping to absolute zero. Maybe it's just prosaically about chronology?
Maybe. The first law, first made specific by Rudolf Clausius in 1850 but much refined since, essentially states that in a closed system the internal energy is equal to the amount of heat applied minus the work done on the system's external environment. Basically, you can't get more out of the system than you put into it. The second law also involves many contributors, including Sadi Carnot in 1824, and Clausius again in 1850. Pinker attributes its largely up-to-date statistical iteration to the physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, whose work on the law dates to the 1860s and 70s. The third law, which also employs the concept of entropy, wasn't formulated until the early twentieth century, firstly by the chemist Walter Nernst. So maybe it's a chronological thing, but it certainly seems uncertain.
Anyway, the mystery attached to its title is just the start for the second law. It's been formulated in multiple ways by scientists and popularisers. It's mystical, hard-nosed, ineluctable, basic, obvious, magnificent and, according to Eddington, supreme. Entropy can be applied usefully to everything, from the universe to a cup of coffee and its consumer. The first point to always keep in mind – and for me that's not easy – is that, left to itself, any system, such as those just mentioned, drifts inexorably from low to high entropy. To put it more succinctly, beds don't make themselves. This obvious point may seem depressing, and often is, but it opens up the intriguing possibility that, if not left to itself, a bed can be made in many mysterious and inspiring ways. Energy into the system, systematically directed, creates art and science, life and intelligence, natural and synthetic. Natural selection from random variation, as we have so intelligently discovered, provides just such a system, through solar energy complexly distributed.
Of course, before we get too excited, there are problems. Although solar energy is the ultimate 'without which nought' of our systematic existence, or at least the emergence of it, we human energumens tamper with and lay waste to a great deal of other complex systems, including what we so euphemistically term 'livestock', in order to order ourselves in increasingly ordered, soi-disant civilised ways. From farming to fracking, from radioactive atolls to space debris, we leave many a wreck behind, and it's still and may always be an open question whether we end up drowning in our own crap, species-wise. Animals are born exploiters, as Pinker writes, and maybe we should celebrate the fact that we're better at it than other animals. Certainly we need to acknowledge it, with due deference and responsibility, while trying to temper the reckless excitement with which we often set out to do things – though they may be our best moments.
The point is that the principal human battle, the main game, is the battle against the inexorability of entropy, and that is why globalism, for as long as this globe alone is our home, and humanism, as long as we see, as Darwin so clearly did, that our existence is due to, and dependent on, the evolutionary bush of living organisms on this planet, must be our highest priorities. William Faulkner famously expressed an expectation that humanity would prevail, but there's nothing inevitable about it, and far from it, given the energy that needs to be constantly supplied to keep the consequences of the second law at bay. Perhaps the analogy of bacteria in a petri dish is just a little oversimplified – for a start, the nutrients in our particular petri dish have increased rather than diminished, thanks largely to human ingenuity. As a result, though the human population has increased seven-fold over the past 200 years, our per capita caloric intake has also increased. But of course there's no guarantee that this will continue – and far from it.
One of the problems is being too smart for our own good, always arguably. In the early fifties, the Pacific, and Micronesia's Marshall Islands in particular, was the scene of unprecedented damage and contamination as the USA tried to improve and perfect its new thermonuclear weaponry there. Not much concern was shown, of course, for the locals, not to mention the undersea life, at a time when the spectacular effects of the atom bombs on Japan had created both a global panic and a thrill about super-weaponry. The nuclear fusion weapons tested in that period dwarfed the Hiroshima bomb by many factors in terms of power and radioactive effects, and there was much misinformation even among experts about the extent of those effects. We were playing not just with fire, but with the most powerful and transformational energies in the universe, within a scant few decades of having discovered them. And today the USA, due to various accidents of history, has a nuclear arsenal of unfathomable destructive power, and a political system sorely in need of overhaul. With galloping developments in advanced AI, UAV technology and cyber hacking, it would be ridiculous to project complacent human triumphalism even a decade into the future, never mind into the era of terraforming other worlds.
Einstein famously said, at the dawn of the nuclear era, 'everything has changed except our way of thinking'. Of course, ways of thinking are the most difficult things to change, and yet we have managed it to some extent. Even in the sixties, hawks in the US and other administration were talking up nuclear strikes, but apart from the buffoonish Trump and his counterpart Kim of North Korea – people we're sadly obliged to take seriously – such talk is now largely redundant. After the horrors of two global conflicts, and through the growing realisation of our own destructive power, we've forced ourselves to think more globally and co-operatively. There's actually no serious alternative. Having already radically altered the eco-system that has defied entropy for a blink of astronomical time, we'll need all our co-operative energy to maintain the miracle that we've so recently learned so much about.
Tagged with energy, entropy, evolution, nuclear weapons, second law of thermodynamics, survival
why is it so?
Ever since I was a kid I was an avid reader. It was my escape from a difficult family situation and a hatred or fear of most of my teachers. I became something of a quiet rebel, rarely reading what I was supposed to read but always trying to bite off more than I could chew in terms of literature, history, and occasionally science. I did find, though, that I could chew almost anything – especially in literature and history. And I loved the taste. Science, though, was different. It certainly didn't come naturally to me. I didn't know any science buffs and in fact I had no mentors for any of my reading activities. We did have encyclopaedias, though, and my random reading turned up the likes of Einstein, Newton, Darwin, Pasteur and other Big Names in science. Of course I was more interested in their bios than in the nature of their exotic researches, but in my idealised view they seemed very pure in their quest for greater understanding of the material world. I sometimes wished I could be like them but mostly I just dived into 'literature', a more comfortable world in which ordinary lives were anatomised by high-brow authors like Austen, Eliot and James (I had a fetish for 19th century lit in my teens). I took silent pride in my critical understanding of these texts, it surely set me above my classmates, though I remember one day walking home with one of the smartest kids in my class, who regaled me with his exploration of the electronics of a transistor radio he was pulling apart at home. I remember trying to listen, half ashamed of my ignorance, half hoping to change the subject to something I could sound off about.
Later, having dropped out of my much-loathed school, I started hanging out, or trying to, with other school drop-outs in my working-class neighbourhood. I didn't fit in with them to say the least, but the situation worsened when they began tinkering with or talking about cars, which held no interest for me. I was annoyed and impressed at how articulate they were about carbies, distributors and camshafts, and wondered if I was somehow wasting my life.
Into my twenties, living la vie boheme in punk-fashionable poverty among art students and amateur philosophers, I read and was definitely intrigued by Alan Chalmers' unlikely best-seller What is this thing called science? It sparked a brief interest in the philosophy of science rather than science itself, but interestingly it was a novel that really set me to reading and trying to get my head around science – a big topic! – on a more or less daily basis. I was about 25 when I read Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, in which Hans Castorp, a young man of about my age at the time, was sent off to an alpine sanatorium to be cured of tuberculosis. Thus began a great intellectual adventure, but it was the scientific explorations that most spoke to me. Wrapped up in his loggia, reading various scientific texts, Castorp took the reader on a wondering tour of the origin of life, and of matter itself, and it struck me that these were the key questions – if you want to understand yourself, you need to understand humanity, and if you want to understand humanity you need to understand life itself, and if you want to understand life, you need to understand the matter that life is organised from, and if you need to understand matter…
I made a decision to inform myself about science in general, via the monthly magazine, Scientific American, where I learned at least something about oncogenes, neutrinos and the coming AIDS epidemic, inter alia. I read my first wholly scientific book, Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, and, as I was still living la vie boheme, I enjoyed the occasional lively argument with housemates or pub philosophers about the Nature of the Universe and related topics. In the years since I've read and half-digested books on astronomy, cosmology, palaeontology and of course the history of science in general. I've read The origin of species, Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle and at least four biographies of Darwin, including the monumental biography by Adrian Desmond and James Moore. I've also read a biography of Alfred Russell Wallace, and more recently, Siddhartha Mukherjee's The Gene, which traces the search for the cause of the random variation essential to the Darwin-Wallace theory. And I still read science magazines like Cosmos on a more or less daily basis.
These readings have afforded me some of the greatest pleasures of my life, which would, I suppose, be enough to justify them. But I should try to answer the why question. Why is science so thrilling? The answer, I hope, is obvious. It isn't science that's thrilling, it's our world. I'm not a science geek, it doesn't come easily to me. When, for example, a tech-head explains how an electronic circuit works, I have to watch the video many times over, look up terms, refer to related videos, etc, in order to fix it in my head, and then, like most people, I forget the vast majority of what I read, watch or listen to. But what keeps me going is a fascination for the world – and the questions raised. How did the Earth form? Where did the water come from? How is it that matter is electrical, full of charge? How did language evolve? How has our Earth's atmosphere evolved? How are we related to bananas, fruit flies, australopithecines and bats? How does our microbiome relate to obesity? What can we expect from CRISPR/Cas9 editing technology? What's the future for autonomous vehicles, brain-controlled drones and new-era smart phones?
