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LOA
Joshua Rapp Learn in Discover:
The largest animals that have ever existed on our planet descended from a miniature deer-like creature that walked on four legs in the swamps of ancient India.
Cetaceans include everything from dolphins to whales. They are fairly unique among mammals in that they live permanently in the sea — something they share with only a few other types of live-bearing, warm-blooded species.
But their evolutionary ancestors weren’t always the seafaring types. In fact, just 50 million years ago, ancestors of all cetaceans were small creatures called Indohyus that waded through swamps on four legs.
“Indohyus basically looked like a tiny little deer, a deer the size of a cat,” says Hans Thewissen, a professor at Northeast Ohio Medical University who has studied whale evolution for years and wrote the book The Walking Whales: From Land to Water in Eight Million Years.
How did these creatures go from that to blue whales the length of about two city buses? It took a lot of small changes over tens of millions of years
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-Sri Mrinalini Mata
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Lecture | April 8 | 5-6:30 p.m. | Zoom Webinar (Registration Required - link TBA soon)
Iain Sinclair, Nan Tien Institute/The University of Queensland
The thirteenth-century disintegration of the Pāla-Sena empire, the last state sponsor of Buddhism in its land of origin, left a fragmented milieu that is still being picked up and pieced together. On Karimun Besar island near Singapore is a short inscription that is unusually written in a Pāla-Sena script. For many decades after its discovery in the mid-nineteenth century it was misinterpreted. Today it can clearly be seen to give the name of a paṇḍita called Gautamaśrī. In 2018 it was found that this paṇḍita has the same name as that of a Bengali exile who was active in Nepal and Tibet in the middle of the thirteenth century. His story, which moves from the Himalayas to Southeast Asia in a period of global disruption, can now be told in detail for the first time.
Gautamaśrī, also known as Gautamaśrībhadra, was a young member of the cohort that fled the destruction of the last teaching monasteries on the Indian subcontinent. In Nepal he took up residence in Guitaḥ, an ancient monastic compound. A medieval avadāna relating to this monastery was most likely written by Gautamaśrī there. Gautamaśrī also conferred with his fellow exiles in Nepal, such as Vibhūticandra, and transmitted dozens of texts and practices to visiting Tibetans. They include works pertaining to the Kālacakra and Vajrāvalī/Kriyāsamuccaya tantric systems. Gautamaśrī visited Sa skya and his name reached as far as Beijing. However, Gautamaśrī was not like the many other thirteenth-century Indian Buddhists whose religion lived on only in the translations of the Tibetan canon. After avoiding disasters in the Himalayas and fundamentalization in mainland Southeast Asia, Gautamaśrī sailed to the ends of the Buddhist earth, reaching the islands of the Malay Archipelago. There, distinctive aspects of his expertise flourished: a revival of the Malay eight-armed bodhisattva Amoghapāśa, and a new cult of the ravenous deity Vajramahākāla. Gautamaśrī can also be linked to a paṇḍita who is said in the Sejarah Melayu to have co-founded a new dynasty in Sumatra. This lecture presents a range of previously unpublished findings on precolonial transnational networks, late Buddhism, Sanskrit literature and epigraphy, and the Indo-Malay kings.
Iain Sinclair is a lecturer at Nan Tien Institute, Australia, and an Honorary Research Fellow at The University of Queensland School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry. He has been a Visiting Fellow at the Nalanda-Sriwijaya Centre, ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute, and a Käte Hamburger Kolleg Fellow at the Centre for Religious Studies, Ruhr University Bochum. His published research focuses on Buddhist tantra, Sanskrit manuscripts, medieval Asian history, classical art and contemporary religion. His specialty is the Sanskritic Buddhism practiced in the Kathmandu Valley and the Malay Archipelago.
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KARMIC MERITOCRACY
Buddhism does not look to salvation through belief — or through the grace of god. But there is an ability to accumulate merit (to cultivate virtue) and to accumulate wisdom. In that sense, it is a very positive religion. We are not ruled by our flaws — they are subject to change guided by wisdom and powered by exertion. We are also not condemned by our past actions. Past actions create our present circumstances so we have to live with the consequences of our past actions — but the future is wide open.
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However, when an action develop into reaction, a lot of things can happen, which it's called condition,and it can make things better or worse, or make it take longer or shorter to manifest. So, if you made a horrible mistake, but you did a lot of things to make up for it, you bare a very minimum consequence. A good example, is imagine your bad karmas as salt, and good ones as water. If you add a lot of salt, it's very salty and hard to drink ; but if you add a lot of water to salt water, it becomes better or even unnoticeable.
The closest Buddhism has for redemption in Abrahamic religion is repentence ceremony. It gives you good karma, make you reflect on your past mistakes and you get to help other beings in the process as well.
