Month: November 2008

My Theory of Human Evolution (Chinese birthday gift)

Seth Roberts4 Comments

In 1952, following the Soviet model, Tsinghua University was stripped of its humanities and social science departments and became an MIT-like university entirely devoted to engineering and science. Eventually it became clear this was a mistake. Fifteen years ago a School of Humanities and Social Sciences was established to begin to restore things. Two weeks ago, because I am a faculty member in that School, I got a fancy tea set to mark the 15th anniversary of its founding. Here is what the tea set looks like:

I asked a Chinese friend of mine to explain it to me. She pointed to the tools in the box with the cups. “They’re useless,” she said. She pointed to the slatted bamboo box. “I think it’s useless,” she said.

To pour the tea you put the cups on the slats. The box is slatted so that if you spill some tea while pouring the surface will continue to look good. It’s not the total uselessness my friend saw but she is right that the added value of the slats and the tools, in practical terms, is very low.

My theory of human evolution says that the reason for gifts, ceremonies, and special days (such as Christmas) is to provide a demand for hard-to-make stuff. This allows artisans on the cutting edge to make a living and further develop their skills, advancing the start of the art. This is why gifts and ceremonial things are typically hard to make and, were it not for their value as gifts, not worth making. My friend’s reaction illustrates this. My theory predicts that this feature of gifts, ceremonies, and special days has a genetic basis and should be found in all cultures. This example shows it is found in a culture quite different from American culture.

Flaxseed Oil Used to Treat Cancer

Seth Roberts10 Comments

The Budwig protocol is the food treatment and cure for cancer and other major debilitating diseases created by Dr. Johanna Budwig. It was designed for use with extremely ill and wasted cancer patients who had been sent home by their doctors to die. These were patients so ill that many were unable to take any food at all in the beginning, and had to be initially treated with enemas. The protocol is so simple that it can be tailored to fit whatever situation is encountered, from use with someone at death’s door to use as a preventative and part of a healthy lifestyle.

There are only two essential foods in the protocol, flax oil and cottage cheese or some other sulphurated protein such as yogurt or kefir. The oil provides electron-rich fats, and the cottage cheese provides the sulphurated protein to bind with the oil and render it water soluble. In this state, the oil is able to carry immense amounts of oxygen straight into the cells. Cancer cells cannot thrive in an oxygen rich environment.

From Natural News. Yeah, the explanation (“electron-rich fats”) is absurd, but the general empirical idea (the use of flaxseed oil and cottage cheese to cure cancer) is of course very important. It isn’t complicated why flaxseed oil might be highly beneficial: Our diets used to provide much more omega-3 than they now do; flaxseed oil, high in omega-3, reduces the deficiency. The idea that cottage cheese makes flaxseed oil more digestible is also very interesting.

Thanks to Peter Spero.

Walking is to Driving as Idea Generation is to Idea Testing

Seth Roberts4 Comments

Mary Soderstrom, a Montreal writer, has written a recently-published book called The Walkable City. From a blurb:

The idea that a city might not be walkable would never occur to anyone who lived before 1800. Over the past 200 years there have been dramatic changes to our cities.

Over the same period there were also dramatic changes in the practice of science. Maybe the biggest change was the introduction of significance tests and associated logic. Just as cars took over cities, so did significance tests take over statistics textbooks. Cities built for cars made it hard to walk; statistics textbooks full of significance tests made it hard to teach how to generate ideas.

How to generate plausible new ideas — ideas worth testing — is pretty much a mystery to most scientists, as far as I can tell. The idea generation:idea testing :: walking:driving analogy provides a little guidance, and at least makes it clear that something is missing from today’s scientific education. Walking is slower than driving; idea generation is slower than idea testing. Walking is more exploratory than driving; idea generation is more exploratory than idea testing. Walking is much cheaper than driving but it may take a lot of walking to discover somewhere you want to drive; techniques for idea generation should be very cheap because it may take a lot of use of them to discover an idea worth testing. Walking is “softer” than driving; perhaps idea generation will never be as mathematical as idea testing. Walking is far more flexible than driving; idea generation methods must be far more flexible than idea testing methods. It is hard to drive somewhere that no one has ever driven before but it is easy or at least much easier to walk somewhere new. Which should suggest to a scientist that if all you know how to do is test ideas, it will be hard for you to innovate.

