Holy Shit, the Gombe War!

As wars go, the Gombe War was fairly small in scale. Combatants numbered in the dozens, battles were sparse, and casualties came to a grand total of 11.What's really remarkable about the Gombe War wasn't so much how it was fought as who fought it. Because who fought it were these guys:

Not specifically these two. I mean, one of them is a baby.

Chimpanzees. The full name of the conflict is the Gombe Chimpanzee War. The factions involved were once part of a larger community of chimpanzees. They were known as the Kasakela and Kahama groups, and they inhabited the Gombe National Park in Tanzania. Pretty much everything we know about this war comes from a single source, and she's always been one of my personal heroes: Jane Goodall, the famous ethologist, animal rights activist, and all-around awesome chimp lady.

Hearing her greet a crowd by howling like a chimpanzee was a formative moment for me.

She started noticing a rift in the chimpanzee community, which appeared to be driving the two sub-groups into different areas of the Park. One January day in 1974, the rift tore into open violence. A gang of six Kasakela chimpanzees surrounded a lone Kahama, brutally attacking and killing him. Over the next four years, the two groups were constantly at odds. Open conflict was relatively rare, but by June of 1978 every single Kahama chimpanzee had been slain. Only one Kasakela died.

For Jane Goodall, this was one of the most horrific - and most important - events she witnessed in her time with the chimpanzees. She describes devastating nightmares that plagued her later in life, where she would relive the experience of seeing creatures she knew to be gentle in the midst of tearing one another limb from limb, literally drinking the blood of their fallen enemies. Enemies that had once been like family to them.

For some reason this picture is suddenly chilling.

But it was important for the same reason it was important when she first witnessed chimpanzees using tools. Because chimpanzees are animals, and the suggestion that animals could engage in organized hostility - warfare - was so far-fetched at the time that many in the scientific community doubted her reports and wrote them off as anthropomorphizing nonsense. Further study with more rigorous methods have only underscored Goodall's work, though.

So we just have to face the fact that we don't get to be the only ones who go to war.

So...yay?

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Deir el-Medina!

You won't find much in the way of functioning society at Deir el-Medina these days. It's just Northwest of the city of Luxor, next to the famous Valley of the Kings, just past the area where the Nile makes the ground fertile. What you will find, though, is plenty of evidence that people used to live there.

Deil el-Medina was a workers' village in New Kingdom Era Egypt. In case that doesn't mean anything to you, let me point out that the New Kingdom Era was 1550 and 1077 BC. Which is a hella long time ago.

As old to Cleopatra as Cleopatra is us. Seriously.

It's placement was no accident. The workers who lived there were tasked with building the tombs of the Valley of the Kings. Thanks to painstaking excavations of the site during the 1920s, it's one of the clearest windows we have into the ancient Egyptian world.

Crucially, the surviving documents from the village were not preserved for posterity's sake, but rather by happenstance. That means that instead of self-aggrandizing tales of historical significance, Deir el-Medina gives us a glimpse into the ordinary daily life of the Ancient Egyptian worker.

We know, for example, that the village was what we might consider "middle class," and that the laborers there were mostly skilled tradesmen.We know that people worshiped both the "official" gods and their own "personal" gods, and that was pretty much okay with the authorities. We know that they practiced an eight day work week followed by a two day weekend. We know that they were allowed days off for both illness and hangovers. During their time off, some workers would build their own tombs - since, you know...they were pretty good at it.

"Sick tomb, bro! Can't wait to see you in it!"

Maybe the most interesting thing we know about Deir el-Medina, though, is something that occurred during the reign of Ramesses III. Things weren't so hot for the Egyptian Empire at the time. In fact, the economic turmoil the Empire was embroiled in during that era was a significant factor in the overall decline of Egypt's influence.

What this meant for Deir el-Medina was that their wages and rations were late. This was a big no-no. A religious no-no, in fact. So, for the first (known) time in history, the workers went on strike. They refused to do any more work until the Pharaoh or Vizier came to speak with them about their wages and rations. Eventually, the authorities relented, but the process played out several times before it became clear that the workers were holding a winning hand.

That, as far as we know, is the origin of organized labor. In Egypt, over 3,000 years ago.

Holy Shit.