This all might sound like gaga adolescent optimism, but I'm only cautiously optimistic, or maybe not optimistic at all, just fascinated about what might happen, on the upside and the downside. And I'm endlessly impressed by human ingenuity in discovering new things and using those discoveries in innovative ways. I'm also fascinated, in a less positive way, by the anti-scientific tendencies of conspiracy theorists, religionists, new-agers and those who identify with and seem trapped by 'heavy culture'. Podcasts such as The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, Skeptoid and Australia's The Skeptic Zone, as well as various science-based blogs like Why Evolution is True and Skeptical Science are fighting a seemingly never-ending fight against the misinformation churned out by passionate supporters of fixed non-evidence-based positions. But spending too much time arguing with such types does your head in, and I prefer trying to accentuate the positive than trying to eliminate the negative.
And on that positive side, exciting things are always happening, whether it's battery technology, cancer research, exoplanetary discoveries, robotics or brain implants, more developments are occurring than any one person can keep abreast of.
So I'll end with some positive and reassuring remarks about science. It's not some esoteric activity to be suspicious of, but neither is it something easily definable. It's not a search for the truth, it's more a search for the best, most comprehensive, most consistent and productive explanation for phenomena. I don't believe there's such a thing as the scientific method – the methods of Einstein can't easily be compared with those of Darwin. Methods necessarily differ with the often vast differences between the phenomena under investigation. Conspiracy theories such as the moon landings 'hoax' or the climate science 'fraud' would require that scientists and their ancillaries are incredibly disciplined, virtually robotic collaborators in sinister plots, rather than normal, questing, competitive, collaborative, inspired and inspiring individuals, struggling desperately to make sense and make breakthroughs. In the field of human health, scientists are faced with explaining the most complex organism we know of – the human body with its often perverse human mind. It's not at all surprising that pseudo-science and quackery is so common in this field, in which everyone wants to live and thrive as long as possible. But we need to be aware that with such complexity we will encounter many false hopes and only partial solutions. The overall story, though, is positive – we're living longer and healthier, in statistical terms, than ever before. The past, for the most part, is another country which we might like to briefly visit, but we wouldn't want to live there. And science is largely to be thanked for that. So, why not science? The alternatives do nothing for me.
The SGU team – science nerds fighting the good fight
Posted in argument, scientific method
Tagged with alternative medicine, evolution, health, history, religion, science, skepticism, society
When was the first language? When was the first human?
Reading a new book of mine, Steven Pinker's The sense of style, 2014, I was bemused by his casual remark on the first page of the first chapter, 'The spoken word is older than our species…'. Hmmm. As Bill Bryson put it in A short history of nearly everything, 'How do they know that?'. And maybe I should dispense with 'they' here – how does Pinker know that? My previous shallow research has told me that nobody knows when the first full-fledged language was spoken. Furthermore, we're not sure about the first full-fledged human either. Was it mitochondrial Eve? But what about her mum? And her mum's great-grandad? Which raises an old conundrum, one that very much exercised Darwin, and which creationists today love to make much of, the conundrum of speciation.
Recently, palaeontologists discovered human-like remains that might be 300,000 years old in a Moroccan cave. Or, that's the story as I first heard it. Turns out they were discovered decades ago and dated at about 40,000 years, though some of their features didn't match with that age. They've been reanalysed using thermoluminescense dating, a complicated technique involving measuring light emitted from escaping electrons (don't ask). No doubt the dating findings will be disputed, as well as findings about just how human these early humans – about 100,000 years earlier than the usual Ethiopian suspects – really are. It's another version of the lumpers/splitters debate, I suspect. It's generally recognised that the Moroccan specimens have smaller brains than those from Ethiopia, but it's not necessarily the case that they're direct ancestors, proof that there was a rapid brain expansion in the intervening period.
Still there's no doubt that the Moroccan finding, if it holds up, is significant, as at the very least it pushes back findings on the middle Stone Age, when the making of stone blades began, according to Ian Tattersall, the curator emeritus of human origins at the American Museum of Natural History. But as to tracing our ancestry back to 'the first humans', we just can't do this at present, we can't join the dots because we have far too few dots to join. It's a question whether we'll ever have enough. Evolution isn't just gradual, it's divergent, bushy. Where does Homo naledi, dated to around 250,000 years ago, fit into the picture? What about the Denisovans?
Meanwhile, new research and technologies continue to complicate the picture of humans and their ancestors. It's been generally accepted that the last common ancestor of chimps and humans lived between 5 and 7 million years ago in Africa, but a multinational team of researchers has cast doubt on the assumption of African origin. The research focused on dental structures in two specimens of the fossil hominid Graecopithecus freybergi, found in Greece and Bulgaria. They found that the roots of their premolars were partially fused, making them similar to those of the human lineage, from Ardepithecus and Australopithecus to modern humans. These fossils date to around 7.2 million years ago. It's conjectured that the possible placing of the divergence further north than has previously been hypothesised has much to do with environmental factors of the time. So, okay, African conditions were more northerly in those days…
So these new findings and new dating techniques are adding to the picture without clarifying it much, as yet. They're like tiny pieces in a massive jigsaw puzzle, gradually accumulating, sometimes shifted to places of better fit, and so tantalisingly offering new perspectives on what the whole history might look like. I can imagine that in this field, as in so many others, researchers are chafing against their own mortality, as they yearn for a clearer, more comprehensive future view.
Meanwhile, speculations continue. Colin Barras offers his own in a recent New Scientist article, in which he considers the spread of H sapiens in relation to H naledi and H floresiensis. The 1800 or so H naledi fossil bones, discovered in a South African cave four years ago by a team of researchers led by Lee Berger, took a while to be reliably dated to around 250,000 years (give or take some 50,000), just a bit earlier than the most reliably dated H sapiens (though that may change). Getting at a precise age for fossils is often difficult and depends on many variables, in particular the surrounding rock or sediment, and many researchers were opting for a much earlier period on the evidence of the specimens themselves – their small brain size, their curved fingers and other formations. But if the most recent dating figure is correct (and there's still some doubt) then, according to Barras, it just might be that H sapiens co-existed, in time and place, with these more primitive hominids, and outcompeted them. And more recent dating of H floresiensis, those isolated (so far as we currently know) hominids from the Indonesian island of Flores, has ruled out that they lived less than 50,000 years ago, so their extinction, again, may have coincided with the spread of all-conquering H sapiens. Their remote island location may explain their survival into relatively recent times, but their ancestry is very much in dispute. A recent, apparently comprehensive analysis may have solved the mystery however. It suggests H floresiensis descended from an undiscovered ancestor that left Africa over 2 million years ago. Those who stayed put evolved into H habilis, the first tool makers. Those who left may have reached the Flores region more than 700,000 years ago. The analysis is based on detailed comparisons with many other hominid species and earlier ancestors.
I doubt there will ever be agreement on the first humans, or a very precise date. We're not so easily defined. But what about the first language? Is it confined to our species?
Much of the speculation on this question focuses on our Neanderthal cousins as the most likely candidates. Researchers have examined the Neanderthal throat structure as far as possible (soft tissue doesn't fossilise, which is a problem), and have found one intriguing piece of evidence that makes Neanderthal speech plausible. The semi-circular hyoid bone is located high in the human throat, and is found in the same place in the Neanderthal throat. Given that this bone is differently placed in the throat of our common ancestors, this appears to be an example of convergent evolution. We don't know the precise role of the hyoid in speech, but it certainly affects the space of the throat, and its flexible relationship to other bones and signs of its 'intense and constant activity' are suggestive of a role in language. Examination of the hyoids of other hominids suggests that a rudimentary form of language may go back at least 500,000 years, but this is far from confirmed. It's probable that language underwent a more rapid development between 75,000 and 50,000 years ago. It's also worth noting that a full-fledged language doesn't depend on speech, as signing proves. It may be that a more or less sophisticated gestural system preceded spoken language.
a selection of primate hyoid bones
Of course there's an awful lot more to say on the origin of language, even if much of it's highly speculative. I plan to watch all the best videos and online lectures on the subject, and I'll post about it again soon.
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/6/7/15745714/nature-homo-sapien-remains-jebel-irhoud
Did Neanderthals Speak?
http://www.isciencetimes.com/articles/6557/20131220/neanderthals-speak-like-humans-hyoid-bone-study.htm
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2128483-mystery-human-hobbit-ancestor-may-have-been-first-out-of-africa/
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2128834-homo-naledi-is-only-250000-years-old-heres-why-that-matters/
Posted in human origins, language, paleontology, primates
Tagged with evolution, Homo floresiensis, Homo naledi, language, Neanderthals, science
how evolution was proved to be true
The origin of species is a natural phenomenon
The origin of species is an object of inquiry
The origin of species is an object of experimental investigation
Hugo de Vries
(quoted in The Gene: an intimate history, by Siddhartha Mukherjee)
Gregor Mendel
I've recently read Siddhartha Mukherjee's monumental book The Gene: an intimate history, a work of literature as well as science, and I don't know quite where to start with its explorations and insights, but since, as a teacher to international students some of whom come from Arabic countries, I'm occasionally faced with disbelief regarding the Darwin-Wallace theory of natural selection from random variation (usually in some such form as 'you don't really believe we come from monkeys do you?'), I think it might be interesting, and useful for me, to trace the connections, in time and ideas, between that theory and the discovery of genes that the theory essentially led to.
