Is it just another special effect? Or, rather, is Chris Hemsworth, the actor who plays Thor in the Marvel movie series, just so much stronger than everyone else in the universe that only he can lift Mjölnir, the short-handle hammer associated with lightning and Norse mythology? Chris Hemsworth has obviously lifted weights and appears to be very strong, but he’s human. Best guess is that the hammer is a movie prop and probably not as hefty as it looks. We could, however, run a test, not with other humans, but rather with some member of Pan troglodytes verus of the Taï National Park, Côte d’Ivoire.

​True (verus) Troglodytes? Is this a movie scene in which Thor goes into a dark cavern to encounter strange, otherworldly creatures and challenge them to lift his hammer? No, Pan troglodytes verus is a species of chimpanzee, a species that uses “hammers” to crack open Coula edulis nuts. Well, not “hammers” as you are thinking: Basically fallen branches of Coula edulis and other trees used as hammers. The chimps find a hard surface like an exposed root that serves as an anvil on which they put the nuts they want to crack. And like you, they make an estimate of their “hammer’s” weight in their first lift and strike. You make such estimates every time you lift an object. Once you lift an object, you store its heft and plan your future lifts accordingly.

So, how do you do that estimating? When you have experience with an object, say a real or movie prop hammer, you have already stored information about the effort and strategy you need to lift it. But before you lift, you look for clues that you can, of course, misread. Misreading is easy when something appears to be a solid object, but is, in fact, hollow. And misreading also occurs when the object appears to be made of one substance like a dense cast iron but turns out to be made of painted plastic. We’ve all experienced the two ends of this weight-lifting spectrum: “Wow! This is a lot heavier than it looks,” and “Oh! I expected it to be heavier than it is.”

Now imagine some devilish trick played on chimpanzees in Côte d’Ivoire by some researchers interested in seeing how the animals respond to “hammers” of identical appearance but of different densities. Here’s what Giulia Sirianni and others did. They cut two pieces of Coula edulis wood to equal length, but hollowed out one. Then, they filmed the chimpanzees picking up the “hammers” to strike nuts. Of course, the upward acceleration of the lifted hollow hammer was much faster on the first try because these forest-dwelling Thors didn’t know they were lifting a prop.*
Don’t worry; no animals were hurt in this experiment, but the nuts fared poorly. Funded by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology at Leipzig, Sirianni and colleagues wanted to measure the lifting process and to see whether chimpanzees, like humans, “anticipate the weight of an object using long-term force profiles...[suggesting] that, similarly to humans, they use internal representations of weight to plan their lifting movements.”**
 
Okay, so what? Both chimpanzees and humans can be fooled by the appearance of an object. “Nothing new,” you think. Probably, a likely outcome for almost every “first lift.” So, let’s emerge from somewhat troglodytic thinking that both we and the chimps exhibit at times, thinking by which we fool ourselves into accepting appearance over substance.

​You can look at how others (possibly not you) see the objects used by people around them. Expensive cars, for example. Big homes. Great jobs. All have appearances that might not, in fact, be what they seem to be. Judging by “first lift” can be misleading. Maybe after handling the objects—and the lives—of others, we might all come up with a different estimate of the strategy needed to do the lifting. Maybe after experiencing the objects—and lifestyles—of others, we might exclaim, “Wow! That’s heavier than it looks,” or “Oh! I expected it to be heavier than it is.”
​
* Sirianni, Giulia, Roman M. Wittig, Paolo Gratton, Roger Mudry, Axel Schüler, Chrostope Boesch. (2017) Do chimpanzees anticipate an object’s weight? A field experiment on the kinematics of hammer‐lifting movements in the nut‐cracking Taï chimpanzees. Animal Cognition https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-017-1144-0 Published online: 01 December 2017
**Abstract and article: http://pubman.mpdl.mpg.de/pubman/item/escidoc:2506422:2/component/escidoc:2506421/Sirianni_Do-chimpanzees_AnimCog_2017.pdf

A college basketball player in one of my geology classes made the comment that the mountains of Pennsylvania were “wimpy.” She was a scholarship player from British Columbia, and the Canadian Rockies were her benchmark for “mountains.” Her comment was definitely understandable in the context of her personal experience. The Rockies have elevations twice the height of the Appalachians.
 
