What brought the question to mind was a thought last night – that in my youth colours seemed more vivid and that many more of them were apparent then as well. Turning then to a painting on the wall I found that the colour had returned much as my clothing or hair become perceptible as soon as I consciously address them. From there it took me to the Huxley’s ‘Doors of Perception’ (which I haven’t picked up for several years) and the concept of the mind as a funnel or filter, rather than an entity constructing my reality from pieces of information gathered from the world. The problem boils down to this; does my mind seek out the world to piece together some comprehension of it, or does the world essentially force itself on my mind?

This concept seems useful when I consider all the stimulus I regularly exclude and which can interfere with decision making. Similar structures must also be present in other organisms (including non-humans, think of an insect’s compound eye and all they see in a glimpse). I suppose then, to take things away from the depths of philosophy, it is really a matter of attention. I will come down of the side of Huxley.

sensation>>perception

Sensation is greater than perception. Not only is there more in the world than I consciously perceive, but there is also much more that I sense than I consciously perceive. Looking at the keyboard (an admittedly horrible typist), I am ignorant of the scene surrounding it. My elbows rest on the desk, my dry winter skin is tight across my nose, the ventilation runs noisily in this public building. All this sensation is unnecessary to the task at hand (this writing), and in excess will quickly become detrimental to it.  The foreground becomes my focal point and the background essentially fades away.

Yet this also assumes that attention is not only quantifiable, but limited. A professor today, taking a mild diversion from class, explained the ways in which to juggle two sets of objects in two hands, while doing so and cycling seamlessly through the different methods. For a learned task attention becomes much different. Is there a limit to learning beyond the number of hours in a day?

Having toyed with the rudiments of cognition, I’ll leave further details to the more adept. If the mind is an antenna then for me it turns to the signals, against a constant background of noise. The means which it uses to distinguish ever newer and more complex signals are as of yet a mystery to me.

Regarding the title; the mind takes sensation, which is capable of becoming true perception, but destroys this potential within it by ignoring it until it has left recent memory. Once gone from memory, that unique event ceases to exist as a possibility of experience.

Credit Mike Libby Insect Lab - Click for Link

As the nineteenth century came to a close reductionist empiricism had sown the seeds of its own demise. If human beings were themselves the product of the chance and rational processes of evolution, driven primarily by their own personal struggle for existence, were they really capable of detached observation? Where was the selective pressure for pure rationality? Would primitive man have benefited from quietly contemplating the origin and nature of the saber-tooth tiger while being stalked on the savannah? Certainly not, selection would have favoured those who had a rapid aggressive and emotional response, those dominated by the strong intent to live.

This reality began what would now be called an ‘existential crisis’ in philosophy that would eventually bleed into the natural sciences. Of course one of the major products of this crisis was existentialism itself. Not too oversimplify, but these developments can largely be traced to one very influential thinker: Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche turned German philosophy on its head. A self-proclaimed futurist, his writing defied the analytic methods of the day. Even his more direct exposés relied on allegory and metaphor. Yet some of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century found his philosophy indispensable. Martin Heidegger, the foremost student of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, would write literal volumes on Nietzsche. From this German foundation would grow the French school of Existentialism with Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. This school in turn would usher in the most modern era with the likes of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault.

All well and pretty with a lot of important sounding names being dropped (the neophyte names the thinkers rather than the ideas he can’t understand), but what does it have to do with modern biology? Biology is the science tasked with understanding the nature of life itself. By the early twentieth century the advent of quantum mechanics had provided adequate grounding to explain most commonplace physical and chemical phenomena. Yet even the most advanced quantum theorist was at a loss to explain that most basic fact of human existence: Conscious thought. Husserl went back beyond Kant to the study of consciousness as proposed by Descartes. In his Cartesian Meditations he systematically examined the phenomena of thought and awareness and coined, in a Freudian tradition, the ego cogito. Translated literally as the ‘thinking self’, this conscious self is tied inexorably to the unconscious, and cannot step outside. It is a continual actor and presence in the world. Every step taken leaves a print, and this being is incapable, especially when considering its own self, of not changing the world around it. The twentieth century definition of self had found its birth and would inform a whole generation of philosophers.

