The Power of Clarity

The web comic Misfile illustrates a point that is a powerful one in litigation and conflict resolution generally: clarity of proof can be extremely powerful.

The scene as set as two of our main characters, both high school girls (actually, it is a bit more complicated than that, but those issues aren't relevant to this post) and neither of whom has any prowess at fighting, head to the parking lot after a late night burger and fry session where they encounter two imposing men with bad intentions who make increasingly less veiled threats until their not very imposing high school friend appears and confronts the men (1, 2, 3, 4, and 5).

Our hero is clever, however, and does have a cell phone, which saves the day as illustrated below in the scene's climax:

Mangaka Chris Hazelton isn't breaking new ground in this twist. I've seen it in popular fiction half a dozen times, but it really does work in real life, and I've seen this general insight used with success in media reports of real life lawsuits, cases that I've actually worked on, and in day to day disputes that threatened to escalate over the years quite a few more times than I have in action movies and police procedurals.

While there are fine points of the law that are resolved in appellate courts, often to address instances when the facts or law are ambiguous, the law can be an extremely powerful and predictable tool when the facts are crystal clear and that law that applies to those particular facts is not ambiguous.

Video recordings and DNA evidence, for example, have led to an surge in cases where police misconduct is identified and punished, where innocent defendants who are convicted are exonerated, and where guilty individuals are identified and convicted of serious crimes. Likewise, as a general rule, the value of private investigators who can develop a clear set of facts in a case, is greatly underestimated.

Clear facts mean that presumptions that protect powerful interests don't work. Clear facts mean that the party with the facts in their favor doesn't have to compromise in settlement negotiations. Clear facts permit litigators to present a smaller number of simpler legal theories rather than hedging their bets due to factual ambiguities with multiple theories.

A great deal of the way that economic transactions are structured can be explained by a desire to create a compact set of completely unambiguous, easily proven facts should there be a need to bring suit as a result of the transaction. For example, when a purchase is financed with credit, the underlying purchase of goods or services for money is typically separated from the promise to pay a third party lender with whom the only material issues are the terms of a promissory note or credit agreement, the amount lent in documented non-cash transaction, and the payments made in documented non-cash transactions. By segregating disputes about the underlying purchase from disputes about the debt, the resulting lawsuits become simpler. Lenders also tend to lend predominantly in low dollar amount transactions that can be litigated with the expedited procedures of limited jurisdiction courts, or in transactions with collateral where the collateral can be seized in at least partial satisfaction of the debt without judicial process or with an expedited and standardized foreclosure process. Moreover, because the judicial process poses such a low barrier to enforcement of an obligation in a situation where the facts are clear, it is often not necessary to resort to that process at all to secure compliance.

Messy aspects of economic transactions can be and are litigated. Business people sometimes extend credit to their customers, linking the credit arrangment and the underlying transaction, and dissatisfied customers sometimes bring suit when the goods and services they receive are unsatisfactory. Some deals are inescapably complex, multi-party arrangements. Accidents happen in ways that are not foreseen and not well documented but serious nonetheless. But, these make up a decided minority of cases that are litigated in the civil courts.

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Denver Post Purges Comics

The Denver Post, in its continuing commitment to reducing the quality of the service it provides its customers, purged about fifteen twelve comics from its weekly offerings starting today. It had cut 22 of them on March 1, 2010. Repeating its last effort, the announcement of the cuts didn't identify the specific strips cut. The cuts appear to include:

Bizarro
Brevity
Drabble
Doonesbury
Dustin
F-Minus
Frazz
Free Range
Freshly Squeezed (despite the fact that it is home grown)
Funky Winkerbean
Heart of the City
The Knight Life
Non Sequitur
Overboard
Scary Gary

Any errors in this list are attributable to the Denver Post which failed to list them itself.

Various Two puzzles and games have also been cut:

Wuzzles
Your Move (chess)

UPDATED June 27, 2011.

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Does Law Have Insufficient Visual Drama?

Once upon a time, where you wanted to sell real estate, you handed some soil or twig for the property to the buyer in what was called livery of seizen. Couples kiss, wear traditional costumes, and exchange rings when they marry in front of a crowd. One of the traditional ways to revoke a will (recently litigated in Colorado) is to destroy or deface the physical document (which leads to a number of peculiarities of probate law). Traditionally, wills were read aloud after a death, although that rarely happens these days. Even though it no longer legally matters, it is traditional to seal a contract with a handshake. When sports teams finish a game, win or lose, the players each slap hands saying "good game", emotionally putting an end to disputes over the details that led to the final result. Churches acknowledge affiliations to their faith with dramatic baptisms in the Christian church and a vividly memorable circumcision ceremony for infant Jewish and (at least in traditional societies) adolescent Muslim boys. Basic trainees in the military, men entering monastic orders, and prison inmates have their hair shorn, and are stripped of almost all of their personal possessions.

The current story arc in the webcomic Red String's (set in Japan but written by Gina Biggs of Georgia) features Hanae Niijima, a lesbian whose mother will not accept the fact that she has come out or acknowledge Hanae's true love Fuuko Akimoto. The set up to the scene is in this dialog:

Hanae: Why can't you be happy for me? This is who I am. This is ME.