Mountains, like people, vary in age. The Appalachians formed before the Canadian Rockies and once had elevations that matched and even exceeded the current mountains of western Canada. The mountain-building on the eastern side of North America ended more than 200 million years ago, whereas most of it on the western side largely ended about 60 million years ago. More time, more erosion. More erosion, lower elevations.
 
Where did the ancient Appalachians go? Eroded, they became sediments washed into low-lying basins, shallow inland seas, and the westernmost section of a widening Atlantic. In short, their rocks on lofty heights were distributed down their slopes by gravity, ice, wind, and water, making deposits that are as deep as the mountains were once high. The Canadian Rockies are undergoing the same process today, but have had less time to wear down, less time to redistribute what they are. Geologists know that previous mountain systems lie as layers of sediment miles thick. They also know that such layers of sediment, turned to sedimentary rock, can be uplifted into new mountains. It’s an old and repeated story: Uplift, erosion, deposition, lithification, and new uplift to make mountains from the redistributed materials of old mountains. What now seems to be a “wimpy” Appalachian mountain system was majestic.
 
Seems that mountains can play analog to human experience. Mountain-building can take hundreds of millions of years, but let’s just say it takes a long time. In relative terms, acquiring wisdom also takes a long time, and although humans haven’t been around as long as mountains, the species has had a considerable acquisition of wisdom, now compiled in a “mountain” of books, some very old by human standards.
 
There’s no way any of us can individually explore all the mountains, and there’s no way any of us can read through all that accumulated wisdom that previous generations have shed like sediments. But in our youth, we fail to realize that achieving great heights largely depends on the distribution of knowledge accumulated and piled high as older “mountains” of wisdom. Mark Twain captured the idea: “When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”
 
Ignore chronology and realize that most of us are attitudinally “fourteen” at one time or another. On our way to becoming mountains of wisdom, we see only the erosional remnants of the wisdom acquired in previous generations. And in the ages of industry and technology, we might have a tendency to say our “mountains” are mighty compared to wimpy “old” mountains. While we are familiar with the landscape rising to new elevations around us, we are simultaneously largely unfamiliar with the former elevations of those who went through their mountain-building stage and have attempted to redistribute themselves through their books.
 
By today’s standards, becoming knowledgeable might be a matter of mastering new industry and technology and a matter of discovery and invention, but becoming wise is partly a matter of rediscovering the views from those older lofty heights. 

Not quite the era of Sturm und Drang, is it? Or maybe it is the epitome of Sturm und Drang. Have we become the culmination of Germanic Romanticism and individual expression? Seems the slightest opinionated drizzle or dust devil is enough to cause stress.
 
Probably, there’s really been no change. When storms of any nature arise, they drive people to react and often overreact. And no doubt we’ve been overreacting since Cain found a suitable “storm” to justify fratricide. Overreacting is part of what we are, especially in social contexts that now spread across nations and continents via the Web.  
 
Just read the conversations on any website. The slightest drizzle or swirling breeze can be a storm in someone’s mind. Little drizzles and swirling dust, seemingly insignificant, produce Drang. Think Mars. Those planet-wide dust storms that can last for weeks seem to begin as individual dust devils. Tiny swirls merge and develop into larger and larger movements of atmosphere and dust.
 
Maybe we need some website umbrellas or dust masks, some protection against the little drizzle or dust that can build into a major clash with major stresses.
 
Here’s an idea.
 
Don’t add a dust devil to the little devils that are out there in cyberspace. Don’t add more drizzle. Too much drizzle amounts to a downpour just as too much dust amounts to a sandstorm.
 
“But someone has to respond,” you say.
 
“Has to? Maybe sometimes. But not every time and not on every subject, and not when the response will engender only a wider storm. If you feel compelled to respond, make the response as small as you can. No overreacting respondent is interested in a lengthy rational rebuttal. And remember the lesson of Mars: Little storms merge to become big ones.  
 