Holy Shit, Senses!

Senses! Everyone knows we have five of them, right? Sight, Hearing, Taste, Touch, and Smell. We all learned that in Kindergarten, so why bother writing a whole blog post about it?

Well, one good reason is that we all learned wrong. There are more than five senses. I mean, it's not even close. There's not really a consensus on the exact number, either. The number doesn't really matter. Think of it like individual parts of your body. How do you define a "part?" Is your forearm a different "part" than your whole arm?

And where does your Foreman come into play?

That's how it is with sense. You've got your traditional senses, which the Elizabethans called the "Five Wits" (incidentally, that's where the phrase "keep your wits about you" comes from). Then you have things like thermoception. That's your ability to detect temperature. You could argue that it's part of your sense of touch, but when you shiver, is it really a response to touching something cold?

Then there's proprioception. That's your sense of where your body is. It's another one that's either ignored or thrown in with touch. We can demonstrate the issue with that by performing a ten second experiment. Put your hand behind your head. You can't see it. You can't feel it. But you know where your hand is. You know what it's doing. That's your kinesthetic sense, otherwise known as "proprioception." It's what lets you touch your nose with your finger even when you close your eyes.

Uh...you know...in most cases.

How about your sense of balance? Can't really call that one touch, can you? It's based in your inner ear, and I don't think anyone would argue that it's part of hearing, either. But you can stand on thin surface and innately know when you're beginning to tilt too far in any direction.

There are tons of sense that you use all the time without thinking about it. Knowing when you need to breathe, knowing when you need to empty your little bladder or evacuate your bowels, feeling the urge to vomit, and even recognizing the passage of time are all senses beyond the traditional five.

If that's not enough to get you excited, think of it this way: most people want to experience the world in ways they never could before. One way to do that is by consciously recognizing what our bodies are automatically doing for us. When you acknowledge that you know where your hand is because of a sense you never knew you had, you're paving a conscious road where there was once only a subconscious dirt path.

See, the road roller is a metaphor for thinking.

And isn't that cool?

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Onfim!

Remember when you were a kid, and you would fidget in all your classes and make weird doodles in your notebooks? Maybe you even still do it. It's a pretty common form of expression, usually reserved for when you can only spare about half your attention.

Onfim was a kid from Novgorod, Russia who doodled a lot. By itself, that doesn't mean much. But when Onfim was a student, Novgorod wasn't in Russia. It was the administrative center of the Novgorod Republic, which hasn't existed since 1478.

I mean it was practically the size of Continental Europe. How am I just now learning about it?

We know about Onfim because he wrote his notes (and the aforementioned doodles) on soft birch bark. Before paper became a really big thing, birch bark was often used for that purpose. It's hearty and water-resistant, which is great for preservation since water is the mortal enemy of history.

We'll beat you someday, water. You just wait.

Most of Onfim's writing involved practicing the Old Slavic alphabet and writing Psalms. The doodles, though, were likely not part of any assignment. He sketched portraits of himself, his friends, and his tutor. He drew fanciful monsters with arrows sticking out of them. He even drew pictures of knights in battle. I'm not sure which of those is the 13th Century equivalent of the Bond-Villain's-Underground-Bunker that every boy knows how to draw today, but I'm sure it's in there somewhere.

I'm sure I've done something similar to this with helicopters instead of horses.

The great thing about Onfim is that he puts a human face on history. Not just a human face, but a face we all know. Because everybody doodles in school, and thanks to Onfim we know that we share that subtle desire to express ourselves with our ancestors going back at least 800 years.

Holy Shit.

Holy Shit, Mass Extinction!

Mass extinction is, you might (very correctly) assume, a pretty bad thing. I mean, every mass extinction so far has paved the way for a new form of dominant life on Earth, so there are some silver linings. We're here because of mass extinction.

But still, an event where over 50% of the species on Earth have been wiped out can only be called a catastrophe. This has happened on at least five occasions on the geologic time scale. The worst of them was the Permian-Triassic Event over 250 million years ago.

This chart is the visual equivalent of jargon, but the Event in question is the highest blue peak.