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B No-self means that you, your mind/consciousness, does not exist independently of everything else. There is no such thing as an essential, transcendent “I” that is separate, unchanging and permanent. Your body, sensations, perceptions, thoughts and feelings, and consciousness are aggregates (heaps) without a fixed center or an essential core component. What appears to hold you together as a separate entity, on a moment to moment basis, is the interdependence of countless causes and conditions, relationships of parts to wholes, and conceptual imputation (thoughts of “this is me, my mind, and my body”), which leads to attachment to self. This attachment to self results in suffering because we cling to things (mind, body, reputation, status, possessions) that are impermanent and unsatisfactory, subject to loss and separation, as well as sickness, old age, death, which are inevitable facts of life. Our uniqueness, personality and individuality are tremendously beautiful, but we must not be seduced by appearances into assuming that there is something more there (a transcendent soul or atman) that is exempt from the interdependent nature of existence, which is marked by impermanence, unsatisfactoriness and essencelessness. In short, no-self teaches us not to take refuge in our narrowly conceived sense of self or think, speak, act egotistically, but rather, to let go of inflexible conceptions of self and other, so that we can take up the path to enlightenment.
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B In the day to day use of the terms "I" "self" "soul" "mind", you don't need to be confused. Buddhists are not suggesting we are mindless, no-self, zombies walking around, buying eggs and groceries without thinking or personhood.
The no-self (anatta/anatman) teaching is a Buddhist rejection of Hindu Upanishad (and others) notion that there is a perdurable (enduring continuously; imperishable), persistent independent substratum (an underlying layer or substance) of personhood. Any holding on to the existence of an independent, unchanging identity is rejected.
So it is with ontological issue (study of fundamental nature), that we say there is no self. We still carry out our day, with a fully healthy psychological functioning of the mind, thinking, cognizing, assessing, operating in the real world. But at the same time understand that this "self" in the ontological sense of an independent enduring substance does not exist.
You don't need to worry about psychology's teachings of "self development". We don't reject that. We agree with that actually. A healthy dose of intelligence, tirelessness, and compassionate character helps. Just remember that there is no inner core that subsist beyond death.
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B In the day to day use of the terms "I" "self" "soul" "mind", you don't need to be confused. Buddhists are not suggesting we are mindless, no-self, zombies walking around, buying eggs and groceries without thinking or personhood.
The no-self (anatta/anatman) teaching is a Buddhist rejection of Hindu Upanishad (and others) notion that there is a perdurable (enduring continuously; imperishable), persistent independent substratum (an underlying layer or substance) of personhood. Any holding on to the existence of an independent, unchanging identity is rejected.
So it is with ontological issue (study of fundamental nature), that we say there is no self. We still carry out our day, with a fully healthy psychological functioning of the mind, thinking, cognizing, assessing, operating in the real world. But at the same time understand that this "self" in the ontological sense of an independent enduring substance does not exist.
You don't need to worry about psychology's teachings of "self development". We don't reject that. We agree with that actually. A healthy dose of intelligence, tirelessness, and compassionate character helps. Just remember that there is no inner core that subsist beyond death.
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B t would be best to answer the question about a self or soul in the context of what views prevailed in the Buddha's time. While there were many views among spiritual teachers (of which the Buddha was one) many folks were educated in the Vedas (four religious texts, perhaps the oldest in the world). The Vedas proclaimed that the Self (note the capital S)/soul or "atman" was immortal and unchanging. It is the atman that takes on a new body after death (discarding a worn out garment and slipping into a new one). The Upanishads (a summary of the Vedas) describe the atman as a "thumb sized being" that resides in the heart. This Self journeys on and on (samsara) until such time that the samsaric cycle is broken and the self is free from future birth (moksha). There's much more to this than can be explained in the time and space of this subreddit allows.
The Buddha took a sharp turn from the Vedic teachings saying that there is no unchanging, immortal self/soul. This is central to all Buddhist teachings. The Buddha never explains what we are, instead he explained what we are not and what we are not is anything unchanging because there is nothing unchanging. This is a big deal and forms a foundation upon which the Buddha's teachings are erected.
As for the ego, this term as described by Sigmund Freud is separated from the Buddha by thousands of years but to put it in perspective and say that the ego is the "I am." This is a tendency that existed from the first tick of human history and a tendency that must be put to rest by way of understanding in order to uproot the conditions that lead to future birth and suffering. This understanding is to be gained by way of the Buddha's Noble Eightfold Path.
The Buddha never denied that individuals have individual traits. What he cautioned about was creating an permanent identity from them because these traits are impermanent. As human beings that's just what we do. Think about it. How many times a day do we, like the leopard, change our spots? We think "I am hungry. I am angry. I am rich. I am stupid. I feel this or that." And so on. Is there anything there that is changeless? This of course is a simple example and like above it is impossible to cover fully in a post.
As for rebirth without a permanent soul the Buddha explains this through the doctrine of Dependent Origination. Much has been written about this doctrine and Google (or your choice of search service) is a powerful resource. It isn't something one grasps in a day but as they say, a journey begins with the first step!
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b According to Buddhism, do we have a self like the soul ? if not, what do we have ?
Although the Buddha taught his followers that they had been reborn an 'inconceivable' amount of past lives, he taught that life is experienced through 5 separate phenomena that come together to give us a sense of our self ("I", "me"). The fact that these 5 phenomena 'come together' is why they are called the 5 aggregates. All beings within the realms of Samsaric existence experience the world through these. They are:
form (your body): made up of the four elements
feeling (pleasant, unpleasant, neutral)
perception (recognition)
fabrications (thought)
consciousness (arises dependent on sense-door ie. eye-consciousness)
When you think of your past, it's through one, two or several of these aggregates. When you think of your self, it's through these aggregates. The Buddha taught us to look at these aggregates as something separate from us, not ours, not what we are. Just as if you saw leaves burning on the ground you wouldn't think 'its me' burning, you shouldn't see these aggregates as self.
