In the late ’80s, a friend of mine had a conversation with a couple of Trotskyist acquaintances, where she got them to admit that there just was no point in having any politics without addressing sustainability issues. Whereas I agree with her about this, there are clearly also political positions which allow for non-sustainable options, such as driving the human race to extinction for the sake of the planet. This is a form of accelerationism and I’ll return to it in another post, but in general, most people are expected to agree that the long-term survival of the human race, or a fraction of it, is something they could get on board with, and to be honest I do think that could be a positive thing. It would be hypocritical for someone with grandchildren to be anti-natalist, although they may have changed their minds since they had children or may have had children against their will or better judgement, so it is possible. Given the current forced-birth movement in the US, this is indeed a plausible scenario, and it has also been in the past. Nonetheless it doesn’t apply to me. Consequently, no opposition to effective measures being taken to extend our long-term survival is consistent with such politics. What I’m saying, to put it simply, is that if you believe people being around in the future is a good thing, you can’t oppose effective measures to manage, for instance, climate change. If you do, your politics are worthless in that respect.
So, suppose you are a supporter of the current fascistic régime in the United States. Leaving aside your support for fascism, for once maybe tolerating that as a viable political position, you cannot support opposition to environmental sustainability. It may be that the current approach to relieving climate change is ineffective, but it’s a reality and urgently needs addressing. You can question the effectiveness of the measures, but you can’t support one of the largest industrially-active nations in the world opposing attempts to do something about it, because if you do that your politics don’t matter. Policies are unlikely to be realised in a post-apocalyptic world.
Other measures being taken are, well I would say equally bad but in fact the sheer scale of the approach to climate change dwarfs the others. However, a major one of these is to erode pandemic readiness and the ability to counteract research into addressing the dangers of a new pandemic if it does occur, because the chances are that it will and that it’ll be more severe if, again, a nation of that size actively avoids doing something about bird ‘flu. Again this just means that many millions of people will die. Whatever leads to this mind set has to be opposed, again regardless of what one’s politics are further down the line from this.
So that’s one thing. What else?
That a lot of what’s going on is a distraction from other things which are taking place too. Trump himself is a distraction. In a sense he doesn’t matter. Nor does Elon Musk. There are not shadowy people behind a curtain orchestrating this either. This has been thrown up by the inevitable and impersonal economic and political forces operating within capitalism. Apparent leaders are insignificant on the whole, and by focussing on Trump we’re kind of playing into what “they” want. Nonetheless their actions are important. It’s also important to be wary about paying too much attention to them. That said, it’d be weird not to talk about these antics.
The very obvious one is Musk’s Nazi salute, and this in fact highlights a lot about the character of world leaders in recent decades. It seems edgelordy – deliberately provocative and extreme and possibly insincere. There are a couple of issues with his behaviour. One is that attempts have been made to excuse it on the basis of being on the spectrum. There are clearly aspects of this which do reflect this, for instance he may have expected his audience to return the salute, which obviously wouldn’t happen, but none of these are adequate excuses. That specific piece of behaviour may be associated with other behaviours, and in fact is, such as calling the caver who refused his submarine to rescue the scout troop in Thailand a paedophile, which demonstrate that he’s not fit to be in the role he’s been placed in, and that in fact is rather a long thread to be pulled regarding others in office. The real difficulty is that Musk is a fifty-three year old man behaving like a thirteen year old boy. This, one might think, is exceptional but unfortunately it isn’t, and it’s not new either. I first noticed this in about 1991 at the age of twenty-three when George Bush senior did himself no favours in the negotiations to prevent the Gulf War and again behaved like a juvenile. The world is being run by little boys. I’m not entirely keen on this characterisation because it seems insulting to little boys, but there’s a strong element of egocentrism and emotional immaturity in their behaviour. As I say, this isn’t new. Caligula and Nero spring to mind, for example. That said, we particularly cannot afford for men behaving like that to be in esteemed positions nowadays with the likes of the climate crisis, risk of weapons of mass destruction use and pandemics ready to rage across the planet.
Then there’s the question of Panama, Canada and Denmark. Panama, sadly, is business as usual because it seems very much to be the continuing pursuit of US foreign policy in Latin America which has been going on for a very long time now. The reason I want to focus here on what’s happening in the North is that Denmark and Canada are both in NATO. I also recognise the importance of self-determination for those living in Kalallit Nunaat, also known as Greenland, and Canada. The history of élite White people’s relationships with these peoples is liable to introduce more than a little nervousness into their reaction to Trump’s idea of Manifest Destiny here. In fact, this is also the case with ICE harassment of the Navajo and I’m guessing others in the past few days, on their own territory. I don’t want to ignore any of this but I do want to focus on Denmark because that’s what’s been made most prominent by the media lately.
Denmark is a NATO member, and famously an attack on one NATO member is considered an attack on all by the organisation. Clearly the US is a NATO member, implying that by doing this, Trump has attacked his own country, but more importantly the most obvious thing to do next would be for NATO members to declare war on the US. That wouldn’t be a good thing, and there are other practical considerations such as the situation in the Ukraine which mean that having been stimulated to shore up defences in Kalaallit Nunaat, resources may be taken away from other areas. At the moment, many Scandinavian citizens want their own nations to break off diplomatic relations with the US. It’s also worth bearing in mind that in a sense, Trump has declared war on his own nation, and this is very close to being true in the sense that even the people who voted for him are being ill-treated by the government. It’s not just a metaphor that this has happened, and it’s vital that we remember that millions of American citizens, many of whom would never have considered voting for him, are now going to suffer as a result of his election.