The way science is supported in America is horribly biassed against idea generation — grant proposals must be all about idea testing. I don’t know if the people who run that system have any idea how unbalanced and unhealthy it is.

Interview with William Rubel, Food Historian (part 2)

Seth Roberts1 Comment

William Rubel is the author of The Magic of Fire, about hearth cooking.

RUBEL I started to think, once I finished that book, I thought, ’well, this bread that I’ve been interested in for so long, I wonder if they ever wrote down how they made bread when they were still doing stone-ground flour and working the bread by hand at home or in the bakeries.’ And the answer is, really, that they had not written down with much precision. So my goal–another primary goal–is to find the lost part of the techniques that were not written down and revive them in a way that will provide inspiration for modern bakers.

A third idea is that I’ve certainly noticed that our current bread culture is exceedingly narrow. In other words, the artisan culture–the slow food breads that we all like–tend to be French breads that trace their lineage to France and the primary ingredient is flour, water, and salt and either yeast or leaven, which is a sourdough starter. And in this bread culture, the leaven starter is preferred. There’s also a preference for an irregular crumb–big holes on the inside of the bread but not a regular shape; some of them are big, some are small. We like the color to be little bit off-white, to be cream. We tend to like a crusty crust. It’s very specific. We tend to badmouth other breads like Wonder Bread as a garbage bread and fast-risen yeast breads or breads with soft crusts and soft interiors, we tend to feel that those are bad breads, that there’s a good bread which is that French-inspired one and these other ones are bad. But as an historian, I say that bread is an invention of human culture. There is no bread–farmers don’t farm breads, they farm grain. You could say that this is a perfect apple, an apple at peak ripeness, and you can measure the sugar content in the apple to know that it is at peak ripeness. But there is no ideal bread because bread is just an expression of human culture; it’s simply an invention. So once you start saying that something is good and bad, really you’re saying that this culture that produces that bread that you don’t like is bad. You are demeaning the people who like that bread.

In one way I’m thinking of using history books to comment on the present, much the way that historians in totalitarian states–like in Stalin’s Soviet Union–would write about Medieval Period and they could talk about problems there (and political problems in the Medieval Period), whereas they could not directly address similar problems in the modern state. I’m also using this work to critique our own values and value system when it comes to bread and hopefully help readers to see themselves in the story of bread and in the historical continuum of bread culture.

ROBERTS That’s what fascinates me the most. I think that everything about your history of bread is fascinating, but the last thing that you said is what fascinates me the most. Why don’t we turn to that now? When I’ve talked with you about the book, when you’ve been talking about the book, one point you made that I especially liked was about white bread and how white bread was seen and how we came to have white bread. Can you say a little about that?

RUBEL White bread is the starchy part; the white flour is the starchy part of the grain called the endosperm. The way you got that historically, before the invention of modern roller mills (steel mills with steel rollers in the 19th century), was that you ground the grain between stones and then you sift it. Before agriculture was invented, the hunters and gatherers who had settled in the Fertile Crescent around the big fields of grain had stone scythes and they had grindstones. The archaeological sites are littered, when you look at drawings of archaeological sites of the hunter-gatherers–we’re talking 13,000-15,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent–these sites are just littered with grindstones. Metates: we think of Mexican women grinding the corn to make the tortillas, grinding the boiled corn they mixed _____ to make Tamasa.

It was certainly possible for people to have ground grain–we don’t know that they did–it was certainly possible that grain was being ground a very, very long time ago. Once you have ground grain, separating out the white part–the powdered part–is fairly easy. Whether people did it, we don’t know, but certainly if you can make a sieve and if they could make a basket, if they could make cloth, then they could make sieves. You can go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and in their Egyptian room they have a storehouse of linen cloths–bolts and bolts of the finest linen cloths you can imagine. Anyone with fine linen cloth can make the very, very fine white flour.

ROBERTS Because you can use the linen as a filter?

RUBEL You’d sift it; that’s what they’d use. They would use linen or they would use silk. Until nylon bolting cloths were developed, silk was the highest grade bolting cloth. But anything you can weave–horsehair (they had horses in Mesopotamia), a horsehair sieve–you can sift. Remember, you’re talking about a high status product, so you’ve got lots of slaves. You also could just shake and blow; you don’t even need to sift. You can certainly make a whiter flour than a whole wheat flour just by shaking a bowl of it and the finer particles will fall and the courser particles will rise to the top. If you take fine sand and course sand and just shake, the fine will go one direction and the course sand will go another.

