This blogger admits being on performance-enhancing drugs

(DrTom has decided to back off the steroids for a while.  None of his shirts fit anymore.)

I have described my gastroenterology experiences of late--hiatal hernia and eosinophilic esophagitis.  Part of the treatment for this condition is a drug that comes in an atomizer (Flovent) that I squirt in my mouth and then swallow.  The active ingredient is a corticosteroid.  Within days after starting this regimen I began to feel wonderfully different.

My wife noticed that I am looking more and more buff as the days pass.  I am stronger, and I have been contacted by Nike to represent them in the blogging world.  Their new line of writing clothes will have a logo of a pen and paper, instead of the Swoosh, denoting the tools of the original authors of old.  The steroid I am taking has improved my ability to think of useful words, synonyms, and metaphors, and the substance gives me an edge in a very competitive arena. I type faster and more accurately than ever, including the ability to hit that back slash with the little finger on my right hand.  Before starting this cycle of steroid, my right-hand finger could not reach past the key that has the left-facing bracket.

Am I worried about an investigation or any unannounced drug-testing of a urine sample?  Not really.  Since I began taking this drug, I only urinate outside in the woods so that the sample soaks immediately into the soil.  They will never get my urine for testing.  Also, I have no need to frequent a locker room for writers, so there is little danger of bragging to my colleagues who would probably squeal to the paparazzi like a stuffed pig.  I have no mistress who might have incriminating text messages from me, and I'm an atheist, so I don't even confess to a priest who might talk.  I have all the bases covered.

Not sure how long this euphoria will last.  And I am worried about the long-term effects of using Flovent.  One side effect is that you begin too lossE yyyour motorr skillz, buh i dubt this wila ahpoen to ee.

(1/11/09: Today Mark McGwire, the baseball home run king, announced that he used steroids for 10 years during that period of his athletic fame.  Let us note that yours truly announced here in writing nearly a week ago that he was using steroids, which would explain his much praised athletic prowess in writing blogs.)

Does God watch the Rose Bowl?

(When you see military jets doing a fly-over during a football game, it should cause you to ask some questions.)

I watched the Rose Bowl yesterday, or as much of it as I could, because Ohio State University was in the game. I was an undergrad at OSU in the 60s, so I thought I had some sort of obligation to participate in the festivities. I watch almost no sports on tv whatsoever, but I made an exception for this one. I actually lettered for three years in tennis at OSU, so when they won the game, I guess my status ticked up a notch. I still have the scarlet and gray jacket to prove that I'm not just anti-sports.

But I was thinking about what I saw before and during the game. It is all very curious to me. We typically play the National Anthem before most high school, college, and professional sports. How did this custom ever come to be? What does this nationalistic/quasi-militaristic song have to do with sports? At about that same time yesterday in Pasadena, four military jets did a fly-over past the stadium, adding to the battlefield aura of the entire spectacle. (By the way, do the taxpayers pay for this flight time?)

And then, military veterans were prominent during the ceremonies, with the Wounded Warrior representatives in attendance. It reminded me of stories you hear about the early days of the Civil War, only in reverse. Apparently, citizens from the nearby town would come out with their picnic lunches to watch a real battle between the North and South from a hill overlooking the battlefield. Pass me a watercress sandwich, please.  But now, real soldiers come out to watch civilians battle it out on the gridiron.  (In fact, they kept referring to the game between Oregon State and University of Oregon to decide which team went to the Rose Bowl as a "civil war".)  Can it be that combat with an opposing force is so ingrained in our genetic code that we have to reenact a facsimile of it over and over again?

Religion is even incorporated into the pageantry of these sporting events. Each team, or many members of each team, usually pray to their god just before the game starts. I assume they are praying for victory over the other team. In the case of OSU and University of Oregon, I have to assume that they are each praying to the same god. Now, I don’t believe in an all-knowing, all-powerful god for one minute, but apparently these players do. Therefore, I find this pre-game prayer the most pretentious and selfish behavior I have ever seen. There are tens of millions of people on this planet struggling for survival every day of their lives, millions of babies starving to death each year, and millions more suffering from malaria, dysentery, tuberculosis, and water-borne parasitic diseases. If this god had the power to grant you the winning of a football game while he/she/it allows all this human suffering on earth, I would have to conclude that this deity was pretty sadistic.

I don’t really want to begin the new year by bashing an activity as American as a college football game. But the behaviors that humans display are not just some random actions that have no meaning or history. They all come from some place and they had, or still have, significance for us. We may have forgotten from whence they came, so this essay is simply a reminder to ponder what we see and hear. As I’ve said many times, human behavior is about as interesting as it gets. It ranks right up there with bobolinks.

Just not that into you?

(A dance of nurses, but the dance I attended was more exciting than this one appears.)

The call came on a Wednesday and on Friday night my college roommate and I jumped into his red Chevy convertible and headed off to the nursing school down the road.  We met the two girls who had invited us, but they were so short.  It just wasn't going to work.  So we politely cut it off, split up, and reconnoitered the room full of dancing nursing students. 

Within an hour we were each dancing with a freshman student nurse who turned out to be roommates at the school.  Later, we went out for a hamburger in the convertible, which must have been impressive, and by the end of the evening it was obvious that the girl my roommate had been dancing with and I were muy sympatico.  I called her the next week, we went to the OSU homecoming dance the following month, and we were married in three years.  Simple.  Now, four dogs, six cats, and three children later, we are still married 44 years after that Friday expedition.

