Annals of Evolution: What Are Goosebumps?
Like hiccups, goosebumps are a QWERTY phenomenon. They are relics of our evolutionary heritage. Rob Dunn explains:
When our ancestors were covered in fur, muscles in their skin called “arrector pili” contracted when they were upset or cold, making their fur stand on end. When an angry or frightened dog barks at you, these are the muscles that raise its bristling hair. The same muscles puff up the feathers of birds and the fur of mammals on cold days to help keep them warm. Although we no longer have fur, we still have fur muscles just beneath our skin. They flex each time we are scared by a bristling dog or chilled by a wind, and in doing so give us goose bumps that make our thin hair stand uselessly on end.
Interestingly, it’s these kind of traits—ones that don’t really make sense or contribute to an organism’s current adaptive fitness—that make the most compelling arguments for the theory of natural selection. More examples in Dunn’s piece at the Smithsonian.
This Week in Numerology
- According to a recent poll, 42% of Americans purportedly believe the Bill of Rights contains the provision, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” That’s funny because, you know, it’s actually from somewhere else.
- The Federal Open Market Committee is about 42% unconstitutional.
- And, of course, 42.
- 17 years after Bowers v. Hardwick, we got Lawrence v. Texas. 17 years after DADT, we got…not-DADT. That is, in both cases, 17 years elapsed between the codification of a reactionary anti-gay policy and the repeal of that policy.
The New Organon
I’ve redesigned the site. The changes are subtle, but the new design is cleaner and more socially mediated. Getting an early start on my new year’s resolution to raise my social-networking profile.
Lead Us Not into the Magnet Room Carrying a Pair of Scissors
Neuroskeptic offers up a new liturgical gem for scientists who work with MRI scanners. Apologies for quoting in full. (Hat tip to Mind Hacks.)
Our scanner, which art from Siemens,
Hallowed be thy coils.
Thy data come;
Thy scans be done;
In grey matter as it is in white matter.
Give us this day our daily blobs.
And forgive us our trespasses,
As we forgive them that trespass onto our scan slots.
And lead us not into the magnet room carrying a pair of scissors,
But deliver us from volunteers who can’t keep their heads still.
For thine is the magnet,
The gradients,
And the headcoil,
For ever and ever (at least until we can afford a 7T).
Amen.
There’s also a good illustration at the source. But beware the 9 Circles of Scientific Hell.
Weekend Wordery: Is the Google Books Ngram Infinitely Fun, or Just Asymptotically Approaching Infinite Fun?
The Google Ngram Viewer could be a hoax producing random line graphs totally unrelated to user input, for all I know. But according to this paper’s abstract, it draws on 4% of all books ever printed to represent the frequencies of words written between 1800-2000. As linguist Geoffrey Nunberg mentions in his review of the study, the English language corpus contains 360 billion words. Read Nunberg (also at Language Log) for sober consideration of the project and its uses.
Read just about any other blog, and you’ll find that it’s amateur sociolinguistic wonko-Christmas morning! Google supplies the answers (in chart form), and it’s up to you to figure out what the question was.
Consider the graph of truth (blue) v. money (red):
truth v. money
So the question is: when did people start caring more about money than truth? The answer is about 1875, it seems. Though we briefly entertained second thoughts in about 1882. Very briefly.
When did sex eclipse wisdom? The Roaring Twenties, of course:
wisdom v. sex
When was God eclipsed by the electron?
god v. electron
1940? Not so fast! It was a trick question. The Ngram Viewer is case-sensitive. Despite a steady diminution in market share from 1840-1940, God—as opposed to god—continues to outnumber electron, not to mention sex, drugs, music, and money:
God v. sex v. drugs v. music v. money
And lastly: cake or death?
cake v. death
Weekend Birdery: History of the Bird
People have been flipping the bird for thousands of years. It may very well be the most widespread and longest-lived obscene finger gesture there is. It appeared in Aristophanes’ 5th-century B.C. play The Clouds and was known to the Romans as Digitus impudicus, the impudent finger. According to Ira Robbins (pdf), writing in the UC Davis Law Review, the Bird recovered from near extinction in the Middle Ages and eventually migrated to the New World, where it now flourishes.