Mother: It's NOT you. You were my sweet little girl who liked flowers and unicorns; who loved to be dressed up in frilly clothes and have me curl your hair. You were never a tomboy!

Hanae: That's STILL me. You think you have to be boyish to like a girl? That's . . .you can't believe that.

Hanae decides the overcome the conceptual block that seems to be getting in the way of her mother by making a visual statement:

Hanae: Fine. [Grabbing scissors with one hand and her long flowing curly hair with the other.]

Mother: What are you doing?!

Hanae: If its frills and curls keeping you from accepting this then I'll get rid of them. Will that work?

Hanae then hands a long pony tail of crudely cut off hair into the hands of her shocked mother who sits, holding it, staring off into space.

Obviously, I'm not recommending that this become a ritualized part of the process of coming out that is mandated in any way. But, powerful visual dramas can often convey meanings about abstract concepts, particularly emotionally charged ones, that some people have a hard time grasping from mere words.  Hanae's mother might be able to understand from the hair in her lap what she couldn't when her daughter merely spoke to her.

For example, one of the classic problems that one sees in modern family law litigation is that one or both of the people who once were married, or at least a loving couple, can't let go of that relationship. The service of the divorce petition, the signing of the papers, the dryly worded court order ending a marriage and providing for the sharing of the children and property of the marriage, and often a restraining order as well, don't communicate to the former member of that relationship with adequate emotional force that the relationship is really, once and for all, over.  Some people are simply beyond reaching by any means of communications, but a large number of people who go through family law proceedings simply don't really understand at an emotional and subconscious level what has happened until much later, even if they can parrot the court's ruling.

Perhaps if that message could be conveyed with more visual drama in some universally accepted new ritual, more people who move on, and there would be, as a result, less senseless fighting driven by old emotions instead of new practicalities. The demise of fault based divorce has made the process much more antiseptic for all involved in the process, but have we overdone it to the point of failing to really acknowledge in an emotionally valid way that not just the legal construct of the marriage, but also the emotional reality of the relationship that it approximates, has ended. Shouldn't the symbolism and ritual that ends of marriage need to be even more powerful and less subtle than the symbolism and ritual that starts one?

Adoptions tend to be even more understated, for fear of spooking the relinquishing parents, and not surprisingly, the main complaint that gets litigated in adoptions is that of relinquishing parents who claim they were properly appraised of the gravity of their actions.

A classic problem in consumer litigation of all kinds is the not infrequent failure of a debtor or consumer, already overwhelmed by paper and having trouble determining what is most important, to realize that a summons and complaint in a lawsuit is a once and for all speak now or forever hold your peace notice that has profound legal consequences if ignored.  This lack of understanding is one of the driver's of the almost ubiquitous paranoia about ulterior motives and about being cheated by one's betters found among unsophisticated people who have frequently been on the receiving side of litigation.

Perhaps we would do well to imitate the litigation practices of the protocol agents of the advanced civilization in the science fiction book "Jaran" by Kate Elliott, where legal disputes are announced by delivery of a physical baton in person by a courier, and one responds to the allegations at a mandatory in person appearance at the designated place and time, as inefficient as that may be, rather than simply enforcing the duty to appear by entering a default judgment against a party who does not appear (one that is often forgotten until property is seized pursuant to the judgment).

I have no empirically evidence to support the theory that more dramatic visual drama in the legal system would make any difference at all. The modern trend has been to strip away formalities, arcane language, pompous court room surroundings, wax seals, fancy ribbons and the like from legal matters. Instead, modern legal proceedings and legal facilities, favor plain English, the bare minimum of in person appearances, contemporary but understated and inoffensive surroundings suited for efficient, processing of business matters, dispenses with wigs and obtuse morning suits, and use very simple seals and acknowledgements - relying on the ability to confirm orders with third party repositories rather than lack of counterfeitability for reliability. Many documents that used to have to be notarized are now simply signed under penalty of perjury with no third party verification of identity or intent.

For lots of purposes this trend may be a good one. It demystifies the legal system and makes it more accessible to pro se parties. Much of what courts do is as much administrative business as it is emotionally meaningful decision making. For the most part, people prefer an inexpensive, quick, form driven informal probate process to the traditional succession proceedings of courts of equity will all their pomp and circumstance. And, some parts of the court process, like the delivery of jury verdicts finding someone guilty or not guilty, have managed to hold onto some of the drama that gives them emotional power. But, maybe some of the time, particularly in civil matters that don't involve business people and may have consequences for people who do not have the same cultural heritage as the lawyers and judges who are running the system, a higher touch, lower tech approach is in order and would make courts more effective. It is certainly a hunch that would be worth exploring with more systematic research.

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College Graduates Usually Live With Parents After Graduating

When I graduated from college, I went straight to law school, and from law school, straight to a home that my wife and I shared with no one else but our cat.  I've never moved back in with my parents and neither did my brother after he graduated from college, nor did either of our spouses.  But, this pattern is increasingly rare. 