In that event, up to 96% of the species on Earth were completely eliminated. While there are several theories as to the cause of this disaster, it's nearly impossible to tell for certain what happened. Maybe a large meteor struck the planet or a supervolcano erupted and kicked up enough dust to choke out the majority of life. Maybe a massive, cross-species plague swept through every living thing. Maybe the atmosphere simply changed and most life couldn't catch up.

The point is, shit died. A lot. And that was just the worst Mass Extinction Event. There have been several others. The most famous was the one that finished off the dinosaurs.

It's not like they were even phoning it in by the end. T-Rex was one of the last surviving species

The criteria for a mass extinction is that roughly half the species on the planet must have been destroyed within a short period of time. A short period of time on a geologic scale, mind you, means "within a million years or so."

Or, "Significantly longer than the entirety of human history

So when I tell you that Earth has lost 50 percent of its wildlife in the past forty-five freaking years, you should know that this means serious business. We are absolutely in the middle of a mass extinction. Right now. And we are absolutely the cause. Whatever your feelings are about the environment, there is no way that this will end up being anything but terrible for humans.

Because "mass extinction" really is just as terrifying as it sounds.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Mentoring Biases!

#heforshe because I want my daughter to live in a world without the below scenario

Lately there's been a lot going on in the realm of gender politics. One of the big rallying cries for the Women's Rights movement of late has been the fact that women make about 77 cents for every dollar men make in the work force. One of the big answers to that cry has been that women tend to choose lower-paying jobs, so it's your own fault for not joining the STEM collective.

...and adding your biological and technological distinctiveness to their own

Well, not so fast.

It's generally accepted that, in order to really excel in any discipline, you need a good mentor. Academic mentoring is a time-honored tradition that dates back to probably around the time humans realized that they could use specific noises to pass their knowledge on to another person. It's an essential part of the learning experience.

With this in mind, researchers sent thousands of letters to professors asking if they'd be willing to be a mentor to the letter-writer. These requests were 100% identical, but were signed with different names. In the STEM fields, if the letters were signed by a female-sounding name (or what we'll politely call an "ethnic" name), not only were they less likely to get a willing mentor -- they hardly ever even got an answer.

These mentors are essentially the gatekeepers of lucrative career fields, and the sign they're currently hanging on the gate looks like this:

Wherein Brother Bear is kind of an asshole

This sort of thing has always bothered me, but now that I have a daughter?

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, the Great War!

One hundred years and two days ago, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia after a series of political machinations that followed the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Due to a tangled web of alliances and escalations, this declaration of war was followed by at least half a dozen others in less than a week. The next four years tore Continental Europe apart, both figuratively and literally.

This is Beaumont-Hamel after almost a century of healing.

World War I isn't as sexy as its sequel. It's much messier. There's not a clear "bad guy" to hate. I mean, if you're looking for a villain, you're not going to do much better than friggin' Hitler. No such luck in The Great War. The villain there was the war itself. The trenches. The ineffectual artillery barrages and futile charges into certain death. The gas.

Which...you know...fuck that noise.

All told, nearly 18 million men, women, and children died as a direct result of the war. That's close to 2% of the population of the participating countries. Some fared worse than others. Serbia may have lost as much as 18% of their population, which...Jesus, can you imagine what that would do to your country? That's not to mention the specific battles like the Battle of the Somme, where the first day of the fighting cost 20,000 allied lives and resulted in a single mile change in the battle lines.

It was horrific, to say the least. And a lot of people will tell you it started because of a sandwich. Because several assassination attempts failed on the day Franz Ferdinand's death set the wheels in motion, and Gavrilo Princip happened to sit down and ruminate on the day's events with a sandwich from a deli that happened to be exactly where the Archduke's car would stop after the driver got turned around. Rest assured, though, that the sandwich had nothing to do with it.

It wasn't a coincidence. Princip went there not to ruminate, but because he suspected that the motorcade would come that way. Aside from that, the bare fact is (and I can't believe I find it necessary to explain this) sandwiches don't cause world wars. Not even a little bit. World Wars are caused by tangled webs of diplomacy, mass escalation at crises, and overconfident world leaders whose only experience with war is in fighting a vastly technologically inferior foe.

