Tuesday, March 14, 2006

NOW POLITICALLY CORRECT NOT TO HELP HURT CHILDREN

Mum Julie Scott was called in by a school to stick a plaster on her daughter’s cut finger because teachers were BANNED from using them. Emily, nine, had nicked a tiny piece of skin with the zip of her coat pocket at playtime and the wound oozed a little blood. But her school recently binned all plasters under tough new safety rules, in case any kids were allergic to latex.

Teachers told Emily they could only wash it and dab it with a paper towel — so mum-of-two Julie, 38, was phoned to bring in a plaster and administer it. She said: “It’s absolutely beyond belief.” Her husband Kevan added: “It’s the nanny state gone mad. “If they’re worried about being sued, I’d suggest there are more people who might sue for NOT putting a plaster on a bleeding cut, than are allergic to latex.”

Emily hurt herself on Wednesday lunchtime in the playground of 323-pupil Uphill Primary School near Weston-super-Mare, Somerset. Businessman Kevan, 39, said: “She just had a little cut where the fingernail meets the skin. Would she have been taken to hospital if nobody had been at home to answer the call?”

School head David Edwards said he took a “common sense approach” to guidelines laid down by North Somerset Council. He is reviewing his policy. A council spokesman admitted: “This seems to be a misinterpretation. We might need to tidy up the guidelines a bit to avoid any confusion.”

An estimated 1.5 million of Britain’s 60 million people are allergic to latex. Sun Health Reporter Emma Morton said the allergy was rare in under-16s. She added: “The reaction is minimal — a slight red rash in most cases.” The British Association for Anaphylaxis — the medical term for a life-threatening reaction — had never heard of severe reaction to a sticking plaster.

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THOSE INCORRECT GENES ARE EVEN MORE IMPORTANT THAN WE THOUGHT

East Asian and European cultures have long been very different, Richard Nisbett argued in his recent book "The Geography of Thought." East Asians tend to be more interdependent than the individualists of the West, which he attributed to the social constraints and central control handed down as part of the rice-farming techniques Asians have practiced for thousands of years.

A separate explanation for such long- lasting character traits may be emerging from the human genome. Humans have continued to evolve throughout prehistory and perhaps to the present day, according to a new analysis of the genome reported last week by Jonathan Pritchard, a population geneticist at the University of Chicago. So human nature may have evolved as well. If so, scientists and historians say, a fresh look at history may be in order. Evolutionary changes in the genome could help explain cultural traits that last over many generations as societies adapted to different local pressures.

Trying to explain cultural traits is, of course, a sensitive issue. The descriptions of national character common in the works of 19th-century historians were based on little more than prejudice. Together with unfounded notions of racial superiority they lent support to disastrous policies. But like phrenology, a wrong idea that held a basic truth (the brain's functions are indeed localized), the concept of national character could turn out to be not entirely baseless, at least when applied to societies shaped by specific evolutionary pressures.

In a study of East Asians, Europeans and Africans, Pritchard and his colleagues found 700 regions of the genome where genes appear to have been reshaped by natural selection in recent times. In East Asians, the average date of these selection events is 6,600 years ago. Many of the reshaped genes are involved in taste, smell or digestion, suggesting that East Asians experienced some wrenching change in diet. Since the genetic changes occurred around the time that rice farming took hold, they may mark people's adaptation to a historical event, the beginning of the Neolithic revolution as societies switched from wild to cultivated foods.

Some of the genes are active in the brain and, although their role is not known, may have affected behavior. So perhaps the brain gene changes seen by Pritchard in East Asians have some connection with the psychological traits described by Nisbett. Some geneticists believe the variations they are seeing in the human genome are so recent that they may help explain historical processes. "Since it looks like there has been significant evolutionary change over historical time, we're going to have to rewrite every history book ever written," said Gregory Cochran, a population geneticist at the University of Utah. "The distribution of genes influencing relevant psychological traits must have been different in Rome than it is today," he added. "The past is not just another country but an entirely different kind of people."

John McNeill, a historian at Georgetown University in Washington, said "it should be no surprise to anyone that human nature is not a constant" and that selective pressures have probably been stronger in the last 10,000 years than at any other epoch in human evolution. Genetic information could therefore have a lot to contribute, although only a minority of historians might make use of it, he said.

The political scientist Francis Fukuyama has distinguished between high-trust and low-trust societies, arguing that trust is a basis for prosperity. Since his 1995 book on the subject, researchers have found that oxytocin, a chemical active in the brain, increases the level of trust, at least in psychological experiments. Oxytocin levels are known to be under genetic control in other mammals. It is easy to imagine that in societies where trust pays off, generation after generation, the more trusting individuals would have more progeny and the oxytocin-promoting genes would become more common in the population. If conditions should then change, and the society be engulfed by strife and civil warfare for generations, oxytocin levels might fall as the paranoid produced more progeny.

Napoleon Chagnon for many decades studied the Yanomamo, a warlike people who live in the forests of Brazil and Venezuela. He found that men who had killed in battle had three times as many children as those who had not. Since personality is heritable, this would be a mechanism for Yanomamo nature to evolve and become fiercer than usual.

Since the agricultural revolution, humans have to a large extent created their own environment. But that does not mean the genome has ceased to evolve. The genome can respond to cultural practices as well as to any other kind of change. Northern Europeans, for instance, are known to have responded genetically to the drinking of cow's milk, a practice that began in the Funnel Beaker Culture that thrived 5,000 to 6,000 years ago. They developed lactose tolerance, the unusual ability to digest lactose in adulthood. The gene, which shows up in Pritchard's test, is almost universal among people of Holland and Sweden who live in the region of the former Funnel Beaker culture.

The most recent example of a society's possible genetic response to its circumstances is one advanced by Cochran and Henry Harpending, an anthropologist at the University of Utah. In an article last year they argued that the unusual pattern of genetic diseases found among Ashkenazi Jews (those of Central and Eastern Europe) was a response to the demands for increased intelligence imposed when Jews were largely confined to the intellectually demanding professions of money lending and tax collection. Though this period lasted only from A.D. 900 to about 1700, it was long enough, the two scientists argue, for natural selection to favor any variant gene that enhanced cognitive ability.

One theme in their argument is that the variant genes perform related roles, which is unlikely to happen by chance since mutations hit the genome randomly. A set of related mutations is often the mark of an evolutionary quick fix against some sudden threat, like malaria. But the variant genes common among the Ashkenazi do not protect against any known disease. In the Cochran and Harpending thesis, the genes were a response to the demanding social niche into which Ashkenazi Jews were forced and the nimbleness required to be useful to their unpredictable hosts.

No one has yet tested the Cochran- Harpending thesis, which remains just an interesting, though well worked out, conjecture. But one of its predictions is that the same genes should be targets of selection in any other population where there is a demand for greater cognitive skills. That demand might have well have arisen among the first settled societies where people had to deal with the quite novel concepts of surpluses, property, value and quantification. And indeed Pritchard's team detected strong selection among East Asians in the region of the gene that causes Gaucher's disease, one of the variant genes common among Ashkenazim.

Source



Prime Minister Howard's "incorrect" Australian voters:

I am writing this sitting in a coffee shop in Narellan, a booming centre near Camden in south-western Sydney. It's in the federal seat of Macarthur, which, like most on the fringe, is held by the Liberals. I have just met some people who I think help explain why John Howard is still Prime Minister.

Harrington Park is one of the best of the new housing estates. About 2500 homes have been built in the past decade on what was once the farm of Sir Warwick Fairfax. Yakou Marcus is a businessman who came to Australia from Egypt and lived in Bosley Park, near Liverpool, for 20 years. He says Harrington Park is "a very quiet area, very good for peace. Better than Bosley Park because there aren't too many problems. In Bosley Park Chinese, Arabs, Assyrians, but here they're all special people." He likes his house so much he bought two more blocks in the suburb, one for his son and one as an investment.

Poppy and Bill Prezios and their children moved to Harrington Park from Eastlakes. Bill says their old suburb was "too busy . and it's not that friendly. Everyone keeps to themselves. There's no competition out here, everyone's equal. My brother-in-law bought at Sans Souci for $1.3 [million] but I wouldn't live there."

The couple stayed with their in-laws for two years while their house was being built. "It's not really family-oriented there," Poppy says. "The kids would go to the beach at Brighton-le-Sands to play and it was scary - a lot of violence, a lot of angry people." At Harrington Park they have many friends in their street and leave the doors open when they go visiting. For this, Poppy leaves home at 6.30am to drive to her job at Sydney University.

Frank is a retired Italian carpenter and waiter who moved from Green Valley to Harrington Park last year. "I like this area because it's more comfortable, more quiet," he says. "Around Green Valley, a lot of Arabs moved in, there was a mosque not far from me. I didn't have any trouble, but who knows in the future, because at Punchbowl you get a lot of problem people."

He says he likes Harrington Park because it has "real quality people. I'm very concerned about these things." His neighbours are Indian but "they're good, they're not the Indians with turbans on their heads . We're happy here."

These comments were provided spontaneously in response to my general questions about why these people had moved house. I know some of them will make readers wince and start to have dark thoughts about the innate racism of the Australian people. But I would disagree with such an interpretation. I believe they simply reflect the fears and experiences of ordinary, decent people, exposed to some of the pressures and uncertainties of large-scale immigration involving record numbers of people from non-European backgrounds. There is a concern about physical security, the most basic of human needs, entirely valid if you look at the relevant crime figures.

They also reflect a common way of understanding and dealing with the world through rule-of-thumb stereotypes about strangers. These people are not symbolic analysts, they do not search the internet for sophisticated theory about racism and its causes. They just want to do their jobs and make sure their children are safe when they're walking home from school. Their needs are, if you like, simple, and they want leaders who respect those needs.

They also want to feel the security of belonging to a community, which Harrington Park gives them. There's nothing elitist about this: we're talking about a normal desire to live with others who are also polite, clean and non-violent. There's a political dimension to this too: I don't know how they vote, but I suspect they want leaders who will allow them to assimilate and not keep treating them - or anyone else - as an ethnic category.

John Howard gets this. Labor doesn't.

A related thing Labor doesn't get is the implications of the prosperity of recent decades. Prosperity changes people and therefore changes politics. People look to politicians more to manage solutions than to talk up problems. Of course it's hard for Labor to be positive from Opposition. But a bigger problem is that the party was set up to represent one side in a class war that (like the union movement) hardly exists any more. Labor lacks a theory relevant to modern life, which means it lacks insight and purpose.

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