\\ ztruktrl glasez

[integer at www.god-emil.dk]

t byfield <tbyfield at panix.com>   - very busily keeping nn locked in his personal closet ___... away from the world uuuuuuuuuuuu
                                   "she's mine! all mine!" he mumbles in sync with other western .edu personnel e.g. chris murtagh



>> hallucinated. konfused. intoxicated.
>
>'spooky'


dearest ted

ernst dwinger in his siberian diary mentions a german lieutenant
-for years a prisoner in a camp where cold + hunger were almost unbearable-
who konstrukted himself a silent piano with wooden keys.

in the most abjekt misery, perpetually surrounded by a ragged mob, he
komposed a strange musik which was audible to him alone.



<were this a fairytale

you see, my dear ted, i have merely built a piano.
but she ___... she plays rachmaninov beautifully. 


in gratitude for your superlative + superlative + superlative assistance during the piano's creation
i prepackage two gifts - just for uuuuuuuuuu






Creature comforts: baby monkeys held on to the cloth mother (left) whenever they could.
"You cried and cried and cried, and I wanted so much to comfort you, and I knew that I just mustn't pick you up and hold you. That's what they told me, so I believed them." That was a mother in my own family, apologizing decades later to her adult daughter. The mother still suffered because she had not dared to comfort her baby.

In Love at Goon Park, Deborah Blum tells the extraordinary story of Harry Harlow. It is a nuanced and brilliant evocation of a major figure in psychology who dared to challenge the orthodoxy of his time. Harlow said that babies need love, that they are born needing love, and that without contact, comfort and social responsiveness, primates, including humans, grow up as incomplete beings ‹ if they live to grow up at all. But memories are short. Those who remember Harlow now mostly have memories of him as a man who tortured baby monkeys by removing them from their mothers and giving them surrogate wire or cloth dummies with bicycle-reflector eyes. Yes, Harlow's experiments were cruel. Yes, he knew they were cruel; he shoved that in people's faces. But he did them to show the appalling cruelty of the prevailing dogma on how to treat human children.

Blum reminds us of that dogma. John B. Watson, the founder of behaviourism, proclaimed in Psychological Care of Infant and Child, his best-selling childcare book of 1928: "You will soon be ashamed of the mawkish, sentimental way you have been handling your child." Behaviourists thought that we are born blank slates, formed only by conditioned reward and punishment. Milk was the reward; the baby simply learned to associate his mother with milk. Over-mothering was thought to produce over-dependent offspring. With the dawning of an understanding of hygiene, human contact was seen as passing dangerous germs. In families there was usually some compensation, but in hospitals and orphanages, babies could be kept in solitary confinement, away from care-takers and each other. Mysteriously, the infants seemed to lose interest in life, and many died. The remedy prescribed was ever more sterile isolation.

In England, the revolt against this view was led in the 1950s by John Bowlby and James Robertson. Many psychologists, though, saw the campaigners as soft, sentimental and unscientific. It was Harlow's hard science that broke the barriers of doubt. He showed conclusively that baby rhesus monkeys could not be conditioned to love a wire mother, even if she was the one equipped with a milk bottle ‹ they clung to warm cloth instead. They would work to open a window just for a glimpse of their cloth 'mother'. They ran to the cloth mother if they were terrified by something new, such as a wind-up toy bear banging on a drum, and were comforted by 'her' presence. Monkeys raised in isolation, without contact, grew up insane, unable to deal with other monkeys. Some were unable to mate unless fastened in what Harlow, with characteristic bluntness, called a 'rape rack', and then they were likely to abuse or murder the resulting child. Of course it is obvious now. It just wasn't obvious t!
 hen.

Who should read this book?








-

Genetic analysis has revealed how a small and isolated population of grey wolves 
found salvation in the form of the genetic variation offered by a single, immigrant male. 


Human influence has led to the decline of many animal species and fragmentation of their populations. One consequence is loss of their genetic diversity. But how does this loss affect endangered species? Some have argued that it is only a minor threat to survival, because small populations are more vulnerable to demographic or environmental effects ‹ for example, chance events affecting the birth and death of individuals, or atypical weather conditions such as an unusually cold winter. Others believe that a lack of genetic diversity increases the risk of inbreeding, which may ultimately drive a species to extinction because inbred organisms have reduced survival and fecundity.

Immigration from surrounding areas may prevent the extinction of small populations by increasing their size. Alternatively, genetic rescue ‹ replenishing genetic variation and reducing the consequences of inbreeding ‹ could have the same effect. A paper by Vilà et al.1, published last month by Proceedings of the Royal Society, lends strong support to the view that genetic rescue does occur2. The authors provide compelling evidence that the current Scandinavian population of the grey wolf (Canis lupis; Fig. 1) was for a long time limited in size by lack of genetic diversity. Furthermore, the authors show that the steady increase in that population over the past decade started with the arrival of a single immigrant wolf.

Scandinavian grey wolves were decimated during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, largely through hunting and poisoning. This population was finally considered to be extinct in the 1960s. But in the early 1980s, a single breeding pack was once again established in southern Scandinavia, about 1,000 km from the nearest known populations in Finland and Russia. The pack remained small, consisting of around ten animals, for several years. It was monitored from its initial establishment, and genetic data showed that a single male and female were the founding members. Moreover, the population suffered from inbreeding and declining levels of genetic variation over time. At the same time, studies of captive wolves indicated that birth defects, such as hereditary blindness, were common for levels of inbreeding similar to those observed in the wild population3, 4.

Suddenly, in 1991, the Scandinavian wolf population started to increase and now numbers 10­11 breeding packs, totalling about 100 wolves. From the genetic data obtained by Vilà and colleagues1, it is evident that the increase corresponds with the immigration of a single male wolf of Finnish or Siberian origin. Coinciding with the arrival of this male, much of the genetic diversity that had been lost from the population was restored. Vilà et al. show that of the 72 wolves born after 1993, 68 can trace at least part of their ancestry to the immigrant male of 1991. This male has had a disproportionately large influence on the genetic make-up of the present Scandinavian wolf population, implying that natural selection5 has driven the rapid increase in numbers.

The authors hint at a possible cause for the extraordinary reproductive success of the immigrant male. Many species have behavioural mechanisms that prevent matings between close relatives to avoid the deleterious effects of inbreeding, and wolves are no exception. So these mechanisms may have contributed to the low birth rate in the original breeding pack and thus prevented the population from expanding. With the input of new genetic variation from the immigrant, the potential for matings between unrelated animals was considerably increased.