One of the problems for Darwin's theory, as first set down, was how variations could be fixed in subsequent generations. And of course another problem was – how could a variation occur in the first place? How were traits inherited, whether they varied from the parent or not? As Mukherjee points out, heredity needed to be both regular and irregular for the theory to work.
There were few clues in Darwin's day about inheritance and mutation. Apart from realising that it must have something to do with reproduction, Darwin himself could only half-heartedly suggest an unoriginal notion of blending inheritance, while also leaning at times towards Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characteristics – which he at other times scoffed at.
Mukherjee argues here that Darwin's weakness was impracticality: he was no experimenter, though a keen observer. The trouble was that no amount of observation, in Darwin's day, would uncover genes. Even Mendel was unable to do that, at least not in the modern DNA sense. But in any case Darwin lacked Mendel's experimental genius. Still, he did his best to develop a hypothesis of inheritance, knowing it was crucial to his overall theory. He called it pangenesis. It involved the idea of 'gemmules' inhabiting every cell of an organism's body and somehow shaping the varieties of organs, tissues, bones and the like, and then specimens of these varied gemmules were collected into the germ cells to produce 'mixed' offspring, with gemmules from each partner. Darwin describes it rather vaguely in his book The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, published in 1868:
They [the gemmules] are collected from all parts of the system to constitute the sexual elements, and their development in the next generation forms the new being; but they are likewise capable of transmission in a dormant state to future generations and may then be developed.
Darwin himself admitted his hypothesis to be 'rash and crude', and it was effectively demolished by a very smart Scotsman, Fleeming Jenkin, who pointed out that a trait would be diluted away by successive unions with those who didn't have it (Jenkin gave as an example the trait of whiteness, i.e. having 'white gemmules', but a better example would be that of blue eyes). With an intermingling of sexual unions, specific traits would be blended over time into a kind of uniform grey, like paint pigments (think of Blue Mink's hit song 'Melting Pot').
Darwin was aware of and much troubled by Jenkin's critique, but he (and the scientific world) wasn't aware that a paper published in 1866 had provided the solution – though he came tantalisingly close to that awareness. The paper, 'Experiments in Plant Hybridisation', by Gregor Mendel, reported carefully controlled experiments in the breeding of pea plants. First Mendel isolated 'true-bred' plants, noting seven true-bred traits, each of which had two variants (smooth or wrinkled seeds; yellow or green seeds; white or violet coloured flowers; flowers at the tip or at the branches; green or yellow pods; smooth or crumpled pods; tall or short plants). These variants of a particular trait are now known as alleles.
Next, he began a whole series of painstaking experiments in cross-breeding. He wanted to know what would happen if, say, a green-podded plant was crossed with a yellow-podded one, or if a short plant was crossed with a tall one. Would they blend into an intermediate colour or height, or would one dominate? He was well aware that this was a key question for 'the history of the evolution of organic forms', as he put it.
He experimented in this way for some eight years, with thousands of crosses and crosses of crosses, and the more the crosses multiplied, the more clearly he found patterns emerging. The first pattern was clear – there was no blending. With each crossing of true-bred variants, only one variant appeared in the offspring – only tall plants, only round peas and so on. Mendel named them as dominant traits, and the non-appearing ones as recessive. This was already a monumental result, blowing away the blending hypothesis, but as always, the discovery raised as many questions as answers. What had happened to the recessive traits, and why were some traits recessive and others dominant?
Further experimentation revealed that disappeared traits could reappear in toto in further cross-breedings. Mendel had to carefully analyse the relations between different recessive and dominant traits as they were cross-bred in order to construct a mathematical model of the different 'indivisible, independent particles of information' and their interactions.
Although Mendel was alert to the importance of his work, he was spectacularly unsuccessful in alerting the biological community to this fact, due partly to his obscurity as a researcher, and partly to the underwhelming style of his landmark paper. Meanwhile others were aware of the centrality of inheritance to Darwin's evolutionary theory. The German embryologist August Weismann added another nail to the coffin of the 'gemmule' hypothesis in 1883, a year after Darwin's death, by showing that mice with surgically removed tails – thus having their 'tail gemmules' removed – never produced tail-less offspring. Weismann presented his own hypothesis, that hereditary information was always and only passed down vertically through the germ-line, that's to say, through sperm and egg cells. But how could this be so? What was the nature of the information passed down, information that could contain stability and change at the same time?
The Dutch botanist Hugo de Vries, inspired by a meeting with Darwin himself not long before the latter's death, was possessed by these questions and, though Mendel was completely unknown to him, he too looked for the answer through plant hybridisation, though less systematically and without the good fortune of hitting on true-breeding pea plants as his subjects. However, he gradually became aware of the particulate nature of hereditary information, with these particles (he called them 'pangenes', in deference to Darwin's 'pangenesis'), passing down information intact through the germ-line. Sperm and egg contributed equally, with no blending. He reported his findings in a paper entitled Hereditary monstrosities in 1897, and continued his work, hoping to develop a more detailed picture of the hereditary process. So imagine his surprise when in 1900 a colleague sent de Vries a paper he'd unearthed, written by 'a certain Mendel' from the 1860s, which displayed a clearer understanding of the hereditary process than anyone had so far managed. His response was to rush his own most recent work into press without mentioning Mendel. However, two other botanists, both as it happened working with pea hybrids, also stumbled on Mendel's work at the same time. Thus, in a three-month period in 1900, three leading botanists wrote papers highly indebted to Mendel after more than three decades of profound silence.
The next step of course, was to move beyond Mendel. De Vries, who soon corrected his unfair treatment of his predecessor, sought to answer the question 'How do variants arise in the first place?' He soon found the answer, and another solid proof of Darwin's natural selection. The 'random variation' from which nature selected, according to the theory, could be replaced by a term of de Vries' coinage, 'mutation'. The Dutchman had collected many thousands of seeds from a wild primrose patch during his country rambles, which he planted in his garden. He identified some some 800 new variants, many of them strikingly original. These random 'spontaneous mutants', he realised, could be combined with natural selection to create the engine of evolution, the variety of all living things. And key to this variety wasn't the living organisms themselves but their units of inheritance, units which either benefitted or handicapped their offspring under particular conditions of nature.
The era of genetics had begun. The tough-minded English biologist William Bateson became transfixed on reading a later paper of de Vries, citing Mendel, and henceforth became 'Mendel's bulldog'. In 1905 he coined the word 'genetics' for the study of heredity and variation, and successfully promoted that study at his home base, Cambridge. And just as Darwin's idea of random variation sparked a search for the source of that variation, the idea of genetics and those particles of information known as 'genes' led to a worldwide explosion of research and inquiry into the nature of genes and how they worked – chromosomes, haploid and diploid cells, DNA, RNA, gene expression, genomics, the whole damn thing. We now see natural selection operating everywhere we're prepared to look, as well as the principles of 'artificial' or human selection, in almost all the food we eat, the pets we fondle, and the superbugs we try so desperately to contain or eradicate. But of course there's so much more to learn….
William Bateson
Posted in biology, botany, Charles Darwin, evolution, genetics, Gregor Mendel, science
Tagged with biology, botany, Charles Darwin, evolution, Gregor Mendel, Hugo de Vries, pangenesis, William Bateson
three problems with Islamic society, moderate or otherwise
As a teacher of English to foreign students, I have a lot of dealing with, mostly male, Moslems. I generally get on very well with them. Religion doesn't come up as an issue, any more than with my Chinese or Vietnamese students. I'm teaching them English, after all. However, it's my experience of the views of a fellow teacher, very much a moderate Moslem, that has caused me to write this piece, because those views seem to echo much that I've read about online and elsewhere.
It's well known that in such profoundly Islamic countries as Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, there's zero acceptance of homosexuality, to the point of claiming it doesn't exist in those countries. Its 'non-existence' may be due to that fact that its practice incurs the death penalty (in Saudia Arabia, Yemen, Mauritania, Iran and Sudan), though such penalties are rarely carried out – except, apparently, in Iran. Of course, killing people in large numbers would indicate that there's a homosexual 'problem'. In other Moslem countries, homosexuals are merely imprisoned for varying periods. And lest we feel overly superior, take note of this comment from a very informative article in The Guardian:
Statistics are scarce [on arrests and prosecutions in Moslem countries] but the number of arrests is undoubtedly lower than it was during the British wave of homophobia in the 1950s. In England in 1952, there were 670 prosecutions for sodomy, 3,087 for attempted sodomy or indecent assault, and 1,686 for gross indecency.
This indicates how far we've travelled in a short time, and it also gives hope that other nations and regions might be swiftly transformed, but there's frankly little sign of it as yet. Of course the real problem here is patriarchy, which is always and everywhere coupled with homophobia. It's a patriarchy reinforced by religion, but I think if we in the west were to try to put pressure on these countries and cultures, I think we'd succeed more through criticising their patriarchal attitudes than their religion.