These aggregates fit into a much larger context: the impermanence of all conditioned things. Everything that comes into existence in the world arises dependently and then inevitably ceases. Because of this, nothing has a permanent identity or 'self'. This is what no-self means in an ultimate sense.
Nothing in the world can provide a lasting and stable happiness because nothing in the world lasts, it leaves people continuously craving not only for permanence in a world incapable of providing it, but believing things are ours and possessed when in ultimate reality nothing is ours and nothing belongs to anyone. That's why the Buddha's entire path is about renouncing things of this nature for something far greater and stable.
The Buddha didn't use the word ego. But if we were to talk about the idea (in a way not associated with Sigmund Freud), the concept that every person on planet Earth has a cloud of self-importance around them. People experience the world through their senses (and aggregates) and therefore the world encourages people to engage their immediate surroundings, survive and thinking bigger could come later if at all.
The Buddha also taught of three root poisons: delusion, greed and aversion. This is a specific teaching that shows how we act selfishly (ego) or selflessly.
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b The soul, you may have it, but it's a composite of your consciousness, memories, karmas and Buddha nature, which changes all the time. And when you reincarnate, your current memories are gone from your consciousness, and start with blank memory, more karmas, and that Buddha nature doesn't change.
That's a simplified version of the latter 3 of the 7 vijnana, which is consciousness, manas and alaya. It's a popular theory in mahayana Buddhism, first established by yogacara sect
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B MAHAPARINIRVANA SUTRA
ommentary by Dr Tony Page: In the Nirvana Sutra, the Buddha upholds his earlier teaching that what the ordinary person regards as his or her “self” is in fact “not the Self” (anatman). That is to say, the 5 skandhas (constituent elements) which make up our “mundane ego” are not the essence of what we are. What are these skandhas? They are:
1) form/ matter;
2) feeling;
3) ideation/perception;
4) intention-related impulses;
5) consciousness.
None of these, whether taken singly or together, constitutes our Self (atman).
However, according to the Buddha’s final Mahayana teachings, as embodied in this Mahaparinirvana Sutra, there does exist a “true Self”. This is equated with the Buddhic Element (Buddha-dhatu) which resides deep within all beings, beneath the coverings of negative states of mind and character which have, since beginningless time, concealed this Supramundane essence from view.
Here follows a discussion from Chapter 4 of our Sutra (Tibetan version) between the Buddha’s monks, who have long been meditating on (“cultivating”) the notion of impermanence, suffering, and non-Self, and the Buddha, who now teaches them to balance their practice with the recognition that there is a Self, and that it is eternal and unchanging:
“…When those monks heard that the Tathagata [Buddha] was going to pass into Parinirvana [Complete Nirvana, at death] , they became downhearted. Murmuring “How terrible!”, their eyes brimming with tears, they bowed their heads at the Tathagata’s feet and circumambulated him many times. Then they said this to the Blessed One [Bhagavat]: “Blessed One, you have related to us your teaching that suffering, impermanence, and non-Self is most excellent [just as] the footprint of an elephant is the greatest of all footprints. Thus, we shall eradicate our attachment to [the Realm of ] Desire, eradicate our attachment to [the Realm of ] Form, eradicate our attachment to the Formless [Realm], if we repeatedly cleave to, and cultivate, the idea of impermanence; all ignorance will be eradicated; all arrogance will be totally eliminated.
“… Blessed One, for example, a person might drink wine and become intoxicated, not even knowing who he is himself, unable to distinguish right and wrong, unable to recognise his mother, his sisters or his daughters; he falls head over heels and soils his whole body with urine and excrement; later he becomes sober and learns for some reason what befell him and reflects how useless alcohol is and decides to rid himself of all his sins. Then he thoroughly trains himself to regard the drinking of alcohol as utterly useless, and gives it up. Likewise, Blessed One, this world of living beings has spun around from time without beginning like a dancer. Whirling around, completely confused, they are unable to recognise their mothers, sisters or daughters, and so get lustful thoughts towards their mothers, sisters or daughters, and like those inebriated by alcohol, they experience suffering. Then those people who have a sense of shame, just like a drunk becoming sober, train themselves thoroughly to regard the world as useless and then totally leave behind its miseries.
“Moreover, just as a castor-oil shrub (eranda) does not have a core, likewise this body does not have a self (atman), a being (sattva), a life-essence (jiva), an individual (pudgala), manava, nara or an acting agent (kartr). In that way, we repeatedly cultivate the idea that a self does not exist. For example, just as it is pointless to plant even ten million (koti) dry husks, likewise is this body, which is devoid of a Self. For example, just as the flowers of wheat (valla-puspa) have no fragrance, likewise this body is devoid of a Self. In that manner do we cultivate repeatedly the idea that this body is devoid of a Self.
How the Monks Mistakenly Cultivated for Years
“The Blessed One has instructed us [in this way]: ‘Monks, all phenomena [dharma] are devoid of a Self. Practise thus! Those who practise thus will eliminate clinging to self (atma-graha). When clinging to self has been utterly eliminated, Nirvana will be attained.’ Blessed One, since all phenomena are thus devoid of a Self, we repeatedly cultivate the idea that a Self does not exist. Moreover, just as a bird leaves no tracks in the sky, so we shall detach ourselves from all types of [false] views when we have cultivated the idea that there is no Self.”