Which was this whole other thing

If it wasn't Franz Ferdinand, it probably would have been someone else. Germany, France, England, Russia, and Austria-Hungary were positively itching for a fight. Germany was once the voice of reason. Otto von Bismark kept the whole thing together more or less by sheer force of will for quite some time. But then he was sacked, and the world began its inexorable march toward a preview of Armageddon. And no, I don't mean the campy oil industry wet dream film.

After the Great War came and went, nothing would ever be the same. My pet example of the effects of World War I is Dadaism. The avant-garde art movement was born of a complete rejection of everything in civilization up to that point, because that's what got us into this mess. Realism, reason, and logic were thrown out the window, and artists embraced the absurd. Because when you're dealing with constant explosions, fruitless sacrifices, and gas that melts your face and lungs, what else are you going to embrace?

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Poison Ivy!

This weekend, I was mowing the lawn when I spotted a bushel of trifoliate weeds. Remembering the old adage, "Leaves of three, let it be (unless it's under your backyard tree)," I sprang into action. With gloved hands, I yanked the whole damn thing out of the ground, roots and all. Then I put it into a plastic bag and tossed it into the trash.

Alas, one of the leaflets brushed against my hand, spreading the urushiol onto the bare skin there. Then I wiped the sweat from my brow with the same spot on my arm. Now my arm has an infuriatingly itchy rash, my eyes are swollen and bumpy, my heart is a pit of black rage, and every fiber of my being is screaming in hatred of Toxicodendron radicans, more commonly known as poison ivy.

Or "Satan's Salad"

So we're going to talk about this little son-of-a-bitch weed. First and foremost, how it works. Poison ivy is one of many plants that produces urushiol, an oily substance that 85% of human immune systems treat like Genghis freaking Khan. If you're allergic, like most people are, your body will throw everything it has at the urushiol, and that's why I hate botanical world right now.

Once your dumbass pores absorb the oil (probably because you took a hot shower, which opens them), you are very unlikely to be contagious. The blisters are full of water and pus, but not poison ivy juice. Any clothing you have that came into contact with it, on the other hand, is highly contagious and should be washed as soon as possible. Or burned in a cathartic bonfire. Or nuked from orbit. Your choice, really.

From there, depending on the severity, you either wait it out, take some antihistamines, apply some itch cream, or take steroids to unleash the hidden powers of your manly immune system or something (citation needed). I'm on the steroids route.

Artist's rendition

Now here's the weird stuff. You knew it was coming. First of all, humans are the only animal we know of that is allergic to poison ivy. Even chimps, who share a ludicrous amount of DNA with us, are completely immune.

In fact, one of the preferred (or at least entertaining) methods of getting rid of an infestation is your yard is to hire a goat. They love the stuff. They'll eat it all up for you without getting so much as a stomachache.

I knew there was a reason I don't trust them. I could see it in their eldritch eyes.

The other big weird point: urushiol is not restricted to poison ivy. Of course, most people know that poison oak and poison sumac work the same way. That's true enough. There's also a tree found in Asia called the Asian lacquer tree that has it. The Japanese call it the urushi. I respect you enough as a reader to assume you can make that connection. That's not too weird, though, is it? You were expecting more.

I guess I'll have to throw in some mangoes.

I'm generous like that

Mango leaves and stems (and possibly also skins) have the same allergenic compound as poison ivy, and are, in fact, the number one cause of plant-based rashes in places where mangoes are cultivated, like Hawaii.

The moral of this story is fuck mangoes, fuck urushiol, and most of all, fuck poison ivy.

So holy shit, or whatever. I'm gonna go take some more Benadryl.

Holy Shit, Memory (and Photography)!

I think we can all agree that memory is weird. So weird, in fact, that I'm only going to focus on one aspect of memory in this post. It's a newly discovered thing that Neo-Luddites (now there's an oxymoron) have been bemoaning ever since cameras came with phones.

Pictures. That is, the incessant picture-taking of the kids-these-days generation. The kids these days traditionally respond by claiming that taking pictures helps them remember important events. "But sight is only one sense," the Neo-Luddites retort, "and you're so focused on taking pictures you forget to use the rest of your senses, or even actually see what you're recording."

"Pish-posh," say the youths, and they skateboard away full of mirth and truancy or whatever. I'm not really young anymore, I don't know.