Part 1.

Cargo-Cult Universities

Seth Roberts3 Comments

From an article about bureaucratic suppression of Indian higher education:

Mr. Rao says space requirements are calculated to ensure students have the room to learn. “For quality education, you need enough space — enough space for labs, for teaching. Our experts decide based on these requirements after examining world-class universities.”

Richard Feynman criticized what he called cargo-cult science — pseudo-science (including my area, animal learning) that had the appearance of science but didn’t actually work. Mr. Rao’s beliefs about what quality education requires are based, like cargo cults, on what is easy to see.

Special Days in China

Seth Roberts4 Comments

On Monday, by virtue of being a Tsinghua professor, I got a big box of apples (about 40). I haven’t figured out why. On Tuesday I got a lovely tea set that I will blog about later; it was the 15th birthday of the founding of the School of the Humanities at Tsinghua. My department is within that school. Today is Boys Day at Tsinghua University (a school-specific special day). November 1st is a nationwide day for people without boyfriends or girlfriends. It is Only One Day; in 11-1 there are only ones.

Speaking of only one, did you know that China’s One Child policy (if you have two children both parents will lose their jobs and pay a fine) applies only to cities? In rural China you can have two children. Some families have three. The central government has little control over rural areas; it would be too hard to enforce a one-child policy there.

Happiness in China: Who Wants to Be a Construction Worker?

Seth Roberts2 Comments

A recent survey of happiness/life satisfaction among various groups of people in China found that Shanghai construction workers were quite satisfied with their lives. (The details are only in Chinese, as far as I know.) They were happier than middle-class Chinese, in spite of earning much less. This has nothing to do with low Chinese prices, since the construction workers paid the same prices as middle-class Chinese. The researcher who discovered this attributed it to two things: 1. They got paid every month. The construction workers came from agricultural areas where payment is less frequent: only after a harvest. The construction workers sent money home to their villages. The steadiness of their income was a source of respect. 2. Because they live far from home, they can break all the rules, including sexual rules. A middle-class Chinese man, living with his family, is more constrained.

The massive rural-to-urban migration happening all over the world, especially in China, is one of the most important events in human history. The Chinese part of this story has usually been told through the eyes of a young woman who leaves her village and finds factory work — for example, a series in the Wall Street Journal, the documentary China Blue, or the new book Factory Girls by Leslie Chang. These results suggest that the male side of the story is much different.

These findings also suggest a big problem with conventional academic economics, which revolves around measurements of money (e.g., prices, salaries, savings, GDP, the ultimatum game). If desire for respect and personal freedom motivate major economic changes, measurements of money will miss a lot.

Flaxseed Oil Alert: Don’t Take When Pregnant

Seth Roberts3 Comments

From a press release:

A study has found that the risks of a premature birth quadruple if flaxseed oil is consumed in the last two trimesters of pregnancy. The research was conducted by Professor Anick Bérard of the Université de Montréal’s Faculty of Pharmacy and the Sainte-Justine Hospital Research Center and Master’s student Krystel Moussally.

In Canada, 50 percent of pregnant women take prescription medication. Yet many of them prefer to use natural health products during the pregnancy. “We believe these products to be safe because they are natural. But in reality, they are chemical products and we don’t know many of the risks and benefits of these products contrarily to medication,” says Bérard.

Bérard and Moussally set out to conduct one of the largest studies ever undertaken on by analyzing data from 3354 Quebec women. The first part of the research established that close to 10 percent of women between 1998 and 2003 used natural health products during their pregnancy. Before and after pregnancy they were respectively 15 and 14 percent to use these products. The increase means that about a third of women consuming natural health products stopped during the pregnancy.

The most consumed natural health products by pregnant women are chamomile (19 percent), green tea (17 percent), peppered mint (12 percent), and flaxseed oil (12 percent). Bérard and Moussally correlated these products to premature births and only one product had a very strong correlation: flaxseed oil.

“In the general population, the average rate of premature births is 2 to 3 percent. But for women consuming flaxseed oil in their last two trimesters that number jumps up to 12 percent,” says Bérard. “It’s an enormous risk.”

The correlation existed only with flaxseed oil, yet women consuming the actual seed were unaffected. Even if more studies must be undertaken to verify these results, Bérard recommends caution when it comes to consuming flaxseed oil.

Thanks to Joyce Cohen.