As the nineteenth century drew to a close, psychologists had begun the struggle with irrationality and identified the hidden unconscious. Yet the natural sciences at that time were still dominated by the Cartesian assumption that humans are a separate class of beings. Whatever may have been deemed necessary for the understanding or explanation of human beings did not have any implications on the understanding of animals or other living things.  As noted above, the understanding of human beings as a product of natural selection that allowed psychology to look more objectively at its subject would eventually find its way into biology. Certain biological phenomena appeared to defy naturalistic explanation. How could a goose imprint on a human being, displaying the non-human equivalents of love and devotion to a being to which it had no real selective relationship? Lorenz demonstrated traits that could not have been selected for directly, but instead required the selection of higher order cognitive processes. For all intents and purposes it appeared that animals were capable of what was a rudiment of abstract thought.

The questions addressed daily in the humanities defy even the most advanced quantum explanation, yet all are products of the human mind. These and all other conscious phenomena are genuine emergent properties, impossible to explain from even the most complete explanation of lower order components. Existentialism – exploring the human actor as embedded in a world that is not of its choosing or creation – is a well developed philosophical perspective that allows for a certain degree of deeper explanation.  That which cannot be addressed by our current naturalistic understanding of the world will benefit from any dissection of their traits that incorporates the phenomenological and existential paradigms,  well developed in the early post-modern era.

Post-script:

Incredible artist website for which I did not feel comfortable using images without permission:

Vladimir Gvozdariki – Mechanical works, all around incredible site and works

Three day (after-laying) chick embryo, courtesy of lab partner NaRae Song.

The means to accomplish these seemingly impossible tasks are aided by many hidden mechanisms, leading to my personal maxim that just because I can’t understand how something works doesn’t mean it defies explanation. Take heterochrony. From looking at the word you can probably tell that it has something to do with change and time. In developmental biology it’s the concept that a change in the timing of a developmental event can lead to evolutionary change. It accounts for a whole bunch of diversity, especially the oddball axolotl salamander of Mexico.

The idea has been explored by mucking about with metamorphosis in reptiles. If you take our above species with their external gills in their sexually mature form, subject them to the right chemical at the right time, they will actually develop into a ‘normal’ looking salamander without a pair of lungs sticking out the side of its head. Leave a couple of these treated salamanders to reproduce, and if you don’t interfere their offspring will look like their grandparents, face-lungs and all. Over an evolutionary timeline they’ve lost the ability to produce hormones that stimulate the thyroid. The experimental proof came from the treatment of axolotl with a precursor from  a sheep, aptly named thyroid stimulating hormone. It’s also an elegant example of complex molecules that have distincct effects in various species. The hormone that influences your own metabolism is exactly the same in farm animals and even amphibians. If not the hormone thyroxine itself, then likely one of its precursors goes all the way back to the time when we first crawled out of the water.

So how does all this relate to the hatching of a mammal? The title is a double entendre. As mammals we hatch from the gelatinous zona pellucida as a blastocyst before implanting into our mother’s uterine wall. The more controversial meaning is in my intention to outline the principles by which humans could have evolved, and this is where my discussion of heterochrony is leading.

If humans evolved from the other primates in the past four to seven million years or so, how have drastic apparent changes come to pass in what you could say is a relatively short evolutionary timeline? We’ve lost most of our bodily hair and have a number of other retained juvenile traits. Click here for a scholarly reference if interested.

When I was younger I had assumed this involved the development of a suite of genes that specifically directed hair growth. The suite was already there, the evolutionary change was in turning it off at a certain time in certain cells. This does not require drastic genetic ‘rewiring’, but just a simple change not unlike what the axoltyl underwent; a loss of function mutation that resulted in a paedomorphic form; a mature juvenile form. In the salamander it’s more specifically called neoteny because they have a larval stage whereas we don’t undergo metamorphosis in our life-cycle. The advantage conferred by losing body hair is a discussion for another time, but next time someone questions our relationship with the apes, ask them what they think a hairless baby chimp might look like.

In my personal belief evolution is the ethical standpoint. Any attempt to downgrade the importance of all non-human life (i.e. the common argument that animals do not have 'souls') shows a concerning lack of empathy.

The mechanisms of evolution are coming to be understood better and better each day. Those who dismiss it as a ‘theory’ have an unfortunate misunderstanding of the nature of scientific language. Each decade a new mechanism is described that helps us understand the at first seemingly impossible task of generating advanced lifeforms capable of culture, language and altruism from the early chemical soup of the developing Earth. Heterochrony and the huge commonalities in the development of the many classifications of animals are only a couple of the many sources of empirical data that support the theory of evolution by natural selection. If you have a couple you would like to add, please be vocal about them, because apparently a great many people still need to be convinced.

A popular image of the Young Haeckel (that used by R. Richards on the inside cover of his 2008 book) with colleague - Likely on one of his trips to Naples or other areas of southern Italy to collect coastal diatoms.

His ‘religious monism’ would earn him the accusation of being a Nazi bedfellow, and there are surely instances of his writing that are flagrantly racist from our modern perspective. Yet some would argue that he was a product of his times and quite progressive one at that. In 1917, his last year of life, Haeckel agreed to a publication being dedicated to him in name. That publication was an exposition of homosexuality, Natural Laws of Love, and its author the Jewish physician Magnus Hirschfeld, who was also interested in transvestites. The Nazis were not known for kindness toward the less common sexual orientations.

It was (and is) his theory of recapitulation, the biogenetic law, for which we know him best. Technically stated; that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, or, that the developing organism, from fertilization to adult, passes through the evolutionary intermediates that got it there in the first place. He outlined and illustrated it in works such as Natural History of Creation and Anthropogeny: The Developmental History of Man. These books were intended for a broad public, and reached it, to the chagrin of both his critics and colleagues.

The popular representation (from Anthropogeny -1874) showing similarities amongst various vertebrate species. Almost ubiquitously found in high school and introductory text books in some form.

His best seller, Die Welträthsel – The Riddle of the Universe, sold tens of thousands of copies in the first year alone, and was requested by Gandhi for permission to translate it into Gujarati. That hugely popular work would bring a “burning shame” to contemporary philosophers, be called “a mass of contradictions” by an eminent historian of biology, and lose him one of his closest intellectual confidants. As well the twentieth century historians were not quick to forget his division of the human species into twelve, and the subsequent rankings the races would be given.

From the 1st edition of Anthropogeny - 1868. The following edition would include twelve 'species' and the ape antecedents. Later editions would lose this provocative image but keep the phylogenetic tree ranking the races (See Richards Figs 7.13-7.15 pp.745-9)

In the end we have one easy way to look at Haeckel; through his Artforms in Nature, other artwork and his painstaking biological drawings. Now entered forever into the public domain, they are certain to reemerge in ways the creative and audacious embryologist and marine biologist never could have imagined.

Haeckel's Discomedusae from Kunstformen der Natur 1904

*Prepared in part for presentation at Acadia University, Biology 4023 Fall 2011

**Page references omitted for ease of reading. Please contact.

*** Title above is taken from Haeckel’s Riddle – Chapter VIII

References

Haeckel, Ernst, The Riddle of the Universe. Trans. Joseph McCabe. New York: Harpers, 1902. Print.

Haeckel, Ernst, The Evolution of Man, vol. 1. Trans Joseph McCabe. New York: Puntman’s, 1910. Print.

Proteus: A Nineteenth Century Vision. Dir. David Lebrun. Pref.  Marian Seldes, Corey Burton and Richard Dysart. 2004. Night Fire Films. DVD.

Richards, Robert J., The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle Over Evolutionary Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Print.

Note on the references: R. Richards esp. Intro & chapters 7,8,10,11, excellently written, convincing and through; Proteus is a well put together exploration of Heackel’s work on the Radiolaria and fixing him within historical context; Joseph McCAbes translation of The Riddle of the Universe is a very accessible read and lays bare Haeckel’s monism.

A model of the structure of ATP synthase - found in nearly all animal and plant cells.

Since I became interested in Blender several months ago I have been convinced of the potential applications of modelling in science. Obviously communications are greatly enhanced by the 3d models we can easily make these days, but there are also people out there using modelling to investigate basic science questions relating to biological systems. One such individual is Aleksei Aksimentiev, at the University of Illinois. Check out this brief podcast (and associated article) from EarthSky.org:

University of Illinois Professor Aleksei Aksimenitev, supercomputers in tow.

I came across Aksimntiev and his work group in the first stages of research into a presentaiton I will be giving for a seminar course in cell biology later this semester. The complexity of ATP synthase and the structure of the bacterial flagellum have long been a favourite of creationists in arguing the irreducible nature of these systems. While I won’t begin to tackle these arguments, which usually rely on nuanced semantics and the inherently probabilistic approach of the natural sciences, suffice to say that my own ‘belief’ resides in the continual emergence of principles and details that help to explain that which may at first seem supernatural.

The Aksimentiev group is using computation in a number of interesting ways; modelling the nanopore/DNA system mentioned in the podcast (which could potentially be developed into a cheap and quick gene sequencer), also in exploring the mechanical properties of microtubules, and in elucidating the possible function of yet to be understood multi-subunit proteins. All of these can be found at the main page for the Aksimentiev Group. To help with my own modelling and project I hope soon to explore the tutorials available, and to begin exploring the Visual Molecular Dynamics (VMD) and associated software environments. Did I mention most of these programs are free?

Screenshot from the program described above. Click to explore photo source and remote-visualizing with VMD.

We can start by defining Political Ecology by exclusion: it is not social geography, or social psychology with an ecological bent, or economic history, or social philosophy, or traditional knowledge. Nor is it any more just a criticism of classical or new political economy. Certainly informed by Marx, and even more so by Engles Dialectics of Nature, it is still well outside of this capital-centered theoretical perspective. Broadly, political ecology refers to the unequal sharing of the ecological costs and benefits of development, which are often but not always interrelated with their economic counterparts. A classic example is the coal miner who toils and may even die young, but lives in the midst of the ecological disaster of the coal mine, makes scarcely enough to keep himself and his family warm through the winter, whilst those who enjoy his labours may live in a picturesque country winter-chalet. In this way I personally claim to see a train of thought extending back especially to the French writer Emile Zola in the novel Germinal.

Zola's classic work on the situation of French coal miners in the 19th century - informed by his own anthropological participant research.

To try and construct this political ecology I had done my best to decipher Foucault, Heidegger and Derrida. Perhaps with time and hefty revisiting I’ll be able to incorporate their works. I’ve also read neo-Marxists and reactions to them, Matt Hern (contemporary Vancouver-based writer on urbanity), popular geographers Paul Robbins and David Montgommery and a smattering of articles dating back to the advent of the term in the 1950’s and a few select papers from the recently (1994) formed Journal of Political Ecology. I have been through the fallacies of drawing direct analogies with ecology – such as niche analysis, the organismal approach, and systems analysis that all have histories that generally date as far back as the scientific theories from which they drew their analogies. I have also attempted to classify the structuring of the built environment as a product of labor, which is really more a project directly within the classical perspectives of Marx and Durkheim. What I have settled on goes back to my attempts to understand the philosophies of Heidegger, Foucault and Derrida: A post-structuralist, phenomenological, emotive and existential account of what I know as opposed to that which I purport to know or understand.

Here I owe a huge debt of gratitude to professor Joseph Moore, of Vancouver Island University, who painstakingly guided my while I went down all these paths and did his best to provide me with the direction to formulate my own novel approach without interfering or simply imprinting his own conceptions.

While trying desperately to contribute to the ephemeral Academy of thought I have instead found myself more aptly positioned to add to the un-academic body of knowledge. It suits my current academic experience – or general lack thereof – and fits with my personal experiences in which legend, hearsay, journalism and literature have formed my understanding of the social world far more than academic theory and formal research publications.

I have focused on the only place I can pretend to know – Yellowknife, NT – with some other places I have drifted through in an attempt to build meaningful comparisons. Over the next few months I will publish on this forum the revised analyses of this, my hometown, and brief comparisons including Resistencia, the capital of the northern Argentine province of El Chaco and other Canadian towns. My data will be primarily personal experiences, with deductions and inferences therefrom.

The city of Resistencia on the río Paraná.

I am especially thankful to author Matt Hern for his perspective and the idea that while the academic cannon may have its usefulness, for those of us who hope to effectuate positive change in the world around us, the more accessible and honest prose of the storyteller is a much handier tool. So in the end I do not claim to have done anything except lain bare what I claim to know and have experienced. Speculations as to how to build this project are smattered throughout, but they can be taken more as musings than philosophical justification.

I hope that those of us who are often frustrated by what we see around them will gain some peace by pulling them apart – and putting them back together again. In the end I aim to gain and share insights into how to make positive changes within our communities by identifying the problems, their root causes, and the best means to their solutions.

“Ex nihlio omne ens qua ens.”

-Existential Poverb (“out of nothing every being becomes being”)

Leo Strauss, Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism

The purely physical, rationalised rendition of the self does not have true roots anywhere. It has arisen as an implication of the various philosophical positions that have sought to create a special place for humanity in the hierarchy of existence while essentially denying any possibility of transcendent being – be it our own pursuit as such or the a priori existence of a non-human transcendent entity. Husserl’s ego cogito (the ‘thinking I’) may be drawn to such a belief to rectify its experiences of life and eventual death with its incapacity to truly contemplate a world in which the ego itself is no longer there to perceive. At risk of sounding cliche, it really does touch on the ancient riddle of the tree in the forest. If there are no more ears then what does sound become? Doesn’t perception require the perceiver and well as the perceived?

Rational existentialism, in which I must come to terms with my physical existence and its limitations in order to function within the world in any meaningful way, has a transcendent root. First and foremost it posits the existence of meaning, a category of knowledge that exists outside the being. Meaning is discovered and not made. When an author writes or an artist paints they imbue their work with meaning but this meaning is considered to have existed prior to the work. Hence the importance of allusion, which attempts to tie into the stream of meaning that stretches back into human history. But where is the origin of meaning? Does it begin with existence itself, or in the origin of language or perhaps the visual arts or music?

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” -John 1:1

Second we have the world, another entity which exists outside of and completely separate from the observer. This is the simplification of our age-old religious problem. Many ancient cultures are though to have doubted the regular rising of the sun, or to at the very least have endorsed myths that posited scenarios in which the sun refused to rise on its usual schedule. It appears as though they would not take for granted something which they themselves were not able to verify. Be it Horus, Helios or Inti, someone usually stood in the stead of the average person so they could sleep in comfort knowing that the next day would proceed just as the previous even without their constant watchful gaze. In the complex mathematics of Newton and Leibniz a mechanistic explanation becomes possible but instead relies on paradoxes that troubled even the mos educated minds.

How then does this all relate to ecology? Ecology is the study of systems in which the evidence garnered at certain points proves the functioning of the system within certain parameters during the intervals between observation. While the same is broadly true for all the positivist physical sciences (i.e. the entire Faculty of Sciences save Mathematics) there are features that distinguish this particular branch of biology and render it especially relevant in light of our existential argument. Within the understanding of the human entity as a complex ecological entity with a natural flora in constant flux and and the nuanced and unpredictable complexities this brings, lies the possibility for rectifying the need for transcendent understanding within a purely natural world-view. For the ecological individual the world – including the functioning of their own internal organ systems – is subject to to complex interactions of a nearly countless myriad organisms. Each organism is its own actor with a certain degree of free will – if we take the term loosely. Even chemotaxis is not predetermined, but depends on subatomic quantum interactions which react in a chain to produce an observable effect. Different not so much in type but only in degree from the interactions that give rise to thought in our current neurological understanding, quantum reality gives each and every living creature a certain capacity for self determination. In a roundabout way we have returned to the pre-civilized (read: pre-settlement and pre-agriculture) animistic beliefs in which transcendence and self-awareness are not the sole domain of human actors.

The human community I refer to hear is not the fraternity we should experience as the now cliche ‘global village’ but the fraternity we feel with our guts and simple facts like the newly recognized importance of the appendix. From our throats to our anuses, our urethras and at times our lymph and blood streams – we are not human entities so much as we are a complex flora - we are an ecological entity with our own webs of production and myriad commensal, mutual and parasitic interactions.

The arguments presented here do of course require further thought and elucidation. They deal heavily with the a priori, or that which exists prior to and without the influence of perception. The writings of Immanuel Kant deal heavily with this concept and I am not overly familiar with them. Also herein are references to Descartes, another recent thinker with whom I am not overly familiar. As well I have knowingly missed the complex treatment of anti-rational existentialism found in Kierkegaard and excluded the popular and widely known philosophy of Platonic Forms which also deals heavily with the nature of experienced reality. Yet I think I have built enough of a concise and complex argument to make my main point; that much in the way that the absolute vacuum of space has been re-filled with the very ether-like dark matter, so too could the philosophical void left by the mechanistic human (especially contentious since the time of Darwin), be re-filled with the animistic understanding of human life as an amalgam of  beings. We can only hope that soon new discoveries in the physical world will help us extend this animism back to the inorganic, to understand how even rocks, stars and galaxies make their ‘preferences’ felt. In that age the need for classical religion will disappear – though we can expect its hangers-on to linger at least a few millennia more.

Crafted from my own handiwork - note that any abnormalities represent disfigurations of the artist and not faults in the program.

The image above represents the product of the several tutorials I have gone through in the last few months since I discovered Blender, a free, open-source 3d design program. All told, this piece took about 90 minutes from start to finish. While there is a steep learning curve for the product, the weeks spent getting to this point are due more to the other things going on in my life –  I’m not a graphic designer of any kind and have no formal training. I would estimate a combined total of fifteen hours reading and mucking around to get to the final model which I produced just this afternoon. While I do have a fairly capable computer (AMD Phenom, 6GB Ram, Radeon 5770), I think the earlier versions of Blender (v.2.48 for example) would run on most contemporary machines.

Check out the media below for an idea of the awesome capabilities of this program:

Elf-head rendering done with Blender 2.5 - Source: Blender cookie

The image below represents most of the steps I took in learning this simple modeling the hand (excluding the basic materials tutorial product, i.e. a beach ball). The image below that is a screen-shot showing the armature (bones) of the simple hand in the Blender2.5 environment.

Steps to the Blender hand - from simple house to simple person with multires/subdivision to hand with full armature and material.

Blender screen-shot with three different 3D view windows and the outline window. Half the time I spent learning the program was on all the different windows available and their manipulation.

For those who are curious, I also spent a lot of my initial learning focusing on the liquid simulator and downloading the run-times necessary to use the Blender game-engine to export stand alone executable files – features I plan to have a lot of fun exploiting once I’m more capable with the basics.

Here are all the links to pieces necessary to run Blender:

Blender.org – rife with everything from the downloads to tons of tutorial and forums

Blender Cookie – nifty community site, haven’t explored this one too much yet

Python – open-source programming language – don’t worry you don’t need to know a damn thing about it, just download the correct version as per Blender.org

Blender N00b to pro Wikibook – excellent source for learning everything, I’ve just recently gotten around th going through the first few chapters in sequence

YouTube – Just search whatever it is you are looking for, sometimes it can be easier to comprehend than the writing in the Wikibook – just make sure to go high resolution so you can see what they’re doing!

Child Sexual Abuse as an Underreported Phenomenon

I personally am very concerned that underreporting could be an issue, that victims may slip by unnoticed and even be subjected to further victimization. While this may have been more severe in the past, perhaps even on the scale of “an order of magnitude”, it is less so now. Not to say that underreporting is not still a problem, but not so much as it has been. Current widespread fear regarding pedophilia has probably helped to assure that parents and authorities are very much on guard for these things after they have occurred. The preference would of course be that they not occur in the first place.

Pornography

Pornography depends on the viewer, and how it is viewed. For a healthy individual it may serve to “diffuse sexual tension” whereas for an individual with problematic sexual attractions (paraphilia). Like alcohol, drugs, and even food, youtube or television, the problem is not in the medium but in the user and in the particulars of how it is used.

Relations between Adults and Adolescents

As I had hoped and expected, Dr. Berlin did not see any need for facilitating these sorts of interactions, and that instead the problem lies more in a lack of understanding and support for healthy intimate relations between adolescent peers. Want the best way to shield your child against pedophiles? Try allowing and encouraging them to be involved with people their own age, taking a limited but active role in screening. The outcomes of dating significantly older individuals is “not helpful” at the very best, and we are all too aware of just how bad it can be in the more common of circumstances.

Parents who are open about sexuality, including their own child’s potential homosexual interests or interests in individuals a couple years different in age my be best for shielding their adolescents from interference by adults. For parents of young children it more likely centers around being aware of a child’s crushes and curiosities, allowing them to explore healthy avenues of development with peers.

Neuropathology and the Legal System

As any rational individual would expect the best way to integrate understandings of mental illness (for which neuropathology is the broader umbrella) is to facilitate communications between the criminal justice system and public health officials. To elaborate we can envision this as ranging well beyond simple expert testimony (which is a cost-ineffective, case by case approach) to more collaborations on policy and legal reform, to the development of specific inter-disciplinary journals. One place to start might be the Journal of Correctional health Care.

From a public health perspective current laws may even be much of the problem. In a 1991 publication Dr. Berlin cited changes in Maryland state law that had caused self-referrals to his sexual disorders clinic to drop to zero in one year. The change was in requiring that therapists report  all instances of sexual misconduct involving minors – be it past or present-  reported in confidence by patients.

The Internet and Self-Regulation

The internet has been a problematic invention in terms of sexual misconduct; “clinicians may encounter a number of cases where the presence of the Internet itself seems to have been the primary impetus for such (paraphilic or pedophilic) conduct.” (Paraphilias and the Internet in Sex and the Internet: A guidebook for clinicians). Both previous offenders and those who worry they might be at risk of offending have a duty to self-regulate. Possibilities discussed included purchasing professional blocking software (such as NetNanny) or giving the account password for an internet enabled PC to a family member, so it can only be used with their permission or even presence.