Having said this, it just might be that acceptance of homosexuality among liberal Moslems outside of their own countries (and maybe even inside them) is greater than it seems to be from the vibes I've gotten from the quite large numbers of Moslems I've met over the years. A poll taken by the Pew Research Centre has surprised me with its finding that 45% of U.S. Moslems accept homosexuality (in 2014, up from 38% in 2007), more than is the case among some Christian denominations, and the movement towards acceptance aligns with a trend throughout the U.S. (and no doubt all other western nations), among religious and non-religious alike. With greater global communication and interaction, the diminution of poverty and the growth of education, things will hopefully improve in non-western countries as well.
2. Antisemitism and the Holocaust
I've been shocked to hear, more than once, Moslems blithely denying, or claiming as exaggerated, the events of the Holocaust. This appears to be a recent phenomenon, which obviously bolsters the arguments of many Middle Eastern nations against the Jewish presence in their region. However, it should be pointed out that Egypt's President Nasser, a hero of the Moslem world, told a German newspaper in 1964 that 'no person, not even the most simple one, takes seriously the lie of the six million Jews that were murdered [in the Holocaust]'. More recently Iran has become a particular hotspot of denialism, with former President Ahmadinejad making a number of fiery speeches on the issue. Most moderate Islamic organisations, here and elsewhere in the west, present a standard line that the Shoah was exactly as massive and horrific as we know it to be, but questions are often raised about the sincerity of such positions, given the rapid rise of denialism in the Arab world. Arguably, though, this denialism isn't part of standard anti-semitism. Responding to his own research into holocaust denialism among Israeli Arabs (up from 28% in 2006 to 40% in 2008), Sammy Smooha of Haifa University wrote this:
In Arab eyes disbelief in the very happening of the Shoah is not hate of Jews (embedded in the denial of the Shoah in the West) but rather a form of protest. Arabs not believing in the event of Shoah intend to express strong objection to the portrayal of the Jews as the ultimate victim and to the underrating of the Palestinians as a victim. They deny Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state that the Shoah gives legitimacy to. Arab disbelief in the Shoah is a component of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, unlike the ideological and anti-Semitic denial of the Holocaust and the desire to escape guilt in the West.
This is an opinion, of course, and may be seen as hair-splitting with respect to anti-semitism, but it's clear that these counterfactual views aren't helpful as we try to foster multiculturalism in countries like Australia.They need to be challenged at every turn.
Amcha, the Coalition for Jewish Concerns holds a rally in front of the Iranian Permanent Mission to the United Nations in response to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's threats against Isreal and denial of the Holocaust, Monday, March 13, 2006 in New York. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)
While the rejection, and general ignorance, of the Darwin-Wallace theory of evolution – more specifically, natural selection from random variation – may not be the most disturbing feature of Islamic society, it's the one that most nearly concerns me as a person keen to promote science and critical thinking. I don't teach evolution of course, but I often touch on scientific topics in teaching academic English. A number of times I've had incredulous comments on our relationship to apes (it's more than a relationship!), and as far as I can recall, they've all been from Moslem students. I've also come across various websites over the years, by Moslem writers – often academics – from Turkey, India and Pakistan whose anti-evolution and anti-Darwin views degenerate quickly into fanatical hate-filled screeds.
I won't go into the evidence for natural selection here, or an explanation of the theory, which is essential to all of modern biology. It's actually quite complex when laid out in detail, and it's not particularly surprising that even many non-religious people have trouble understanding it. What bothers me is that so many Moslems I've encountered don't make any real attempt to understand the theory, but reject it wholesale for reasons not particularly related to the science. They've used the word 'we' in rejecting it, so that it's impossible to even get to first base with them. This raises the question of the teaching of evolution in Moslem schools (and of course, not just Moslem schools), and whether and how much this is monitored. One may argue that non-belief in evolution, like belief in a flat earth or other specious ways of thinking, isn't so harmful given a general scientific illiteracy which hasn't stopped those in the know from making great advances, but it's a problem when being brought up in a particular culture stifles access to knowledge, and even promotes a vehement rejection of that knowledge. We need to get our young people on the right page not in terms of a national curriculum but an evidence-based curriculum for all. Evidence has no national boundaries.
Conclusion – the problem of identity politics
The term identity politics is used in various ways, but I feel quite clear about my own usage here. It's when your identity is so wrapped up in a political or cultural or religious or class or caste or professional grouping, that it trumps your own independent critical thinking and analysis. The use of 'we think' or 'we believe', is the red flag for these attitudes, but of course this usage isn't always overt or conscious. The best and probably only way to deal with this kind of thinking is through constructive engagement, drawing people out of the groupthink intellectual ghetto through argument, evidence and invitations to reconsider (or consider for the first time) and if that doesn't work, firmness regarding the evidence-based view together with keeping future lines of communications open. They say you should keep your friends close and your enemies closer, and it's a piece of wisdom that works on a pragmatic and a humane level. And watch out for that firmness, because the evidence is rarely fixed. Education too is important. As an educator, I find that many students are open to the knowledge I have to offer, and are sometimes animated and inspired by it, regardless of their background. The world's an amazing place, and students can be captivated by its amazingness, if it's presented with enthusiasm. That can lead to explorations that can change minds. Schools are, or can be, places where identity politics can fragment as peers from different backgrounds can converge and clash, sometimes in a constructive way. We need to watch for and combat the echo-chamber effect of social media, a new development that often reinforces false and counter-productive ideas – and encourages mean-spirited attacks on faceless adversaries. Breaking down walls and boundaries, rather than constructing them, is the best solution. Real interactions rather than virtual ones, and thinking about the background and humanity of the other before leaping into the fray (I'm beginning to sound saintlier than I've ever really been – must be the Ha Ji-won influence!)
Posted in evidence, evolution, homosexuality, ideology, Islam, patriarchy, religion
Tagged with antisemitism, education, evolution, Holocaust, homosexuality, ideology, islam
touching on the complex causes of male violence
A bout of illness and a general sense of despair about blogging has prevented me from posting here for a while. For my health and well-being I'll try to get back on track. So here's a brief post on my hobbyhorse of the moment.
It surprises me that people could try to argue with me about the violence of men compared to women, trying to explain it away in terms of physical size – I mean, really? And then, when this doesn't fly, they point to individuals of established combativeness, the Iron Lady, Golda Meir, and why not mention Boadicea, or [place name of fave female serial killer here]?
And it really demoralises me when this argumentative cuss is a woman. I mean I love a feisty female but really…
It reminds me of a scenario from my not-so-youth, when I briefly hung out with a perverse young lass who insisted with unassailable feistiness that men were clearly more intelligent than women (by and large, presumably). It certainly made be wonder at how intelligence could be turned against itself. But was it intelligence, or something else?
But let's get back to reality. Men are more violent than women in every country and every culture on the planet. This is a statistical fact, not a categorical, individual claim. Of course there are violent women and much less violent men. That isn't the point. The point is that you cannot sheet this home to sexual dimorphism. Two examples will suffice. First, look at death and injury by road accident in the west – in countries where both men and women are permitted to drive. The number of males killed in road accidents is considerably higher than females in every western country. In Australia males are almost two and a half times more likely to die this way than females, and in some countries it's more, but it's everywhere at least double. The WHO has a fact sheet On this, updated in November 2016:
From a young age, males are more likely to be involved in road traffic crashes than females. About three-quarters (73%) of all road traffic deaths occur among men. Among young drivers, young males under the age of 25 years are almost 3 times as likely to be killed in a car crash as young females.
The second example is youth gangs, including bikie gangs. These are, obviously, predominantly male, their purpose is usually to 'display manhood' in some more or less brutal way, and, again obviously, they can't be explained away in terms of size difference. Other causes need to be considered and studied, and of course, they have been. Some of these causes are outlined in Konner's book, but I can't detail them here because I've lent the book out (grrr). An interesting starting point for thinking about the social causes of male violence is found in a short essay by Jesse Prinz here. Prinz largely agrees with Konner on the role of agricultural society in sharpening the male-female division in favour of males, but I think he oversimplifies the differences in his tendency to apply social explanations, and he says nothing about gene expression and hormonal factors, which Konnor goes into in great detail. It seems to me that Prinz's line of reasoning would not be able to account for the reckless, life-threatening behaviour of young male drivers, for example. While there is clearly something social going on there, I would contend that something biological is also going on. Or something in the biological-social nexus, if you will. Clearly, it's a very complex matter, and if we can uncover hormonal or neurotransmissional causes, that doesn't rule out social factors playing a regulatory role in those causes. Social evolution, we're finding, can change biology much more quickly than previously thought.
Posted in evolution, gender, genetics, violence
Tagged with evolution, gender, history, society, violence
CARE and women's empowerment
We have an abundance of rape and violence against women in this country and on this Earth, though it's almost never treated as a civil rights or human rights issue, or a crisis, or even a pattern. Violence doesn't have a race, a class, a religion or a nationality, but it does have a gender.
Rebecca Solnit, author and historian
Canto: So the CARE organisation, an NGO with a long history, is perhaps best known to us here due to our former PM Malcolm Fraser becoming the founder of CARE Australia in 1987, and the president of CARE international from 1990 to 1995. It's one of the oldest humanitarian aid organisations, with its origins in the forties, in that post-war period when international co-operation and healing became something of an obsession. But did you know that in recent times it has directed its focus on the empowerment of women in disadvantaged circumstances?
