the art and observations of Ranjit S. Mathoda

When I was about 6, I was bitten pretty badly on the back of one leg by a neighbor’s German shepherd that saw me running around in circles and mistook me for fleeing prey. It had the effect of making me look at dogs differently than most people. In even the smallest dog I could see the teeth, the potential for rage, and I felt an inability to know what they were really thinking or feeling. Unlike humans, you couldn’t communicate easily with a dog, and I wondered at people’s willingness to raise the sharp toothed creatures and treat them like their children.

When I was perhaps 10, I lost my fear of dogs. I had a friend who was a few years older, who every kid on the street admired for his bravery, his athleticism, and his collection of martial arts weaponry. A bunch of us were in a large field when 2 doberman pinchers appeared at the far end of the field and started approaching us, snarling. My friend ran away from us, and away from the dogs, and they took chase after him. But then he turned and ran straight at them being noisy and flapping his arms, and they became confused, and ended up running from him. I realized then that dogs were vulnerable creatures, and easily manipulated by human intelligence. I started to see better how dogs have many states of mind, which vary between individuals. As you can see from my paintings of the terribly sweet Lara and the very inquisitive Tank, I have attempted through painting to capture the essence of some of the dogs I know. My fiancee and I recently rescued a beautiful puppy that’s a German shepherd mix of some type, named her Bizou, and she’s now part of our family. She gives us play bites sometimes, but they don’t hurt.

Yet some part of me remains aware that models for predicting behavior can be seriously flawed.

Sometimes our models are flawed because in making our models for animal behavior we are getting confused about the true causes. The dog is barking because its territory is being infringed, not because it doesn’t like someone.

Sometimes they are flawed because the models are only predictors of what usually happens, and don’t account for extreme situations. Like a polar bear deciding it wants to play with a husky (http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/play/audiogallery/soundseen.shtml#slideshow).

And sometimes our models don’t accurately reflect what usually happens, because we are kept ignorant of behavior or choose to avoid observing true behavior. Like the vicious fighting engaged in by giraffes trying to establish dominance (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7HCIGFdBt8).

With animals, when our models fail to make accurate predictions, we call it wildness. And yet perhaps unpredictability is more a fault of our ability to model, of our internal capabilities, than it is a characteristic of the animal. The animal is likely acting on a complex chain of cause and effect relationships, which we don’t understand, but that are still there. If that’s true, real wildness lies in ourselves.

Update, 9/28/07: Some animals, once trained, are more likely to hold to that conditioning than others, at least until a powerful environmental stimulus causes them to forget their conditioning. We consider such animals domesticable, and think of their character as reverting to one that is more wild. But in this use of the word “wild” we often mean behavior we would find predictable (e.g., the dog will chase a skunk), but tried to condition out of the animal. My conclusion is that wildness has two definitions: one is based on the unpredictability we feel about nature, and the other just means acting as they would in nature without human agency or conditioning even if we find such acts predictable. In this second sense, the dog isn’t really acting wild, it’s acting natural, as if “in the wild”.

For me, growing up, a woman’s period was a mystery. At some age (I wish I could recall what age exactly), I realized that women get periods. The information was cloaked in some kind of taboo that sex also is when you’re young. It seemed such a strange phenomena. On the other hand, if you stare closely enough at the skin on your thumb, it can seem pretty strange too.

Is a woman’s period a natural, necessary phenomena, a natural way of reducing the risk of certain diseases, as some researchers have argued and many women believe? Or is it an unnecessary fluctuation in hormones, like the appendix serving no real useful purpose, that it would be nice to avoid?

Women are soon going to have the choice of whether to avoid it. As the NY Times reports :

For many women, a birth control pill that eliminates monthly menstruation might seem a welcome milestone. But others view their periods as fundamental symbols of fertility and health, researchers have found. Rather than loathing their periods, women evidently carry on complex love-hate relationships with them.

This ambivalence is one reason that a decision expected next month by the Food and Drug Administration has engendered controversy. The agency is expected to approve the first contraceptive pill that is designed to eliminate periods as long as a woman takes it. Doctors say they know of no extra risk to the new regimen, but some women are uneasy about the idea.

…

Eliminating menstruation is not a completely new concept. Women who take any kind of oral contraceptive do not have real periods. Because the hormones in pills stop the monthly release of an egg and the buildup of the uterine lining, there is no need for the lining to shed — as occurs during true menstruation.

…

Still, since the advent of oral contraceptives in 1960, birth control pills typically have been designed to mimic the natural 28-day menstrual cycle to assure women using the pill that their bodies were functioning normally. The pills are usually packaged as regimens of 21 days of hormone pills and 7 inactive pills. The interruption of hormone therapy during the inactive part of the regimen induces bleeding that resembles a mild period but is, in fact, caused by unstable hormone levels.