A new survey discussed by Time Magazine finds that 85% of college graduates move back in with their parents after graduating from college.  The iconic modern American twentysomething is comic strip character Dustin, who spends days looking for jobs and nights at home with his parents, and his undead television comedy counterpart "George" (played by Ellen Muth) in the series "Dead Like Me," both of which presciently debuted before the current economy made their protagonists' experiences so routine.  What is driving the trend?

Times are undeniably tough. Reports have placed the unemployment rate for the under-25 group as high as 54%. Many of these unemployed graduates are choosing to go into higher education in an attempt to wait out the job market, while others are going anywhere — and doing anything — for work. Meanwhile, moving back home helps with expenses and paying off student loans.

Failure to launch, is no longer the exception.  It is the norm in the current economy.  This also helps to explain why more and more young twenty-somethings are deferring getting married and having kids.  Household formation rates are at record lows.  We are experience the baby boom in reverse.

The particularly troubling part is that missteps at the beginning of a career often have a disproportionate impact on a person's entire work life.  If this is really just a temporary bump in the road, it isn't that big a deal in the greater scheme of things, but this may be a far more serious case of a nascent lost generation.  When the economy picks up again, that big businesses and professional firms that would have hired people from the last few crops of college graduates to entry level jobs that put those hires on a path to high end careers are likely to hire almost entirely from the most recent crop of new graduates, rather than trying to locate promising talent that was missed in the prior years when hiring was stopped or slowed.  Even for those new graduates who wash out of their plum first jobs a few years later as firms winow out all but the most talented prospects whom they promote, not starting off at a plum job may make the difference between being able to pay off students loans in five years and being able to pay off student loans in twenty years.

For bright new college graduates, their prospects are not totally crushed.  The current bought of unemployment is probably cyclic.  When the economy comes back, there will be jobs and it is always better to be in the job market with a college degree than to be without one.  But, jobless new graduates are left in a particularly frustrating position.  While commentators like David Brooks wants to call them lazy, what can they do?

It’s difficult to argue that they need to go to college, because they did. It’s difficult to argue that they can’t move to new jobs (unlikely to be homeowners) or suffer high health care costs (doesn’t health care reform allow employers to push their health costs onto their parents’ employer?). Unless we think that the graduating class of 2008 is fundamentally worse than the graduate class of 2006 I don’t see a technology problem.

Also for fun, the graduating classes post-Recession have increasingly large student debt loans, which should lower the reservation wage they’ll accept due to liquidity pressures. So the idea that everyone 20-24 is on vacation is harder to accept compared to earlier years.

New college graduates emerging out into the world this year are no more, and no less than unlucky.  They should have been born a few years earlier or later than the year that I graduated from high school, but they weren't.

We can hope, at least, that this will be merely a temporary circumstance.  But, it isn't impossible that this trend will endure.  For example, one of the major forces driving Islamic terrorism in the world is the existence of an immense class of unemployed college graduates across the oil rich states of the Middle East and North Africa.  Indeed, the suicide of a once too often discouraged college graduate in Tunisia was the spark the set off the wave of revolutions that have dislodged or tried to remove authoritarian regimes across tthe regime.  Similarly, this phenomena has been the norm in Japan ever since it experienced its housing bubble collapse triggered lost decade, long before the financial crisis, and it has defined a whole generation since then.  There is not obvious end to that trend on the horizon in Japan.

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The Rise of Television Due To Its Demise

I don't watch much broadcast television or cable television.  Indeed, I haven't since I was in high school and for a little while after I graduated from law school and before I had a sustained full time job working for a law firm, with a small handful of exceptions.  Most television is and always was crap.

But, as broadcast TV has mostly gone down market looking for the lowest common denominator, there has also been a notable strata of really quality TV series on non-free TV stations like Showtime and HBO, and to a lesser extent on other stations.  The multiplicity of channels has made it more attractive to dominate the niche of intelligent (and often affluent) TV watchers in the context of an advertising environment where no one channel commands much of the total market share, rather trying to win high ratings by maximizing the number of demographics to which a show will appeal at the cost of dumbing it down.

The true revolution in TV, however, has come with the availablility of whole series of TV programs on DVD, Tivo, or via live streaming from netflix.  This is, for TV, what the transition from serial magazine publishing a la Dickens, to novel publishing was when it happened a hundred and fifty years ago or so.  It is now possible to sit down and watch a ten hours season of a television series the same way that you can sit down and read a novel for ten hours -- uninterrupted by commercials, when you want to, in sequential order, for as long as it retains your interest.  The knowledge that this is possible also makes it less important for television episodes to have stand alone plots - longer story arcs are now feasible since the lion's share of the audience will no longer be seeing the episodes as re-runs in more or less random order.

There had been attempts to achieve this effect with mini-series, but the production values were still low due to low budgets,  the total duration, while longer than a movie wasn't that long, and they still needed to appeal to broad audiences with undiscriminating fare.