This came up when I googled "kids these days," so I guess it's possible that they've switched to unicycles

Well, the Neo-Luddites have new ammunition in their constant struggle against new and exciting things. Linda Henkel, a psychologist at Fairfield University, decided to find out whether of not they have a point through the clever use of science. It turns out they do.

Henkel sent a bunch of college students into an art museum and told them to photograph some pieces but just look at others. When they were quizzed later on, they were significantly more likely to remember small details if they hadn't taken a photo. Which means our brains really do subconsciously use photos as a memory crutch.

It's like that old drug PSA, but way less serious. And Rachel Leigh Cook isn't going to destroy your kitchen over it.

Before you Neo-Luddite readers get too excited, you should know that the rule is not absolute. When instructed to take photographs of specific details instead of an object as a whole, their memory was just fine. And that's not just on the detail they zoomed in on - zooming in on one detail made them as likely to remember all the details as students who took no pictures.

So next time you want to savor a moment, either savor it without the use of a camera or savor a few very specific details of it when you take a picture. Because otherwise your memory will partially shut down like the lazy young whippersnapper it is.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, HIV.

The second I wrote the title of this post, I realized that I didn't want to make this topic funny. I can write about all kinds of promising research into a cure for HIV/AIDS. I can write about how much progress has been made in removing the stigma from both the virus and the gay community. But instead, I'll just tell you to look at this graph:

That's what HIV/AIDS has done to sub-Saharan Africa. It's effects, particularly in the late '80s, were downright apocalyptic. Young people are most susceptible. In the coldest possible terms, that means countries with major AIDS epidemics are deprived of a taxable work force. Which means they just can't afford to fix the problem.

Progress has been made, but we're a long, long way from recovering fully as a species from what HIV/AIDS has wrought. To this day, there are countries where one in four people are HIV positive. I honestly don't have the stomach to say much more than that. Maybe I'll revisit more specific elements later.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck

I was, maybe, a bit too kind to Erwin Rommel when I wrote about him. He did some great deeds for a Nazi, but in the end he was, after all, a Nazi. Maybe he wasn't a model citizen in the modern, not-complicit-in-a-brutal-dictatorship sense of the word.

If you want an example of what a bold and decent person does against the rise of National Socialism, maybe a better choice would be Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck. Lettow-Vorbeck was a hero to the German people after World War I. He led the only successful invasion of Imperial British soil during that conflict, and he did so by waging what has been described as the greatest guerrilla operation in history.

There are other contenders.

He led about 14,000 men in East Africa on a campaign that was meant solely to divert as much resources as possible away from the Allies on the Western Front. That way, he reasoned, the folks in the thick of the war could get the important fighting done. There was essentially no hope of success, and Lettow-Vorbeck proved it by surrendering entirely undefeated under orders from high command after the Armistice.

While he was in command, more than half of his men were native Africans. He lived in a different time -- when the White Man's Burden was considered progressive -- and yet, he showed a remarkable amount of tolerance and even respect for other races. He spoke fluent Swahili and named black soldiers as officers, a rarity at the time. When questioned, he firmly stated, "We are all Africans here."

A bunch of white kids would say the same thing years later in the Book of Mormon. The musical. Not the book.

After the war, Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck became involved in politics. He is chiefly known today as a vehement opponent of Adolf Hitler during his rise to power. He was one of Hitler's chief adversaries, and when the Führer offered him an ambassadorship as an olive branch in 1938, rumor has it that his response was, "Go fuck yourself." Imagine saying that to Hitler near the peak of his power. Even better, Lettow-Vorbeck's nephew was asked about the incident decades later, he said, "I don't think he put it that politely."

And everybody was like "OOOOOH YOU GOT SERVED MEIN FÜHRER!"

Pretty cool guy, right? Well, here's the thing: the guy was a major warhawk. He disobeyed direct orders by the governor of German East Africa in order to engage the British. The governor wanted to remain neutral in the war, because he rightly feared that war would destroy any positive change Germany brought to the region in favor of starvation and violence. That's exactly what happened, and Lettow-Vorbeck shrugged it off as an unfortunate fact of war. Add to that the fact that he regularly (albeit strategically) denied food to civilians so that his army could stay in the fight and he doesn't seem all that terrific.