Jacinta: Yes, this is something we've been discovering only recently, and if you go to the CARE website right now you'll find the leading article there is about women fleeing Syria, often with children, and about the increasing number of female-headed families among Syrian refugees in Jordan and elsewhere.
Canto: Well, that's illustrative, and as you know I've just read Melvin Konner's book, Women after all: sex, evolution and the end of male supremacy, and it has a few pages on CARE and how it has kind of renewed itself in recent times by focusing on female disadvantage, and I think that's a damn good idea.
Jacinta: Yes, not exclusively of course, but it has been focusing on education and empowerment – those things go naturally together of course – which is more of an issue for women in countries like India and many African countries.
Canto: Oh yeah in many countries, wherever you have extreme male dominance you have women reduced to drudgery, virtual slavery, if not actual slavery, women forced into marriage at an early age, an acceptance of rape within marriage, and of course women and girls deprived of whatever paltry education they have in these benighted regions. And these are the most violent and backward regions in the world, but I suppose we've harped on that enough already.
Jacinta: So what specifically is CARE doing for women?
Canto: Well its rebranding, as Konner describes it, began nearly a decade ago with a campaign called 'I am Powerful' developed by Helene Gayle, then CEO of CARE USA. It was all about knowledge being power and education being key, and this was focused on in a lot of problem regions, in India, Bangladesh, Yemen…
Jacinta: I read that, in India, of the children not attending school, 80% are female. One of the worst records anywhere, but of course, the percentage of girls not being educated is always higher than boys wherever you look.
Canto: Even in Australia?
Jacinta: Well, I'm guessing, but we've not quite reached gender equality, and then there are migrants coming from heavily patriarchal societies…
Canto: Anyway the research they did showed the knock-on effects of education for women and girls. Educated girls postpone motherhood, have fewer kids, healthier kids, better educated kids, and this transfers to the next generation and the next in a multiplier effect.
Jacinta: And educated women earn more, suffer less abuse, are healthier…
Canto: So they've done great work in developing schools in Benin and Sudan and other trouble spots, places where educated women were a novelty. But it's not just education, they've been providing safe havens for women against male violence within refugee camps in Kenya and Sri Lanka where they had such brutal suppression of the Tamils. And they've been involved in microfinancing, along with other NGOs and banks. Because over the decades they've found that loans to women are more effective than loans to men.
Jacinta: Hmmm, I wonder why that would be.
Canto: Well, some have disputed it, but it might be that because women are generally more collaborative and group-oriented, social pressure between women ensures that they put the loans to better use, repay them more promptly and so on. CARE is also combining microloans with training in health, governance, human rights and such. This raises consciousness on the importance of education and health, and this is indicated in increased household expenditure in these areas. It's been noted that microfinance-only programs tend to be more abused, often because the women get leaned on by male relatives.
Jacinta: Okay, so I think you're right, we need to get rid of men. Gene editing, with this new CRISPR Cas-9 technology and further developments, should make it all straightforwardly possible soon enough. In time we'll be able to edit the genes of embryos to make them all female. Or maybe we'll keep about 10% of them as males for reproductive purposes, and as fun toys and slaves around the house. Forget the bloody moslem brotherhood, I'm only interested in the moslem sisterhood, and forget mateship, which emerged supposedly out of the 'Great' bloody War, and fuck 'we band of brothers', which came from Shakespeare's bloody Henry V, the battle of bloody AgitpropCourt, with Harry's band of bros splattering the Frenchy band of bros for larks and sparks. Yep it's time.
Canto: Well thanks for that. We'll talk again, women willing.
Posted in consciousness, crime, patriarchy, politics, power, society, solutions, violence, war
Tagged with charity, evolution, gender, patriarchy, politics, violence
beyond feminism – towards a female supremacist society
Canto: I've decided to declare myself as a female supremacist.
Jacinta: Really? I thought you had nothing to declare but your genius. So you've come out at last?
Canto: Well it's not as if I've been stifled in the closet for years. I've rarely thought about it before. I've always considered myself a feminist, but recently we've been looking at female-male differences, and it's been making me feel we need more than just equality between the sexes.
Jacinta: You've got a hankering for that bonobo world, haven't you? Females ganging up on you and soothing your aggressive macho emotions with a bit of sexual fourplay.
Canto: Well, yes and no. I first learned about bonobo society almost twenty years ago, and of course it excited me as a model, but then the complexity of human societies with all their cultural overlays made me feel I was naive to imagine a non-human society, without even its own language, could teach us how to improve our own. And the sex stuff in particular – well, that really got me in, but then it seemed too good to hope for. Too much self-serving wishful thinking, to model our society on a bunch of oversexed, indolent banana-eaters.
Jacinta: Do they have bananas in the Congo?
Canto: Absolutely. They have a town there on the Congo River, called Banana.
Jacinta: Oh wow, sounds like heaven. I love bananas. Let's go there.
Canto: Anyway, now I'm thinking that a female-supremacist society is what we need today, though not necessarily based on bonobos….
Jacinta: That's disappointing. I think it should be based on bonobos. Bonobos with language and technology and sophisticated theories about life, the universe and everything. Why not?
Canto: Well then they wouldn't be bonobos. But do you want to hear my reasons for promoting female supremacy?
Jacinta: I probably know them already. Look at the male supremacist societies and cultures in the world – in Africa, in India, in the Middle East. They're the most violent and brutish societies. We can't compare them to female supremacist societies because there aren't any, but we can look at societies where discrimination against women is least rampant, and those are today's most advanced societies. It might follow that they'll become even more enlightened and advanced if the percentage of female leaders, in business, politics and science, rises from whatever it is today – say 10% – to, say 90%.
Canto: Yes, well you're pretty much on the money. It's not just broader societies, it's workplaces, it's schools, it's corporations. The more women are involved, especially in leadership roles, the more collaborative these places become. Of course I don't deny female violence, in schools and at home, against children and partners and in many other situations, but on average in every society and every situation women are less violent and aggressive than men. In fact, all the evidence points to a female-supremacist society being an obvious solution for a future that needs to be more co-operative and nurturing.
Jacinta: So how are you going to bring about the female-supremacist revolution?
Canto: Not revolution, that's just macho wankery. I'm talking about social evolution, and it's already happening, though of course I'd like to see it speeded up. We'll look at how things are changing and what we can hope for in some later posts. But the signs are good. The feminisation of our societies must continue, on a global level!
Posted in argument, bonobos, culture, evolution, feminism, gender, language, patriarchy, politics, power, primates, sex, society
Tagged with bonobos, debate, evolution, feminism, gender, history, matriarchy, patriarchy, society
bonobos and us – lessons to be learnt
Let's be sexy about this
Bonobos separated from chimps maybe less than a million years ago, according to some pundits. We haven't yet been able to determine a more precise date for the split. So which species has changed more? Have chimps become more aggressive or have bonobos become more caring? Is there any way of finding out?
It's not just about genes its about their expression. It will take some time to work all that out. Brain studies too will help, as we move towards scanning and exploring brains more effectively and less invasively.
But surely we seek not just to understand the bonobo world but to change our own. Who wouldn't want a world that was less violent, less exclusionary in terms of sex, more caring and sharing, without any loss of the dynamism and questing that has taken us to to the very brink of iphone7?
That last remark will date very quickly… Nah, I'll leave it in.
So we can learn lessons, and of course we're already on that path. Advanced societies, if that's not too presumptuous a term, are less patriarchal than they've ever been, without losing any of their dynamism. On the contrary, it can easily be seen that the most male-supremacist societies in the world are also the most violent, the most repressive and the most backward. Some of those societies, as we know, have their backwardness masked by the fact that they have a commodity, oil, that the world is still addicted to, which has made the society so rich that their citizens don't even have to pay tax. The rest of the world is supporting tyrannical regimes, which won't change as long as they feel well-fed and secure. Not that I'd wish starvation and insecurity on anyone, but as Roland Barthes once said at one of his packed lectures, the people standing at the back who can't hear properly and have sore feet must be wondering why they're here.
Maybe a bit of discomfort, in the form of completely shifting away from fossil fuels for our energy needs haha, might bring certain Middle Eastern countries to a more serious questioning of their patriarchal delusions? Without their currently-valuable resource, they might wake to the fact that they need to become smarter. The women in those countries, so effective on occasion in forming coalitions to defend their inferior place in society, might be encouraged to use their collective power in more diverse ways. That could be how things socially evolve there.
Meanwhile in the west, the lesson of the bonobos would seem to be coalitions and sex. We've certainly arrived at an era where sexual dimorphism is irrelevant, except where women are isolated, for example in domestic situations. The same isolation also poses a threat to children. The bonobo example of coalitions and togetherness and sharing of responsibilities, and sexual favours (something we're a long way from emulating, with our jealousies and petty rivalries) should be the way forward for us. Hopefully the future will see a further erosion of the nuclear family and a greater diversity of child-rearing environments, where single-parent families are far less isolated than they are today, and males want to help and support and teach children because they are children, not because they are their children…
Posted in bonobos, consciousness, culture, energy, environment, evolution, feminism, gender, genetics, humanism, patriarchy, primates, sex, solutions
Tagged with bonobos, evolution, gender, patriarchy, sex, society