Meeting the right person seemed so easy then.  But last night I watched "He's Just Not That Into You" on tv for the first time, and I was reminded of how difficult it seems to be for young people to develop satisfying relationships in recent decades.  And finding that ONE right person is nearly impossible, or so it would seem.  My conclusion is also supported by dozens of conversations I have had with my students over the years.  I won't be so pretentious as to offer a solution for these difficulties, but my observations suggest that the older you get and the more experience you have with potential partners, the more difficult this all gets.  It is like trying to choose a cell phone.  There are simply so many models that come with so many different plans that it is difficult to settle on the package that is right for you.

But let's analyze this fundamental issue of human ecology a bit more.  There are two aspects to the "problem".  First, you have to encounter that right person and, second, you have to recognize the right person after you have encountered them.  I'm betting that #2 is a more common problem than #1, given that most of us encounter hundreds of people every month.  There may be dozens of Mr. or Mrs. Rights all around us; we just don't know which ones they are.

But maybe I've made that too simple.  We "encounter" lots of people every week, but we don't really "meet" most of those whom we encounter.  You would never know who the right one is if you sat next to them at Starbucks if neither of you uttered a word.  I used to talk a lot more than I do now, and my wife has always given her words away freely, so this was not an issue for us in 1965.  We opened up completely with our thoughts and goals and hopes; we hid very little.  What's the point of false advertising, given that the other person will eventually learn the truth anyway?

So that is how it went.  In hindsight, it seemed simple and easy, but I am sure there was a bit more to it than that.  There was a huge dose of serendipity involved as well.  If that short girl had not called my roommate, if we had not gone to that dance, if my roommate had not had a convertible, if I had not worn that sexy cranberry sweater, if they had not played the Bristol Stomp at the dance, if she had not moved her hips in exactly that way, if, if, if...........  But I wonder if the movie that I saw last night had been made in the '60s, would we have even understood it?  I just don't think we would have been that into it.

The depth of our environmental concerns mimics our evolutionary heritage

(Early humans probably traveled only short distances and only worried about short intervals of time into the future.)

Last year at the annual meeting of the Western Political Science Association in San Diego, CA, University of Missouri professor David Konisky reported on the results of his survey of 1,000 adults regarding their environmental concerns in a paper titled "Environmental Policy Attitudes, Political Trust and Geographical Scale". “The survey’s core result is that people care about their communities and express the desire to see government action taken toward local and national issues,” said Konisky, a policy research scholar with the Institute of Public Policy. “People are hesitant to support efforts concerning global issues even though they believe that environmental quality is poorer at the global level than at the local and national level. This is surprising given the media attention that global warming has recently received and reflects the division of opinion about the severity of climate change.”

In other words, people are more concerned about what happens in their own backyard than they are about the global environment. “Americans are clearly most concerned about pollution issues that might affect their personal health, or the health of their families,” Konisky said. Global warming ranked 8th among the environmental concerns reported by the respondents.

Is this really an unexpected result? On the surface, it seems surprising that given all the media attention to the problem of global climate change (e.g., rising ocean levels, melting glaciers, demise of polar bears and penguins, mass extinctions, shifts in agriculture, etc.) that it would not rank as the number one concern among a sample of Americans. But thinking as an evolutionary biologist for a moment, something I try to do a lot, the results could be viewed exactly as expected.

Throughout the Pleistocene epoch, which lasted from about 1.8 million years BP until about 11,000 years BP, humans lived in relatively small nomadic groups, or clans, of related individuals. They probably did not live much past the age of 40 and they probably did not travel long distances. The landscape must have been a dangerous place, so I have to presume that individuals went only as far as they needed to obtain the requisites of life: food, water, animal skins for clothing, wood for a fire. Occasionally there would be a dispersal event to colonize new territory, but the world you knew was only as large as the area you walked during your relatively short life. What another hominid clan did three valleys away had no effect on your life whatsoever, and it seems likely that humans living 100 miles apart never even knew of each other’s existence. What I have briefly described here is what evolutionary psychologists call the “environment of evolutionary adaptedness” or EEA. That is, conditions of life during the Pleistocene were such that humans were selected to be adapted to that environment, where life was short and known distances and effects were spatially small.

But times have changed. Now, the lifestyle of Americans, or Europeans, or Chinese threatens the well-being of a Bangladeshi living on the coast through the effects of global warming and rising ocean levels. The demand for furniture in Japan made of tropical woods can eliminate the habitat and homeland for native wildlife and humans living in parts of Indonesia. Radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine resulted in resettlement of more than 300,000 people locally, but the fallout was detected in North America. And on, and on, and on.

Somehow we have to rise above our evolved concerns focused on immediate issues of time and space, but I still do not know exactly how to bring that about. We are all at least aware of how local actions can have global effects, and that is a start. And many of us pay lip service to our responsibility to future generations. But it seems to me that overcoming the "small distance-short time" dilemma is critical to solving 21st century environmental problems. The evolutionary problem is simply this: what is best for us and our family right here and right now may be harmful to others further away and not yet born. This dilemma manifests itself over and over again. Recognizing it is a first step to overcoming it.