The first recorded sighting in America was in the 1886 photograph below, depicting Boston Beaneaters’ pitcher Charlie “Old Hoss” Radbourn (top left) flipping off the camera, a profound cultural moment which would later be replicated countless times by rogues and rapscallions everywhere.
Penetrating Observations: Holidays Edition
- “The ideal gift is not something that the recipient can’t afford or didn’t know she wanted” (emphasis added). Rather, “A good gift is something that someone really wants but feels guilty buying for themselves.” (Via Mind Hacks.)
- Eating turkey doesn’t make you sleepy.
- State and local governments lose $7 billion in tax revenues as a result of Amazon’s policy of not charging sales taxes. Via Ezra Klein.
- An ontological argument for the existence of Santa.
- Sayonara, Rudolph: Electric eels can power the Christmas lights, and they exist.
- Io, Saturnalia! (h/t Ilya Somin)
Courtroom Camellian
Apparently Judge Vinson peppered the hearing in Pensacola Thursday with personal anecdote and unfortunate policy suggestions. Instead of a mandate, the judge reportedly recommended requiring the uninsured to buy insurance—wait for it—in the emergency room! This, um, creative approach to the problem of adverse selection does make one wonder how much Vinson really grappled with the policy rationale supporting the administration’s case. (Hat tip Ian Millhiser. )
Vinson also showed a sympathetic side, as shown in this clip from the LA Times:
“A lot of people, myself included for years, have no health insurance,” said Vinson, who described being a law student and paying cash to the doctor who delivered his first child. “It amounted to about $100 a pound,” he said, laughing.
Judge Roger Vinson, President of the American Camellia Society
I’m just having some fun here, and I really don’t think Judge Vinson is in any way a bad judge or a bad person, whether I agree with him or not. But while I’m going on in this vein, I’ll just mention, as I did once before, that the one thing I’ve learned about Judge Vinson from people who know him is that he is fanatical about Camellias. If I had a twitter feed, I’d use it to make some kind of joke about how one species in the Camellia genus is Camellia sinensis. That’s tea, to you and me. And I bet Judge Vinson has been going to Camellia parties for a long time.
Hey, wait a minute. I do have a twitter feed!
The Other Issue in Florida
Today’s hearing in Pensacola—city of five flags, America’s first European settlement (sort of), and birthplace of me—concerns not only the familiar arguments over the individual mandate, but also the states’ claim that the ACA’s Medicaid reforms are unconstitutionally coercive, effectively commandeering state governments.
Medicaid is administered by state-government agencies but funded jointly by state and federal dollars (with the feds paying the lion’s share). State participation in the program is voluntary. The 20 states challenging the ACA claim that, by requiring state Medicaid programs to expand eligibility to everyone earning up to 133% the federal poverty level and to dispense with all other categorical eligibility restrictions, the federal government is imposing a huge liability on state government. The argument is that, even though Medicaid is a voluntary program, states are not “really” free to drop out if they don’t like the strings attached to the federal funding.
The recent experience of the state of Texas provides a good illustration. Texas studied (pdf) the likely consequences of dropping out of Medicaid when Governor Rick Perry began publicly mulling the possibility. It found that “the state would…lose billions each year in federal funds; billions of dollars in indigent health care costs would shift from the state and federal levels to local governments, public hospital districts, medical providers, and the privately insured; and 2.6 million Texas residents could lose health insurance, depending on future coverage options the state chooses to pursue.” (Hat tip Igor Volsky.) Clearly certain state politicians resent being subordinate to federal legislative power, but also it’s true that, in a very real political sense, they have no viable alternative to implementing the ACA’s Medicaid reforms.
However, the question is whether the political pressure thus applied by the ACA is so coercive as to constitute unconstitutional interference with state-sovereign government. And that’s a hard sell.
But the states do have a colorable claim here. That’s because the Supreme Court’s precedents in the area do not articulate a “bright-line rule” to follow. In South Dakota v. Dole, the Court upheld federal conditions on grants to state and local governments, specifically in that case the condition that 5% of highway funds would not be available to states who did not adopt a drinking age of 21. However, the Court acknowledged that at some point “the financial inducement offered by Congress might be so coercive as to pass the point at which pressure turns into compulsion.” And compulsion is verboten.