The Blessed One asked, “Do you know how to cultivate that kind of meditation?”
The monks replied, “Blessed One, if we were to cultivate anything contrary to the idea of suffering, impermanence and non-Self, we would be like a staggering drunk who sees the heavens, mountain peaks, the ground, the sun, the moon, trees and hills whirling around, though they are not moving; for those worldly beings who do not cultivate the idea of suffering, impermanence, and non-Self are just like drunks. [For this reason], Blessed One, we have cultivated it properly.”
The Buddha Reprimands his Monks for Cultivating Anicca, Dukkha, Anatta Incorrectly
The Blessed One said, “Monks, I shall explain the meaning of this example. With regard to the meaning of this verse, you do not clearly understand, ‘this is the meaning, this is the letter’. Just as a staggering drunk sees the heavens, mountain peaks, the ground, the sun, the moon, trees and hills whirling around, though they are not moving, in the same way do those who are utterly confused, ensnared by numerous kinds of distorted notions, adopt the idea that they are a Self, eternal, happy and pure.
“Herein:
– ‘Self’ signifies the Buddha;
– ‘Eternal’ signifies the Dharma-kaya [Body of Truth; quintessential being];
– ‘Happiness’ signifies Nirvana, and
– ‘Pure’ is a synonym for the Dharma.
Monks, you should not pride yourselves, arrogantly and haughtily saying, ‘We have cultivated the idea of suffering, impermanence, and non-Self’. When you engage thus in those three kinds of meditative cultivation, then for you to have cultivated that threefold meditative cultivation in the context of my Dharma is a worthless cultivation. These three types of meditative cultivation of suffering and so forth are contingent, most contingent [visista].
The 4 Perversities/Inversions
1. “To think of suffering as happiness is perverse, to think of happiness as suffering is perverse;
2. To think of the impermanent as eternal [nitya] is perverse, to think of the eternal as impermanent is perverse;
3. To think of the non-Self as the Self is perverse, to think of the Self as non-Self is perverse;
4. To think of the impure as pure is perverse, to think of the pure as impure is perverse.
“You repeatedly cultivate these objects of cultivation without properly knowing these 4 perversities:
You engage in meditative cultivation [treating]:
1. The eternal as though it were impermanent,
2. That which has Self as though it lacked Self, and
3. The pure as though it were impure.
[Pronouncements regarding] happiness, the Self, eternity, and purity are found both amongst mundane people and amongst supramundane people, but these are each different. The letters [ = words] are mundane designations, while the meaning is supramundane Knowing [lokottara-jnana].”
The Monks Ask the Buddha How to properly cultivate
“Then the monks said this to the Blessed One, “Blessed One, since we have for a very long time repeatedly seen and repeatedly cultivated various cognitive distortions, such as these four ideas which the Tathagata has established in the correct manner, we now entreat you to tell us how we are to proceed …”
“Monks, you ask me how you are to cultivate the ideas of suffering, impermanence, non-Self, and impurity?
“Monks, as an example: at the height of summer, some people dam a stream in the woods and, each bringing their bathing things, play in the water. One of them puts a genuine beryl gem [into the water] and then, because they all want to have that beryl, everybody puts aside their bathing things and climbs into the water. Thinking that a pebble or a piece of gravel is the gem, they grab it and cry out, ‘I’ve got the gem! I’ve got the gem!’, each holding it aloft.
“But when they get to the banks of the pool, they realise that it is not the gem after all. Then the very water of that pool gleams beautifully, as though with moonlight, by the glinting light of that gem. Seeing that beautiful gleaming, they say, ‘Ah! There’s the real gem!’, and realise how magnificent it is.
“Then, somebody in their midst who is skilled in means and intelligent is actually able to get that gem.
“In the same way, monks, you have latched onto such extremes as:
1. ‘Everything is suffering’
2. ‘Everything is without a Self’,
3. ‘Everything is impermanent’
4. ‘Everything is impure’ and repeatedly cultivate that.
All of that is mistaken and worthless – just like the pebbles and gravel in the pond.
“Be like the person who is skilled in means!
I declare that there is:
1. Happiness
2. The Self
3. Eternity, and
4. Purity
In whatever you meditatively cultivate of all those extremes which you have latched onto; those four [extreme views] are perverse!
“Therefore, cultivate the idea that the reality [tattva] of the Dharma is eternal, like that gem.
Why Did the Buddha Teach Anatta/Not Self Initially?
“…the Tathagata-Arhat-Samyaksambuddha [utter and total Buddha] … the Supreme, the Teacher of Gods and Men, the Blessed Buddha appears in the world … and then takes himself to all the heterodox teachers [tirthika] … He utterly quells them all, utterly destroys them, and delights many kings.
“In order to curb [nigraha] the heterodox teachers, he says that there is no Self, no sattva [being], no jiva [life-essence], and no pudgala [individual]. The teachings about the Self by the heterodox teachers are like the letters bored [by chance, without understanding] by worms, and therefore I made known the teachings that all beings are devoid of a Self. Having proclaimed that the absence of Self is the word of the Buddha …
“I ALSO teach that there is a Self, after I have taught that all dharmas [phenomena] are devoid of Self, taking the occasion into consideration with regard to those who need to be trained and in order to benefit beings.
