Women need to lead to get community action

If you want to sell community action (vaccination or climate change), don't put up a mansplainer talking science. Get an older women with technical leadership and high status to put the message of community solidarity and express anger at the opposition.

E.g. "My grandchildren have been vaccinated. But they might still be vulnerable because vaccines sometimes fail to fully protect. This isn't a problem if everyone is vaccinated because disease can't spread without many potential victims. Anti-vaxxers make all our children vulnerable. They provide enough vulnerable children to allow an epidemic, and some vaccinated children are effected. This is not about individual health, it is about community health. Everyone needs to get behind it."

For Climate Change she might say "Managing the climate is the community's responsibility. There has to be rational evaluation of what needs to be done, and that has to come from the scientific experts looking at all the data, not just a cool day in July. The community that counts is the whole world because we all share the same air. We need to be part of that community. People who don't get behind this shared effort are harming us all, and particularly our children"

Chemicals attacking the microbiome

The microbiome is complicated

Recent research into the health problems being experienced by bees showed that it was not just insecticides causing the problem. What made the bees sick was a combination of small amounts of insecticide with fungicide.

Why would fungicide affect bees? I think the answer is very clear from other research into the microbiome: the cocktail of living things in and on humans and other multicell creatures such as bees.

We used to think bacteria was bad, so antibiotics must be good. Then we learnt that we are home to lots of beneficial bacteria that are damaged by antibiotics. But now we know that the microbiome is a cocktail of bacteria, fungi and viruses. And they are all involved, some more beneficially than others.

Whether we are looking at insect health (which is urgent), or the health of humans, we need to investigate the overuse of a whole range of chemicals, whatever their targets, and even if they are not intended for biochemical effects. And we need to look at the effects of combinations. Given the large (and indeed exaggerated) reaction the general population has to radiation, I believe they can be induced to demand action on this.

[update 2/5/2019: More evidence that fungicide causes health problems: https://www.diabetes.co.uk/news/2019/apr/Additive-found-in-baked-goods-linked-with-possible-type-2-diabetes-risk-91661279.html]

Racism in Tim Flannery's latest book

Tim Flannery is a great bloke, fighting hard to save the world. The last person anyone, including himself, would suspect of racism. But we all want to think well of ourselves, and this very easily extends unconsciously to wanting to think well of groups that we belong to, compared to others.

For Europeans this now embraces Neanderthals, and the hybrids that are descended from them. So in Tim Flannery's book "Europe, A Natural History" we see on page 6 at the end of the Introduction the assertion that the rise of culture resulted from the "hybrid vigour" of the combination of humans from Africa with European Neanderthals. I will easily disprove that hybrid vigour could have anything to do with it. Which shows how tempting such ideas must be to get past the guard of an expert like Tim Flannery.

I have previously written about the genetic advantage of culture (https://grampsgrumps.blogspot.com/2015/02/what-is-culture-for.html). If the genes for culture arose in hybrid populations in Europe, the question arises of how it then appeared in Africa? An easy answer comes along: parallel evolution. This, we remember, was the explanation the Chinese (and others) had for the rise of Homo Sapiens in multiple places. But it was easily disproved by genetic analysis. And even before that, the people who understand evolution know that there is no such thing as parallel evolution. If some substantial and complicated evolutionary change occurs in multiple places at roughly the same time it is because it is all descended from a single point. We can be certain that this is the case with culture. It arose in pure African homo sapiens. It might have taken a slightly different path after hybridization. It is a tempting fancy for us hybrids to regard that slightly different path as superior. If it was a harmless fancy we could let it pass. But it isn't, and we have to reject it.