Obviously this raises the problem of how to distinguish mere pressure or encouragement from excessive coercion or compulsion. It has been my intuition that the Court’s majority couldn’t settle on any objective limitation on the spending power but also did not want to give Congress carte blanche to impose draconian conditions. So they said the conditions must be related to the spending purpose; they must be clearly stated in the legislation; and they can’t be too harsh—or at least not tooooo harsh.
That not-tooooo-harsh qualification is the basis for the 20 states’ challenge to the ACA’s upgrade of Medicaid eligibility standards. It seems like a weak claim, because the basic qualitative framework of Medicaid—feds pay the lion’s share of the state-administered health insurance for the poor—remains the same. Many more people will be eligible (more than 15 million nationwide), but the feds will pick up a greater portion of the tab. Nevertheless the claim is not meritless, because no rule or principle exists that can tell you how much is tooooo much when it comes to federal conditions on grants to the states.
Check out Brad Joondeph’s excellent, in-depth analysis of the commandeering issue at the ACA Litigation blog.
How to Get Things Done
Here’s a handy summary of evidence-based suggestions of the optimal psychological states one should maintain in order to get stuff done.
- To avoid procrastinating on a task, focus on its details and use self-imposed deadlines.
- To stick to a task, while actually carrying it out, now it is beneficial to keep the ultimate, abstract goal in mind.
- When evaluating progress on a hard task, when the chance of failure is high, stay focused on the details of the task.
- Once tasks are easier or the end is in sight, a more abstract, goal focus is once again the psychological approach to choose.
From PsyBlog.
Navigating the Hudson Decision
There were no major surprises in Judge Henry Hudson’s ruling on Monday that the ACA individual mandate is unconstitutional. The key holdings of the opinion (pdf) were:
Retro Henry Hudson
- that the individual mandate is a regulation of “inactivity” (i.e., the status of being uninsured);
- that Congress has no authority to regulate inactivity under the Commerce Clause;
- that the Necessary and Proper Clause does not extend the commerce power to reach inactivity;
- that the mandate penalty is a regulatory penalty and not a tax and therefore not an exercise of the taxing power.
Also significant was Judge Hudson’s finding that the minimum coverage provision was severable from the rest of the statute: striking down that one provision, the judge found, would not invalidate any other parts of the law not overtly tethered to it by specific statutory reference. And though the legislative scheme of the ACA is aptly described as a three-legged stool—propped up by the individual mandate, the insurance regulations, and subsidies to help individuals buy insurance—the interdependence of the legislation’s policy purposes does not makes its provisions legally inextricable from one another.
Many legal commentators have taken issue with Judge Hudson’s treatment of the Necessary and Proper Clause (N&P). Orin Kerr thinks Hudson simply made an error, noting that the whole point of N&P is that it expands congressional means beyond the enumerated powers in order to ensure that those powers are effective.
Jonathan Adler and Jason Mazzone each respond that Hudson is not arguing that N&P adds nothing to the Commerce Clause, but just that it too must be limited by some objective principle, and that the activity requirement is that principle. In other words, N&P may extend the commerce power beyond regulation of interstate economic activity to regulation of intrastate activity, or even non-economic activity, but not to regulation of inactivity.
To which ACA supporters rejoin that (a) the individual mandate aims to regulate not based on inactivity but based on the aggregate effects of behaviors (viz. economic decisions) on healthcare and insurance markets over time, and (b) there is no activity requirement in the first place. Making the latter point, Michael Dorf writes:
There is no constitutional prohibition on Commerce Clause regulation of inactivity, at least where that inactivity is economic in nature. Judge Hudson accorded talismanic significance to the fact that prior cases had used the phrase “economic activity,” without ever pausing to explain why the government cannot regulate inactivity that is in its nature economic. Consider, in this regard, the provisions of federal labor law and federal antitrust law that have been construed to forbid secondary boycotts . A boycott, of course, is economic inactivity–a refusal to purchase goods or services from the target–in exactly the same way that the non-purchase of health insurance is economic inactivity. Under Judge Hudson’s analysis, such prohibitions are constitutionally invalid, even though no one even thought to question them on these grounds during the decades they have been enforced.