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


HomeJust Me Talking Are our politicians bullies?
A bully when entering adult life, is likely select a profession in which they can find ways to assert power; finding suitable jobs in policing, the military, prisons, perhaps even law or politics. It is through politics that one can achieve the highest levels of power in our society today.
Historically the world's leaders have been politicians and many of them have been dictators who have ruled through bullying. In Canada, we have democracy and an elected government, many of the politicians have law degrees, and so our preferred form of bullying comes out in the handling of our rights, changing or creating new laws.
The true nature of our politicians is revealed in election years, they create an election platform to manipulate our opinion to get our votes, and they verbally assault other party leaders through advertising. In parliament they stand up and verbally harass opposing politicians to discredit them. How can we allow this to happen?
We discuss ways of handling bullying in schools as we find it very upsetting when we hear about our kids engaging in such behavior, but we are not saying much when the political parties goes at each other. This week, the Harper government has launched TV advertisement to discredit Stephan Dion as a leader, somewhat ineptly using out of context clips to cast doubts on his environmental platform. Harper, as the face of the conservative party has allowed his party to show their true face, they are worried about loosing their power so they act as bully to keep it.
Canadian must stand up against such childish schoolyard antics and vote for a party that is concerned about our welfare, our environment, and our health. We cannot allow this to happen over and over again; we need to grow up and stand up for issues that affect our society. We need to see through the negative bullying and through our vote, support the party that is genuine, open to change and actually deal with real issues.


Our bird traps are hand-made using 1.22mm diameter galv finish cage wire. Light weight but strong enough to last for years.
Both doors have a locking pin to secure the opening and silicon coated doors to avoid scratching your arms.
We are the original manufacturer of the MDB myna bird traps with a long history of happy customers, our traps are still the largest and most affordable trap on the market.
"Our record is 15 myna birds trapped at once in 3 hours. What's yours?"
We're you looking for Myna Bird Traps? We've recently just re-designed our website and some of our pages have been moved around. Here's a list of content within the website relating to myna Bird Traps For Sale.


J-39-1, Block J, Persiaran Multimedia, I-City, Shah Alam, 40000 Selangor, MY.
Service Provided: MOLPay is the Southeast Asia multi-currency payment gateway that provide complete coverage of payment methods, inlcuding credit/debit card processing from Visa, MasterCard, Amex, CUP and JCB in more than 170 currencies, domestic internet banking with more than 100 banks in Southeast Asia, and Online to Offline (O2O) payment or MOLPay CASH. MOLPay CASH accepts cash payments for online purchases, through physical outlets such as convenience stores and petrol stations. MOLPay CASH has over 40,000 physical payment points in Southeast Asia.