Our species has always had too many Cains, too many people who become stressed by the slightest raindrop or sand grain. No one is going to stop the drizzle or dust storms. They are inevitable, but exacerbating them isn’t. 

Have you ever seen the video of Commander David Scott’s demonstration of Galileo’s equivalence principle?* It’s the one in which the astronaut, standing on the moon, drops a feather and a hammer. On the airless moon, the feather encounters no resistance, so it ties the hammer in the race to the surface. And now we have further and refined proof that Galileo—way back when people were listening to Renaissance and Baroque music and Galileo himself was using the sway of a cathedral chandelier in the breeze as a pendulum—was correct to within parts much finer than the distinguishable beats on a tabor or the timing of a swaying chandelier. We now have a demonstration of the principle of equivalence to within one part in a 100 trillion. It’s a matter of refinement.
 
On the moon, you and a feather fall equal distances in identical times. The most recent confirmation, more accurate than dropping dissimilar objects from the Leaning Tower of Piza, was conducted aboard a spacecraft called MICROSCOPE. The aim of the project is to achieve an accuracy in parts per quadrillion, and some scientists have proposed launching satellites for conducting experiments accurate to one part per sextillion. If that isn’t splitting the hair enough for you, there’s even a proposal to launch Bose-Einstein condensates to test the equivalence principle on a level of single quantum waves.* How’s that for distinguishing between a feather and a hammer in free fall?
 
Galileo would be astonished, of course. So would Newton. Einstein would rejoice in further confirmation of his work; and you, well, you are probably saying that’s it’s all a bit too much refinement of knowledge. “What’s next?” you might ask. “I don’t live my life on that level of refinement.”
 
You’re right. You don’t. You’re also wrong. You sometimes do. Have you noticed that you use one level of refinement when you deal with yourself and another level when you deal with others? Dropping a feather and a hammer from somewhat bulky spacesuit gloves and eyeing their fall is sufficient refinement when we consider our own stumbles and falls. But when others trip, we get very scientific. As they fall, we seek refinements of information; we become very particular. We examine; we reexamine. We analyze. We overanalyze. You see your falls in terms of one part per one part; their falls in parts per million. “Of course, she stumbled. What do you expect? Look at her history, her manner, her company, her vices, her….”
 
It seems that when we compare our own falls to those of others, we don’t see an equivalence. In judging the falls of others and making comparisons, we apply a Principle of Nonequivalence.  
 
 
* https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/lunar/apollo_15_feather_drop.html
** http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/11/galileos-400-year-old-theory-free-falling-objects-passes-space-test  

What’s your attitude about information? Too much is too much? Too little is dangerous? But what’s the right amount? Is there really anything we shouldn’t know? Is there a reason we sometimes balk at learning? Is that reason our limitations, our laziness, or our disinterest? All three? Others? Oh! And one more question: Does it seem that you’ve never left school because of all the new and sometimes contradictory information that daily inundates you?
 
Not that I know anything significant about the subject of heart disease or atherosclerosis. I don’t. But like most of the laity, I’ve heard that some things, like HDL, are good, and other things, like LDL, are bad because they either jeopardize our health or maintain it. So, when someone wants to add more to my general knowledge about cholesterol, I can easily say, unless I have already had some negative health effect or have some specific interest in the subject: “Too much. Just give me the basics. Do I eat butter and coconut oil or not?”
 
So, in Mitch Leslie’s online report* about the research of cardiologist Allan Sniderman has done on apolipoprotein B (apoB), I like many others might find the information lying on the periphery of my interest or beyond my level of expertise. It’s a matter of information, new information. Do I really want to get into the level of detail a researcher does on a blood protein?
 
What’s the story? Well, it seems that all these years of cholesterol testing for cardiovascular risk might have been focused on the wrong “thing.” Sniderman says a $20 test for apoB is more indicative of that risk than the traditional cholesterol test. And, according to Leslie, his work seems to be supported by lipidologist Daniel Rader, who is quoted as saying, “…the question of whether LDL cholesterol is the best measure of cardiovascular risk now has a clear answer: ‘No.’”
 