“The Self of the worldly, which they say is the size of a thumb or a mustard seed, is NOT like that. The concept of the Self of the worldly is also NOT like that. In this instance, it is said that all dharmas [things, phenomena] are devoid of Self. [But actually] it is NOT true to say that all dharmas are devoid of the Self.
– The Self is Reality [tattva],
– The Self is unchanging [nitya],
– The Self is virtue [guna],
– The Self is eternal [sasvata],
– The Self is unshakeable/ firm [dhruva],
– The Self is peace [siva];
…The Tathagata teaches what is true. Let the four divisions of the assembly strive meditatively to cultivate this.” (Tibetan version)
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s no longer recommend routine voiding cystourethrogram (VCUG) for a first urinary tract infection (UTI) unless an ultrasound reveals hydronephrosis, scarring, 1 or other findings that would suggest either high-grade vesicoureteral reflux or obstructive uropathy
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Older children with unexplained unilateral deformities of an extremity (e.g., pes cavus) should have screening magnetic resonance imaging to evaluate for intraspinal disease.
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Women with primary genital herpes simplex virus (HSV) infections who are shedding HSV at delivery are 10 to 30 times more likely to transmit the virus than women with recurrent infection.
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Aldous Huxley said the brain isn’t the source of consciousness, but its reducing-valve.
We’re conscious not because of the brain, but in spite of it.
Huxley was a New Age writer.
Now we’re starting to hear this from psychiatrists and cognitive scientists.
We can't account for consciousness at all.
Nobody is saying the brain has nothing to do with it.
If someone’s occipital lobe is damaged, blindness can certainly result.
Clearly, there’s a close correlation between organic damage and loss of function.
But when cortical activity flatlines completely, blind people sometimes later report they had better-than-perfect sight.
They can describe in detail what the people around them were wearing.
When the appropriate brain area is damaged, we can lose sight.
When cortical activity flatlines completely, we can gain extraordinary sight.
Does the brain produce a narrow facsimile of vision - an obscurity we miscall sight?
It may be.
Meditation and other techniques reduce brain activity.
With brain activity (somewhat) out of the way, powerful insights arise.
For more information on this fascinating topic, I recommend the book After by Dr. Bruce Greyson.
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P The classic picture of appendicitis is anorexia followed by pain, then by nausea and vomiting, with subsequent localization of findings to the right lower quadrant. However, there is a large degree of variability, particularly in younger patients.
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pUp to 10% of normal, healthy children may have low-level (1:10) positive antinuclear antibody testing that will remain positive. Without clinical or laboratory features of disease, it is of no significance.
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P Acute kidney injury (AKI) has replaced the term acute renal failure (ARF) to reflect the more appropriate concept that smaller reductions in kidney function (short of complete organ failure) have significant clinical repercussions in terms of morbidity and mortality.
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#########################P Why should the sense of smell be tested in a teenager with delayed puberty? Kallmann syndrome is characterized by a defect in gonadotropin-releasing hormone [GnRH] with resultant gonadotropin deficiency and hypogonadism. Maldevelopment of the olfactory lobes also occurs, with resultant anosmia or hyposmia. Less commonly, cleft palate, congenital deafness, kidney malformation, pes cavus, and color blindness can co-occur. Boys who have GnRH deficiency often have a small phallus and testes, but physical exam may be significant only for sexual immaturity. Delayed bone age is the only consistent lab finding. These patients require hormonal therapy to achieve puberty and fertility.
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Nature is famously, gloriously complex. But it wasn’t always so. When the Earth was young, physics ruled. Steam spewed from prodigious volcanoes and seeped through the cracked surface, transforming our planet into an ocean-covered mass, circling in the darkness. The physics that governs a phase change from steam to water in the oceans is as true today as it was 4.5 billion years ago. Gas would turn to liquid on any planet at any time, so long as the temperature and air pressure oblige. Then, as now, the laws of physics were predictable and straightforward.
But the history of life that followed from that fateful phase change didn’t proceed along such a simple trajectory. Its evolution over billions of years defies simple rules and predictable outcomes. Nature became a complex system, a tangled web of invisible connections. As nature’s intricacy ramped up, it brought with it opportunities for expansion, but also possibilities for annihilation. Fortunately, with each problem that arose, a strategy evolved to overcome it.
Our increasingly urban world now rivals a rainforest or a coral reef in its connectedness and complexity. Food grown far away reaches consumers through complicated supply chains. Water gets pumped and delivered, while waste is shunted away. Information flows around the world at the speed of the internet. A storm can raise prices and cause riots far away. A virus can spread around the world in a matter of days.
In fact, life on Earth and modern civilisation share some basic problems. They need to persist through calamities and recover from inevitable falls. They both rely on dynamic networks to move materials and energy. Destruction from an unexpected event that ricochets throughout the system is an ever-present danger. Both depend on collective actions from individuals who need to coordinate their actions.
Nature shows a remarkable ability to take advantage of the benefits of all this complexity while avoiding its dangers. The problem for us is that humanity lacks nature’s experience of persisting through catastrophe. We have no playbook to navigate through all the uncertainty ushered in by our hyperconnected world. However, the adaptability of evolution itself and the curious strategies that nature has developed offer up unexpected pathways for survival that are now vital for us to consider.