But doesn’t the case law require that the underlying predicate for regulation be some sort of affirmative activity? The short answer is no. Although the cases talk about “economic activity,” that’s only because the predicate for regulation in the prior cases happened to be activity rather than inactivity. Consider a quite closely related question. In Gonzales v. Raich, the Supreme Court for the first time defined the “economic” aspect of “economic activity,” borrowing from Webster’s dictionary: “the production, distribution, and consumption of commodities.” Does this mean that the purchase of services is not economic activity for Commerce Clause purposes? Of course not. The Court in Raich had before it a case involving a commodity (marijuana) and so it chose a definition that focuses on commodities. In a subsequent case involving services the Court will undoubtedly say that they are included too. In the meantime, it would take a particularly obtuse district court judge to think that because of the definition in Raich, services are not covered by “economic activity.” Likewise, the use of the term “activities” must be understood as a product of the context of the cases in which the term was used, rather than any consideration of the constitutional difference between activity and inactivity.
(Bold added.) I find that persuasive, but I also see the need to articulate a limiting principle on the commerce power. Brad Joondeph thinks that emphasizing the unique character of health insurance markets could be the key. Maybe so, but I think we need to remain open to the possibility that the Constitution leaves it to the political process to determine its own “logical limitation.”
Straight to SCOTUS?
Some conservative pols are calling for immediate Supreme Court review of the district court rulings on the constitutionality of the ACA individual mandate, a move which would overstep the regular appeals process in the circuit courts.
Kevin Drum tentatively agrees, saying “I mean, everyone knows this is going to end up at the Supreme Court anyway, and everyone knows that the Supreme Court quite plainly couldn’t care less what any of the lower courts say about it. All those lower court decisions are no better than waste paper.” Drum does acknowledge that he may be “missing some important process issues that make it unwise to just hand this off to the Supremes right away.” He should embrace his inner doubter.
The Supreme Court does care what the lower courts have to say, especially the Circuit Courts, for a number of reasons. Not least is that appellate judges and lawyers are generally very smart people and have lots of experience and expertise on the issues. SCOTUS will let the process play out in order to have the benefits of the work done at the trial and circuit levels. This (usually) helps the Court to avoid embarrassing mistakes. Also, the process has a way of crystallizing the legal issues at stake and isolating the logical pressure points. It’s a dialectic. As the pressure ratchets up, arguments are synthesized and refined.
Then, of course, the Court is free to cast all that aside and bend judicial doctrine to achieve the desired outcome of the majority of its members. But, even so, the process helps the Court weigh the consequences of various pettifogging cop-outs, so as to avoid unnecessary institutional damage in the fallout.
Judge Strikes Down Individual Mandate
As expected, Judge Hudson of the Eastern District of Virginia has issued his decision holding that the ACA’s minimum coverage provision—a.k.a. the individual mandate—is unconstitutional. The opinion (pdf) is up at the ACA Litigation blog. I haven’t read the whole thing yet, but here’s the key line, via Brad Joondeph:
Neither the Supreme Court nor any federal circuit court of appeals has extended Commerce Clause powers to compel an individual to involuntarily enter the stream of commerce by purchasing a commodity in the private market. [Op. at 24.]
Annals of Evolution: What Are Hiccups?
Hiccups are pretty damn weird, if you think about ‘em. And one of the reasons they are weird is that thinking about them does not help you control them. Anyway, it’s something I’ve always wondered about—making it a perfect topic for my occasional series, Things I’ve Always Wondered About. Over at the Smithsonian, Rob Dunn explains:
The first air-breathing fish and amphibians extracted oxygen using gills when in the water and primitive lungs when on land—and to do so, they had to be able to close the glottis, or entryway to the lungs, when underwater. Importantly, the entryway (or glottis) to the lungs could be closed. When underwater, the animals pushed water past their gills while simultaneously pushing the glottis down. We descendants of these animals were left with vestiges of their history, including the hiccup. In hiccupping, we use ancient muscles to quickly close the glottis while sucking in (albeit air, not water). Hiccups no longer serve a function, but they persist without causing us harm—aside from frustration and occasional embarrassment. One of the reasons it is so difficult to stop hiccupping is that the entire process is controlled by a part of our brain that evolved long before consciousness, and so try as you might, you cannot think hiccups away.
In other words, hiccups are a QWERTY phenomenon, a reminder of the path dependence of evolution. See the full piece for more of evolution’s legacy in our daily lives.
Weekend Wordery
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