That brings me back to my initial question: What’s your attitude about information? You might not be a lipidologist or cardiologist, so what should you do about this information? And what should any doctor who has relied for decades on cholesterol tests do? Relearn? Incorporate the information? Get all the details to add to all the details already in a super-packed brain? Will there be a test in the morning?
 
Want a complication? Many doctors disagree with Sniderman and Rader’s conclusion. Either they believe long-term research on LDL is of greater value than Sniderman’s, or they believe the effort to switch gears is coming a little too late in their careers to change the testing model. Yet, regardless of their past practice, doctors do see a number of heart attack victims who have normal or low LDL. Is that supposed to happen? That’s why Sniderman wants apoB tests. It reveals the LDL particles rather than the cholesterol they contain, and those particles seem to be the “bad actors.” And here’s where doctors face the dilemma we all face. For doctors, according to epidemiologist Jennifer Robinson, “It’s too much information—and when you give people too much information, they ignore it.”
 
What’s your attitude about information? Can’t get enough about subjects of current interest? Don’t want any that makes your head spin? Feel you are just too overwhelmed to acquire highly specific information that might even be related to your well-being? Long for simpler times before Gutenberg invented his printing press, before people used it and subsequent means to disseminate news from every corner of our round Earth? Happy that we live in an era of specialists, but sad that they can’t agree on something like which method is best for determining cardiovascular risk factors?
 
So, what will you do? Will you ask your doctor to give you an apoB test instead of or in addition to a blood test for cholesterol? Or because, as Jennifer Robinson says, “It’s too much...," will you ignore this new information?  

​Now, would you like butter on your popcorn?
  
*Leslie, Mitch. Science. Sciencemag.org, December 6, 2017, online at http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/12/it-time-retire-cholesterol-tests , doi:10.1126/science.aar6854

There’s an interesting—at least, to me—phrase in L. F. Salzmann’s Mediaeval Byways: “the alchemy of the pen.”* In fact, words do the magic medieval alchemists sought by way of a “philosopher’s stone,” the magic of turning base metals into gold. But there’s more: The pen can also turn “gold” into “base metals,” and that reverse process, never sought by those alchemists, seems today to dominate online and other media alchemy.
 
Not that there aren’t uplifting and ennobling statements, blogs, performances, treatises and, on the physical side, beneficial chemicals; there are some of those if one looks for them. But most word alchemy seems to be negative, or, at the very least, debasing. Maybe we just have too much time on our hands and too few ennobling thoughts in our heads.
 
Now, I risk the same negativity and debasement if I write only the base metal side of this modern analysis. I make myself a reverse alchemist, and we have enough reverse purpose in both physical and mental alchemy today. Physical: the use of chemistry to imprison the mind in addiction. Mental: the use of blogs, news, performance, and even daily conversation to debase. Of course, we could argue that such has always been the way of the world and that no people at any time had no mal intent in its alchemy.
 
The question we might pose to ourselves is whether or not we have become one of those alchemists who has devoted much of his or her efforts to turning “gold” into “base metals.” Look to your laboratory; look in your test tubes; look at your chemistry; and look to your words. Have you produced base metal or gold?
 
*Salzmann, L. F., F. S. A. Mediaeval Byways. New York, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1913, p. 6. Online at https://www.gutenberg.org/files/42975/42975-h/42975-h.htm#Page_1  

In The Madman: His Parables and Poems, Kahlil Gibran tells of a fox that sees its shadow in the morning and decides he’ll eat a camel for lunch. When he again sees his shadow, it is noon, and the fox decides that a mouse will make a sufficient lunch.
 
Morning shadows are, like evening shadows, long and large. Steeper angles of a higher sun make shadows shorter and smaller. We make a mistake when we take such shadows for true reflections of size. One wonders whether humans, particularly those who are surrounded by sycophants, take shadows they cast under bright lights of paparazzi and TV cameramen as indicators of their true size and value. Shining from the eye- and near-eye-level of humans, lights cast on idolized humans make very large shadows.
 
Knowing this, you might be wise not to stand in someone's shadow lest you begin to believe, like the fox, that the shadow truly reflects the size of the shadow-maker. Similarly, turn to those who would stand in your shadow and advise them not only to step into their own light, but also to choose that light which casts a shadow that reflects “true size.”