That's the problem with heroes. They're all so human, and they all have to live in the real world.

Still, he told Hitler to go fuck himself. Major props for that one, right?

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Shanties!

Have you ever seen a wild goose sailing on the ocean?

Who hasn't these days?

If you answered "Ranzo, Ranzo Ray," (or some variation) you're probably very much familiar with sea shanties. Because that is one. And you're weird.

Sea shanties emerged around the 19th Century as a specific type of work song (though some theorize this was when they were revived from obscurity, not born). They were chiefly an English language phenomenon inspired in large part by African work songs. Just let that sink in for a second, considering the nature of the relationship between Europeans and Africans back then.

Oh, right. The travesties.

They existed because work on a sailing ship is difficult, laborious, repetitive, and requires a high degree of coordination. For example, to set sail on a square-rigged ship, you first need to hoist the yards. That requires a number of people pulling on ropes and pulleys in unison. All it takes is one or two people pulling at the wrong time to get the whole thing out of whack, which could delay departure or even endanger the crew.

Not like it's confusing to have the same word mean a measurement, field, and part of a sail.

The traditional solution would be to have someone count out, "One, two, three," and have everyone haul on three. That worked well enough, but it was no fun. A better way, certain enterprising sailors decided, was to have a sort of foreman/lead singer, the shantyman, sing out a line or two and have everyone else sing the chorus. For example, when hoisting the yard, the song would go:

Shantyman: Our boots and shoes are all in pawn
Crew: Go down, you blood red roses, go down
Shantyman: Its flaming drafty 'round Cape Horn
Crew: Go down, you blood red roses, go down

On every "Go down," the crew would haul in unison. For a great example of this exact situation, watch the 1956 film Moby Dick. If you're the impatient type, just watch the part below. If you're especially impatient, just go straight to the 1:04 mark. As a bonus, you get "Heave Away Me Johnny" right afterward.

All the classic shanties were associated with certain types of work. "Drunken Sailor," the one you definitely know, was for continuous hauling work. Songs with longer verses would be used for raising the anchor, which involved circling around the capstan over and over to wind the rope. Some songs had extremely specific meanings.

"Leave Her, Johnny, Leave Her" was a pump shanty used for the last pump of a voyage -- thus, "Now those pumps are all pumped dry and it's time for us to leave her" means the water is all pumped back into the sea, and the sailors are free to disembark. There's a terrific note of ironic nostalgia in that one. It's about a voyage where everything was as bad as it can be on a sailing ship, but the minor key suggests that everyone is still sad to leave the awful ship behind.

Music can make any ship the Millennium Falcon

Well, the shanties may actually have something to do with that. Recent studies suggest that singing in unison with a group of other people actually makes everyone's hearts literally beat in unison. That sort of connection can't not be powerful, and it may help to explain the cohesiveness of a sailing crew and the pervasiveness of work songs throughout history. That's pure speculation, but it's not that far of a leap.

But that brings us to a problem. Where are our work songs today? When we do menial tasks with other people, we sit in relative silence. We chat sometimes. We even listen to music. But we don't have that quasi-mystical connection that songs can provide. Veteran sailors bemoaned the loss of the sea shanty with the rise of the steam engine, but what if it goes deeper than that? What if we're losing something critical to our innate understanding of the human condition by segregating music from everyday life?

I, for one, will be busy learning all the call-and-response work songs I can manage from now on. When my kids get to an age where putting them to work is reasonable (I'm thinking six months or so), they'll be singing bawdy songs all the while. According to science, that will bring us closer together.

DAD, WE DON'T EVEN HAVE A HALYARD.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Delta 32!

C-C Chemokine Receptor Type 5, or CCR5, is a protein in your white blood cells. We don't know its exact function, but we're pretty sure it interacts with T cells, and it may play a key role in inflammations that result from infection. All in all, it's a pretty standard white blood cell protein. That's what HIV counts on.

Some forms of HIV use CCR5 as their point of entry into your immune system. When that happens, shit gets bad. That's why most early drugs given to HIV positive people target CCR5. It's more or less the main point of entry for the AIDS virus.

It's like that drainage grate at Helm's Deep. Only, you know, AIDS.

