continued from
“I saw it last night!” Zephyr said, breathlessly, the next morning at the coffee shop. “The monster bird. Huge, black, with glowing red eyes.”
“Like a crow, or a raven?”
“No, more like an owl. The eyes were on the front of his head.”
“His head?”
“Oh, he was male.” Her eyes widened again, but for emphasis this time.
“You didn’t see—?”
“Don’t be a perv. I could tell how he was watching me.”
“Maybe it was a lesbian.”
“Shut up.”
“Did you put it on Flap?” I asked.
“Yeah, there’s somebody coming to interview me tomorrow.”
“Here?”
“No, at my house. That’s where I saw it. Him.”
I was unreasonably jealous. I knew I was in no state to be doing chaos magic, or lucid dreaming, or trying to boost the latter with smoky quartz and vitamin B. I knew all that, and I did it anyway.
Saturday: Spirits in Your Mouth
Last Friday’s Biology seminar series at UNCG starred Laura Weyrich, an anthropologist who drills calcified plaque off people’s teeth, both modern and ancient, in order to examine the microbiome of the mouth. According to her presentation, dental textbooks claim that there is a single consistent and problematic suite of decay-causing bacteria across the world, anchored by various species of Strep. She and others have spent a couple decades proving that this is untrue, that the population of bacteria varies across culture and across time.
That first link was interesting to me because until watching Blue Eye Samurai a few weeks ago I had never heard of ohaguru, the historical Japanese practice of cosmetically blackening the teeth of high-status married women. One of the things I liked about that series (as opposed to your average anime) is that they didn’t feel the need to explain every damn thing. According to the article there was some ironic tradition that the treatment was supposed to prevent tooth decay in addition to its social marking functions.
Some of Dr. Weyrich’s main collaborators are at the University of Adelaide in Australia, where she did her postdoc. In their studies of aboriginal microbiomes in the interior deserts, they found that some of them had cellulose digesting Archaea from the guts of termites living in their mouths, possibly making them super-efficient at digesting plant materials, and possibly setting them up for diabetes when eating an industrial diet high in simple carbs. These may go some way towards explaining why none of the public health campaigns around diet and exercise have helped them. People studying similar problems among desert tribes in the US like the Pima have looked holistically at lots of environmental factors,
but since the 1960s the holy grail has been finding the “thrifty gene” predicted by evolutionary theory.
Neel proposed that in the past, populations who have struggled with periods of limited resources and therefore, have experienced periods of famine, were more likely to survive if they were metabolically thrifty and stored calories efficiently. Their survival gave a genetic advantage to this characteristic. Based on his hypothesis, however, what had been historically an advantage became detrimental as time elapsed. Through modernization food has become abundant and continually available. The genetic capacity to store calories efficiently in our current environment becomes a risk factor for type 2 diabetes and obesity.
Of course, bacteria also evolve, much faster than humans do, and are probably important. Gut microbiome researchers are all about thrifty bacteria (can’t let a good buzz word go to waste), but the dentists apparently haven’t caught up. I’m going to suggest to Dr. Weyrich that she look into Rotary International as a potential partner. With polio almost eradicated, they’re now looking for other grand challenges in the public health field, and if there’s one thing that affects more people than malaria, it’s tooth decay and gum disease.
Current practices fall around nudging the species composition with cleanings and killings (bad bacteria), probiotics (inoculating good species directly), and prebiotics (providing nutrient support for good species). Dr. Weyrich and her colleagues in Australia are going for a more “nuke ‘em and replace ‘em” transplant approach, analogous to the fecal microbiome transplants people use to treat inflammatory gut conditions.
There’s a small but robust DIY community around fecal transplants, but when I asked our entrepreneurial guest about similar communities for the mouth, she pooh-poohed the idea.
Sorry, it’s like 3am and literally everything seems funny to me right now.
Sunday: The Dreaming Path
I happened across this book, subtitled Indigenous Ideas to Help Us Change the World. It is written, in a typical self-help kind of voice, by a Worimi man who seems to have run community colleges in Australia (he calls them Technical and Further Education) and a Ngemba storyteller. It says things in interesting ways.
The creation story at the beginning of chapter 1 . . . tells us that human beings were the last to be created. We are the youngest siblings in the family of living things. As the youngest, we are told to remember that everything around us is older and wiser than us.
This extends even to the British conquest and occupation of Australia,
In 1788, some of the forgotten children came back.
which is a really interesting way of putting it.
A follow-up to Dr. Weyrich's talk. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adj9223
An anonymous reader just sent me this. Which is awesome. The sharing, I mean, though the article itself is fine, too.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/30/well/eat/alcohol-gut-health-microbiome.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Sk0.FWBx.QwqRQzvLqobC&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
I asked our speaker last week about this, and she said that at least in the mouth, coffee and tea seemed to shift things more than alcohol does.