Movies, which tend to hover at an hour and forty-five minutes, plus or minus about twenty minutes, almost aways had higher production values than television for the entire period during the 20th century during which they co-existed and were the only mass produced theater form that could count on keeping the bulk of its audience for the entire work.  But, the 21st century has brought us movie quality productions in a television format that are seven or more times as long as a movie and far more involved.  An entire TV series will have a novel length script.  A movie has a script a bit longer than a typical short story, but shorter than a typical novella.

As blogger Amber Taylor, writing in the Atlantic, accurately describes the current state of affairs:  "television, not motion pictures, is now where truly sweeping, complex stories are being told."

Movies and television still aren't plays and novels, whose authors we revere.  In both of these visual media, the director and producers are kings and the script writer, or often, a whole team of scriptwriters turning out episodes faster than any one writer can churn them out, are often secondary players, whose initial drafts are mere suggestions to be freely modified and ad libbed around in the course of filming.  But, we do finally seem to be giving quality script writing a little more respect.

The revolution isn't really in the production values; it is in the story telling.  Japanese anime and manga have far lower production values than American comic books and animated features.  But, American comic books tend to have never ending rambling story lines with a narrow scope of issues that they address by comparison to the superior story telling and broad reach of their Asian counterparts.  Latin and Asian telenovellas, despite low production costs, have carefully crafted, thoughtful season length story lines that earn them their name, rather than the multi-decade abominations that are American soap operas, or the plotless meanderings that are American sitcoms and run of the mill dramas. 

Yet, somewhere along the line, mostly in the last decade or two, somebody in New York and Hollywood decided that a minority of well paying prime time viewers deserved to be told stories with some real wit and coherence.  Somebody finally figured out that it makes no sense to spend multi-millions on A list actors and special effects and scenery and costumes, if all they are going to do is act out mediocre scripts in performances filmed with mediocre cinematography.

After a generation in which American writers were convinced that good writing was about everything but plot (a sentiment widely shared by all of my high school and college english teachers), plot has regained its rightful place as the foundational skeleton upon which everything else must be built, and it is again legitimate to discuss the issues posed by the story itself, as opposed to the metastory of its authorship and technique.

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Scott Adams On College Curriculums

I understand why the top students in America study physics, chemistry, calculus and classic literature. The kids in this brainy group are the future professors, scientists, thinkers and engineers who will propel civilization forward. But why do we make B students sit through these same classes? That's like trying to train your cat to do your taxes—a waste of time and money. Wouldn't it make more sense to teach B students something useful, like entrepreneurship?

From here, by Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame.

FWIW, business majors at Miami University of Oxford, Ohio have to take a semester of calculus, or at least they did when I was a part-time student there, and I had something of Adams' view of that requirement for them.

The theory was that calculus was necessary for them to understand economics, but, in practice, it was simply a hurdle to keep out lots of people who probably could have been very successful in business but were weak in high level quantitative skills, or simply intimidated by the requirement.

The reality is that nobody in the business world ever does calculus (or for that matter trig, which is often considered a pre-requisite for calculus), and that even key calculus concepts in economics, which can be taught in a non-mathematical way, aren't used outside a very narrow group of people who also need advanced economics, in the business world. Plenty of business lawyers have trouble doing compound interest calculations (although they sometimes resort to algebra), and tend to get uncomfortable when non-linear equations come into play.

Also, FWIW, my cats always filed their tax returns when required to do so as a result of their taxable income (which just happened to be never).

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More Than Three Years Of Grief

A significant share of mental health issues are congenital. But, episodes of severe stress, grief and trauma don't fit this pattern. Miscarriage and stillbirth is one common, but profound stressor.

Women who have lost babies to miscarriage and stillbirth experience unusually high levels of depression and anxiety during new pregnancies and for nearly three years after delivering healthy infants. . . . Many women become depressed and anxious after losing a baby during pregnancy, and these reactions often persist after carrying another child to term[.]

From here.

Infant morality is now much lower than it used to be, so few Americans will have to bury very young children, something that my grandparents and almost all of the generations before them often experienced. But, it is estimated that about one in three pregnancies ends with a miscarriage or stillbirth, which means that the average American woman will experience at least one in a lifetime.

My mother experienced this before I was born. My wife and I experienced this before our children were born. Even people who welcome pregnancies routinely keep this very private for the first three months, when the risk of a miscarriage is greatest, so that they won't have to endure the discomfort of explaining what happened to everyone who knew.

This is one of the more emotionally potent experiences that a person can encounter. When it happened to us, we remembered it in a little ceremony for just the two of us in the mountains. For better, or for worse, this grief is rarely a community event. It can be a painful, silent, lonely grief.

People are resilient. Eventually, they do reach a point where the present overwhelms the potency of life's past heartbreaks. But, the time it takes to reach that point is often much longer than the pregnancy itself.

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Daylight savings time and other annoyances

* So, we're back on daylight savings time, which takes more of the year than standard time. Daylight savings time is like the ultimate popular kid stunt: "I can make the entire country pretend its an hour ealier than it really is, just because I can get everyone to agree with me." And, of course, once it takes off, you really have no choice but to go along. Still, losing an hour in the spring is brutal.