Sometime in the first billion years of the planet’s 4.5-billion-year history, a cell emerged in a primordial stew of chemicals brewing in liquid water. At that moment, the predictable chemistry and physics of the early Earth gave way to seething, roiling complexity. Primitive life thrived in the deep sea, where underwater volcanoes vented heat and spilled a cocktail of chemicals into seawater. Once life was underway, the course of the planet and the life it supported became a single, intertwined system. The Earth’s interacting oceans, atmosphere and life developed into what’s known as a complex adaptive system, in the nomenclature of scientists who study such phenomena. Once its parts were connected and able to respond to their surroundings, feedback loops of cause and effect allowed the system to constantly adjust.
For around a billion years, simple bacteria dominated life – producing sugars by extracting hydrogen from hydrogen sulfide and combining it with carbon and energy from the Sun or from deep-sea vents. Then a switch in bacteria’s survival strategy set off cascading feedbacks that changed the course of all life that followed. Not only could bacteria extract hydrogen from hydrogen sulfide in swamps or in the sea, but some now expanded their repertoire to use the hydrogen from water. They could live anywhere, so long as it had water and energy from the Sun. The effect reverberated into blue-green algae that transformed the atmosphere.
With oxygen as the by-product of blue-green algae’s ability to extract hydrogen from water, oxygen levels built up in the atmosphere about 2.5 billion years ago. Those bacteria accustomed to low-oxygen conditions retreated to airless, stagnant waters, but life as a whole overcame the problem and prospered. Photosynthesising plants thrived as atmospheric oxygen shielded them from the harmful radiation of the Sun. Over the course of billions of years, sponges, corals and jellyfish flourished in the oceans, followed by insects, reptiles, dinosaurs, mammals and other animals on land.
Diversity is humanity’s insurance against the uncertainties of a changing climate
The proliferation of life forms created both problems and opportunities. Many kinds of life couldn’t survive the bombardments from space and the swings in climate from erupting volcanoes. About 250 million years ago, ashes and gases from colossal volcanoes blocked out sunlight and obliterated most forms of life, including trilobites, corals and other marine creatures. Another potential disaster occurred around 66 million years ago, when a comet collided with the Earth. The massive collision ejected dust into the air, which blocked the Sun’s energy once again. Many organisms didn’t survive, including nearly all of the dinosaurs. But the range of life within the Earth’s complex adaptive system meant that some could adapt and life persisted. Without a diversity of life forms, a diversity of species within life forms, and a diversity of individuals within species, life on Earth might not have recovered 250 million years ago, 66 million years ago, or at any other time throughout geological history when an existential onslaught threatened life itself.
The life-saving benefits of diversity don’t just apply to ancient forms of life. In the current day, diversity is humanity’s insurance against the uncertainties of a changing climate. While our food supply depends increasingly on a homogeneous stew of a handful of crop species, nature’s experience shows the wisdom in keeping variety alive. The principle applies not just to plants and animals that humans eat, but to languages, world views, cultures, and forms of knowledge that the modern world overlooks as old-fashioned. In finance, the benefits of ‘portfolio diversity’ are well known, while ‘design diversity’ in engineering creates failsafe mechanisms by creating slightly different parts for the same function. Investments in seed banks and an awareness of the value of non-Western ways of thinking suggest we’re slowly absorbing the principles that allowed evolution to overcome inevitable calamities.
After the dinosaurs, nature’s ability to adapt offers another message for human civilisation. Mammals were the winners from the comet-induced tragedy. Early mammal-like forms of relatively large-brained creatures swam, climbed and burrowed in the time of the dinosaurs. The age of mammals had its origin about 800 million years ago, when abundant oxygen in the atmosphere spearheaded a new life strategy – getting energy from eating plants rather than soaking it up from the Sun. Animals could use oxygen inhaled from the air to release usable energy from digested food. The new plant-eating strategy brought mobility for animals, unlike their rooted plant counterparts who needed nutrients from the soil. That’s what allowed animals to satisfy the copious energy requirements to maintain a brain.
Cold-blooded sponges, jellyfish, flatworms and roundworms, fish and reptiles ruled the animal kingdom for many hundreds of millions of years. Their strategy was to adjust their body temperature to their surroundings, which allowed for the efficient use of energy. They basked in the Sun or lay on a hot rock to get warmth. At night, when the source of warmth went away, they simply slowed down to conserve energy. No wonder that snakes and other cold-blooded animals need to eat only once every few months or once a year.
Perhaps around 250 million years ago, a relative sliver in time in our planet’s existence, another strategy evolved. Warm-blooded animals, namely birds and mammals, evolved to keep their bodies at a constant temperature – a process known as homeostasis. What they lose in raw efficiency, they gain in the peak cell performance that comes from this internal thermostat. Warm-blooded animals can seek food, defend themselves and stay active at night, while cold-blooded animals are stuck if temperatures get too hot or too cold.
One trade-off for warm-bloodedness is the energy needed to create heat for buffering against temperature fluctuations, whether day-to-night, season-to-season or place-to-place. Warm-blooded animals need to eat more – and more often – than their cold-blooded counterparts to keep body temperatures stable. They need ways to keep body temperature at a level that’s stable enough for cells to function and to stop blood sugar from getting too high with each meal, or too low between meals.