…

…. users can have unpredictable and irregular bleeding or “spotting” that is worse than with regular birth control pills. But for some women who view their periods as the natural order of things, the qualms go beyond purely medical concerns.

(http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/20/health/20period.html?ei=5088&en=8c05265873077d2e&ex=1334721600&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&pagewanted=print)

I remember reading sometime back an article on the invention of the birth control pill in which it was pointed out the inventors of the first birth control pills found that if they tried to bring it to market without having some form of menstruation discharge, they were going to have a revolt on their hands from the Catholic Church and other sources. They cleverly introduced birth control as a way to control a woman’s period, whereas really as the above article points out, women on birth control pills don’t actually have normal periods.

Is this new technology a good idea? Should it be regulated and prevented? Some would argue it’s not natural, and it avoids a necessary phenomena. It seems difficult to argue a period is literally necessary, since a technology now lets women live without it, and since women on birth control have long avoided a real period.

What people are really arguing is that it has unknown long term risks. So do all technologies. Technologies also affect different people in different ways. I’m sure this technology is no different.

Some women will try it, and like it, and some women will try it and not like it, and others will never try it and deplore it. Many different approaches to the future sounds good to me. The risks it creates, if any, should of course be studied, and made known, but I’m sure many women would like the right to evaluate those risks for themselves.

Of course the technology does not benefit me personally, since I’m a man, and men are women who have had genetic mutations leading to hormonal differences that causes them to develop very differently from women. If I understand what people mean when they use the word “nature”, nature has arguably already given me the technology to avoid a period. Arguably, human knowledge is playing catch up.

A study by federal scientists has concluded that meat and milk from cloned animals and their offspring is safe to eat and should be allowed to enter the food supply without any special labeling. It is likely based on the study made by federal scientists that the Food and Drug Administration will approve such meat and milk for human consumption. The study has attracted considerable media attention (see http://news.google.com/news?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&tab=wn&q=clone+fda&btnG=Search+News), and has given rise to shock and concern.

Why would scientists conclude there is a lack of risk? After all, if you clone a creature, isn’t there something unnatural about it?

To my mind, part of the problem is that cloning is a terrible term. The actual technology should be called twinning. The technology made famous by the sheep Dolly doesn’t xerox a creature. It instead is an expensive process that often fails, but creates a slim chance that identical twins will be born. Because this technology is so expensive and so prone to failure, its unlikely that anyone will eat meat from a cloned animal anytime soon. Simply put, once you’ve gone through the process of creating a cloned animal, it’s too valuable to kill. It’s much more likely that people will eat the offsprings or milk of the identical twins created by the process.

Currently, we don’t worry about whether the steak we are eating or the milk we are drinking was from a cow that was an identical twin or not. Some people say that would change if the identical twin was forced into being by a process like cloning. Yet it doesn’t make difference to the molecular makeup of the animal whether it is an identical twin that arose due to complex processes in a womb, or complex processes in a petri dish, just as it doesn’t make a difference whether a human child arose due to conception in a womb, or conception in a test tube. When artificial insemnination first arose, people thought the human child conceived in a test tube would be somehow different. Time has put that fear to rest.
Interesting things are likely to result from twinning technology. For example, a lot of drugs must now be created by synthetic processes that are expensive and difficult to distribute. You could potentially gene splice a drug into a cow that allowed it to by organic processes produce an anti-malarial drug. With twinning technology you could then create identical twins of that cow and then breed mutliple offspring from such cows. The offspring that carried the spliced gene could be used to create very inexpensive therapies.

Alternatively, you could breed different cows together, and then when the cows have an offspring that produces a particularly high quality milk, you could twin the offspring so that you can create more robust milk producing breeds. Therefore twinning technology could be used in conjunction with the much older technology of breeding.
Regardless of the factual evidence, not everyone would trust such a process. Should such people be kept purposely dark of the source of their food by government mandate? I don’t think so.

Although I don’t think it is proper for the government to ban people from making the decision that such food sources are fine with them, I do think it is proper for the government to require better information be provided to consumers.

Therefore, although I agree with the conclusions of the federal scientists that the meat and milk of cloned animals is safe for human consumption, I would prefer that the source of such food be clearly disclosed. We should be able to know what we ingest, and choose whether or not to ingest it, whether or not we will be rational in making that choice.

Therefore I support the conclusion of federal scientists that meat and milk from cloned animals and their offspring is safe to eat, but I do not conclude that it should therefore be allowed to enter the food supply without any special labeling. In fact, I would support that all food in the food supply be labeled as to its origins (farm, factory, etc) and the processes used upon it.

“There is nothing so horrible in nature as to see a beautiful theory murdered by an ugly gang of facts.”
Benjamin Franklin

You can find my other favorite quotes here: http://mathoda.com/quotes