text:
Layer launches "unhackable" wallet for storing cryptocurrency
Natashah Hitti | 5 June 2018 Leave a comment
Benjamin Hubert's design studio Layer has launched Trove, a digital wallet and app system that allow you to store your cryptocurrency without fear of loss or theft.
Layer collaborated with fintech startup Trove to launch the products, which are designed to make it safer and easier to store and manage digital currencies such as bitcoin.
The system keeps cryptocurrency offline, making it less susceptible to hackers, and also incorporates smart security systems, making it much harder to lose if you forget your password. The designers call it unhackable and unloseable.
Trove is a digital wallet and app system that allow you to safely store your cryptocurrency offline
Trove consists of four parts: Coin, Keep, Safe, and the Trove app.
Coin is a small wearable device that allows users to store currency for everyday spending, like a wallet or purse. Measuring just two centimetres wide, it can be easily carried around in a pocket or worn on the body like jewellery.
Currently in the prototype stage, the device comes with an inbuilt electrocardiogram (ECG) sensor that means it can only be opened biometrically. This means users need to press their skin against the contact zone on the front of the device for a few seconds to unlock it.
The system centres around Coin, a small wearable device that allows users to store currency for everyday spending, like a wallet or purse
Just like fingerprint or iris detection, the ECG sensor recognises the user's unique heartbeat pattern, and uses it as a mode of verification. This activates a bluetooth connection with the Trove app, providing access to the data and funds contained within.
This feature makes the product markedly different from cryptocurrency wallets that use static encryption keys – complex passwords or pin numbers – to provide access.
"Researchers speculate that 35 per cent of all bitcoins have been lost due to irrecoverable passwords," said Layer. "As the security of bitcoin is based on complex private keys that allow the transfer of funds, once the private key is lost, it is extremely improbable that lost coins can be recovered."
"This system is much simpler than existing systems that require complex password recovery systems or the need to print multiple pages of unique cryptographic hashes," it added.
Pigzbe app aims to teach children about cryptocurrency
Coin comes in two materials, black aerated aluminium and silver anodised aluminium, and can be magnetically attached to three different accessories, a wristband, necklace or brooch, giving plenty of options for personalisation.
The wristband comes in a variety of Kvadrat textiles, while the necklace features a variety of fascias, in material including terrazzo, acrylic or ceramic.
"The Trove Coin is designed to fit a user's personal style," said Layer. "The user has the option to openly display the Coin as a fashion accessory, or wear it in a more discreet manner."
Keep is a container used to inductively charge the Coin
Keep and Safe are both designed to be used alongside Coin.
Keep is a container made from volcanic rock and polycarbonate, which is powered by a USB-C port. It is used to inductively charge the Coin.
Meanwhile Safe is a "discreet personal home bank", protected by ECG verification, which allows users to safely store cryptocurrency at home.
"While Coin stores currency for daily use, Safe holds your decentralised personal wealth at home," said Layer.
The Trove app provides the interface for the whole system. It comes with a tracking function to help users locate their Coin
The Trove app provides the interface for the whole system. Users can keep track of their spending history, monitor how the value of the currency changes over time, and compare the performance of different cryptocurrencies.
The app also comes with a tracking function to let users know exactly where their Coin is at all times, as well as an AI financial advisor.
Benjamin Hubert rebranded his studio as Layer back in 2015, as part of a shift towards more "human-focused" projects. The team has worked on numerous tech products, including ceramic trays that wirelessly charge electronic devices and wristbands that track carbon footprints.
This latest project recognises the growing interest in cryptocurrency and blockchain. Other recent designs in the field include an app that teaches kids to use the tech.
More Layer
Layer and Panasonic aim to enhance your wellbeing with ...
Layer and Raeburn create furniture collection from recycled ...
Layer designs pendant lamps based on silkworm cocoons for Muuto
Layer and Nio's intelligent Pal scooter learns your ...
Layer's smart Move seating for Airbus adapts to the ...
Kite offers eyewear that is 3D-printed to fit exact ...
Nolii's wireless Rise lamp also functions as a charger and ...
Benjamin Hubert designs wearable device to track performance ...


Local very central in Premià de Mar (Barcelona), from 15 m2 to 160 m2. Fully exterior well-lit airy, ideal for any commercial activity permitted in residential areas.
Locals are delivered outside and finishes with basic facilities inside, ready to adapt to the activity to develop. We have different measures.


devtools::install_version apparently tries to download already installed packages from the "CRANextra" repo, which can cause the installation to fail for no good reason.
even though the package was installed succesfully (library(data.table) succeeds).
same kind of problem here. install_version() fails when length(repos) > 1.
@jimhester could you take a look at this one too please?


text:
Andreessen Horowitz Invests $15 Million in Stablecoin Firm MakerDAO
Andreessen Horowitz via its investment fund a16z has acquired 6 percent of the total MakerDAO token supply.
10828 Total views
209 Total shares
American venture capital fund Andreessen Horowitz has invested $15 million into blockchain startup MakerDAO (MKR), according to an announcement published September 24.
MakerDAO is the firm which stands behind Ethereum-based stablecoin Dai (DAI) and its accompanying decentralized credit system. DAI is pledged to U.S. dollars but collateralized by Ethereum (ETH). DAI users can generate the stable coin by locking up an excess amount of ETH in a smart contract, so if a user wants to access their collateral, they have to pay back the DAI debt.
Per the announcement, Andreessen Horowitz via its investment fund a16z acquired 6 percent of the total MKR token supply. The purchase will allow a16z to manage MKR and the Dai Credit System as it reportedly becomes "the first" decentralized autonomous stablecoin organization.
MKR will also receive operating capital through further financing stages, three years of support for the community, and operational support from more than eighty a16z team members. Rune Christensen, CEO and cofounder of MakerDAO, commented:
"With investment and operational support from a16z crypto, MakerDAO will be able to accelerate evolution, innovation, and adoption of the Dai Credit System."
In August, Andreessen participated in a $100 million funding round of cloud computing startup DIFINITY. In February, Andreessen previously participated in the startup's investment, contributing to a $61 million round. Having raised a total of just under $200 million since its foundation in 2015, DFINITY ultimately wants to create a platform which will "host the world's next generation of software and services on a public network."
In July, blockchain cloud computing platform Oasis Labs announced that it raised $45 million from major investors as part of its plan to help companies adopt blockchain. Oasis' investors included a16z along with cryptocurrency exchange Binance, Pantera Capital and Accel.
At press time, total market capitalization of DAI is around $55 million, while the currency's circulating supply is around 54.9 million, according to data from CoinMarketCap.
#Andreessen Horowitz
#Investments
#Stablecoin
Crypto Crime on the Rise — Good Odds of 2020 Becoming a Record-Breaker
DAOs will be the future of online communities in five years
We haven't even begun to tap into the potential of NFTs
Algorithmic asset experiments continue to entice traders & developers
Ethereum will become the main asset for investors in 2021


We have been lucky in 2018 after the terror that tore across Europe and the UK in 2016 – 2017 with vehicle, knife and bomb attacks happening in Nice, London Bridge, Westminster, Manchester and Barcelona. These are just a few of the places left reeling from a wave of extremism targeting people going about their normal lives and enjoying themselves. The often crudeness of the weaponry used belies the sophistication of many of the attacks.
2018 has been successful for the security services with a number of attacks being stopped, but the UK Counter Terror Police continue to remind everyone that they have approximately 600 active investigations going on with over 3000 people of immediate concern and another 20,000 on their radar!
2017 was marked by some of the most virulent global cyber-attacks with Wannacry infecting more than 230,000 computers in over 150 countries disabling parts of the UK's health care in the NHS, the Spanish Telecoms giant, Telefonica and FedEx. North Korea was blamed for this incident.
In another state blamed attack, Russia was blamed for unleashing the NotPetya attack on the globe which hit many government systems in the Ukraine and elsewhere but had a massive impact on global logistics with the shipping giant Maersk falling victim and having to shut down its terminals in 4 different countries for a number of weeks costing the company an estimated $200 million in losses.
2018 has seen a development of the threat environment with the introduction of the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) meaning that data breaches could well have huge implications for companies that suffer them with a €20 Million or 4% or global annual turnover fine brining additional focus to the cyber security environment.
In addition, whilst not a terror attack, we saw the first use of the colourless, odourless, virtually undetectable nerve agent Novichok, used on the streets of the small, sleepy English city of Salisbury. The attack, against a former Russian intelligence officer who defected to the West, Sergei Skripal, resulted in 7 people being contaminated and one dying. The British government quickly blamed the Russians and the international community followed suit.
Keeping abreast of the threats, the countermeasures, the developing technologies, having a platform to discuss and share best practice is always a challenge for the security community. This is where Peter Jones, the CEO of Nineteen Events comes in. He recently said in a blog, "all I want to do, with my team, is something to help make it a little less chaotic and bring the chance of a little more safety and security. If I can do that, then it is all worth it and will leave the world a little better for my loved ones!" This is his mantra behind the International Security Expo.
What many don't realise is a big part of his team consists of 40 Advisory Council members who come from all aspects of the security community including Government, Industry & Academia, all at senior levels and they assist in the development of International Security Expo and help shape the content to attract the highest calibre visitors.
That content is delivered in 12 free to attend conferences held over the 2 days and these conferences include: Retail, Hotel, Education, Maritime and Transport, CNI, Crisis Response and Business Continuity, Protecting Crowded Places, Night-time economy, Designing Out Terrorism, Cyber, Data and Information Security, Aviation and Border security and finally Facilities Management security. Some of the speakers come from the Advisory Council but many are industry leaders in these spheres and are not generally on many conference circuits.
The International Security Expo provides a unique platform for the entire security industry to come together to source products, share experience and gain the knowledge needed to address current and emerging security challenges. It and all of the conferences are free-to-attend and unite the entire security community allowing shared learning and collaboration from Government, CNI, Law Enforcement, Military, Major Events, Transport & Borders, Cyber Security, Facilities and Public and Private sectors.
A key theme running through the two days of the expo is that of innovation and many new technologies will be on display, ranging from a cost effective British built drone with thermal and optical zoom cameras that has a flight time of an hour, to the Protecting Urban Spaces feature. This new immersive demonstration area will showcase physical products, technologies and have live scenarios to illustrate how urban spaces can be protected from mass casualty terrorist attacks.
Given its ambition, the UK Government has come on board in strength and forms the core of the Government Agency and Department zone. The USA, Canada, China and the EU all have their own zones but it is expected that representatives from over 50 countries across the globe will attend the event. In fact, over 12,500 are confidently expected to attend over the 2 days, the networking alone will be amazing.
With the rapidly changing threat landscape the one place to come for 2 days to be brought up to speed with everything that is needed, is the International Security Expo. This is one not to miss. Visit internationalsecurityexpo.com for further details and register to attend the free conference series.
This entry was posted on Saturday, September 15th, 2018 at 20:00	and is filed under Guest Post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
I wonder if John Kerry is attending?


