Path To Possible Treatment For M.S. Identified

Scientists have identified in mouse models a "previously unknown kind of immune cell makes a protein that may be a pivotal player in multiple sclerosis."  The protein is called GM-CSF. 

This suggests that it might be possible to cure (or at least effectively treat) MS with a therapy based on neutralizing the GM-CSF protein.   These therapies were effective in the mouse model. 

M.S. is a degenerative auto-immune disease which is probably not genetic and usually strikes in the prime of life, but whose causes are not known.  It leads to decline in nerve function and mental health generally resulting in premature death, and while there are some drugs used to treat it, the treatments only partially control M.S. rather than definitively shutting it down the way an antibiotic, for example, does.

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Physiological Test Predicts Effectiveness of Talk Therapy For Depression

[A] quick, inexpensive, and easy to administer physiological measure, pupil dilation in response to emotional words, not only reflects activity in brain regions involved in depression and treatment response but can predict which patients are likely to respond to cognitive therapy[.]. . . activity in the brain's cortical emotion regulatory systems is strongly related to pupil size when people are viewing emotion-laden words . . . It is because of this relationship between eye and brain that pupil measurements predict the response to cognitive therapy."

Cognitive therapy is a type of psychotherapy designed to help individuals overcome difficulties by modifying negative or irrational thoughts and behavior, which, in turn, can improve mood and reduce stress. It is usually completed in weekly sessions, with 10-20 sessions being effective for most individuals who benefit.

From here, citing Greg J. Siegle, Stuart R. Steinhauer, Edward S. Friedman, Wesley S. Thompson, Michael E. Thase. "Remission Prognosis for Cognitive Therapy for Recurrent Depression Using the Pupil: Utility and Neural Correlates." Biological Psychiatry, 2011; 69 (8): 726 DOI: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2010.12.041.

The abstact of the paper provides more details:

Although up to 60% of people with major depressive disorder respond to cognitive therapy (CT) in controlled trials, clinicians do not routinely use standardized assessments to inform which patients should receive this treatment. Inexpensive, noninvasive prognostic indicators could aid in matching patients with appropriate treatments. Pupillary response to emotional information is an excellent candidate, reflecting limbic reactivity and executive control. This study examined 1) whether pretreatment assessment of pupillary responses to negative information were associated with remission in CT and 2) their associated brain mechanisms.

We examined whether pretreatment pupillary responses to emotional stimuli were prognostic for remission in an inception cohort of 32 unipolar depressed adults to 16 to 20 sessions of CT. Twenty patients were then assessed on the same task using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Pupillary responses were assessed in 51 never-depressed controls for reference.

Remission was associated with either low initial severity or the combination of higher initial severity and low sustained pupillary responses to negative words (87% correct classification of remitters and nonremitters, 93% sensitivity, 80% specificity; 88% correct classification of high-severity participants, p < .01, 90% sensitivity, 92% specificity). Increased pupillary responses were associated with increased activity in dorsolateral prefrontal regions associated with executive control and emotion regulation. For patients with higher severity, disruptions of executive control mechanisms responsible for initiating emotion regulation, which are indexed by low sustained pupil responses and targeted in therapy, may be key to remitting in this intervention. These mechanisms can be measured using inexpensive noninvasive psychophysiological assessments.

The small study obviously needs to be replicated in a larger sample before being used on a widespread basis, but the 88% rate at which this simple test determines if high severity depressed patients will respond to cognitive therapy, compared to a 60% response rate in the absence of screening, is a major improvement for a technique that requires no investment in drugs or equipment and only minimal additional training for mental health practitioners. This test could spare more than half of severely clinically depressed individuals time and misery trying cognitive therapy that is unlikely to be effective for them, allowing them to use alternative therapies like drug treatments that are likely to be more effective for them immediately, while allowing about half of severely clinically depressed individuals to receive cognitive therapy, knowing that it has a very high probability of being successful, and avoiding the need for them to undergo a psychiatric drug treatment regime that is unnecessary for their recovery. The fact that the benefit is statistically significant at the 99% level in this small study also makes a study calculated to replicate this result look like a promising good investment.

Given that clinical unipolar depression is one of the most common mental health conditions, and is by far the most common one that is not typically congenital, which makes it disproportionately likely to be a condition dealt with by a primary care physician as opposed to a specialist mental health care professional, this kind of advance has particularly great practical relevance. Also, since unipolar depression is so common, the cost savings to the health care system of a diagnostic tool for determining what kind of treatment will be most effective could be an evidence based medicine technique that could make a material dent in the overall cost of mental health care.

Since this is a diagnostic approach, rather than a drug or device, it also doesn't need a long and costly approval process from the Food and Drug Administration. Funding of a simple large scale replication of this study which could be completed in a year or two, would be enough to include this diagnostic technique as part of the standard by the book treatment regime for unipolar depression nationally. Of course, since this isn't an approach would have a biotech company backing it, this kind of study almost necessarily would need to be funded by the public sector, for example, through a National Institute of Mental Health (NIHM) grant.

The real value of treatment effectiveness prediction tools as a means to improve the quality of patient care while reducing health care costs, a field which is coming into its own as a subfield of psychiatry and psychology, also suggests another funding possibility. Health insurance companies have historically viewed themselves primarily as financial institutions and as institutions through which patients can collectively bargain for provider health care pricing. But, the health insurance industry might be well advised to develop and fund a non-profit research foundation to develop treatment effectiveness prediction tools that do not have drug companies or medical equipment makers to fund them, as a way to promote health enhancing quality control.

The benefits of this little study aren't just practical in an immediate sense either. This is some of the hardest empirical evidence yet that there are medically relevant subtypes of unipolar depression in existence, with some indication of what the underlying neurological basis of that subtyping might involve. One of the deep issues in psychiatric classification of mental health conditions, for which the DSM-IV is the current industry standard, is that diagnosis of psychiatric conditions is almost entirely based upon non-physiological symptoms. It is entirely possible that some common DSM-IV conditions are really a cluster of separate conditions with similar symptoms but different causes (and hence different courses of treatment that are likely to be effective), and that other common DSM-IV conditions currently viewed are in fact merely distinctive syndromes that arrives when separate co-morbid conditions are present.

For example, this study shows that there are at least two types of unipolar depression, one of which is talk therapy responsive and one of which is not. This very likely indicates that the causes of the two types of unipolar depression are different. If this insight in incorporated into prior research on the causes of unipolar depression, the sometimes muddy and contradictory theories about what causes unipolar depression and how it can best be addressed might be clarified. One leading theory regarding the cause of unipolar depression conceptualizes it as a situation where prolonged stress and anxiety cause the body's normal responses to stress to shut down and try the new strategy of becoming depressed to deal with the situation. This might be a primary causal mechanism in one but not the other of subtypes of unipolar depression. If so, somewhat muddy data linking this cause to depression might become much more definitive with regard to the relevant subtype of depression, while clearing the decks for a search for one or more alternative causal mechanisms for the other subtype of depression.

Another possibility is that the pupil dilation response to emotion laden words may be a congenital element of a person's personality that is present even in the absence of unipolar depression. If this is the case, this trait might be one of many that is routinely tested for in children or young adults along with traits like blood type. Children with the trait might be at higher risk for the cognitive therapy responsive subtype of depression. Similarly, medical records could indicate which children are at risk for non-responsiveness to cognitive therapy as a treatment for unipolar depression. Since the physiological test for this trait is quite objective and easy to administer on a mass basis, it might also be possible to see if this trait corrolates with other mental health conditions, particularly those which are often co-morbid with unipolar depression (a co-mordidity pattern that might be more stark when restricted to a particularly subtype of depression), and to determine if it has a hereditary component. Patterns of co-morbidities associated with a particular subtype of unipolar depression might shed insight into the causal mechanism of a variety of mental health conditions which in turn might shed light on the kind of treatment regimes that are likely to be effective for those co-morbid mental health conditions.

Indeed, it might even be possible to provide these children or young adults, on a prophylactic basis, the kind of cognitive training that people with unipolar depression receive after they are diagnosed to help these individuals deal with situations that could lead to clinical depression before they happen.

There is no obvious reason that the benefits of cognitive behavioral therapy, which boils down to teaching people habits of thinking and mental tools for coping with certain kinds of problematic cognitive habits or tendencies, in general, can't be almost as effective when administered in advance as they are when administered as therapy after the fact. It might be possible to put together a set of empirically validated cognitive behavioral therapy regimes into a comprehensive set of coping skills that could be transmitted on a mass basis in a manner not unlike the model by which we instruct people in first aid, CPR, rescue breathing, the use of abdominal thrusts to respond to choking incidents, the proper way to respond to house fires, tornados and tsunamis, or suicide and bullying prevention programs. People who experience cognitive behavioral therapy responsive conditions anyway may benefit for refresher instruction and may be able to make more sense of what these therapies involve when they actually have the conditions that they are designed to alleviate, but it isn't unreasonable to think that this kind of public health preparedness model could materially reduce the overall incidence and impact of many common mental health conditions, some of which are subclinical or would otherwise never be diagnosed as such.

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The Sociology of Brain Disorder Treatment

There are two medical specialties that deal with brain disorders and conditions. One is neurology. The other is psychiatry. Where does one draw the line between the two?

Neuroskeptic compares the number of articles on particular conditions in leading academic journals for each specialty (Neurology and the American Journal of Psychiatry), to look empirically at how the line has been drawn within the medical profession.

The division doesn't seem to be very strongly linked to the extent that a condition is biologicallly based. As he notes:

Schizophrenia, which is probably considered "the most neurological" psychiatric disorder, is in fact the least talked about in Neurology.

Both mental retardation and autism are middle ground between the two specialties, with mental retardation leaning towards neurology, and autism leaning towards psychiatry.

Eyeballing the data, one way to think of the way that the conditions have been allocated is that psychiatrist deal with conditions that influence your personality and social interactions, other than pure cognition, while neurologists deal with other conditions and conditions that impact pure cognition.

This explains the mental retardation v. autism divide, for example. While both have a cognitive function element, explaining the neurological interest in both conditions, what distinguishes an autism diagnosis from a mental retardation diagnosis that is not autism is the diagnostic and treatment focus on how autism affects personality, social interaction and empathy, particularly in the case of autism spectrum disorders like Asperger's, where IQ is often in the normal range.

The gray area for ADHD, likewise, can be explained as a product of the lingering ambiguity over whether to think of the condition as a personality disorder that is a cogential part of who someone is, or as a developmental disorder of something large is part of a larger cognition process.

Psychaitry is concerned with "who you are" while neurology is concerned with "what you are" even though there isn't obviously any fundamental difference between the kind of brain functions that lead to schizophrenia and those that lead to congential epilepsy. The looming question behind Neuroskeptic's post is whether the divide says more about perhaps unfounded biases about mental health that pervade even the supposedly enlightened medical profession, than it does about science.

There are other ways to see the distinction, of course. One is that neurologists deal with issues that are believed to be exclusively "hardware" issues, while a core issue for psychiatrists is to parse "hardware" from "software" issues and address each appropriately. Some conditions may not neatly fit that divide today simply because historical ambiguity led a condition to be assigned to one category or the other, and given that all of the physicians involved have a similar allopathic medical background and training, there is no compelling reason to upset the apple cart of institutional and funding and bureaucratic arrangements based on the distinction at this point, even if it isn't terribly logical.

In the same way, no one is urgently pushing to have responsibility for counterfeiting enforcement removed from the duties of the United States Secret Service even though this doesn't logically have much to do with is primary responsibility to provide bodyguard protection to the President and other senior federal officials and candidates, because the skill set for the two tasks is similar.

Still, the divide has a strong impact on treatment modality. Neurologists use drugs and sometimes surgery, while seeing little place for therapy. Psychiatrists, while also prescribing drug treatments, recognize the value of psychological talk therapies as a complementary treatment modality to a much greater extent.

A footnote to the post in the study is also interesting:

"Gathering" this data took me 15 minutes. 20 years ago, it would have taken... well, you'd have had to read and manually categorize 30,000 abstracts. Even at 2 minutes per abstract (bare minimum) that's, er, 1000 man-hours of work.

READ MORE - The Sociology of Brain Disorder Treatment

Interesting Studies

* A new study predicts the extinction of religion in nine countries using models similar to those to predict language extinction. (See also here on language extinction: 6% of the world's languages are spoken by 94% of the world's population. The remaining 94% of languages are spoken by only 6% of the population. 133 languages are spoken by fewer than 10 people.) "The team took census data stretching back as far as a century from countries in which the census queried religious affiliation: Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland." The key constant in their model in all of the studied countries was a best fit to a value that would lead to completely secular beliefs in the long run.

Daniel M. Abrams, Haley A. Yaple, Richard J. Wiener, "A mathematical model of social group competition with application to the growth of religious non-affiliation."

The model looks at the proportion of people who are religious, the proportion of people who are non-religious, and assumes that conversion rates in each direction are a function of the proportion of the population that belongs to that group and a constant called "u" for the perceived utility of membership in that group. This probability they put in the form: "c(x^a)(u), where c and a are constants that scale time and determine the relative importance of x and u in attracting converts, respectively." Using 85 sets of long term census data they found that the best fit to "a" was 1, that c is also succeptible to global fits, and that u varies from place to place. When they solve the equations on this basis they find:

The behavior of the model can be understood analytically for a = 1, in which case we have dx/dt=cx(1-x)(2u-1): logistic growth. An analysis of the fixed points of this equation tells us that religion will disappear if its perceived utility is less than that of non-affiliation [i.e. u is greater than 0.5], regardless of how large a fraction initially adheres to a religion. However, if a is less than but close to one, a small social group can indefinitely coexist with a large social group.

The study estimated the constant "u" from census of religion data for "(a) the autonomous Aland islands region of Finland, (b) Schwyz Canton in Switzerland, (c) Vienna Province in Austria, (d) the Netherlands. . . . Relative utilities for the religiously unaffiliated populations as determined by model . . . were u = 0:63; 0:70; 0:58; 0:56."

No estimate of the key constant was made for the United States, which is far less secular than the countries studied, but has a growing non-religious population. There is also good reason to wonder if the either or model used in the study (in which religious or non-religious were the only categories) makes sense in a nation without a tradition of an established or locally dominant religion as found in most of the studied areas.

The general empirical trend in the study of American religious affiliation has been a candle burning at both ends result, with both more demanding religious faiths and secular beliefs growing at the expensive of mainline moderate religious belief. Similarly, in Latin America, the trend has been to see a growth in both Pentacostal faiths and secularism at the expensive the Roman Catholicism which is the dominant established church. In sub-Saharan Africa, the trend has been for conversion from animism to Christianity, with a minor growth factor (partially demic and partially from conversion) for Islam, while secular views have not been particularly notable as a share of the population.

Put another way, there is a lot to be said for a logistic model to explain trendlines in religious affiliation, but the model does nothing to explain what drives changes in the key constant "u" that drives these trends. By analogy, is is compable to looking at politics at an electoral level without really examining the movement politics that cause political views to change in the general population over time.

This model is a good antidote, however, to purely population genetic models that start from the assumption that children will share the faith of their parents, rather than attempting to quantify propensities to convert from one faith to another in a meaningful fashion. To some extent, by deriving empirical constants in the model from data, it glosses over these theoretical objections in a robust way. The constant "u" effectively subsumes both conversion propensities and reproduction rates. But, near the extremes, it becomes more and more important to recognize the relevance of subgroup membership, subgroup coherence, and reproduction rates, although its constant "a" can help mediate that result.

For example, in the sample "a" equals 1 model, it can't explain the persistence, and even growth, of faiths that Judaism and the Amish, in the face over overwhelming minority status for thousands of years and hundreds of years respectively. More generally, a more realistic model would assume a hetrogeneous propensity to convert which might very well have a hereditary component (due to psychological tendencies to take certain approaches to tradition and authority selected for heavily through religious endogamy when a religion is in the minority).

In more complex models, some religious populations and some personality types might be slow to convert, while others might convert more rapidly, and if the populations slow to convert also have more children and have children younger, you might end up with a bimodal outcome with a stable, fertile religious segment and a stable less fertile non-religious segment. It isn't hard to imagine the United States and Latin America evolving into this kind of equalibrium. And, while Turkey is nominally 99% Muslim, its division into different varieties of Islam arguably reflects this kind of balance.

* In a decidely participant-ethnographic investigation, New York City dezinens have discovered that godless people who get together in clubs are happier.

* A parasitic factor in mental illness may have been located:

Toxoplasma gondii infects approximately 25 percent of the human population. The protozoan parasite is noted for altering the behavior of infected hosts. . . .

"It is noteworthy that we found vasoactive intestinal peptide receptor 2 (VIPR2) was upregulated by all three Toxoplasma strains," says Xiao. VIPR2 "is linked to schizophrenia in some recent publications. Since the tropism of Toxoplasma for brain has been linked with specific behavioral changes and psychosis in humans, this finding will have some fundamental significance for understanding the correlation between Toxoplasma and psychosis."

The report based on the study by J. Xiao, L. Jones-Brando, C. C. Talbot, R. H. Yolken. "Differential Effects of Three Canonical Toxoplasma Strains on Gene Expression in Human Neuroepithelial Cells." Infection and Immunity, 2010; 79 (3): 1363 DOI: 10.1128/IAI.00947-10 suggests from a mouse model that there may be an important subclass of mental health conditions with a parasitic infectious agent as a cause or trigger.

* There may be a quick and easy vaccine cure for a complication of dust mite allergies:

Monash University researchers are working on a vaccine that could completely cure asthma brought on by house dust mite allergies. If successful, the vaccine would have the potential to cure sufferers in two to three doses. . . . Professor O'Hehir has also made significant gains in developing a vaccine for people with peanut allergies. Currently there is no specific treatment for peanut allergy with avoidance and emergency treatment of anaphylaxis with adrenaline as the only options. Allergen immunotherapy is available for selected patients with house dust mite allergy but typically injections need to be given regularly for three to five years.

I've never been diagnosed with asthma, but do have a dust mite allergy and have had subclinical asthma-like symptoms, so this is naturally of great interest to me.

* Native Americans had big influences on the environment of the Americas beyond a megafauna extinction, in the Everglades:

Tree islands are patches of relatively high and dry ground that dot the marshes of the Everglades. Typically a meter (3.3 feet) or so high, many of them are elevated enough to allow trees to grow. They provide a nesting site for alligators and a refuge for birds, panthers, and other wildlife.

Scientists have thought for many years that the so-called fixed tree islands (a larger type of tree island frequently found in the Everglades' main channel, Shark River Slough) developed on protrusions from the rocky layer of a mineral called carbonate that sits beneath the marsh. Now, new research indicates that the real trigger for island development might have been middens, or trash piles left behind from human settlements that date to about 5,000 years ago.

These middens, a mixture of bones, food discards, charcoal, and human artifacts (such as clay pots and shell tools), would have provided an elevated area, drier than the surrounding marsh, allowing trees and other vegetation to grow. Bones also leaked phosphorus, a nutrient for plants that is otherwise scarce in the Everglades.

And, in the Eastern United States where "prehistoric people decreased forest cover to reorient their settlements and intensify corn production. They also contributed to increased sedimentation in valley bottoms about 700 to 1,000 years ago, much earlier than previously thought. The findings suggest that prehistoric land use was the initial cause of increased sedimentation in the valley bottoms, and sedimentation was later amplified by wetter and stormier conditions."

* Unimpressive social science discovery of the week: Subjects in psychology experiments distinguish between real human beings and mere video recordings of human beings.

* Traits that cause organisms to disperse rapidly in space lead to selective evolution without regard to other measures of biological fitness.

* We know more about the apes of Europe and Asia tens of millions of years ago than we used to know:

Extant apes (Primates: Hominoidea) are the relics of a group that was much more diverse in the past. They originated in Africa around the Oligocene/Miocene boundary, but by the beginning of the Middle Miocene they expanded their range into Eurasia, where they experienced a far-reaching evolutionary radiation. . . Here we provide an updated chronology that incorporates recently discovered Iberian taxa and further reevaluates the age of many previously known sites on the basis of local biostratigraphic scales and magnetostratigraphic data. Our results show that identifiable Eurasian kenyapithecins (Griphopithecus and Kenyapithecus) are much younger than previously thought (ca. 14 Ma instead of 16 Ma), which casts serious doubts on the attribution of the hominoid tooth from Engelswies (16.3–16.5 Ma) to cf. Griphopithecus.

READ MORE - Interesting Studies

Friday News Dump

In Colorado

* Colorado's unemployment rate in February, of 9.1%, is the highest the state has experienced since the Great Depression and above the national rate of 8.9%. The oil bust of the early 1980s brought the rate to its previous peak of 8.8%. Also, unemployment estimates for Colorado over the last couple of years turn out to have been greatly understated, since the census revealed that the population figures used in making the original unemployment predictions were too low in high unemployment areas. Colorado's record lowest unemployment, since 1976, was at the turn of the millenium when it dropped to a little under 3%.

State officials have blamed migration to Colorado and the decision of many people who have given up looking for work to return to the workforce. Still, the fact that unemployment is climbing, rather than falling, long after the "recovery" in GDP terms has been underway, is discouraging. Unemployment is alawys a lagging indicator, but the employment situation has been worse and longer lived in the current employment recession than any since the Great Depression.

* Despite an immense state budget deficit, House Republicans in Colorado are still proposing large new tax cuts, in excess of $60 million.

* Colorado's proposed state budget will include more cuts to the Fort Logan psychiatric hospital, continuing a trend of decreasing mental health hospital capacity. The current cuts would close a juvenile ward that current houses an average of a dozen inpatients. The Joint Budget Committee argues that private facilities in the state offer the same services at a lower price and can handle another dozen patients.

In Other State Legislatures

* Both houses of Wisconsin's state legislature has passed a bill ending collective bargaining for public sector workers in Wisconsin's state and local governments. Republican Governor Walker has promised to sign the bill, which he championed. Naturally, the bill received voted only from Republicans, and a few Republicans broke ranks to join with Democrats in opposing it. Protests continue in Madison, with farmers set to encicle the state capitol with tractors next. Public opinion in Wisconsin has shifted decisively away from the Republicans and towards President Obama and the public employees unions in Wisconsin as a result of the union fight. Recall efforts are underway targeting a number of legislative anti-union Republicans, although it isn't clear if these will make the ballot or have a realistic chance at succeeding. Similar efforts are making progress in other Republican controlled states.

* The Governor of Illinois signed a bill abolishing the death penalty in that state, appropriating the funds that would have been used for death penalty litigation to a trust for murder victims, and pardoned the fifteen people on death row there. Illinois is the 16th state in the United States to abolish the death penalty.

* Kentucky has joined the list of states addressing state budget shortfalls with sentencing reforms, particularly with milder sentences for non-violent drug users.

Kentucky . . . became the latest to make the shift when Gov. Steve Beshear signed into law a measure increasing spending on rehabilitation programs and intensive drug testing. The law also reduces penalties for many drug offenses and may allow some traffickers and users of smaller amounts of drugs to avoid prison.

Delaware, Florida, Indiana, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania are among those that have pending bills to reduce penalties for drug offenders, in some cases by directing defendants into treatment programs. Similar laws have taken effect in South Carolina, Colorado and New York in recent years. States have maintained stiff penalties for more-serious drug crimes.

While the changes are part of broader belt-tightening efforts, they also reflect a growing belief among state lawmakers that prosecuting drug offenders aggressively often fails to treat their underlying addiction problems and can result in offenders cycling in and out of prisons for years — a critique long voiced by groups that advocate in favor of defendants' rights. . .

The state measures mark a sharp retreat from the war on drugs, which gathered steam in the 1980s and '90s with mandatory-minimum and three-strikes prison sentences that resulted in some drug offenders being locked up for decades. Drug arrests nationwide climbed from about 580,000 in 1980 to about 1.6 million in 2009, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Although some states started rethinking drug punishment before the recession, many more states have come on board in the past two years. In 2007, Texas began shifting more drug offenders away from prison, which helped hold down the inmate population. The changes cost $241 million, less than half what the state anticipated it would have spent to build three new prisons.

* Ohio's criminal sentencing commission has released a new report on the causes of that state's prison overcrowding problem. According to the report, "recent growth in Ohio’s prison population — even with mandatory sentences and scores of bills that increase penalties for particular offenses — is not driven primarily by intake (although it is a factor). It’s largely fueled by increases in inmates’ average length-of-stay."

* Connecticut voters in a survey favored the decriminalization of marijuana (79% favor medical marijuana and 65% favor decriminalization), legalizing Sunday liquor sales (65%), and reinstating the death penalty (68% up from 59% in 2005 after a high profile murder). But, majorities there don't favor allowing grocery stores to sell wine or liquor. Connecticut currently has a death penalty but its legislature is considering repealing it.

* Connecticut last year joined a list of states that automatically treat some teens under the age of eighteen as adults in the criminal justice process; New Hampshire changed its law in 2008. Similar proposals are pending in Massachusetts, Wisconsin, and North Carolina. The only other state that automatically tries some teens under the age of eighteen as adults is New York State. Budget savings and increased sensitivity to the distinctiveness of juvenile offenders has prompted the changes. For example, a recent study found that:

[I]nmates in adult facilities (surprisingly) give better reports than youth in juvenile facilities on several measures (including criminal activity and victimization), they also fare much worse on other measures. Importantly, the inmates in adult facilities report substantially and significantly greater rates of PTSD and mental illness symptoms, and are much more likely to be afraid for their safety, compared to those in juvenile facilities.

Colorado never had a law that automatically tried older teens under the age of eighteen as adults, but did give prosecutors the authority to directly file many serious criminal charges against older juveniles as adults without court approval; that authority was recently narrowed by Colorado's General Assembly.

* California is building a new death row prison at a projected cost of $356 million, as a partial response to federal prison overcrowding litigation in the state, in which inmates have been successful on the merits, but not seen many results.

California has 713 inmates awaiting execution. . . . By comparison, Florida ranked second, with 398, and Texas was third at 337. . . About 700 condemned men are confined at San Quentin, north of San Francisco, in facilities built to hold 554, according to the Corrections Department’s website. (Nineteen women face execution and are held in Chowchilla, a prison in the Central Valley.) On average, the men are likely to spend 17 years in the aging cell blocks, according to the prison system. . . . Since 1978, when California reinstated capital punishment, 53 condemned inmates have died from natural causes while on death row. Eighteen committed suicide and 13 were executed. Six died from other causes.

Other Domestic News

* Long Island Republican Congressman King has launched hearings in the House Homeland Security Committee into the radicalization of Islam, over objections that this amounts of a McCarthyistic inquiry that is singling out a single religion that may incite further terrorist sentiment against the United States.

* In Skinner v. Switzer, the U.S. Surpeme Court found, in a narrow 6-3 decision, that a Section 1983 civil rights suit by a death row inmate (as opposed to a habeas corpus suit) was not procedurally barred by prison litigation reform statutes. The inmate challenged an interpretation of a Texas law that prevented him from securing post-conviction access to DNA evidence in his muder case that might implicate another suspect (now dead). The court ruled in his favor because DNA testing itself does not necessarily lead to the setting aside of his conviction, as it could show that he is guilty or be inconclusive (and hence is not duplicative of habeas corpus relief), and does not violate the Rooker-Feldman doctrine because while a "state-court decision is not reviewable by lower federal courts . . . a statute or rule governing the decision may be challenged in a federal action"). The ruling also provided yet another case where heightened pleading standards in federal civil litigation were held not to bar a straightforward lawsuit brought by a prisoner.

* Excessive federal child pornography laws continue to produce absurd results:

In the spring and summer of 2006, Eric Rinehart, at the time a 34-year-old police officer in the small town of Middletown, Indiana, began consensual sexual relationships with two young women, ages 16 and 17. One of the women had contacted Rinehart through his MySpace page. He had known the other one, the daughter of a man who was involved in training police officers, for most of her life. Rinehart was going through a divorce at the time. The relationships came to the attention of local authorities, and then federal authorities, when one of the girls mentioned it to a guidance counselor. Whatever you might think of Rinehart's judgment or ethics, his relationships with the girls weren't illegal. The age of consent in Indiana is 16. . . . Rinehart got into legal trouble because one of the girls mentioned to him that she had posed for sexually provocative photos for a previous boyfriend and offered to do the same for Rinehart. Rinehart lent her his camera, which she returned with the promised photos. Rinehart and both girls then took additional photos and at least one video, which he downloaded to his computer.

In 2007 Rinehart was convicted on two federal charges of producing child pornography. U.S. District Court Judge David Hamilton, who now serves on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, reluctantly sentenced Rinehart to 15 years in prison. Thanks to mandatory minimum sentences, Hamilton wrote, his hands were tied. There is no parole in the federal prison system. So barring an unlikely grant of clemency from the president, Rinehart, who is serving his time at a medium-security prison in Pennsylvania, will have to complete at least 85 percent of his term (assuming time off for good behavior), or nearly 13 years.

* An NPR executive resigned after remarking in a secretly recorded conversation that the Tea Party was full of racists, despite the fact that this is true.

* Oil prices are rising on Mideast turmoil.

* Blockbuster, the dominant player in the storefront video rental market, reached an agreement with its creditors to be auctioned as a business to the highest bidder, rather than having its assets liquidated. Netflix, video on demand, and kiosk video rentals have destroyed its profitability. The chain, which grew dramatically through acquisition of competitors, also probably simply had too many stores for the market's demand and hasn't been able to shutter them fast enough. For example, in Denver at 6th Avenue and Grant Street, it once had two stores less than a block apart - both are now shuttered.

* Department store H&M has decided to open up stores in greater Denver, with the Saks location at the Cherry Creek Mall which is closing likely to be one of them.

Abroad

* Japan has had two major earthquakes in the last week. One was magnitude 7.2 on the Richter scale, and the last night there was an 8.8 magnitude quake that also gave rise to a Tsunami that reached as far as Hawaiii this morning and will be experienced as far off as Peru. The first Japanese quake produced only minimal damage. The current one killed about a hundred people and led to considerable property damage in a few industrial areas mostly from the tsunami waves rather than the earthquake itself. Similar magnitude earthquakes in Iran, Indonesia and Haiti have produced massive loss of life and long term devistation, but Japan's earthquake conscious building codes and better prepared people prevented the damage from being greater. A smaller earthquake in China this weak produced loss of life and property damage comparable to that experienced by last night's massive quake.

* Civil war continues to rage in Libya and France has recognized the rebels as the legitimate government of the country; NATO nations remain reluctant to intervene militarily there. Egyptians will vote on amendments to military proposed amendments its constitution this month to prepare for prompt democratic elections that will transfer power from a military council to civilians. Protestors in Jordan have complained that a new prime minister is stalling on proposals for political reforms, using the fact that the country's 32 political parties are too fragmented to produce quality elections; the main democratic reform that has been demanded is to shift control of the executive branch from the king to a prime minster selected by parliament. Police in a predominantly Shi'ite part of Saudi Arabia shot five protestors at a small demonstration; protests in the absolute monarchy have been muted compared to elsewhere in the region - in part because Saudi Arabia is more repressive and in part because the current Saudi King is popular with majority Sunnis in the country.

* The Daili Lama in Tibet proposed on the anniversary of the day of Tibet's failed 1959 bid to free itself from China, to transfer political power of the government in exile to elected leaders, leaving himself and his successors as spiritual leaders only. Proposed succession to his position is currently unclear as he has also proposed reforms to the traditional approach rooted in the notion that he is reincarnated. China remains officially outraged at any talk of Tibetan independence, or the notion that Taiwan is not part of China. China is also cracking down in an effort to prevent the Jasmine revolution of the Middle East from spreading to it.

Medicine

* A drug to prevent the spread of M.S. has worked in a mouse model. A mouse model of a drug to treat Alzheimer's disease and damage from minor strokes in the brain has also been successful. A new drug to treat lupus has come on the market. Progress has been made in developing a new class of anti-malaria drugs based on a chemotherapy drug.

READ MORE - Friday News Dump

Elements Of Ideal World

Charles Stross has bemoaned at his excellent blog the shortage of writers of utopian, as opposed to dytopian science fiction. There aren't enough people envisioning a positive visions of a good society of the future. I'll take a stab at some pieces of what that should look like today.

Health Care

* Health care billing is invisible to the patient who presents an insurance card, pays a co-pay that is easily determined and known in advance, and never hears about the financial part of the transaction again. The behind the scenes billing process would be highly automated, provide appropriate incentives to health care providers, resistant to fraud and inexpensive.

* A larger share of health care services would be provided by reasonably autonomous health care professionals less expensive and less comprehensively trained, but still carefully technically trained, on a par in expertise and compensation with nurse practioners, physician's assistants, EMTs, and midwives.

* The health care system, somehow or other, would provide universal coverage regardless of ability to pay, and everyone who worked a full working life would be in a pension system that would assure them a tolerable standard of living that was not deeply less generous than the one they enjoyed while they were working.

* A comprehensive, evidence based set of lifestyle recommendations for a healthy life would be easy to understand, easy to access, annotated with the genuine impacts of not following them and their evidentiary basis, and widely followed.

* A comprehensive, easy to access, evidence based authoritative catalog of ineffective treatment for medical conditions would be available as a persausive tool, and false marketing of ineffective treatments with medical claims would be regulated.

* A standard part of the labor and delivery package for every child will be a full genome and biomarker analysis that would become a part of that child's medical file for life and would be available on a privacy protected basis for medical researchers, and would be digested automatically for parents in a way that flagged issues and traits relevant to the child's future mental and physical health care, and educational and parenting needs.

* Cavities would be dramatically reduced by a "vaccine" administered to children around the same time as other childhood vaccines.

* Effective vaccines would be available and widely administered for all significantly harmful viral illnesses.

* Effective treatments to end the causes of injuries and diseases like Type II diabetes, cancer, chronic fatigue syndrome, spinal injuries, and autoimmune disorders (like M.S. and Lupus) would exist and provide relatively inexpensive mostly outpatient treatment.

* Birth control would be near universal for those not ideologically opposed to it from puberty onward, in place until an affirmative decision to have a child was made, capable of being ended without negative long term effects, and not disruptive of normal hormonal balances.

* Effective permanent correction of nearsightedness would be widely available and have an extremely low failure rate.

Mental Health

* Mental health care would be easy to access even by impaired people, would be provided on a categorical basis without regular eligibility evaluation to people diagnosed with conditions that are generally life long (while also having the capacity to address acute and temporary issues), would employ mostly professionals with less comprehensive education and compensation than M.D. trained psychiatrists but the authority to prescribe mental health meds and specialized technical training in mental health care. This would be handled on a more wholistic model than the transactional disease model common today - most mental health patients would see a treating professional at least once or twice a year their home and at least once or twice a year within some context of their daily life outside their home and outside the professional's office.

* Substance abuse would be treatable highly effectively with drugs. Improved, cheap diagnostic "labs on a chip" would facilite more accurate diagnosis of mental health conditions and would reduce the amount of trial and error involved in developing optimal treatment plans.

* An effective permanent "cure" for PTSD would be developed.

* There would be significant "nudges" to influence people needing it to obtain mental health care without going all the way to a court order to compel it involuntariliy in the vast majority of case.

* Evidence based, reliable risk assessment tools and early warning systems would identify people who should not possess firearms due to their current mental health and be implemented in a way that provides genuine and effective barriers to access to firearms for those individuals during those periods.

* The stigma of needing mental health care would be reduced. Indeed, mental health care might be integrated into a larger comprehensive system that reviewed the overall well being of each individual on a regular basis in a wide variety of respects.

* Minimally restrictive residential options for significantly impaired individuals with mental health issues would be about as common as and about as decent as assisted living facilities for the elderly are today.

* There would be adequate psychiatric hospital resources for the most severely impaired individuals with mental health issues, sometime accute and sometimes long term, which would be comparable in quality of life to the nicer private rehab centers today.

Transportation

* Medium and large sized cities would have transit systems that would make up a large share of intracity passenger and parcel traffic, and all places would have transit systems sufficient to meet the needs of those who can't drive.

* Intracity transportation, including cargo delivery, would be almost entirely with electrically powered vehicles in urban areas, and these vehicles would have enhanced safety systems to intervene in cases of operator error or incapacity. Intercity freight bound for urban areas even as small as very small cities and towns would move predominantly by rail rather than trucks.

* High speed rail would have a large share of of inter-city passenger and parcel traffic for distances of under three hundred miles between major urban centers and high volume destinations.

* A family taking a trip on an airplane for Thanksgiving or Christmas could reasonable expect to arrive at an airport 45 minutes before takeoff and make their flight; business traveler traveling light at non-peak times could reasonable expect to arrive at an airport an airport 30 minutes before takeoff and make their flight. Checking baggage would add only about 10 minutes to a typical traveller's travel time.

* Commercial airports would routinely have good quality transit that is comfortable, accomodate typical amounts of luggage easily, and be faster than travelling by car and parking at the airport, and no more expensive than it is to drive to an airport in a car and park there now.

* Most ocean freighters would use some form of sail to be more fuel efficient.

* Very low population density areas would be connected by airplanes, boats, and airships rather than roads, which would be removed from these areas.

* Hydrocarbon fueled vehicles would be predominantly used in niche applications in rural settings and in ocean fishing and pleasure boats where a dense electrical repowering grid for vehicles taking short intracity trips was not practical.

Energy

* Electric vehicles, wider use of transit and freight rail, and wider use of alternative fuels would dramatically reduce petroleum consumption.

* Wider use of renewable energy sources like improved solar and wind technology, tidal power, heat pumps with underground loops, and micro-hydropower would reduce coal consumption.

* Comprehensive conservation efforts would reduce energy consumption through means like better insulation, less electricity hungry appliances and devices, and more efficient energy storage devices.

* Nuclear fusion power including recycling of spent high level nuclear waste would provide a much larger share of electrical power and would be available in small scale versions that do not pose weapons proliferation risks in many small communities. Reasonably safe nuclear waste diposal facilities would come on line eliminating existing backlogs and meeting future needs.

* A significant share of coal consumption would involve converting coal into synthetic liquid and gas phase hydrocarbon fuels that would reduce the amount of air pollution generated by the coal. Coal burning would be subject to carbon taxes that reflected their environmental impact and as a result would be used only in niche applications where there were not other economically viable alternatives.

Food, Agriculture and Rural Life

* Organic farming would become the predominant type of agricultural production for most kinds of agricultural products. Petrochemical use in agriculture would decline greatly.

* Automation and other technologies would continue to increase productivity of farms per farmer resulting in a greatly decreased population in places with farm economies. Farmers would be more affluent as a result, and would mostly send their children to boarding schools for middle school and high school since population densities would be too low to support decent local day schools close enough to home.

* Most fish would be produced in fish farms. Better management of commercial fishing and water pollution would restore wild fisheries as well.

* Subsidies for rural living designed to assist economically stuggling farmers would be ended, this would also discourage exurban living.

* Rural governments would be consolidated to serve much larger rural populations over much larger areas and improve the professionalism of the services they provide.

* Meat consumption as a share of total food consumption would be reduced somewhat and more diverse kinds of meats would be available at affordable prices.

* Door to door delivery of mail in rural areas where it is not cost effective to do so would be replaced by post office pickup.

Education

* A system of state funded, secular schools would operate like charter schools do today and local elected school boards would cease to exist. Students would be allowed to choose to attend any of these school free of charge, schools would be compensated based on enrollment and enrolled student need, schools that failed to secure enough students choosing to attend or failed to meet minimum standards would fold, and neither the state board of education nor elected local school board would have day to day managerial control over their operations. Instead, there would be basic health and safety standards, minimum business model approvals, some standardization of the admissions and transfer process, and impartial government administered student performance and satisfaction evaluations. The schools would have the same sort of legal status as public colleges and universities as governmental entities subject to constitutional standards applicable to public actors such as due process and the First Amendment.

* A system of higher education funding that would provide financial assistance to students through scholarships with both need and merit components. The system would commit to meeting 100% of financial need through grants for the best students, 100% of financial need through a combination of grants and loans (no more than 50% loans) for students with less academic merit, and on public grant or loan assistance for academic higher education for studnets with only marginal academic merit.

* Quality vocational education programs would be a respectable and reasonably popular choice for students who were not particularly strong academically and completion of these program would provide graduates with a reasonable prospect of a steady employment in an upper working class to middle middle class career.

* High school graduates would leave school with significant practical knowledge of physical health and mental health matters in connection with the health care system, to the extent necessary to care for themselves, family members, and strangers in emergency situations in a way consistent with evidence based best practices in a manner rooted in a genuine layman's level understanding of the physical processes behind what they need to do.

* Students at high risk of failing academically, ending up engaged in criminal activity, lifelong economic failure, and dysfunctional relationships would be accurately identified by an early warning system in place by pre-school that would devote significant resources starting as early as possible to support them in changing their course, and to the extent that high risks are not corrected by adulthood to intervene appropriately to protect them and others in a pro-active way that is only actually punitive to the extent that it authorized by crimes, child abuse and neglect, domestic violence, financial defaults or similar events.

Criminal Justice

* Criminal defendants are entitled to a public defender with a manageable case load who is paid enough to attract competent lawyers without regard to ability to pay. Criminal defendants can opt to use the funds that would have been used for their defense to apply towards the cost of hiring private counsel instead.

* The primary penalty for failing to enter into a plea bargain would be a court cost assessed against defendants found guilty to cover the cost of the public defender, the prosecutor, and the judicial system in the case, rather than large differences in sentencing outcomes.

* Evidence based statistical evaluation instruments would pay a strong part in determing the kind of sentence appropriate for particular crimes, and the evidence would be regularly re-evaluated in a transparent and open process. Only individuals whose release would pose a significant threat to others from serious recidivism incidents would be released.

* The criminal justice system would make wider use of sanctions intermediate between probation and long periods of incarceration in prisons, particularly for non-violent offenses, such as electrically monitored house arrest, large but proportionate fines and restitution awards, and low security community corrections/low security facilities for low risk prisoners.

* The process of integrating incarcerated individuals back into the community would be more structured, more supportive and less punitive, particularly for the first two or three years, in order to reduce recidivism.

* Prostitution and recreational drug use would be regulated from a public health perspective, but not criminalized.

* Incarceration rates would be significantly lower.

* Prisons would be safer for prisoners and guards, and prison gangs would be more effectively disrupted.

* Law enforcement officers who were caught lying or engaging in police brutality would routinely and promptly be fired even in cases where the proof of the misconduct while solid, was not beyond a reasonable doubt, and would be entered into a national registry of bad cops. The past cases of bad cops would then routinely and systematically investigated to determine if anyone else had been a victim of misconduct by the officer, and law enforcement associates of dismissed bad cops would be have their past patterns of conduct investigated. Incentives to engage in police misconduct would be identified and addressed. Law enforcement officers who did not personally engage in misconduct would have strong incentives individually and collectively to report it and cooperate in investigating it. Employers of law enforcement officials would be vicarciously liable for misconduct by their law enforcement employees without regard to fault.

* A systematic process to allow for the early release of individuals who were given excessive sentences that would not longer be imposed under existing law and sentencing standards whose post-incarceration conduct was acceptable, would be established.

Family Law

* Gay marriage would be legal and accepted.

* The welfare state and legal system would be more accomodating of and sensitive to the needs and expectations of people in extended family and communal living arrangement situations.

* An early warning system and societal norms would encourage earlier intervention in potentially coercive or violent relationships by better informing and empowering potential victims.

* The financial consequences of a divorce in terms of property division and maintenance would be highly predictable due to well defined and easy to apply rules that afford at least rough justice, and as a result, would be far less acrimonious.

* Disputes over parenting time, parental decision making, child abuse and neglect and paternity would be segregated into legal system separate from the financial part of a divorce that would apply without regard to marital status. In this system, advocates for each party, who would not necessarily be lawyer, would be available without regard to ability to pay. This system would be set up to reflect the fact that parenting issues are ongoing matters, rather than something to be resolved once and for all.

READ MORE - Elements Of Ideal World

Short Takes

* Spinal fluid biomarkers can distinguish between people suffering from Lyme disease (a tick carried infectious agent), Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (probably a viral condition with a long latency period), and uninfected individuals. This is important first, because Lyme disease and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome can present with similar symptoms, and second, because diagnosing Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and even finding ways for sufferers to convince people that they have a genuine biologically caused disease rather than simply being lazy, is a major challenge.

* The Kalash people in a remote part of the Hindu Kush Mountain range are one of the most genetically distinct populations in the world. When one has a computer break the world's autosomal genetics into the most distinct possible seven clusters, the clusters that you get are: African, European, South Asian, East Asian, Papuan, indigenous American and Kalash.

Their Y-DNA haplogroups (from a sample of about 43 people) are as follows:
L3a 22.7% (most common in Pakistan)
H1* 20.5% (most common in South Asia)
R1a 18.2% (most common in Eastern Europe and South Asia)
G 18.2% (most common in Southern Europe, Anatolia, Druze, Brahui and Pashtuns)
J2 9.1% (most common in Anatolia and where Indo-Europeans have had an impact)
R* 6.8% (most common in Thailand, Indonesia, the Phillipines and Australian aborigines)
R1* 2.3% (most common in indigenous Americans)
L* 2.3%. (most common in South Asia)

Their mtDNA haplogroups (from a sample of 44 people) are as follows:
pre-HV 22.7% (most common in Socotri, North Africa, Iran and Arabia)
HV* 4.5%
H 4.5% (the modal haplogroup of Europe)
U2e 15.9% (most common in South Asia)
U4 34.1% (most common in Central Asia)
U7 2.3% (most common in South Asia)
J1 2.3%
J2 9.1%
T* 4.5%

They speak a language from the Dardic branch of the Indo-European family (one of the more basal of the Indo-Iranian part of the late language family), and practice a polytheistic religion.

They are between areas that areas typically Central Asian and areas that are typically South Asian in genetic makeup. Their traditions place them as a lost contingent of Alexander the Great's army, but given their uniparental markers, the genetic makeup, their particularly contingent would have had to have picked up members mostly from the area from Anatolia to the Hindu Kush. Their Dardic language is also an anomaly for an isolated community claiming to descend from the Greeks, they lack common distinctively Greek uniparental markers, and their religion is close to Hinduism than it is to Greek pantheistic beliefs. An origin a millennium or two earlier (if not much more ancient) would seem to be a better fit for the facts.

Given their autosomal makeup, any new arrivals in the region from somewhere would have had to either admixed substantially with a relict population that was largely wiped out or overwhelmed genetically elsewhere such as Europe and Central Asia's pre-Neolithic hunter-gatherers, or South Asian hunter-gatherer populations disrupted by Munda, Dravidian, and Indo-Aryan populations respectively. Alternately, they might have undergone significant selectively driven evolution analogous to that found in Tibetans as a result of living at high altitudes. The case for incorporation of a relict Central Asian hunter-gatherer population is most strongly supported by the modal mtDNA haplogroup U4, which was one of the second most common types found in ancient DNA from Central Asian hunter-gatherers.

* There are a couple of kinds of invasive ants that have an unusual reproductive system. Future queens are clones of the current queen. Future drones (reproducing males) are clones of their fathers. Workers, who do not reproduce, have a mix of the queen and the drone's genes similar to that of ordinary sexually reproducing animals. (I'll try to find a reference later).

* As a thought experiment, it is interesting to consider would it would look like to have a society where a human or near human species with reproduction system in which only half of women had children, but they had an average of four and a half surviving descendants, assuring the replacement of the species. There are several different permutations of this that would be possible. Half of children could be gay. Half of the children could be infertile (perhaps clones of their same sex parent, or perhaps surgically or chemically neutered). Half of females could be in "harems" like those of alpha dominated gorillas or lions, and only alphas might have the pheromones necessary to trigger reproduction. One imagines that such a society might resemble the Byzantine courts.

Alternately, one could imagine a society where half the women were in a social class that averaged surviving three children, while the other half the women were in a social class that average one surviving child. A study of the vital statistic of a Bronze Age society in Spain based on its burials and the inferred diets of the dead, which showed a minority elite with a high protein diet surviving at much greater rates than a "middle class" (perhaps soldiers) or an even more deprived underclass (perhaps servants or slaves), with this kind of demographics.

* There is a tendency in Anglo-American political economy to imagine a society with strong property rights and weak governments as a "state of nature" against which political action should be measured. But, this sense is to a great extent ahistorical, particularly in farming and more urbanized societies. The oldest Minoan Linear A script is preserves administrative records of ration distribution systems, basically welfare states, that had strong parallels in Sumeria, Egypt, the Hebrew Bible and Rome - i.e. all of the major civilizations of the Mediterranean of the Copper Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age, and arguably via feudal societies into to the Middle Ages. There also seems to be evidence that these were command economies in which soldiers played an integral economic part, perhaps along the lines of the large role played by military owned enterprises in the civilian economies of modern Egypt and China. Likewise, fedual societies were basically agrarian economies run on a military footing with involuntary serf labor.

Decentralized market driven economies with contract rights and private property as an important organizing principle doesn't really emerge as the predominant component of the economy until after the Middle Ages end in Europe.

* NPR made some notable observations about the Middle Eastern oil states that are experiencing revolutions at the moment. Generally speaking, these states don't impose significant taxes on non-petroleum activities. Oil money funds government operations including strong military forces and a significant welfare state. This helps explain why the oil rich states of the Middle East have managed to survive while being so undemocratic. Historically, constitutional monarchy and republican government in cases like Rome, England and France have their roots in the need of a monarch to obtain consent of representatives of people who were going to be required to pay taxes to support the state. Taxes are the price of democracy.

* Some of the dates assigned to remains used to argue for an early presence of modern humans in Europe engaged in relatively primative economic industry have been revised upon further examination to more recent dates. Remains previously touted as more than 30,000 years old, which had "long been considered to be the earliest evidence of the remains of modern Homo sapiens anywhere in Europe" in Southern France and Southwest Germany have been re-examined within the last decade and determined to have actually been less than 10,000 years old.

This also influences how one conceptualizes the Chatelperronian lithic industry in Europe, which in turn relates to how smart we think the Neanderthals were. The prior and more primative Mousterian industry is clearly associated with Neanderthals. The industry that follows the Chatelperronian is associated clearly with modern humans. The Chatelperronian has traditionally been associated with Neanderthals as well, but some researchers have argued for it as "an independent development by Neanderthals (d'Errico et al. 1998)" while others "see the Chatelperronian as the result of the acculturation of Neanderthals by modern humans (Mellars 2005)." People care, because if the Chatelperronian was an independent Neanderthal invention, then maybe they were pretty smart and advancing their technology just as the humans did when climate conditions improved. In contrast, the opposite extreme would be to argue that admixture of modern human traits into Neanderthal populations is the only reason that they were able to innovate as much as they did even in the relatively primate Chatelperronian era. Between the two extremes is the possibility that the Neanderthals were capable of mimicing modern human Upper Paleolithic lithic industries, even if they would have been hard put to develop it themselves.

John Hawks, approaching the same underlying question of Neanderthal intelligence from another angle wonders if the ability of people born blind to repurpose their visual centers for language doesn't suggest that language is less hard wired, and hence, less likely to require genetic evolution, than has been often assumed: "Kaschube and colleagues showed that the apparent developmental robusticity of the visual cortex could be maintained by simple rules of self-organization. It doesn't take specialized genetic control to create a visual cortex, it just takes information structured in the right way to flip a few genetic triggers" and the right kind of environmental exposures. As he explains:

The blind subjects tell us that the ground for language processing is almost as fertile elsewhere in the cortex. Many brain areas have the genetic equipment to recruit and organize neurons into useful circuits for language processing. Language development is developmentally robust because it can rely on a rich language environment, not because of genetic standardization. The basic problems of language evolution must be explained by showing how robust language communities emerged. I don't preclude genetics, far from it -- weaker language environments may have become stronger because of evolutionary change. But that evolution must have been substantially domain-general, because language processing is not specifically canalized by genetics.

I like this scenario because it means we shouldn't be looking for lots of language-specific genetic changes in the last few hundred thousand years. The Neandertal genome suggests that there may not have been any at all.

My second speculation: If the language environment determines the instantiation of language processing, then brains must be substantially different in the way they process language. Children experience different language environments -- not only different languages, but different microenvironments within language communities. Only strong genetic controls could canalize brains despite the differences in their language environments. In brains where language processing emerges readily in the visual cortex, genetic controls cannot possibly synchronize brains in the face of environmental variation.

* A case is being made that the strong genetic discontinuity between South Asia and Southeast Asia, despite the lack of an obviously inpenetrable geographic barrier is attributable to the effects of the Toba volcano erruption, that while not wiping out the modern human population in South Asia, did seriously disrupt and reshape it:

Oppenheimer . . . [suggests] that the prolonged ash cloud could have devastated all or most of India, especially both M and N related populations in the east and south, closest to the volcano. He hypothesizes that this area could then have been repopulated by M dominated groups immigrating from the east, who might then have spread, in a cline, to the rest of the subcontinent, while N-related groups to the west could have repopulated India from that region. This could have left India populated by more recent M and N hapolotypes than those found farther east[.]

He also associates this event with the distribution of tone languages which are found in Africa, "scattered among so many indigenous peoples of Southeast Asia, southern China, Indonesia, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Melanesia" and in "northernmost reaches of the Indus valley . . . "would have been a likely spot where a branch of the Out of Africa migrants, who could have broken from the main group to travel north along the banks of the Indus, might have been able to survive the effects of Toba with their African traditions more or less intact. If tone language was part of their HMC inheritance, then that could explain the prevalence of tone language in this area today." Suggested musical linkages that might be legacies of this connection are discussed here.

READ MORE - Short Takes

Neuroscience of Binge Drinking Better Understood

[M]anipulating two receptors in the brain, GABA receptors and toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4), "caused profound reduction" of binge drinking for two weeks in rodents that had been bred and trained to drink excessively." The study was published online the week of Feb. 28 in the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

About 30 percent of Americans who drink do so excessively, and about 75,000 people die each year from the effects of excessive drinking. Current treatments for excessive alcohol drinking include prescription drugs Revia and Campral for controlling cravings. To ease withdrawal symptoms, doctors often prescribe medications such as Valium and Librium that carry their own risks of addiction. Valium and Librium reduce the anxiety alcoholics feel when they stop drinking but do not reduce cravings for alcohol.

The new study found that treatments that manipulate both the GABA receptor and toll-like receptor 4 have the potential to reduce anxiety and control cravings, with little to no risk for addiction[.] . . .

GABA receptors are a class of receptors in the brain that react to the neurotransmitter GABA and act as inhibitory receptors, calming down or inhibiting the activity of neurons in the brain. GABA receptors react to alcohol, giving drinkers a calm and euphoric feeling and reinforcing excessive drinking behavior. . . . This is the first scientific study to document GABA receptors' key involvement in binge drinking specifically, though scientists already believed that the receptors had a role in excessive drinking in general. . . .

Science has traditionally considered TLR4 to be an innate immunity receptor involved with neuroinflammation in the brain. Scientists associated TLR4 with microglia, cells that support inflammatory responses in the brain. "What makes this finding particularly important for the field of neuroscience is that we're showing that TLR4 plays a significant role in neurons, specifically, the neurons that are connected to the GABA receptor," . . . . To establish the connection between the GABA receptors, TLR4 and alcohol, the scientists manipulated this pathway in the binge drinking rodents . . . [with] a herpes viral vector . . . to deliver a gene-modifying agent directly to the neurons in the brain, to target TLR4 and GABA receptors. The scientists found that when they artificially stimulated the GABA receptors and TLR4 in order to simulate the good feelings binge drinkers feel when drinking alcohol, the rats lost interest in alcohol for two weeks after the procedure.

Compounds exist that would stimulate the receptors in the same way the scientists did in the study. "It's very likely that, down the road, these compounds could become new therapies for binge drinking . . . These compounds would act like a substitute for alcohol, much like methadone acts as a substitute for heroin. They would help alcoholics stop drinking, giving them relief from their cravings and from the anxiety that they try to alleviate with drinking."

From here.

So, drugs to end a predisposition to binge drink may be on the horizon in our near future, and there is a methodological precedent for determining a cause and developing a treatment for other kinds of substance addictions.

Given the strong connection between alcoholism and other kinds of substance abuse, and a wide range of socially unacceptable behavior and crimes, the next question is whether these treatments promise a world in which those social ills are dramatically less of problem.

Also, if such drugs existed, what would it take to get binge drinkers to take it? Will drug testing for probationers cease to become a matter of seeing that they aren't taking illegal drugs and become a matter of confirming that they are taking drugs that treat their vulnerabilities?

Given the poor track record of science at observing ethical standards with vulnerable or institutionalized populations, there is also good reason to fear abuses along the same lines in the future.

There may also be an upside to the complexity of many polygenetic mental health traits. While it may take just a single disruption of one of thousands of genes that go into a health functioning brain, if dysfunctional processes are equally complex, a single way to disrupt that process may deal with problems that have a wide variety of causes. This seems to be the story of modern psychiatry. We have found drugs that can manipulate a handful of neurochemicals in the brain, but those drugs treat a large number of patients with neurochemical imbalances in the neurochemical systems that most commonly go awry.

Drugs that act on neurochemical receptors and reuptake channels seems to address a great many mental health conditions. This part of the brain seems particularly succeptable to treatment with drugs. There may be other parts of the brain that are equally important, perhaps miswired neurons, for example, but we don't understand how to treat them as well.

READ MORE - Neuroscience of Binge Drinking Better Understood

Possible Prion Disease Drug Identified

Using trial and error methodology that Thomas Edison could relate to, scientists have located a drug that may have the potential to treat prion diseases such as mad cow disease, scrapie and chronic wasting disease in animals, and diseases including Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, Fatal Familial Insomnia, and Kuru in humans, that "result from deposits of abnormal prion protein in brain tissue. Prion diseases are invariably fatal and no treatments are yet available." At this point testing is in mouse models and cell cultures.

Treatments exist for most other major classes of disease causing agents, such as bacterial infections, viruses, funguses, venoms, and parasites, but not for prions.

Prions are also worrisome because they are resistant to sterilization methods that destroy most other disease agents: "Prions are generally quite resistant to proteases, heat, radiation, and formalin treatments, although their infectivity can be reduced by such treatments." Strong acids in combination with higher than typically used heats are necessary to render them non-infectious.

READ MORE - Possible Prion Disease Drug Identified

Something Works For The Common Cold

Zinc supplements taken within one day after the onset of a cold have been shown to be effective at treating it by shortening the duration of symptoms and their severity in a meta-analysis of fifteen trials involving 1,360 people in all. So often, it seems, herbal or non-traditional remedies placed under the microscope of scientific examination of their effectiveness turn out to be mere placebos. But, this is an exception that applies to an exceptionally common condition. How common?

The common cold places a heavy burden on society, accounting for approximately 40% of time taken off work and millions of days of school missed by children each year.

READ MORE - Something Works For The Common Cold

Alternative Type 1 Diabetes Treatment Considered

Usually, one deals with Type 1 diabetes (early onset) with insulin treatments. But, controlling another hormone can also solve the problem in mice, without regular monitoring of blood sugar levels.

[I]nsulin becomes completely superfluous and its absence does not cause diabetes or any other abnormality when the actions of glucagon are suppressed. . . . Glucagon, a hormone produced by the pancreas, prevents low blood sugar levels in healthy individuals. It causes high blood sugar in people with type 1 diabetes. . . . elimination of glucagon action restores glucose tolerance to normal. . . .

The researchers found that the mice with normal insulin production but without functioning glucagon receptors responded normally to the test. The mice also responded normally when their insulin-producing beta cells were destroyed. The mice had no insulin or glucagon action, but they did not develop diabetes.

"These findings suggest that if there is no glucagon, it doesn't matter if you don't have insulin. . . . This does not mean insulin is unimportant. It is essential for normal growth and development from neonatal to adulthood. But in adulthood, at least with respect to glucose metabolism, the role of insulin is to control glucagon.

Of course, before this can be used medicinally, one needs a good way to disable glucagon receptors - perhaps with drugs, perhaps with surgery, or perhaps with gene therapy, a type of treatment that is has been used only a handful of time theraputically and never in humans for this condition.

Still the possibility that there may be an entirely different way of treating type 1 diabetes than the one that has been the norm since 1922 is an exciting development.

READ MORE - Alternative Type 1 Diabetes Treatment Considered

A Cocaine Vaccine?

Suppose you could get some shots that dramatically reduce the potency of cocaine in your system through an immune system response to it? It is the sort of thing that might make it much easier for a cocaine addict to quit.

In mouse models, such a "cocaine vaccine" seems to be effective. Vaccinated mice have a far less pronounced response to comparable doses of cocaine than unvaccinated mice.

Methadone is a drug sometimes used to ween addicts off their drug addictions, but the need for fairly precise timing and dosing of a methadone therapy have been one of the important factors in a dramatic increase in accidental drug overdose deaths over the last decade or two. A vaccine treatment doesn't pose those kinds of risks.

Also, once someone received a cocaine vaccination, it would be unnecessary to monitor this part of the drug treatment program in an intensive way.

Research into similar treatments for heroin addicts and meth addicts is also underway.

Of course, there are all sorts of questions about how a mouse model translates into a human therapy. For example, the same vaccine that mutes cocaine response might actually be broader and also mute responses to medicinally useful painkillers or stimulants. Or, it might not be long lasting enough, or potent enough to deal with a heavy addiction. In the mouse model, the treatment effectively reduced drug doses by 60%. But, a human might simply increase the dose proportionately and continue the addiction.

Also, the mice were vaccinated before any exposure to cocaine, but this kind of treatment makes no sense for the general population even if the side effects and risks are pretty modest. It is hard to tell if the effect would be the same once the epigenetic changes that drug addiction causes were already in place.

Still, the prospect of a simple drug that once administered would cure people of drug addictions without long painful withdrawal and therapy, probably with relapses in most cases, at least temporarily, is a tempting possibility. And, given the negative health consequences and life consequences of being a drug addict to cocaine, heroin or meth, even significant negative side effects from the treatment would be an improvement if the vaccine is effective for people who have already become addicted. Indeed, it might even make since, pre-emptively, in people who have a strong family history of addiction and live in an environment that put them at high risk of becoming addicts themselves.

READ MORE - A Cocaine Vaccine?

Two Chickenpox Vaccinations Work Better

Studies show that its takes two rounds of chickenpox vaccination to be fully effective.

READ MORE - Two Chickenpox Vaccinations Work Better

The Good News Of The Last Decade

Rather than coming up with my own good news from the last decade, which I'm not disposed to do with the front page story in the paper is Republican plots to repeal health care reform, I'll crip off others including science fiction writer Charles Stross who notes:

1. AIDs is treatable.
2. "[B]oth China and India underwent annual economic growth averaging around 10% per year throughout the decade. The number of people living in poverty and with unsafe water supplies world-wide today is about the same as it was in 1970. Only difference is, there were 3 billion of us back then and today we're nearer to 7 billion. Upshot: the proportion of us humans on this planet who are living in third world poverty (unable to afford enough food, water, clothing and shelter) has actually been halved."
3. "Africa averaged around 5% growth throughout the decade, too." Some haven't shared in those gains due to events like the Congo War, but those who escaped wars have come out far better than that average.
4. "we haven't nuked ourselves." We have had the longest time period (about sixty years) without an international war in Europe since the Roman Empire, and the number of people living in war zones dropped greatly in the last decade on top of further drops after the Cold War.
5. Computer technology is faster, has greater broadband speed, has more storage capacity and in cheaper by orders of magnitude from a decade ago.
6. Genetic science has advanced greatly.
7. The pace of terrorism seems to have slowed down in the first world.

And, I'll also turn to "The Big Picture" which notes:

1. Cell phone use has gone from rare to predominant.
2. Internet use is way up.
3. U.S. population density is modestly up and U.S. power consumption is modestly down. In part driven by rising oil prices.

But, the environmental picture is still bleak. Global warming continues and is speeding up, more species are endangered, and natural disasters have been worse in the last decade than in the decade before it.

Economically, the good news is that things aren't getting worse in employment or GDP. The bad news, however, is that employment isn't improving very fast.

READ MORE - The Good News Of The Last Decade

Worm Therapy Works For Inflammatory Bowel Disease

One major hypothesis of evolutionary biology is that humans used to live in a far less hygenic environment and in particular have an immune system designed to ward of parasitic worms (with a reboot of the gut microbiology being the true purpose of the appendix). The growing tide of auto-immune diseases, including inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), may be a product of the immune system being primed to wipe out these invasive agents and lacking a true target. This hygene hypothesis may also be behind the rise of problem allergies.

University of Iowa researchers have had success in treating patients with the autoimmune disease IBD for twenty-four weeks "with "cocktails" laced with microscopic whipworm eggs. . . . After 24 weeks of worm therapy, 23 of the 29 volunteers went into remission." This is despite the fact that the volunteers had no success with other therapies.

This joins a number of other therapies (e.g. "gut bacteria transplants" that involve putting other people's fecal materials into one's gut with depleted gut bacteria resources, and maggot therapy with decontaminated maggots let loose to eat dead tissue on a person since they don't eat live tissue and are mostly a worry because they carry diseases), that are gross but seem to work.

READ MORE - Worm Therapy Works For Inflammatory Bowel Disease

How Reversible Is Progress?

Sometimes in history, mankind fails. Empires fall. Hard won knowledge is lost. Niceties of civilization disappear. Languages die. Prejudices tamed resurface. Barbarism defeats civilization. Centers of progress stagnate and ossify. Wars, pointless or not, kill millions when wiser statesmen could have secured better outcomes.

We are a fortunate people. We live in a time of technological virtuosity, global communication, remarkable tolerance, greater scientific knowledge than any generation to come before us, awareness of many of the threats to our way of life that loom ahead, economic prosperity viewed in the long term, and a point in time when many countries are liberal democracies, many countries that were once brutal tyrannies like the Soviet Union and early Communist China have changed course, and where truly abysmal countries, like North Korea, are small and isolated and perhaps even on the brink of collapse.

We are, in other words, at a point when we have a great deal to lose.

The risks are not abstract. Our era of toleration has brought out into the open the identities of people who would have been persecuted or killed in all prior eras.

Widespread gay marriage and the end of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" which has already been matched in much of the Western world, means that hosts of gays and lesbians who would have lived secret lives in the past are now out and public. This openness has brought with it acceptance, toleration, and access to legal recognition with all of its blessings. But, openness comes with the price of constant vigilance. Once out of the closet, a population that will always be in the minority must rely forever after on the good will of a liberal democratic society to protect it.

Gays aren't the only ones taking a risk. Many people have come out publicly as atheists, and if religion becomes established, as there has often been democratic pressure of governments to do, they risk persecution as heretics and apostates and blasphemers.

Pagans are in much the same shoes. The Denver Post on Christmas Day informed us that 45 people in Haiti had been murdered based on accusations of witchcraft connected with its recent cholera outbreak.

Anti-Islamic sentiment has swept much of Europe, and lurks ready to turn ugly in America.