Built-in mechanisms to maintain homeostasis are critical for our planet and its inhabitants
Despite its problems, evolution didn’t do away with the warm-blooded experiment. The advantages outweighed the energy-guzzling and homeostasis-demanding disadvantages. Rather, self-correcting negative feedback cycles kept cells safe from fluctuating temperatures and blood sugar from spiking. In humans, if the temperature gets too hot, sensors on the skin send a message to the brain, which in turn sends a message to the sweat glands to produce sweat. Evaporating sweat from the skin brings our body temperature down until the sensors send a signal to stop the sweat glands. If the temperature is too cold, the brain sends a signal to the muscles to shiver, and the shaking creates heat. The brain provides a self-regulating thermostat that involuntarily turns on and off sweat glands and shivering muscles to keep us from overheating or freezing. Likewise, our bodies’ sophisticated system keeps blood sugar within bounds. After a meal, when blood sugar is high, the pancreas excretes insulin to ferry sugars to cells and to help the liver take them out of circulation. When blood sugar is low, another enzyme takes over to release stored blood sugar back into the bloodstream. The cycle oscillates in a self-regulating system.
Nature’s tactics for overcoming the pitfalls of warm-bloodedness illustrate a key strategy for any complex adaptive system – whether that’s organs managing flows of nutrients, blood and enzymes in an animal, or the global interchange of energy and nutrients between the biosphere, atmosphere and solid Earth. Built-in mechanisms to self-correct, maintain homeostasis and keep conditions amenable for life are critical for our planet and its inhabitants.
At a planetary scale, the same see-saw of homeostasis has kept the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere within safe limits for millions of years. Plants pull carbon out of the air. When the plants die and decay, the carbon goes back into the atmosphere. On much longer, geologic timescales, volcanoes spew carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere. When the carbon returns to the Earth dissolved in raindrops, tiny marine creatures use it to build shells of calcium carbonate, which eventually subside into the depths of the Earth after the animals die and sink to the sea floor. Through this process, carbon dioxide eventually makes its way back into the atmosphere, from where it came millions of years before. Such homeostasis-maintaining cycles are the secret of our planet’s fairly stable climate. Without them, Earth would be as inhospitable to life as Mars and Venus appear to be.
Homeostasis to stay within safe bounds is fundamental for an unpredictable, complex system to persist. The principle applies to human societies too. One form is a circuit-breaker to halt a plunge in the stock market before a crash takes down the economy, which was introduced by financial regulators after the Black Monday crash on 19 October 1987. Circuit-breakers were put to the test more recently during the market meltdown at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Few, though, would recognise the parallels with the global cycling of carbon or with the shivers and sweat that keep us within the guardrails of safety.
The adaptation that allowed animals to get energy indirectly from plants – rather than straight from sunlight – brought possibilities and problems for both parties. Plants now had options beyond just wind and water to disperse their seeds. Flowering plants could co-opt bees, birds and butterflies for procreation with the allure of nectar. The wings and feet of mobile insects and birds could deliver male pollen from inside a flower to the female ovule. The brokered match fertilised the plant’s seeds, a task that a stationary plant couldn’t achieve on its own. As a consequence, plants developed vivid colours and shapes to attract pollinators.
A similar strategy emerged in fruit-bearing shrubs and trees, to entice birds, rodents, bats, lizards and other fruit-loving animals. Animals eat the seeds along with the fruit’s juicy flesh and scatter the seeds where they defecate. Shrubs and animals came to depend on each other in a mutual arrangement.
These new synergistic strategies brought another level of complexity to life. Networks of dependencies meant that the sum was greater than the parts. Pollinators and seed-dispersing creatures gained the advantages of nectar and tasty fruits. Flowering plants and fruit-bearing shrubs gained symbiotic partners to assist in procreation. Everyone benefited. On the other hand, they or their progeny could all perish if counterparts in the network succumbed to a disease or a predator.
Networks – whether to ferry pollen to an ovule, distribute seeds through the gut, or carry blood through the brain – opened up new options for life. But they also brought risks. When one part of the network breaks, failures can cascade and cause catastrophe. If the link breaks between a flowering plant and the pollinator who fertilises its seeds, both sides miss out. The flower doesn’t have its seeds spread and the pollinator doesn’t get its nectar. And the effects reverberate into food sources for other animals who depend on the plant’s fruits, and a predator who eats that animal.
Like the self-regulating mechanisms to overcome the challenges of warm-bloodedness, the advantages of networks outweigh their risks in nature’s experience. Without intent or design, nature evolved ways to compensate and minimise the potential for systemic collapse. A plant species rarely relies on a single pollinator species to ferry its seeds. Nor does a pollinator species rely on a single plant species to supply nectar. An orchid, for example, relies on 21 different species of moths and 24 species of butterflies to carry its pollen, rather than any one alone.
The yin and yang of networks provides nature’s most essential lesson for the human-constructed world
The structure of a plant-pollinator, seed-disperser and food-web network provides another elegant level of insurance against cascading failure. Specialist species who rely on a smaller number of partners – such as sunflower bees, who forage only on sunflowers – have a different strategy than generalists – such as honeybees, who are not so choosey about their plant partners. A specialist species tends to rely on a small number of generalist species. A generalist species tends to rely on a large number of specialist species. This network structure means that the specialist species gains some insurance by partnering with a generalist species who has many options, in case of a bad year or some other problem. For a generalist species, if one specialist species drops out of the network, others can do the job. This mutually beneficial arrangement avoids dangerous sole-sourcing in specialist-specialist pairs, or inefficient multi-sourcing in generalist-generalist pairs.