* Washington Park in Denver has a special magical glow that keeps it attractive regardless of what is going on in the outside world. But, I'm beginning to think that it may be a force field instead. I've been trying to stop paying $17 a month for free TV by setting up an antenna. Before I started getting basic cable, I'd tried it from a powered antenna inside my living room and get one or two channels. This weekend, after going to the trouble of setting a powered antenna up on the highest point on my roof, I got absolutely zero reception. Needless to say, I am not very impressed with the digital broadcast TV revolution, although it may simply be that Wash Park is as much of a TV dead zone as it has a reputation for being a cell phone dead zone.

* Another of the great mysteries of life is why old computers accumulate problems. They produce stray, seemingly meaningless error messages. They slow down. Virus scans and disk defragmentation stops helping. It might be possible to remove accumulated programs, but who knows what it is safe to remove. It reaches the point where you'd like to just run the restore disks and start over, but of course, by that point you've invested money in programs and misplaced the restore disks and the original programs with their access codes.

* Then, of course, there are the dreaded smart phones. I held out for the longest time. But, finally, about three years ago, I had to give in because it was expected that you have access to e-mail at all times for work. But, every now and then, you have to change phones, and the switch is painful. It takes weeks to get it back to the unsteady compromise that you have with the machine before you switched, when you knew how to work what you needed and it all worked smoothly.

* My daughter embarks on the brave new world of Home Economics (or whatever they call it these days), today. Rumor has it that the cooking agenda is full of things that we would never actually cook in our own house for want of nutritional value, but such is life. Hello Hamburger Helper(R)!

* The 8.9 magnitude Earthquake which initially seems to have spared Japan too much damage, now seems to have actually inflicted a Katrina class blow as more news reaches the world.

* The situation in Libya is getting ugly, as Kaddafi and the rebels civil war. (On the bright side, the monarch of Oman appears to be ready to convert from an absolute to a constitutional monarchy in the next thirty days.)

* Japanese manga and anime make frequent use of images and scenes that draw on the characters of the real story, but rather than being blubs are just riffs on the concepts that aren't part of the story itself, something quite rare in American media (as is the habit of having the author reserving space to directly address the audience). Is there a general name for these extraneous sketches?

* Why do the Denver Assessor's office have a nice online interface for its records, while the Denver Clerk and Recorder's office, which is just as automated, does not have its grantor-grantee index and file images available online? Both are public records. I suspect it is so that the clerk's office can make us pay 25 cents a page for copies and make title companies pay for bulk downloads to escape that problem. But, I'd surely favor any candidate in the current clerk and recorder's race who would promise to put the grantor-grantee index online.

* Some days, you think humanity is on the right track. Some days, you read the news from Cleveland, Texas (mass child molestation of eleven year old in a small town capture on cell phone video), and you are rather less hopeful. Ironically, the crime of taking the video will probably garner stiffer sentences than the underlying crime itself.

* For reasons mysterious to me, a wave of male enhancement product spam is deluging this blog at the moment, I am trying to review new comments an delete the bad ones a rapidly as I can. I still don't see why it is so hard for regulators to determine who the vendors being advertised are, trace them with sample transactions, and use the vendor records to shut these people down. It really is just a handful of industries that leave the bulk of them, and apparently there are not that many spam purveyors out there comprising the bulk of the traffic. They money trail ought to be auditable. Maybe all those SEC employees who were using government computers to watch porn could do it as a form of community service.

* We are about to celebrate Saint Patrick's Day (indeed, many people did this past weekend), after the man famous for converting the pagans of Ireland to Catholicism. Garrison Keillor's show this weekend (part of the show, apparently originally from 1997 are here) explained why this makes quite a bit more sense than celebrating Saint Olaf's day, something riotously funny to a fellow ex-Lutheran. But, in an era of anti-imperialism and distrust of institutions, why not celebrate Saint Francis of Assisi Day instead? (He has a Saint's Day on October 4, but it isn't all that big a deal.) Perhaps Saint Francis Day could be substituted for ever more controversial Columbus Day (October 12), as a day of Italian-American pride.

* The newspaper comics this weekend also posed the ultimate elementary school boy query for March: In a battle between ancient Romans (associated with the Ides of March) and Lepricauns (associated with Saint Patrick's Day) who would win? The particularly frightening aspect of this query is that there is apparently now a television show devoted to such questions, asking in a recent episode with quasi-scientific rigor, who would win in a fight between the Musketeers and the Manchu warriors (whose ancestors apparently have formed an immigrant community to the north of Denver).

* Also, in hopeful news, the Denver Post has reiterated its support for abolishing or narrowing the scope of the death penalty in Colorado. Narrowing the scope of first degree murder to exclude neo-natal homicide by women in the throes of childbirth and felony murder that does not involve triggermen or people who have solicited a murder would be a good start, and if applied retroactively, would improve the state of the state budget and greatly reduce the ranks of juveniles serving life without parole in the state.

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Friday Web Comic: Hot Mess

Do you ever have conflicted feelings about how to respond to a situation when you were in high school? What if those feelings were represented by have a dozen lushly colored invisible stuffed animals?