text:
ASB Tennis Arena to get $5.5m upgrade, increasing the capacity to 3500
The curtain had fallen on another ASB Classic in Auckland in January and it was a wide open event with no seeds reaching the semi-final in the men's draw, leaving Cameron Norrie and Tennys Sandgren to fight for the title.
The next year's edition of the ATP 250 tournament will take place between two big events, the ATP Cup and the Australian Open and the organizers are ready to undergo the improvements on the ASB Tennis Arena, offering the crowd more enjoyable experience during the matches.
At a committee meeting, Auckland councilors approved a $5.5 million funding package to upgrade the main ASB Tennis Arena, securing the upgrade that includes redeveloping of two stands to bring the capacity to 3,500. To stay on the tennis map in the years to come, the organizers of the Auckland Open had to make some significant changes and improve the facilities, with a retractable roof standing the next in line in some six or seven years.
Redevelopment of the west and south stands will start on April 1 and everything should be completed in seven months, with the construction of other two stands and a retractable roof having to wait until 2023 and 2026 respectively.
"This is not just a facility for international events, it's a place Kiwi tennis players can aspire to play at someday," Councillor Wayne Walker said. "Tennis is a diverse sport which people of all backgrounds participate in.
This redevelopment ticks all the boxes." "International competition to host tournaments is fierce and Auckland is currently fending off challenges from other cities for the rights to host the tournaments," Tennis Auckland chief executive Marcus Reynolds said.
"We're under threat from wealthier hosts with significant government backing. Increasing seating capacity to 3500 is critical to Tennis Auckland's future bids to secure tournaments. ASB Classic tournaments result in the economic benefit of over $11.95m a year to Auckland, made up of operating costs spent with local suppliers, food and beverage spend during the tournaments and visitation impact."


text:
Press statements following Russian-Indonesian talks
Following the Russian-Indonesian talks, Vladimir Putin and Indonesian President Joko Widodo issued press statements.
Vladimir Putin and Joko Widodo made statements for the press following Russian-Indonesian talks.
President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Mr Widodo, ladies and gentlemen,
Our talks with the President of Indonesia have been substantive and constructive.
Both in a narrow and an expanded format – with the participation of the heads of ministries and government agencies – we have addressed the entire range of issues on the bilateral agenda and set guidelines and goals for the further development of Russian-Indonesian cooperation.
I would like to note that Russia and Indonesia are linked by long-standing and close ties. At their origin was this country's sincere friend, Indonesian President Sukarno. Today, we recalled that 60 years ago, in 1956, he in fact visited Sochi for talks with the Soviet leadership.
Russian-Indonesian talks
During our conversation, Mr Widodo and I reaffirmed our commitment to building up bilateral collaboration in all areas. We paid special attention to prospects for the development of trade. After a certain downturn in the volume of trade last year, positive dynamics have emerged this year: during the first three months of the year, the volume of bilateral trade increased by nearly 14 percent. I am sure that it is within our power not only to maintain this pace, but also to provide an additional impulse to the further development of our business ties.
The consistent interest within the business community in stepping up our joint efforts is backed up by a regular exchange of business missions with the participation of representatives of leading Russian and Indonesian companies. We have invited our friends to the St Petersburg and Vostochny (in Vladivostok) economic forums. We have agreed with the President of Indonesia to provide systematic assistance to our business circles and to create a favourable environment for deepening investment and industrial cooperation.
We have discussed the idea of creating a free trade zone between Indonesia and the Eurasian Economic Union. The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, which was established last year, could become a promising source of funding for joint projects and integration initiatives.
Mr Widodo oversees a wide-ranging regional infrastructural programme. Russia is ready to provide all the necessary assistance to its Indonesian partners in the project's implementation.
Significant in this context is a joint project that was launched last year: a railway line in Kalimantan over 190 km long, to be built by our company Russian Railways in conjunction with its partners. The project will create over 2,500 jobs. The railway line will connect the resource-rich part of the island with a new port and industrial and technological cluster where manufacturing and processing enterprises will be located, also with a share of Russian capital.
Plans include the development of coal fields, the production of ferronickel, manganese dioxide, alumina and more. Our companies are ready to provide Indonesia with high-speed hydrofoil vessels, catamarans and floating piers, and to supply modern equipment for satellite vessel monitoring. We have agreed to continue our collaboration in civil aviation.
There is a good potential for expanding energy cooperation. Our companies Zarubezhneft and Rosneft have specific, serious large-scale projects, including the construction of a modern oil refinery on Java Island, with a possible investment of $13 billion.
Plans also include the construction of a 1.8 GW thermal power station, with contribution from our company InterRAO and an investment of $2.8 billion. Rosatom is working on a project to build an experimental low-power reactor.
Our Indonesian partners have proposed strengthening coordination in emergency response. Last year, Russian rescue workers were involved in a number of actions, including fighting wildfires on Kalimantan and Sumatra.
High priority is also given to the development of humanitarian ties. As of now, there are about 150 Indonesian undergraduate students in Russia. One hundred study allowances have been provided for Indonesian citizens for this academic year and the next from the Russian budget.
We will expand our tourism exchange. Last year, Indonesia introduced a 30-day visa-free regime for Russians. The possibility of signing an intergovernmental agreement on the mutual easing of visa procedures is under consideration.
The President and I have also addressed global and regional issues, including the fight against terrorism and extremism. Our countries coordinate their steps in dealing with these threats. We have agreed to expand contacts between our defence, security and law enforcement agenices.
Our countries will continue their interaction at the UN, the G20, APEC, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation and, of course, within the framework of the ASEAN dialogue partnership.
In conclusion, I would like to thank our Indonesian friends for this substantive discussion and express my appreciation to the President for his dedicated participation in preparing the Russia-ASEAN summit.
President of Indonesia Joko Widodo Widodo JokoPresident of the Republic of Indonesia (retranslated): I am greatly honoured to have this opportunity to meet with Mr Vladimir Putin in Sochi again.
Mr Putin and I, as presidents who represent the governments and people of the Russian Federation and the Republic of Indonesia, have had a substantive discussion of issues related to deepening cooperation between our countries on such strategic issues as economic, investment and military cooperation.
We are confident that we can strengthen and build up our economic cooperation dramatically. We have agreed that both sides will work to eliminate tariff and non-tariff obstacles, particularly in mutual trade. The Indonesian side has a special interest in palm oil.
We have agreed to build up investment cooperation. We are interested in Russian investment in major Indonesian projects in the marine sector and infrastructure development. We are also interested in continuing and developing railway construction projects and the construction of a seaport in Kalimantan. We also support oil processing and other investment projects.
We have agreed with President Putin to strengthen our military technical ties. We have agreed on technology transfers and that we will discuss opportunities for joint manufacturing. We are also interested in education and personnel training.
We are interested in the further development of cooperation in addressing threats and challenges, mainly in resisting and combating terrorism. We have agreed to expand cooperation in the exchange of intelligence and to build up contacts between law enforcement agencies.
As for tourism exchange, we have agreed with Mr President on the further expansion of relevant contacts.
I am grateful to the Russian side for the atmosphere in which our talks proceeded. Our dialogue was constructive, and we discussed matters of interest openly, and in great detail.
Allow me to invite Mr Putin, with great respect, to visit Indonesia.
Widodo Joko
Publication date: May 18, 2016, 20:30
Last updated at May 18, 2016, 23:48


text:
Bryan Adrés Ormeño Cid (born 11 May 1993), is a Chilean footballer  who plays as defender for Universidad Católica in the Primera División de Chile.

Club career
Bryan debuts at UC in the national tournament play from the first minute to Cobresal.

External links
UC profile

1993 births
Living people
Chilean footballers
Club Deportivo Universidad Católica footballers
Deportes Valdivia footballers
Footballers from Santiago
Association football fullbacks

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia