4 thoughts on “Monday Message Board”

1. Democracy seems to be on the decline;

   In Focus: Autocratization

   in the USA

   • Under Trump’s presidency democracy in the USA has fallen back to the same level as in 1965. Yet the situation is fundamentally different than during the Civil Rights era.
   • President Trump’s second term can be summarized as a rapid and aggressive concentration of powers in the presidency.
   • The speed with which American democracy is currently dismantled is unprecedented in modern history.
   • Legislative Constraints – the worst affected aspect of democracy – is losing one-third of its value in 2025 and reaching its lowest point in over 100 years.
   • Civil Rights & Equality before the Law, and Freedom of Expression & Media are now at their lowest levels in 60 years.
   • Electoral components of democracy, however, remain stable – for now.

   https://www.v-dem.net/documents/75/V-Dem_Institute_Democracy_Report_2026_lowres.pdf

2. Locally EV sales have gone through the roof, various dealers are telling me that they were hitting record sales before Iran and now it’s gone up another notch. One guy said that he cant give away petrol/diesel vehicles while EV orders flow in.

   There seems to be no hesitation in ordering Chinese vehicles – legacy makers like Volvo/Mercedes/BMW cant price match so have been left behind.

   Youtube is where the reviews are, the showroom trip miss just a formality.

3. Yanomani mushrooms (a diversion from the end of the world as we knew it)

   It sounds like satire, but isn’t. At high-end restaurants in São Paulo, Manaus and Seattle, rich foodies can order mushrooms grown by indigenous Brazilian Yanomani. The practice is part of a traditional and sustainable slash-and-burn agroforestry cycle dominated by cassava. https://culinarycultureconnections.com/blogs/producers/yanomami-mushrooms Small plots in the forest are cleared of softwood, and the bigger hardwood trees partially burnt, leaving charred logs in situ. These logs are then colonised by 15 species of edible mushooms, and harvested along with the cassava.

   I have been unable to find out if the Yanomani actively inoculate the logs or the surounding mycelium webs in the forest do it by themselves. The mushrooms fruit after about 2 years of the complete 4-year cycle. The Latin names, if you are interested, are Lentinus spp., Panus spp., Favolus brasiliensis, Polyporus tricholoma, Favolus striatulus, Polyporus alveolares, Coriolus zonatus, Trametes ochracea, Pleurotus sp., Pleurotus concavus, Favolus sp., Lentinula raphanica, Polyporus aquosus. Names in the Sanöma language are more colourful: “tapir liver,” “deer’s ear,” “croc-croc” and “hairy anus.” I assume the last is a joke at the expense of the gringos. Photo: https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/1394/3389/files/RS3614_MG_7252-lpr.JPG?v=1535220781

   For the moment, the Yanomani are doing well out of this fad, since they control the supply. But it won’t last. Either the market for Veblen mushooms will die away like other fads, or non-Yanomani mycologists and entrepreneurs will find ways to cultivate the 15 species industrially in controlled-humidity sheds supplied with appropriate sawdust.

   Sadly the Yanomani have no way of claiming IP rights from their hard-won discovery, any more than their shamans can claim compensation for their herbal lore. Note that I am not advancing the ascientific romantic nonsense that shamanic medicine is “natural” and hence better than the experimentally tested products of Big Pharma, only that the screening embodied in shamanic learning may save modern scientists a lot of time in looking for interesting active compounds. The indigenous peoples who did this useful work deserve to be compensated for it.

   Humans use a ridiculously small part of the fungal kingdom’s 150,000 formally described species, with a total guessed at 2 million, of which 2,000 are edible, 200 cultivated at any scale and only 20 industrially. It’s a similar pattern to plants, with 380,000 known species, 25,000 edible ones, 200 actually consumed, and a handful dominating commercial agriculture. The scale differs by an order of magnitude. Global mushroom production was 48 mt in 1922; wheat alone was about 800 mt.However, the former is growing twice as fast, at 7-8 % a year.

   This shift will continue. In spite of the obstinate vegan persistence in mislabelling the fungal kingdom as plants, mycoculture has a rosy future. It faces no great ethical problems. It does not compete significantly with other uses for land and sunlight. Indeed there is a long tradition of growing mushrooms under cities, starting in Paris around 1800. (Mushroom cultivation at scale started at Versailles, and migrated to the big city more successfully than the monarchy.) The substrate is tightly specified compost, from food and animal or human waste, in plentiful supply. A commercial mushroom setup is in economic terms a factory: a closed and controlled environment running a highly automated process, and indefinitely expandable, with constant returns to scale.

   A minority of fungi are poisonous to humans – as with plants. The two kingdoms have a similar order of magnitude of poisonous species, a thousand or so: numbers high enough to discourage casual experimentation by hunter-gatherers or subsistence farmers outside extreme emergencies. A few imprudent modern mushroom gatherers die every year from accidental poisoning, an even tinier number from assassination. If there are cases of poisoning from commercial production, they are very rare. https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2023-08-16/mushrooms-poisoning-leongatha-shopper-fears-after-erin-patterson/102730784 There does not seem to be a parallel to the odd (and tightly regulated) Japanese predilection for deadly fugu fish.