It would take a greater calamity to set back human knowledge, science and technology, but would it really take an event so unthinkable. As glorious as a digitized world may seem, the collapse of the Internet remains far more possible than the sack of every decent university and public library on earth. But, if the libraries no long have independent copies of the knowledge upon which we rely, if the technologies we use to access our data cease to be supported for any myriad reasons before the data the technologies make us privy to is converted to new media, how much could we lose?

It is hard to believe that we could ever see a setback as dire as the one that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire. The college textbooks lurking in the basements of hundreds of thousands of middle class families could reconstruct science, if not to the standards of 2010, at least to the start of the art from the 1980s. It might take a long time to rebuild particle accelerators necessary to prove the existence of quarks, and weak force carrier bosons and neutrinos and their properties from first principles and to return to the point where we could answer the remaining open questions of physics. But,a backpack full of graduate school textbooks (or even a binder full of relevant wikipedia printouts) would make the task far less arduous than it was the first time. Not many people know how to run an iron foundry, but again, if just once decent university library of thousands in the United States were to survive, we could learn to do so much more efficiently.

We could easily lose many of the primary documents that back up the story of history. But, there are enough histories out there that it is hard to believe that the broad outlines and even references to many of the key primary sources from which they can be reconstructed, will ever again be lost.

I'd sleep a little better if someone were consciously working out a way to insure that this knowledge survived longer -- printing out a massive library on bronze plates in a dozen different languages maybe -- but even a truly global apocalyptic event would have to be extremely thorough to set back the state of knowledge too far.

It might take a few decades to reconstruct the infrastructure necessary to manufacture decent computers, or mass produce precision stainless steel appliances, or to generate advanced medicines with high levels of purity at reasonable costs. But, there are quite a few copies of the key information available in the kind of technical detail found in patent applications, for example, out there.

More intangibly, how deeply can the modern worldview be suppressed? There have certainly been episodes of history that makes one worry. Who in late tsarist Russia on the verge of Western style liberal democracy could have foreseen Stalinist massacres? Who in the collapsing Chinese empire could have foreseen the Cultural Revolution? The example of Korea is particularly troubling because it was so recent. Dean Koh of the Harvard Law School recounts cities of people with eyes as listless of those of Orwell's 1984 in the hear and now in North Korea, which has been divided from the South for less than sixty years. The return of Albanian society to a medieval state from a similarly brief period of isolation likewise leaves one with qualms.

Yet, Cambodia, while hardly a model of national success, seems to have returned to some semblence of normalcy even after Pol Pot's massacre of the entire bourgouise class in his society. Albania is being reintegrated into Europe. The death of Soviet style communism was traumatic for a generation, but its successor regime seems to be emerging and tentatively is not a total nightmare.

If progress really is inevitable in the long run, despite dire and painful setbacks, then perhaps economic development in places that have not yet experienced its benefits, may also be more or less inevitable. Surely, results achieved from scratch in one place can be secured elsewhere, where they need only be copied, somewhat more easily than they came about in the first place. Or, can they?

Could it be that centuries of ruthless capital punishment that prevailed across Europe was necessary to build a more tame society? Could it be that modern nation states are not really stable unless they arise gradually and naturally from smaller principalities together with all the attendent wars and nationalist strife, unless they arise from a uniform orderly process of colonization? Could it be that liberal democracy has functioned well enough for the last couple of centuries (and far less in much of the world) because it has been sustained by economic growth that has actually only been a coincidental fellow traveler with it?

Historically, mankind has managed to make progress, even as one empire or another has collapsed, by passing the torch of knowledge and tolerance and innovation from one place to another. But, in an increasingly global society, we are increasingly placing all of our eggs in one basket. The collapse of China, or a subcontinental nuclear war between Pakistan and India, or the stagnation of American society, or economic collapse in the European Union due to mismanaged public finance, is no longer the kind of event that the rest of the world can ignore. A major collapse in one part of the world drags the rest of the world down with it to some extent.

In World Wars I and II, Switzerland managed to stay neutral and above the fray. In the next global calamity, there may be no Switzerlands.

The political-economies of the world evolve in very path dependent ways. When something works better than what came before it, it sweeps the "known world" at the time. The invention of farming obliterated the cultures that proceeded it for as far around of empires could spread, even though the extent to which the actual people who followed the old cultures is disputed. Rome expanded as far as the terrain would permit. Every country in the world has a basically modern military, even if its economy carries on with centuries old means of production. All but a handful of legal systems in the world are derived from those of Revolutionary France, the Kaiser's Germany, 17th century England, or 19th century Spain, and the European Civil Law systems had more similarities than differences due to their common Roman origins. There are a few not particularly promising outliers that are more home grown - China, Iran and Saudi Arabia, for example, some of which have a few followers, as do various dictatorships. But, what none of the four or five main political systems that predominate in our big blue marble are up to the next challenge our world needs to overcome.

I'm basically an optimist. I think that humanity will come up with a way to maintain modernity without oil and natural gas. I think that humanity will come up with a way to cope with global warming, although I have no confidence that we will have the will to keep it from running its course. I don't think that a global nuclear war will cause our species to go extinct. I am inclined to think that our ability to detect and deal with diseases have reached a point where we can address any new disease before it does irrepairable damage to the species. I don't think that the bulk of our knowledge scientific and otherwise will be lost.

I worry more that we may reach a point where we have a global government, initially a good one, that stagnates and stifles us. Perhaps we need one to prevent global environmental threats and nuclear war from doing us in. But, we aren't anywhere close to that point now. We may be in a single global system, but it is not a united one.

But, I am not a believer in the notion that we are at "the end of history." I fully expect to see rapid change for centuries to come. The social sciences have a moving target to chase, culture constantly evolves, and the scientific and technical advances we are experiencing now will take decades or even a century to run their course.

Yes, there surely must come a time when our constant barrage of new scientific discoveries is the physical sciences slows down and eventually reaches a trickle.

We are close to that point in physics and earth sciences and inorganic chemistry and mathematics. We are coming to that point in civil engineering, chemical engineering, materials science, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and a great many other practical fields. Computers haven't been perfected to their theoretical limits, but their capabilities are continuing to grow so fast that we will surely come very close, very soon.

There is little in mathematics today that the leaning mathematicians of 1910 could not grasp with a year or so of additional study that would make heavy use of what they already knew. General Relativity has received a lot of experimental confirmation since the theory was published by Einstein in 1915, and several different mathematically equivalent expressions, but it remains state of the art physics 95 years later. Many blanks have been filled into the Periodic Table of the Elements since Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev published it in more or less its current form in 1869, and we understand in much more detail why the periodic table has the properties that it does, but it remains the point of departure for modern chemistry (and he also is the man responsible for the fact that liquor is sold primarily at 80 proof strength, a cultural impact still felt today).

The standard model of particle physics, which reached something close to its current form in 1981, and has been refined in a few minor respects since then, isn't quite so musty and will probably be refined further before it reaches its final form, but its resiliance in the face of three decades of intense efforts to find deviations and refinements suggest that whatever beyond the standard model physics are still out there to be discovered may have rather modest practical impact. The Higgs boson which the Large Hadron Collider will either discover or disprove in the next couple of years, was predicted in 1964.

We haven't discovered every species of life on Earth, but for many taxonomy categories, we are very close to having done so, and the tool of genetics has imparted considerable heft to those classifications. Most of the new discoveries have been of new species of existing taxonomic categories; we may well have discovered ever kingdom, phylum, class and order of living thing in existence already, and almost every species of vertebrates, certainly the pace of new discoveries of higher level taxons and new species of large animals and plants is slowing. There are probably undiscovered beetle species out there, and some new deep sea organisms or microbiological organism that have yet to be discovered, but our sense of the extent and shape of the biosphere and its evolutionary origins is already quite refined.

Biotechnology is still hurling forward. It will take time to truly master the genome and the epigenome, to really have a firm grasp of how the brain works, and to master the manipulation of it all. But, we are getting much closer.

The blue print in the form of the complete genome is available on computers already for a host of organisms including many people, even if we don't yet know how to read it fluently. We've identified the functions many key working parts. We know a great deal about the overall structure. We've identified a large share of the genome that is common to every human being alive today, and can even trace which parts changed from our common ancestor with chimpanzees and from our Neanderthal predecessors.

We have working models of the structure of the human brain functionally and involving its major subsystems, of the role of the major components of our brain chemistry, of the connection between the brain and the rest of our body, of the way that neurons bind themselves into networks, of the process by which memory works, of the extent to which knowledge is hardwired or learned, of the connections between our senses and our experience of them. We have some sense of how gender and age influences the brain. We have some sense of the variety of mental conditions that can arise, their usual course, and their causes. We may understand the brain far less well than we understand bacterial infections, the heart, or the liver, but for the most part, it seems as if our work is cut out for us. We don't know everything, but we have a pretty good sense of what we don't know and have to discover.

One time pipe dreams, like cures for many kinds of cancers, cures for nervous system disorders, cures for autoimmune diseases, workable treatments for many kinds of mental illnesses, treatments for hereditary blindness and more, while not yet attained, seem attainable. Science has brought us an understanding of many diseases that is exquisitely detailed. Even when we can't cure a disease yet, we often know with excruciating specificity how it works. The implications of those developments for our society may be profound.

Even if we don't learn all that science can offer us, we may reach a point where what we don't know is largely esoteric and is only of intellectual curiousity, with little practical impact, sooner. While history may not be at an end, I wouldn't be surprised if the pace of progress in the physical sciences and engineering in 2110 is much slower than it is now. By 2210, it will probably have reached a crawl indeed, simply because we will already know so much at that point. Perhaps at that point a certain amount of political stagnantion will be acceptable, because the world will stop changing so fast and our leaders can be enlightened by a large corpus of established scientific knowledge.

READ MORE - How Reversible Is Progress?