Dr. Metablog

Why Don't Chimpanzees Suffer from Alzheimer's?

Why Indeed?  And also, while we're considering the question, why don't chimpanzees get atherosclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, asthma, endometriosis, myocardial infarction, falciparum malaria, HIV infection, or epithelial cancers?  Chimpanzees are, after all, our closest living relatives. We share a common ancestry and we only embarked on separate path some six or seven million years ago --a blink of an eye in evolutionary terms. Why is it that we human beings, so superior, as we like to think, in so many ways from our cousins -- in our big brains and delicate hand manipulations, for example -- are subject to an array of diseases to which our inferior relations are immune. What's the deal? 

Here's the current thinking on this important problem (which I draw from Eugene E. Harris's informative and up-to-date monograph Ancestors in our Genome [Oxford, 1914]). As I understand it, human beings went through a sort of bottleneck sometime in our recent (say 200,000 years ago) history and our effective breeding population was reduced to a mere 10,000 or so souls. When a population becomes so small, random genetic drift dominates over natural selection, and so moderately deleterious but not incapacitating mutations can survive and even thrive. The defective genes that would be weeded out in larger populations persist in our genome. Hence our many inherited susceptibilities and disorders.

But that's not the end of the story.  Yesterday there was a report that the Ashkenazim went through "a severe bottleneck" six or eight hundred years ago which reduced its population to about 350 individuals. O my, what a boon to genetic drift, what a recipe for genetic disaster or genetic success, or more exactly, both success and failure simultaneously. 

And so our talents, our deficits, our strengths and weakness, our brains and our bodies, are determined by arbitrary aleatory long-ago events. No surprise, really, but another event in the continuously unfolding revelation.

Henotheism

As a born-and-bred third-generation atheist, I never made much of an effort to understand theology, which is, I gather, the study of the nature and attributes of god or gods. But no god, nothing to study. No problem. Theology will always be for me "the subject without an object." And therefore when I read Michael Coogan's The Ten Commandments  (Yale, 2014), I was surprised by own ignorance. For example, I had taken it for granted that the Bible was a document of monotheism. No god but god, Jahweh. And also  that the monotheism of the ancient Hebrews was their gift to civilization (though why to believe in one god was a better idea than to believe in a plethora of godlings will always remain a mystery to me). But Coogan makes it clear that I've gotten it all wrong. The commandment "you shall have no other gods before my face" distinctly postulates the existence of "other gods."

These other gods appear in the Bible in a number of guises and particularly as '"the host of heaven." Some were apparently worshipped even in the Temple itself. It is reported in Kings that the reformer Josiah ordered "all the vessels made for Baal, for Asherah, and for all the host of heaven" be removed from the sacred precincts. The ancient Hebrews were therefore not monotheists, but henotheists (a lovely word new to me), which Coogan defines as "the recognition that while other gods may and do exist, only one is to be worshipped" (14). 

So it seems that what has been represented to naive ol' me as a case of moral development, from polytheism to monotheism, is better understood as a kind of religious nationalism or jingoism: our god is better than your god -- so let's everyone pay him exclusive attention. Or perhaps, more vulgarly but just as accurately, in the words of the spiritual leader Hank Williams, move over little god, big god moving in -- have I quoted this exactly right? -- just as Jahweh moved in on El Shaddai and the rest of the crowd. One of my friends says that the essence of organized religion is "my prince of peace can beat up your prince of peace."

Amnesia on Film: Desperately Seeking Susan (1985)

Desperately Seeking Susan offers a cartoon version of amnesia. Pow, Roberta is knocked into a lamppost and doesn't know who she is. And then, a day later, pow again, she is knocked to the ground, bumps her head, and her memory returns intact. The film isn't interested in amnesia except as a plot device to facilitate the doppelganger relationship between Roberta and Susan. Roberta is a downtrodden cautious Fort Lee housewife; Susan is an anarchic adventuress. In the course of the film, each woman tries on the other's identity. Without a memory, but wearing Susan's clothes, Roberta "becomes" Susan, and Susan in turn invades Roberta's home and tries on her clothes, her pool, and her husband. At the end, Roberta has absorbed enough of Susan's pizzazz to leave her stifling husband and Susan has changed enough so that she can enjoy a moment with the boyfriend who has been desperately seeking her. It's an easy-to-watch film. Rosanna Arquette is lovely as a perpetual naif and Laurie Metcalf is superb as Roberta's short-tempered know-it-all sister-in-law. And it has more than one brilliant line of dialogue. "I thought you were dead."  "Naw, I was in New Jersey."  And my favorite: "How do you use the bird?"  -- which you have to have been there to understand and appreciate. An enjoyable film; unless you approach it with the idea that it has anything to do with real-life loss of memory.