   Poison is not he only risk to be managed. Some fungi attack humans like bactrial infections. As with plants (kudzu), invasive immigrant species can upset settled biocommunities. The Golden Oyster mushroom from Siberia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleurotus_citrinopileatus is cultivated commercially in the USA, and has escaped into the wild, displacing native species. It is also, unusually, a carnivore. Its prey is tiny nematode worms. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-a-carnivorous-mushroom-poisons-its-prey/ There is no reason, I tell you, to fear it will add humans to the menu. None at all. You can trust the experts ….

4. Re “The generation game and the 1 per cent” by J.Q.

   In that post J.Q. stated:

   “For a generation (fifteen years) or more I’ve been writing and rewriting the same piece about the silliness of the “generation game”, the idea that one’s year of birth matters more than class, gender or race in determining life outcomes and attitudes. But this is a zombie idea that can never be killed.”

   To a very considerable degree (more than 50%) I agree that these factors (class, gender or race) usually matter more or much more in determining life outcomes and attitudes. However, I do consider that there can also be some small tendencies to generational characteristics that stem from generation enculturation and education.

   But wait there’s more! Could “Inherited (Transgenerational) Memory” also be a thing? Is the infant (or a generation of infants) not entirely a tabula rasa (blank slate)? Sound preposterous? Well maybe not entirely. View this Youtube vid. about butterflies.

   Of course, butterflies are NOT people.

   Nevertheless, the idea of (some) Inherited (Transgenerational) Memory for humans is now beings looked at. There are mechanisms whereby this could happen. In butterflies, mechanisms like DNA methylation of genes and histone modification and in earthworm (studies) small non-coding RNAs (sncRNAs).

   “1. DNA Methylation This is the most widely studied “tagging” system. When a caterpillar learns a new behavior (like avoiding lavender), chemical groups called methyl groups attach to specific parts of its DNA. The Switch: These tags act like a dimmer switch, turning specific genes on or off without changing the underlying genetic code. The Persistence: In Nagai’s butterflies, these tags likely “escaped” the usual cellular reprogramming that happens during metamorphosis and reproduction, allowing the “lavender = danger” instruction to remain active in the sperm or eggs.

   2. Histone Modification DNA is wrapped around proteins called histones. Experience can cause these proteins to “tighten” or “loosen,” which controls how easily a cell can read certain genes. Architectural Memory: In insects, changes in histone acetylation have been linked to immune priming—where offspring are born with “memories” of pathogens their parents encountered. It is theorized that Nagai’s butterflies used a similar structural change to keep the neural “fear” pathways accessible even after the brain was rebuilt.

   3. Small Non-coding RNAs (sncRNAs) These are short “messenger” molecules that don’t make proteins but instead regulate other genes. The Messengers: Studies in other invertebrates (like C. elegans worms) show that small RNAs can physically travel from the brain to the reproductive organs. Generational Courier: They act as a biological “memo” sent from the parent’s nervous system to the offspring’s developing cells, instructing them to be hypersensitive to specific triggers—like the scent of lavender.” – Google AI.

   “While scientists have not yet conducted “butterfly-style” controlled lab experiments on

   humans—due to obvious ethical and biological constraints—they have begun identifying evidence of inherited memory through epidemiological “natural experiments” and focused molecular studies. 

   Rather than training humans to avoid a scent, researchers study how massive environmental shocks (like famine or war) leave “epigenetic scars” on the DNA of descendants who never experienced the event. 

   Key Human Research Areas (2024–2025)

   • Trauma Inheritance (The Holocaust Studies): Led by Dr. Rachel Yehuda, researchers found that children of Holocaust survivors possess specific epigenetic markers on the FKBP5 gene, which regulates stress. These descendants often have different cortisol levels than peers, suggesting their biology was “pre-calibrated” for a high-stress environment by their parents’ experiences.
   • Famine Memory (The Dutch Hunger Winter): Studies on the Dutch Famine Birth Cohort have shown that grandchildren of women who starved during WWII are more prone to obesity and heart disease. This suggests a “metabolic memory” was passed down to prepare future generations for food scarcity.
   • The TRANSMIND Project (Ongoing): A new collaborative project called TRANSMIND is currently investigating “fictive memories”—how sensory experiences might be biologically encoded and inherited.
   • Paternal Nutrition & Sperm: Recent reviews (2025) indicate that a father’s diet and stress levels can alter small RNAs in his sperm, which then influence the brain development and metabolic health of his children. 

   Challenges in Human Testing

   Unlike Jo Nagai’s butterflies, which have a life cycle of just a few weeks, humans take decades to produce a new generation. To prove true transgenerational inheritance (and not just “in utero” exposure), scientists must observe the effect in the great-grandchildren (F3 generation) of the person who had the original experience. 

   Most human research is currently at the F1 (children) or F2 (grandchildren) stage, meaning we are just now entering the era where “true” three-generation inheritance can be scientifically confirmed in humans.” – Google AI.

   Looks fascinating. Hope I haven’t been fooled by Youtube falsehoods and the Google AI hallucinating. I don’t think I have been but I haven’t done much cross-checking yet. But I do tend to a broad feeling that the natural world and humans is/are far more complex than the social sciences have dreamt of yet and that social science explanations for certain things may yet need be placed on hold for possible modification while hard science sheds more light on the biological complexities and mechanisms involved.