Chemical Intervention

There is a more drastic approach to individuals dealing with problematic sexual urges. It has earned the unfortunate name ‘chemical castration’ though it is no such thing. Chemical intervention can refer to any sort of psychoactive drug use to control behaviour. These could include general therapies like SSRI’s or anti-anxiety medications. More specifically (and generally from the Doctor’s responses, much more effecitve at dealing with sexual misconduct disorders) is the approach of androgen reduction therapy. Dr. Berlin here emphasized the importance of informed consent; that a patient really know what they are getting in to. Our society is generally moving away from forced drug therapy, like that which may have led to the untimely death of scientist Alan Turing. Coercion is an issue, and forced administration a blatant abuse of human rights, but offenders or potential offenders should know of the types of drugs available for this so they can make their own decisions regarding treatment. Unfortunately stigma and certain laws make it difficult for individuals to seek treatment or even information.

I wanted to publish this first portion as I said, while my memory is still fresh, and because of the nature of the visits I have been getting to my blog. While there have not been many comments, my earlier post has garnered a lot of hits, and WordPress even goes so far as to provide search terms that led browsers to the site. Terms such as “how to prevent pedophilia in the family”,  ”why is sexual abuse of children so prevalent in our society” and “what to do if you think you have been a victim of pedophilia” are heart-wrenchingly common. I hope to start a collaborative blog project soon with a view to further exploring the nature of this societal problem, and more importantly to develop a wealth of free and thoughtful resources for anyone affected by pedophilia.

Anyone interested please stay tuned or simply comment on this post; I’ll get back to it once I finish my search for existing forums and domains that might fit the bill.

In the mean time try a Google Scholar search on Dr. Berlin – he’s quite a prolific author and the abstracts alone are quite interesting if you (like me) don’t have means to access the full articles.

A couple of links suggested by Dr. Berlin:

Safer Societies Foundation

Stop It Now

With the pending release of the much delayed Duke Nukem Forever, we find ourselves at another one of those highly frequented intersections of video games and society, that of sex and violence. Duke Nukem is once again following the same old premise; aliens have come to take our women and impregnate them. Only the Duke can save them.

While it’s important not to take this Bruce Willis-esque raunchy action hero too seriously, to blindly pass by the rampant nudity, strip clubs and general portrayal of women primarily as sex objects would be foolish. Sure, it’s a mature rated game, but anyone who thinks kids never play games beyond their age class needs to only ask my eight-year old self what he thought of atom bomb scene in Terminator 2.

Linda Hamilton in her premonition of the 1999 bombing of LA. You best believe that s#!t gave me nightmares.

It would also be nice to think that adults, at least the mature ones, can separate fiction from reality, and not let the worlds they play in bleed into the ones they live in. This too is too important to be taken for granted. So what exactly do we need to examine in the Duke’s libatious behaviour?

• Strip Clubs
• Substance Abuse
• Nuditiy
• Unrealistic female forms
• Unrealistic male forms
• Hypersexuality

It’s a game. It’s a funny game. It’s meant for adults. But why is it okay for adults and not children? Precisely because they are (supposedly) able to separate fiction from reality and to discuss it in an abstract way. In other words, because adults will engage in debate exactly like we are here. So, having justified the whole existence of my post, I’ll go on just a wee bit more.
I think a lot of us could see the problem of a young child without any sexual experiences to draw upon having their perception skewed by the Duke. What about a less than mature adult, one who doesn’t have an optimal repertoire of real experiences themselves? What about this phenomenon in a world where ‘virtual’ sex (pornography, and increasingly sex orioented video games) is increasingly easier to access? Isn’t it conceivable that as ‘virtual’ sex becomes more interactive and high-res, ‘real’ sex will become less attractive to some people who haven’t had ideal successes with it? This is another one of those ever popular video-game debates, the ‘introversion’ problem.
Links:
Escapist magazine, couldn’t find the YouTube equivalent to easily embed so had to do it the good ol’ fashioned way! (no pun intended): Sex in Video Games – Extra Credit
Not so good, but quick and informative for neophytes: 2Bit Gaming – Sex and Video Games (i.e your parents or anyone over 40)
Brenda Brathwaite (Blog) – Author of Sex in Video Games – (let me know if you see an affordable paperback edition anywhere).
And a much earlier edit of the Extra Credit Video