Dip, not stuff you put in your mouth, chew, and then spit, and not a road hazard.
Strike, not missing a pitched ball, knocking down bowling pins, beginning to play a tune, bombing, or hitting.
Plunge, not falling or diving, and not a dress neckline revealing cleavage.*
But other dips, strikes, and plunges: geologic ones, specifically, the terms used for the analysis of geological structures.  
 
Dip, strike, and plunge are geologic terms for the orientations of folded and faulted rocks. Dip: think opened book left page-side down on a coffee table while the reader gets a refill of coffee; the two sides slant away from the central spine; that’s dip. Strike: think compass direction of the book’s spine; that’s strike. Plunge: picture one end of that open book resting partly on a large coffee table book, inclining the spine; that’s plunge. Faulted and folded rocks have orientations that are similar, and the folded ones can even be pictured as an upside-down open book with those same three orientations.
 
Here’s the point: In a three-dimensional universe, we are accustomed to seeing the orientations of everything physical, even when we might not personally know a set of descriptors for those orientations. We see orientations, but most of us do not quantify by angles in horizontal or vertical planes. And that’s okay for everyday living. Just recognizing the way something is oriented is sufficient for safety: “Remember that the ramp is slippery when wet.”
 
If you live in a tree-shrouded humid area underlain by relatively undisturbed, flat-lying layers of sedimentary rocks or in an area of massive granitic batholiths, you won’t see many features to which you might apply dip, strike, and plunge. But in mountainous regions like the Himalayas, the Alps, the Rockies, the Andes, and the Appalachians, or on a tectonically squeezed island like Crete,** orientations of broken and folded rocks can be spectacular, and they reveal the history of shaping forces. 
 
Anyway, this is about orientations. Wherever you find faulted and folded rocks, you might be amazed by the power required to do the faulting and folding. There are, of course, local compressive and tensional stresses, but the most spectacular of the folds are generally the product of movements by the large tectonic plates on which continents move. Slamming India into southern Asia has both raised the Tibetan Plateau and folded rocks in the Himalayas. So, when you think orientations, think of both local and overriding regional (or even worldwide) forces.
 
And the same applies to religious, social, philosophical, and political orientations. We are subject to forces on different scales, and we have all been bent and twisted by forces external to ourselves. Often, because of forces beyond our control, we tilt one way or another, warp this way or that, or incline toward or away from. We even separate and move relative to religious, social, philosophical, and political entities to which we have been long attached. But even if we ignore those religious, social, philosophical, and political tectonics that have shaped our lives on a grand scale, we still have to contend with the emotional tectonics that manifest themselves in our gut responses to circumstances. What forces shaped those emotional responses?
 
All of us can profit from applying the principles of structural geology to our lives. Structural geologists analyze the direction and strength of forces and their resultant effects on rocks. Compressive forces push rocks together; tensional forces pull them apart. Pushed together under great power, rocks can rise, fold, and sometimes fault (move). Pulled apart, rocks can fault and drop to form down-dropped basins.
 
How would we profit? We need to ask ourselves whether or not the forces that shaped our orientations were compressive or tensional. Both? Probably, we’ll all find that in our most recognizable and fundamental characteristics, we exhibit a history of those forces, just as the dipping and plunging rocks do along strikes. We are all that opened book. Our characteristics are those pages and covers that attach to a spine with a specific strike and plunge, sometimes with rips and creases. 
 
Want to understand yourself a bit better? Do some structural analysis.
 
 
*Plunging necklines aside, cleavage is also revealed in the way a mineral or rock splits.
 
**See folded rocks at https://www.google.com/search?q=pics+of+geology+of+Crete&client=safari&rls=en&tbm=isch&source=iu&ictx=1&fir=SuHmWXZ7Dg7VzM%253A%252Cswlme0bHef_rSM%252C_&usg=__ruq4B5HKT0qNBcauhp6p4gPZE4g%3D&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjn-9e7ufXXAhWCl-AKHa4WCQgQ9QEIKTAA#imgrc=SuHmWXZ7Dg7VzM:    

In my somewhat rural area, some farms house horses, and one, just down the street from my house, houses rescue horses, but no Harringtonhippus francisci. All the H. francisci are extinct now for unknown reasons. Did their demise come through the actions of the first North Americans? Bacteria? Viruses? Ecological change? And if there were people living contemporaneously with H. francisci at the time of the extinction, did none of them care to set up rescue farms? All life-forms have a tenuous hold on existence, a fact that conscious beings have difficulty ignoring. Were there no charitable people, none to intervene and save the ancient horse from extinction?  
 
The tenuous hold on life applies to every life-form and to species. As we have seen, however, interventions by well-meaning humans have at least temporarily saved some species of whales and wolves from that ultimate fate. But are there enough well-meaning humans intervening to save our species? What if our hold on the planet becomes a bit shaky because someone who is “well-meaning” like chemist Floyd Romesberg of Scripps Research Institute runs experiments with DNA not on bacteria as he and fellow researchers do, but rather on human cells and unintentionally sends humanity the way of H. francisci?*
 
Extinct horse? Horses are still around, aren’t they? Apparently, the extinct H. francisci just couldn’t keep pace with other horse species. Recently named in honor of Richard Harington, a paleontologist who discovered in Lost Chicken Creek fossils of the “stilt-legged” horse, the defunct horse species once roamed western North America from Nevada to the Yukon, dying out about 17,000 years ago and leaving no distant evolutionary descendants for my neighbor to rescue.**
 
The seven remaining species of horses that still run over the planet include the domesticated horses on my neighbor’s farm, Przewalski’s horse, the donkey, zebras, kiangs, and the African wild asses. Some, like the zebras, are composed of an arguable three or four species, and some cross-bred horses have produced offspring called mules, hinnies, zeedonks, zonies, and zorses. Even if no new species evolves, there are still those horse species that have survived long after the last H. francisci went to the glue farm.
 
In the number of horse species lies some protection from extinction for the genus Equus. The more species in the genus, the better chance of its general survival. But what of the genus Homo? Humans coexisted with H. francisci, and we have survived the 17,000 years after the extinction. The loss of H. francisci provides us with a warning: Although genus Equus survives, its individual species have gone extinct. If we were to follow H. francisci to that glue farm, there would be no continuation of our genus. The End. Do we need a human rescue farm?
 
That you can’t see a living relative of H. francisci but that you can see horses confirms the tenuous existence of individual species and the less tenuous existence of a genus because of its number of species. All species face possible extinction. With regard to horses, one type, the stilt-legged ones, died out, but other horse species remain; the genus survives in its remaining species.
 
How do we compare? We all belong not only to the same genus, but also to the same species. And our species is the only member of the genus Homo.    
 
A new species of genus Homo is probably not on the horizon. Yes, because of our widespread distribution, we might eventually produce a new species, but homogenization seems to be our destiny because of our frequent travel and migration. Where are our ancient relatives the Neandert(h)als? Locked inside our DNA? All of us, regardless of shape, stature, and color, belong to a single human species whose genetic variations don’t impede reproducing fertile offspring. Even the effects of thousands of years of separated gene pools don’t prohibit a Scandinavian and a member of an Australian indigenous tribe from reproducing.   
 
Of course, we are increasingly more capable of making strange pairings because of our ability to edit a genome and affect a germline in processes that teeter at the edge of an ethical precipice. Given our history of “mad scientists,” there’s a remote chance that someone will attempt to produce a new kind of human. It’s been attempted on tragic and cruder levels. But generally, our species might be very much like H. francisci: An evolutionary dead end. And the “dead” part might be enhanced by our interference, by our well-intentioned “rescue farms” of altered DNA.
 
Without the ability to conduct paleontological research into its past or model its future, H. francisci and tens of billions of other species could not see vestiges of their beginning and prospects for their end. We’re obviously different. We have rather extensive—if still only incomplete—knowledge of our evolutionary past from fossil records. We also have the ability, if only imperfectly, to guess our future. Balancing past and future is the nature of our present. In looking ahead on the basis of what we know, we can imagine the scenarios of our own extinction and envision a time when no humans inhabit the planet.
 
Is there a possibility we might even alter our species, making variants that conceivably lead to a different human species? Just keep this in mind: As biology goes, species, NOT individuals, evolve. If you look at the history of humans attempting to alter humans, you’ll see an underlying motive of producing some “super” individual or individuals who will reproduce a race of “superhumans.” It’s that kind of thinking that introduced eugenics and all the tragic consequences of that movement, including numerous incidents of genocide. Human interference for the sake of “improving” the species has had, in many circumstances, very bad consequences for individuals grouped somewhat arbitrarily by nationality or “race.” Think Nazi Germany, for example. Think Rwanda. Think et cetera probably going back to human origins.
 
Some 3.8 billion years of DNA development on our planet has made life-forms very complex, and vestigial body parts and junk DNA are part of that complexity. Because gene interaction outstrips any current or foreseeable total control even with the aid of supercomputers, we cannot know the nature of a second generation of any combination of forced mutations or to mutations that evolve from such mutations. In trying to prevent our becoming yet another evolutionary dead end, we might make extinction happen. That notion has been the subject of numerous science fiction stories. So, with some considerable caution, Romesberg and colleagues conducted research that introduced unnatural bases into cells to make proteins. Now, let’s assign the most well-meaning of motives to the researchers at Scripps. But that still leaves the scary part: According to an online report by Ewen Callaway at Nature, the international weekly journal of science, “The achievement…shows that synthetic biology—a field focused on imbuing organisms with new traits—can accomplish its goals by reinventing the most basic facets of life…’What we’ve done is design a new part that functions right alongside the existing parts and can do everything they do.’”*
 
What being will wander over a future Lost Chicken Creek, discover a human bone or skull, and understand that it represents a species that was not only widespread on a continent, but also on every continent? Human DNA has an almost-four-billion-year history, and our own variants from Australopithecus to us were largely, if not totally, the product of unconscious interactions. Will consciousness improve the process? Will consciousness even remain on the planet? Having some success in technologies like CRISPR/Cas9 to edit genomes has probably encouraged or will encourage someone to make a “better” or even a “newer” species of synthetic human. Yet, there’s no guarantee that the product will be viable or “better.” Evolutionary dead ends are both inevitable and unpredictable, regardless of human hubris.   
 
Maybe we should look at the horses. A number of different species of horses now roam Earth. In the past, a number of different species of horses roamed, also. There is no clear reason why some of them became extinct just as there is no clear reason why there were multiple horse species—or even hominin species—living contemporaneously. But certainly in the past no conscious entity attempted to alter DNA by introducing mechanisms for adding 100 or so extra amino acids to the 20 we now use.
 
What is the reason that there is a sole human species? And will that status have anything to do with our becoming another dead end? Once again, remember that species, NOT individuals, evolve biologically.
 
We keep confusing technological advances—even biotech ones—with improvement in the human condition. True, people in industrialized nations generally have longer lives on average, but that is largely a consequence of reducing infant and child mortality and improving water quality. But in the process of industrial development, we have also incorporated into our bodies chemical compounds that didn’t exist just a century ago and certainly not millennia ago. And now without knowing the full consequences of manipulating DNA, the very stuff that makes us what we are, we believe we are on the cusp of improving ourselves as though individuals could evolve. Should we continue our efforts without some ethical control? How would we agree on the underlying ethics? Some well-meaning researcher could find a cure for one malady while sending us into the Lost Chicken Creek of species’ history.
 
I guess the only one who will know our fate will be that last conscious human who looks around to find himself or herself alone amidst a herd of wild horses.  
 