This is the simple, but delightfully readable premise of the charming web comic Hot Mess, which is join production: "Story by Diana Falzone and Geoff Skinner, Art by Emily Chan, Lettering by Thomas Mauer and Edits by Lauren Perry." And, alas, the animals do not yet include an invisible pink unicorn. Click through the link to see it.

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The Phoenix Requiem To Be Published

Sarah Ellerton's excellent webcomic The Phoenix Requiem will be published this year by 4th Dimension Entertainment. The niche publisher appears to be focusing on publishing webcomics, which makes them available to a wider audience.

The lavishly drawn Victorian era epic ghost story will run about 800 color pages when complete and currently has about 775 pages available on the web, with groups of pages published twice a week. The full webcomic will be complete in a month or two.

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Schizophrenia genes may make you a better date

Schizophrenia is associated with lower fertility, is not associated with increased family fertility, is highly heritable, and have a stable prevalence. Normally, genes that have strong negative effects, particularly associated with low fertility rates, are selected against and disappear from the gene pool. Why doesn't that happen in schizophrenia?

The Dating Advantage Theory

A new study argues that the same genes the increase schizophrenia risk also make you a more attractive person to date and mate. For example, those genes, when expressed in the general population at levels insufficient to lead to clinically diagnosed schizophrenia may enhance courtship related traits such as "creativity, emotional sensitivity, and expressiveness."

(The study is Del Giudice M (2010) Reduced Fertility in Patients' Families Is Consistent with the Sexual Selection Model of Schizophrenia and Schizotypy. PLoS ONE 5(12): e16040. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0016040).

As the article explains, one theory is that:

Schizotypy [i.e. genes that predispose a person to schizophrenia] . . . act[s] as an “amplifier” of individual differences in genetic fitness and condition: high-schizotypy individuals would be more likely to achieve outstanding mating success when they have high genetic fitness and/or grow up in good environmental conditions, but also more likely to develop schizophrenia (and to suffer reduced mating success) when they have low genetic fitness and/or grow up in poor conditions. Thus, schizotypy itself can be sexually selected, possibly more strongly so in populations characterized by high levels of mating competition and short-term mating patterns, where displays of good genetic quality are more critical to successful courtship [than traits associated with success in a long term committed couple relationship].

In other words, schizophrenia related genes may be particularly adaptive in societies with "love marriage" as opposed to arranged marriage, because traits that pre-dispose you to schizophrenia also make you someone who is fun to date. The fact that schizophrenia generally manifests clearly only towards the end of puberty or early young adulthood, also suggests that full blown schizophrenia may often be invisible until after marriage in societies that do not, as modern American societies do, favor historically late ages at first marriage. In other words, if a typical couple gets engaged in their late teens, the most negative aspects of schitzotypy are more likely to be invisible.

This analysis generalizes a similar evolutionary explanation for the persistence of bipolar disorder, which presents similar evolutionary issues to schizophrenia, and is also very common in individuals with extraordinary creative output, a trait that is considered fitness enhancing, at least in modest frequencies, in a society. There is some anecdotal evidence points out, for example, in the graphic novel history of modern mathematics found in Logicomix that there may be a similar association between schizophrenia and extraordinary output in mathematics and logic.

The Undercounted Descendants Theory

The study also hypothesizes that schizophrenics, particularly men, may be more likely to have unacknowledged children outside of marriage, artificially suppressing their measured fertility rates: "This is not an unlikely possibility, given that schizotypal personality traits specifically predict increased engagement in short-term mating and casual sex." This hypothesis, which is powerful in traditional societies, may have less force in societies where contraception is widely used and effective in these kinds of relationships.

The greater fertility impact in men than in women, however, may also be explained by the fact that schizophrenia is more likely to manifest before men have had children (because men have an earlier onset on average, and later peak reproductive years than women) than it is to manifest before women have had children.

Limits Of The Methodology

The study is primarily simply an exposition of a mathematical model that shows that the explanation proposed would be sufficient to explain the survival of genes associated with schizophrenia with mating advantage effects that are within a range that is plausible, without actually measuring if those advantages really exist. But, it has considerable force, despite its modest empirical grounding, because it is hard to find another explanation that could explain the facts that are observed. If the model proposed in this paper is wrong, one has to find some other model of how a strongly hereditary trait that is strongly selected against in many respects has remained stable in population frequency.

Persistent, fitness reducing genetic traits very frequently have an aspect that is fitness enhancing, or was at some time in the past. The sickle cell anemia gene, which is also connected to malaria resistance is the most commonly cited example of this kind of trait, but many strongly hereditary fitness reducing conditions share that feature. A more recent example (details behind pay wall) that is largely speculative at this point, is the hypothesis that a key breast cancer risk gene (BRCA1) may also enhance intelligence, and that the cancer risks and cognitive benefits may both relate to the production of connective tissue proteins. The problem with this model in the case of schizophrenia, however, is that almost all of the genetic conditions of this type known so far have simple, single gene Mendelian inheritance patterns, something that is not what is behind the strongly hereditary component of schizophrenia. Extensive research directed at the genetics of schizophrenia have pretty much ruled out such a simple cause, and it is much harder to develop a "some mutations good, many mutations bad" scenario in a more complicated genetic model. I am not aware of any hereditary condition that has been definitively established as having that kind of phenotype structure.