Now let's take a quick two and a half thousand year trip to the past and take a look at Ancient Athens. In 430 BC, the second year of the Peloponnesian War, Athens was struck with a massive, horrific plague that wiped out a fourth of its population. It was at this point in human history when CCR5 started to change. Medicine back then consisted mainly of blood-letting, the type of thing that lands you in a psyche ward nowadays. Back then you paid people to do it to you.

As a result, natural selection weeded out a lot of people via disease. Many survived, of course. Some of them had a bizarre natural resistance, which we now call CCR5-Δ32, or Delta 32. It's a gene mutation. A tiny variation in your genetic makeup that essentially deletes a certain segment of the CCR5 protein. As smallpox and various other diseases spread across Europe, the Delta 32 mutation became more common in the survivors, conferring various immunities to a lucky minority.

Alas, this did not include immunity to ludicrous superstitious violence.

Today, Delta 32 is found in about 10-15% of European-descended humans. The segment of CCR5 that it deletes turns out to be a chief cause of all kinds of problems. That includes the aforementioned HIV. I suppose you can see what I'm getting at. If you are of European descent, there is as much as a 15% chance that you are, if not immune, then highly resistant to the AIDS virus.

That's evolution at work. Think of the untold thousands of people who had to die so that this mutation could become as prevalent as it is. Think of how many people would have to suffer today for it to become a common feature in human beings. This relatively new strength, like all the strengths we enjoy as a species, came at a massive cost over thousands of years.

Luckily, we've gotten pretty good at tinkering with evolution since then. Rather than opening our veins and hoping all the sick pours out with our blood, we use real science to develop real medicine that really works. And the discovery of the Delta 32 mutation is a boon for medicine. We don't know how, and we don't know for sure it'll work, but it's very possible that this natural resistance might hold the key to curing HIV, a disease that only twenty years ago was synonymous with a death sentence.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Hook!

I'm gonna disappoint some of you loyal readers when you learn that I'm not referring to one of the best adventure movies to come out of the early nineties. Instead, I'm here to tell you about a song that came out three years later. The song that called us all idiots to our face, and we sat here bobbing our heads and proving Blues Traveler's point.

It was this movie. And if you disagree you can shut your mouth, Philistine.

"Hook" ripped its chord structure directly from Pachelbel's Canon in D. That's the song you hear at weddings that might as well be called "Here Comes Everyone Who is Not the Bride." The progression is eerily powerful as an earworm. It's a song that will inevitably described as either Good or Catchy by anyone who hears it, even if they don't like it.

That's why it was chosen. Not in a nefarious way or even out of capitalistic self-interest...sort of. It was an artistic choice in the same way the title "Hook" was. As were the lyrics, which you probably don't remember even seconds after you belt them at the top of your lungs. They're surreptitious and overt all at once.

Like Bryan Cranston disguising himself as Heisenberg

You see, "Hook" is a song about how easy it is to manipulate people into enjoying trite, simplistic, boring music. The only thing original about it is its self-awareness. If you don't believe me, just check out some of the lyrics:

It doesn’t matter what I say
So long as I sing with inflection
That makes you feel that I’ll convey
Some inner truth of vast reflection

But I’ve said nothing so far
And I can keep it up for as long as it takes
And it don’t matter who you are
If I’m doing my job then it’s your resolve that breaks

Because the hook brings you back
I ain’t tellin’ you no lie
The hook brings you back
On that you can rely

The hook John Popper is referring to is the musical concept of a riff that catches your ear and makes you stick around to hear the rest of the song. It worked, too. "Hook" peaked at 23 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. It got there by telling its audience that they were going to be taken in by the composition of the song and convinced that it said something meaningful even though it didn't.

And we obliged. Which actually kind of makes it an interesting song. Hell, check out the video:

If you can get past the incredibly '90s hair and tucked in t-shirts (and the realization that Paul Schaffer was in Blues Traveler), you'll see a perfect companion piece to the song. It's a guy watching television and being taken in by contestants in a beauty pageant and a Citizen Kane-esque politician, all of whom are literally telling him that he's only listening because of the way their words are presented, not what they're actually saying.

And the more you listen to the rapid-fire third verse, the more you understand that it's just John Popper saying, "This is really low and valueless as art, but hell, it'll make me some money."

Holy shit.