*Callaway, Ewen. ‘Alien’ DNA makes proteins in living cells for the first time. Nov. 29, 2017. Nature 551, 550–551 (30 November 2017) doi:10.1038/nature.2017.23040
 http://www.nature.com/news/alien-dna-makes-proteins-in-living-cells-for-the-first-time-1.23040
 
** Peter D Heintzman, Grant D Zazula, Ross DE MacPhee, Eric Scott, James A Cahill, Brianna K McHorse, Joshua D Kapp, Mathias Stiller, Matthew J Wooller, Ludovic Orlando, John Southon, Duane G Froese, Beth Shapiro. A new genus of horse from Pleistocene North America. eLife, 2017; 6 DOI: 10.7554/eLife.29944
AND
University of California - Santa Cruz. "A horse is a horse, of course, of course -- except when it isn't: Analysis of ancient DNA reveals a previously unrecognized genus of extinct horses that once roamed North America." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 28 November 2017. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/11/171128090948.htm
 
   
 

Time to stop all this political bickering? Want a little more rationality and a little less volatility? Start listening to dialects, particularly to vowel sounds.
 
Did CCR subtly give us a mechanism for understanding political leaning in their 1968 version of Susie Q? “Oh, Susie Q…I like the way you talk….” Is there something in Aunt or Cousin or neighbor Susie’s speech that gives us a clue to their political perspective and a mechanism for reducing adrenalin output during conversations about politics?
 
Talk, or, more specifically, dialect, isn’t something we pay much attention to unless we travel outside our regions. Maybe we should pay more attention to it inside our neighborhoods. Brice Russ reports (Dec. 1, 2017) in Science.org that people with a common political bent have a common dialect: “…even small linguistic difference can indicate political affiliation—and help form identities.”*
 
Scottish members of UK’s House of Commons pronounce vowels according to their affinity for a political point of view according to the study Russ reviews. Members of the Scottish National Party would probably read aloud the Dr. Seuss story with a low “a” deep in the throat as The Coht (or Cot) in the Hoht (or Hot), but their counterparts in the Labour Party would likely read it more with a higher pitched “a” as the tip of the tongue presses into the bottom teeth (/kaet/) in voicing The Cat in the Hat.*
 
“How,” you ask, “is this something we could all use when we talk to Aunt or Cousin or neighbor Susie to reduce our output of adrenalin during a political conversation?”
 
Hearing one’s own dialect and distinguishing it is a difficult matter for many of us when we are surrounded by similar speakers. But we all, it seems, can tell the difference in pronunciation when we are among speakers with a different dialect. We might not be able to hear or pay attention to our own dialect, but we can sure hear a different one.
 
Mostly, we associate dialects with regions, and we probably hear what we consider an indigenous pronunciation in city or farmland, in eastern or western districts, or in mountain and valleys. We distinguish generally when we visit another region. People in the USA Midwest differ in pronunciation from people in the Northeast, and a pattern of differences manifests itself in the “Midwests” and “Northeasts” of almost every nation. In assigning dialects to regions, we ignore subtle differences in dialects within regions.
 
But now, according to the study of the Scottish Parliamentarians, we need to consider how political view also shapes the way we talk. Would listening to dialect be a rational mechanism that reduces gut reactions to people of different political persuasion?  
 
So, the next time you visit those relatives with a different point of view, pay less attention to their perspective and more attention to their vowels. You’ll turn yourself away from simply using your amygdalae and toward using your frontal cortex, and you’ll have a smaller amount of adrenalin coursing through your veins. For a brief time at least, let’s all stop listening to what our political adversaries are saying and start paying attention to the sounds they use to say it.
 
If dialect indicates political view, then we really don’t need to hear all those same talking points with which we either agree or disagree. Pronunciation of a single vowel will encapsulate an entire political point of view as much as a generalized dialect represents a region.  
 
Oh, Susie Q. I like (or dislike) the way you talk.
 
Now we just need someone to do a study on how people of differing political perspectives walk. We might not even have to engage a political counterpart in a conversation as we watch him or her walk toward us.
 
Of course, in today’s contentious society driven by incessant shouting matches on talk shows, there’s another alternative for peaceful coexistence between two political opponents: Don’t walk toward or talk to each other.
 
“But nothing will ever be solved that way,” you say.
 
“How is that different from what seems to be the current status of political exchange?”
 
Oh, Susie Q.
I like (or dislike) the way you walk;
I like (or dislike) the way you talk…
Susie Q.
 
* http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/12/how-politics-can-shape-person-s-accent  
 
**This will be difficult for a member of either party to distinguish among colleagues.