Nature relies on networks not just to move pollen, seeds and food. In a leaf, the network of tiny microscopic veins carries water from the soil to the leaf. And the veins carry sugars produced by photosynthesising cells back to the stems, roots and other parts of the plant. Leaf-vein networks evolved to avoid the dangers of single-point failure if a tear or a bite from an insect severs the veins. Redundant networks loop throughout the leaf, with many options to route water and sugars in case of calamity. The strategy has a cost in terms of energy and materials to build the veins. But evolution’s experience suggests that the investment is worthwhile to compensate for the downsides of networks while benefiting from the advantages.
Networks bring particular advantages and perils to those species who live in colonies. Group living offers another example of the sum being greater than the parts in a complex system. A social group can guard against predators and share responsibilities to find food, get rid of waste and raise the young. Termites might have been the earliest to hit on the large group-living, social-network strategy: they might have evolved from cockroaches around 170 million years ago, with the great advantage that they could digest cellulose from abundant wood. Their colonies can number up to several million individuals. Members have specialised tasks for carrying waste, caring for the brood and foraging for food.
Despite its benefits, the distinctive problem with close quarters in the colony is the potential spread of disease. Yet social insects rarely succumb to epidemics. Somehow, if a pathogen enters the colony, nest mates know to take on behaviours in the interest of the colony – carrying out the sick and disinfecting the nest. Infected members leave the nest of their own volition. Colony-mates also strategically adjust their social networks. By cutting off communication between social clusters, they keep the pathogen from spreading.
The yin and yang of networks perhaps provides nature’s most essential lesson for the human-constructed world. Modern civilisation can’t function without trade networks and flows of information. Investments in redundancy, with multiple routes within networks, pay off, as they do for loopy leaf veins and plant-pollinator partners. With much of the urban world dependent on food grown in faraway places, the ramifications of sole-source networks ricochet into geopolitics as food prices rise. The COVID-19 pandemic has squeezed supply chains that deliver food and equipment, bringing this lesson into sharp focus.
Colony-living termites have another problem to solve besides the spread of disease, with equally relevant analogues to human civilisations. Worker termites are blind. But they manage to build their phenomenal spires of termite mounds, which can stand taller than a tall human, with intricate chambers for young termites, fungus gardens, cooling vents, below-ground tunnels and a royal chamber for the king and queen. Despite the misnomer, the queen has no capacity to draw up architectural plans for the structure or to direct each individual worker to carry soil to the right place. Another of evolution’s marvels is the ability of social species to self-organise without coordination or pre-planned design from a central authority.
The queen termite releases a pheromone so the workers can sense where to begin construction. One worker mixes a soil pellet with saliva and kneads it with its mandibles, then drops the pellet at the site. The saliva has a pheromone that signals to other workers to drop their pellets, which in turn alerts the other workers to drop their pellets at the same spot. Once the worker adds its pellet to the pile, it returns to get more soil, guided by pheromones left by its colleagues. Workers drop more and more pellets on separate building sites until they run out of material. The result is a thick wall topped with spires. Without an architect to draw blueprints or a contractor to direct construction, the structure emerges as each individual follows its pheromone-following and pheromone-depositing instincts. The genetic code that controls these behaviours is a mystery we’re yet to uncover.
Nature’s long experience provides lessons for how we might prevail in the face of possible disaster
The termites’ abilities in self-organisation speak to humanity’s growing awareness that people can sometimes solve their own problems from the bottom-up. The prolific science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov, writing about the future fall of the Galactic Empire, patterned on the ancient Roman empire, makes this point: suffice to say, the Galactic Empire’s central-control strategy doesn’t end well. The empire collapses from over-reliance on outer planets and the complexity of ruling from afar. At a smaller scale, examples of communities who self-organise to manage their own forests, fisheries and other affairs better than distant authorities issuing commands illustrate the power of nature’s experience.
Analogies between human societies and termite colonies have their limits. Ideas, morals and learning, rather than instincts and pheromones, shape human civilisation. But nature’s strategies that counterbalance the ricocheting hazards of a complex adaptive system – where diseases can spread, unreliable partners can bring down a network and an unexpected collision or volcano can wipe out previously successful life forms – should give us some pointers. Civilisations throughout history, from the Indus Valley to ancient Rome to the Anasazi of the American Southwest had similar conundrums. They relied on vast networks and dependencies for trade and, similar to a termite queen, rulers couldn’t simply command and control over distant lands. Like the interacting biosphere, atmosphere, oceans and solid Earth, all of which keep our planet habitable, human societies fit the definition of complex adaptive systems.
At first blush, lessons from nature for human-designed institutions seem absurd. Nature has no empathy or concern for human values. Human societies take care of their sick, disabled and non-productive members. People pursue goals, both individually and collectively. Nature has no objectives beyond each individual’s innate aspiration to survive and reproduce. Societies evolve and adapt through ideas, rules and norms. But, on closer reflection, nature’s long experience provides lessons for how we might prevail in the face of possible disaster.
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—Aretha Franklin
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