Breast cancer risk genes, like schizophrenia risk genes, are also notable in manifesting relatively late in life, which reduces their selective impact. "Schizophrenia occurs equally in males and females, although typically appears earlier in men—the peak ages of onset are 20–28 years for males and 26–32 years for females. Onset in childhood is much rarer, as is onset in middle- or old age."

Keep in mind that life expectancy in the Roman Empire (and much of the period before it and after it) was twenty to thirty years, and that historically people had children young, so conditions that first have negative fitness effects when you are in your later teens or early twenties, or later, have had only slight selective effects until the last dozen or so generations or less, in the West, and for half a dozen generations or so in much of the rest of the world. So both breast cancer risk genes and schizophrenia risk genes may have had far less of an impact of evolutionary fitness for 99%+ of their existence in the human genome.

Probably the weakest piece of the model is the significance attached to environmental impacts on the likelihood that schizophrenia will manifest, which seems to be quite low empirically.

A Mutation Model

Perhaps the best alternative explanation to those suggested in the study would be a model similar to that advanced for autism (where that evidence seems to suggest that a majority of all cases may be first generation mutations attributable to advanced parental age; many kinds of mental retardation are also due primarily to "first generation" mutations), which sees the condition as being a product of many different kinds of common mutations that all have the same phenotypic effect (perhaps because they all interrupt the same delicate neurological system). Thus, there may be enough "first generation" schizophrenics to make up for a deficit in schizophrenic children of schizophrenics. The main pieces of evidence supporting this as part of the explanation are the facts that schizophrenia, like autism, is associated with advanced paternal age probably due to the increased frequency of new mutations in children of older fathers, and that both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and autism seem to be associated more closely with the total number of atypical mutations (or subtypes of atypical mutations) in a person's genome than with any one mutation in a particular disease that accounts for a large share of all cases individually.

Schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and autism may all be the "fevers" of mental health. In other words, they may be common observable symptoms because a multitude of underlying causes all disrupt the delicate system that causes each symptom (schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, autism and fever respectively) to manifest.

As long as mutation rates among parents in the general population are high enough to make up for deficits in fertility in schizophrenics (which may be smaller than reported due to unacknowledged children of schizophrenic men who have lower fertility rates than schizophrenic women), schizophrenia can persist in the population at a steady prevalence despite being selected against.

The Theories Are Mutually Compatible And Avenues For Further Investigation

Of course, all three of these theories are compatible with each other. The larger the proportion of "first generation schizophrenics" (something that should be possible to estimate with reasonable accuracy from the strength of the paternal age-schizophrenia relationship), and the larger the number of unacknowledged children that men with schizophrenia are having (which might be best estimated as a percentage in excess of the percentage of unacknowledged children in the general population for which there is better empirical data with the percentage estimated by surveyed extramarital sex frequency of schizophrenic men relative to that of a control group), the less pressure there is on courtship trait advantages conferred by subclinical schitzotypy to have to be large and on subclinicial schitzotypy to be common in the general population (a frequency that can be estimated from the share of diagnosed schizophrenics with a family history of schizophrenia and that is, given the literature, probably quite low but non-zero) to explain the condition's evolutionary persistence.

Similarly, if it takes multiple mutations to create symptomatic schizophrenia, and a significant share of schitzotypy genes are "first generation", it is quite plausible that there is a significant rate of subclinical schitzotypy in the general population, which produces descendants who inherit a combination of schitzotypy genes that produce clinical schitzophrenia. One way to test this hypothesis would be to look not merely at advanced parental age as a risk factor, but also to examine advanced male grandparental age as a risk factor. A new mutation accumulation model with a threshold number of mutations required for an individual to be symptomatic would be supported and could be quantified at an order of magnitude level to the extent that advanced male grandparental age was a factor independent of advanced parental age. A study of advanced male grandparental age, of course, has the virtue of being something that can be cheaply, unobtrusively, and accurately determined from participants in existing studies.

Neurodiversity Implications

The "courtship advantage" model proposed in this study for schitzotypy genes, like the studies showing creativity advantages for sufferers of bipolar disorders, and analysis showing benefits in modern society from traits associated with the autism spectrum disorder all point to the importance of a neurodiversity model for thinking about human hereditiary cognitive differences.

If human hereditary cognitive differences are classified as flaws or diseases on one hand, and as enhancements on the other, there is a strong incentive for society and individual decision-makers to use eugenic approaches and gene therapy to wipe out the flaws from the human genome. But, if we recognize that some of the flaws are inseparable from cognitive traits that have value at some frequency (even if it is a low frequency) in our society, then efforts to wipe out genetic "flaws" in the population in the interest of improving mankind should be viewed with far greater skepticism.

READ MORE - Schizophrenia genes may make you a better date

Boyfriends, Independence and Parenting

[A]fter dropping my daugher at the Denver airport to go visit her college boyfriend, I in turn flew home too quickly. Distracted by my concerns of whether I was being a good mother to allow my daughter such an independent visit, I missed the 45 mph speed limit sign. My maternal worries were quickly replaced by that awful sinking feeling of seeing flashing lights in your rear-view mirror.

Pink traffic ticket in hand, I slowly drove home worried that my speeding ticket might end up costing as much as my daughter's airline ticket.

- Priscilla Dann-Courtney (author of "Room to Grow: Stories of Life and Family") from "Do You Know How Fast You Were Going - And Why?", a guest commentary at the Denver Post, December 20, 2010, page 19A.

The lede is in this story pretty much stole the show. Who can care all that much about traffic court when a young man and woman's fate hangs in the balance on the delicate thread of a long distance relationship?

As someone who has exchanged Valetines with my now wife from the time she was eighteen years old, made and received lots of cross country trips to see her in our long distance relationship phase (Philadelphia, Buffalo, Ann Arbor, Oberlin, Chicago and Grand Junction figured into those itineraries in every imaginable combination), ran up untold long distance bills, and was engaged to be married when she was twenty and I was twenty-one, I'm not someone who underestimates the potency and importance of late teen romance.

As a middle aged parent of a tween, I'm also bracing to figure out how to manage the challenges Dann-Courtney was facing as a parent myself. They will, no doubt, make the current struggles over the terms of conditions of a first cell phone, first e-mail account, unsupervised trips home from the bus stop, homework deadlines, fashion choices, flute praticing schedules, and acceptable snack foods pale by comparison.

Let's face it, I am guilty of helicopter parenting, as are about almost all middle class parents I know. It seems criminal not to know who your children's friends (and their parents) are. Raising kids in a city isn't as condusive to granting them independence as were my small town upbringing, or my wife's suburban childhood. When they were little there was a wide consensus that your children should always be in your sight or hearing, shouldn't cross even side streets alone, and should have carefully controlled diets free of the evils of sugar, unduly processed grains and excessive juice consumption. We felt a little guilty every time we skipped the organic aisle in the produce section.

Teachers and administrators at middle school Back To School night encouraged parents to ride herd on their sixth graders, while they were internalizing good study habits. Independence could wait until they had the hang of it, we were told. Parents were issued passwords that allow us to monitor homework and quiz results in real time, and were taught how to audit our children's planners to determine if they had homework that needed attention. Have we used all those tools? Only indifferently. But, the message is there, we ask a lot more questions about school work as a result, and both our middle school and elementary school child seem far more eager to have parental assistance in completing homework than I every remember being comfortable asking for when I was that age.

Dystopian teen fiction, like Scott Westerfeld's "Uglies," Ally Condie's "Matched," and webcomics like Gina Bigg's "Red String," while still featuring teens seeking independence in worlds where the older generation has plotted a path for them, gives the older generation much more credit for trying to do the right thing, even if they fail in the attempt, than similar young adult fiction did when I was kid.

In part, this is even an issue, because there is less of a generation gap than there was when we were young. My parents spent their college days struggling with slide rules and punch card computers. The software that I used to word process my sixth grade essays isn't that different from the software that my children use. My parents didn't like the Beatles when they first came out, preferring the crooners of Lawrence Welk fame. The jumble of pop, hip hop and country crossover that my kids listen to on Radio Disney isn't all that different from what my wife and I listen to on radio stations with an older target audience. The video games they play are more sophisticated than the ones we played, but we did at least play video games too as children.

It is mildly distressing to learn that the unisex jeans, t-shirt and chucks outfit that was the de facto school uniform of my entire youth has finally been displaced by a mismash of athletic clothes and ballerina skirts. But, the demise of the bowl cut that I wore for a decade in favor buzz cuts and mullets, with little in between, is surely no worse, and while girl's names have gone posh on us, with Ashley in and Jane out, their hairstyles and makeup preferences seem unchanged to my XY eyes from those of my childhood.

The flip side of being more involved in the day to day details of your children growing up, is that you have to acknowledge to a greater extent, the legitimacy of what they do care about. It is harder for Dann-Courtney to say no to her daughter's trip to see her college boyfriend when she knows the young man isn't half bad, and knows her daughter well enough to know that her daughter's feelings are heartfelt and not crazy. It is harder to insist that an elaborate role playing world videogame be shut off precisely at 8:00 p.m. as agreed when you know what a pain it is not to take the extra minute or two it takes to disconnect properly from that kind of fantasy world. Understanding fosters compromise. These days, parents are expected to be caring mentors, not authoritarian dicators of social norms, although the horror of being called out by another adult to "be a parent" puts limits on just how understanding parents can afford to be.

We meddle in our children's lives a lot, they know we want the best for them, and we know that we might not always get it quite right. This is the anxiety of parenting in the twenty-first century. Somehow, we'll muddle through, we hope, with everyone not much worse for wear in the process.

READ MORE - Boyfriends, Independence and Parenting