"Swine Flu" madness.

There is a new madness sweeping the world, "swine flu" madness, or H1N1 lunacy. Its symptoms are clear and focus around strange fears of infection. I shall explain.

Iraqi officials at Baghdad zoo have just killed three wild boars, in the strange belief that these boars, through being "swine" could somehow endanger people. So, too, and rather more drastically, Egypt has indicated that it intends to slaughter all 300,000 pigs in the nation, for fear of them harbouring swine flu. I wonder, at times, on hearing such news, whether I have suddenly slipped back to a pre-scientific middle ages and find myself surrounded by a superstitious world.

Let us get some things right: if an animal does not have a disease, it cannot give it to you. A virus does not magically appear out of nowhere - they don't spontaneously generate themselves inside a pig, simply because the virus was formerly called "swine" flu. The wild boars at Baghdad Zoo lived isolated lives with very little opportunity to pick up an infection. Only if one of their handlers became sick with the swine flu could they ever have caught it - yet they have been killed, simply for being "swine". The same goes for the Egyptian pigs. There hasn't been a hint of the new flu in any Egyptian pig - only if a human handler passed it to a pig, could one ever become infected (or an infected pig from outside Egypt was brought in). There is also no evidence, at all, of pigs transmitting this disease to humans, at this time. It is in fact not just a swine flu - but one that mixes swine, avian and human versions of influenza. The logic of the slaughterers seems to be based on the belief that the pigs harbour the virus, (when they don't)and so should be slaughtered to prevent them passing it on, yet, in fact, it is HUMANS who are harbouring the virus. So, applying this same logic to the true situation, would lead to the slaughter of all Egyptian people as a means to ensure that no Egyptian person succumbed to the disease. It is the logic of lunacy.

For me, one of the bigger surprises of this health crisis, is the way that modern countries appear to be acting irrationally. Slaughtering innocent, harmless animals is not the only lunacy. China and Russia, among other countries, have banned the import of pork. Yet, as I have noted, there is no evidence firstly that pigs are harbouring the disease, nor that they are transmitting it to humans. Anyway, humans don't eat raw pork - and if it is cooked, as it always would be, even if infected with scores of pathogens, it should be safe to eat.

It is customarily believed that Homo Sapiens is sapient, yet, at times like this, I seriously doubt it. Sapience, if a property of Mankind, is only a property of a minority of the species. The vast majority are, as nations all over the world are demonstrating, still quite capable of acting on irrational thought, even at the highest governmental level. Perhaps a greater threat to Mankind than pandemic flu, is the limited rationality possessed by so many of its leaders. It is their foolishness that should concern us, more than the H1N1 influenza A virus - for the virus will pass, but their foolishness will remain, at the helm of their nations. Now, that really is something to be scared of.

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged eight years and seven months, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, five years exactly, and Tiarnan, twenty-eight months, please go to:http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, College, University, Chemistry, Science, genetics, left-handedness, precocity, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, wunderkind, wonderkind, genio, гений ребенок prodigy, genie, μεγαλοφυία θαύμα παιδιών, bambino, kind.

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The brain of Neanderthal Man

Neanderthal man: what do those two words conjure up in you? For many it will be a picture of brutish stupidity. The common image of Neanderthal Man is of a dull-witted race trudging to extinction out of their own inability to cope. Yet, is this so? Was Neanderthal Man our inferior?

Let us look at some data. A typical modern human has a brain size of about 1,300 cubic centimetres. So, Neanderthal Man, being "brutish and stupid" is going to have a smaller one...right? Wrong. From a table of brain size and race that I have seen, Neanderthal man is listed at 1,700 cubic centimetres - a full 400 cubic centimetres larger than the brains of modern men.

Now, brain size has been correlated with intelligence, in many studies (I will post about this on another occasion) - but there is another factor to take into account: brain size to body ratio. A Neanderthal was stronger and more robust than a modern human - about a quarter heavier or so - and muscular with it. Taking this larger size into account still gives Neanderthal Man an advantage over us - for the ratio of 1,700 to 1,300 is about 1.30 - which is larger than the 1.25 scaling for body mass. By this measure Neanderthal Man should still have been smarter than us.

I find it curious that there has been such a tendency to denigrate the Neanderthal man. Just as in marketing, in evolution I am sure that it is not always the case, that the best "product" wins. Apple lost out to Windows - even though for a long time, it was a better product. Betamax lost out to VHS - when it, too, had been a better product. No doubt it is quite possible that a superior human could have lost out to an inferior one, for various reasons.

No-one disputes that they were stronger than us. Perhaps they were smarter too. Certainly, their brain size is suggestive of a significant intelligence, of some kind. There is other evidence, too, that they were not as stupid as people have made them out to be. They managed to move into and populate areas of Europe that had defeated their immediate ancestors, Homo Heidelbergensis, establishing themselves in Central and Eastern Europe. They also show evidence of developing new stone working techniques over time, showing a gradual accumulation of technological skill. These last two statements are supported by a paper by Dr Terry Hopkinson of the School of Archaeology and Ancient History, of the University of Leicester, published in the journal Antiquity.

Some researchers rather oddly argue away the Neanderthal's superiority in brain size by saying that modern human brains are more "efficient". They state that we have advantages in circuitry and brain organization. I find this funny. It is funny because they cannot possibly have any evidence of these statements - they are just supposition - and constitute self-justifying argumentation. We will never have a Neanderthal brain to dissect to study its circuitry. We will never be able to MRI a Neanderthal brain to study its organization. We can only succumb to the temptation to make up a story to say why modern man must be superior to our extinct counterpart. Maybe we are not superior, maybe we were just lucky (or better at warfare...) Whether or not we are superior to Neanderthal Man, the fact remains that Neanderthal Man was not the stupid brute he is made out to be. The archaelogical evidence suggests an adaptable, technologically skilled, very "human" race, which just happens to have died out for reasons that may never be entirely clear.

I, for one, would like to meet a Neanderthal man and have a talk. It would be good to meet someone so different from the Homo Sapiens one normally talks to. He (or she) is likely to think in quite a different way - and that would be refreshing. The one thing that would really surprise me, however, would be finding that they were, in fact, stupid and brutish. I have rather a different expectation.

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged seven years and ten months, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, four years and three months, and Tiarnan, twenty months, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, College, University, Chemistry, Science, genetics, left-handedness, precocity, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, gifted adults and gifted children in general. Thanks.)