More widely, we have Starmer continuing, so far as I know, not to condemn the régime officially. We now have quite a number of wealthy Western nations who have been royally pissed off by their actions and it seems evident that some kind of alliance against them is becoming ever-more practical. Although I have little faith in FPTP, it seems to me now that voting for a party led by someone who has not openly condemned a fascist régime in spite of the likelihood of support from others is unacceptable and tantamount to supporting the fascists. I realise that Starmer doesn’t speak for everyone, but continuing to be a Labour MP or MSP in these circumstances is no longer okay. A breakaway left wing party does seem feasible but right now I feel I’ve reached the point where I can no longer reconcile supporting them with my conscience. And you may say this’ll just let the Conservatives back in, but the fact is that the Labour Party’s whole thing right now seems to be just saying they’re not the Tories, without actually doing much that’s any good. They’ve come out and said their priority is economic growth, which is reason enough to oppose them. But this is what’s happening in Britain, not America.
So I don’t know, other stuff may come up, I may have forgotten stuff and this has been a bit of a ramble, so what’s the take away from this? I suppose to return to my original point: if you support any régime which is actively working to worsen climate change and reduce biodiversity, you are either child-free or don’t care about your children or grandchildren, even if you are a fascist.
Yes, I know what’s happening in the Ukraine. This is what’s stopped me from blogging. Before I get going on this subject, I want to explain why I haven’t said much about it. The truth is that my limited knowledge of the matter leads me to fear saying anything which might turn out to be ill-judged or crass. We all know it’s happening. My response to it, like many other issues, is to engage in what I hope is a helpful manner but also to recognise that there is a lot else going on in the world at all times, and there’s a rôle for escape. For what it’s worth, I’m thinking about Putin’s odd association between a country with a Jewish leader and Nazism, and the psychological influence being a long-term leader has on the person in that position. Even so, I am going to talk about zebras.
There’s a saying in medicine that if you hear the sound of hooves, you should conclude it’s horses and not zebras, which obviously makes more sense in Europe than in certain parts of Afrika. One of the shortcomings of my cognitive style is that I will tend to think of zebras more than horses and then wonder why everyone else hasn’t thought of that. In the context of medical diagnosis, this might mean I’m more likely to think someone has Lewy Body Dementia than Alzheimers or Paget’s Disease of Bone than arthritis. This is, however, self-correcting and doesn’t constitute a huge problem, because in herbalism one can address more than one possible diagnosis at once without necessarily doing harm. Also, it isn’t my job to diagnose, which is a responsibility legally enshrined in particular offices, none of which are mine. That said, I do need to have a firm grasp of disease processes to address them.
But this is not the other blog, so I’ll broaden that to something which is in fact relevant to the current Eurasian situation. If a first-language reader of a language with a Latin script such as English sees a page of Cyrillic text and is mindful of the adage that if you hear hooves, expect horses, they’re quite likely to presume that the passage is Russian rather than, say, Ossetian. However, Cyrillic has been used to write a wide variety of languages and it may not be Russian. This, of course, would arise in the case of the Ukrainian language, since a cursory glance from someone unfamiliar with the details of the differences might think the text was Russian. This is part of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Ukrainian:
Всі люди народжуються вільними і рівними у своїй гідності та правах. Вони наділені розумом і совістю і повинні діяти у відношенні один до одного в дусі братерства.
And this is the same in Russian:
Все люди рождаются свободными и равными в своем достоинстве и правах. Они наделены разумом и совестью и должны поступать в отношении друг друга в духе братства.
For the record, in English this reads:
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
Since I’m much more familiar with Russian than Ukrainian, having abortively attempted to learn it in the late 1970s and early ’80s CE, the first text looks foreign to me, and in particular its use of the letter “i” seems very incongruous. The two languages are quite similar, and I wonder if the differences would be perceived as a little like those between Scots and English. That is, is there a tendency for Russian speakers to regard Ukrainian as merely a dialect of Russian? Historically there has been. This might sound quite abstruse in the setting of the conflict, and I’m aware too that many Russians won’t consider this war as done in their name, but it does impinge on English media in one particular aspect: the name of the capital city.
I’ve long considered the name of the capital of the Ukraine to be «Киев», but in fact that is the Russian version. The Ukrainian, and therefore correct, name of the city is «Київ», and at this point I’m also wondering about Ukrainian punctuation – do they use guillemets like Russian or something more like inverted commas? The Romanisation of the name is now “Kyiv” in English, whereas it has formerly been written “Kiev”, the Russian pronunciation. Is it important to focus on this with all the other stuff going on? Well, probably. The spelling and pronunciation of placenames in the Ukraine has remained stubbornly Russian in the international news media even though the country became independent from Russia in 1991 and the name of the capital was officially changed in 1995. This politicises the name. It once again reminds me of Scottish placenames, which in that case is further complicated by the presence of the Gàidhlig language and its nationwide promotion by the Scottish government. Speaking of which, when I laboriously ploughed through a Russian tweet yesterday (not “labourious” – there’s another one), I found myself, as I often am, reminded of Q-Celtic languages in the dual pronunciation of many of the consonants, leading me to feel very much, once again, that they could really benefit from being written in Cyrillic script. But it ain’t gonna happen is it? Another illustration of the politics of scripts.
But this post wasn’t supposed to be about the Ukraine but horses, asses and zebras. Note that I put horses first in that list. Conceptually, we often have a tendency to separate marked from unmarked concepts in our language and thought, so I clearly regard horses as the unmarked concept in that list. Also, asses are apparently less exotic than zebras to me. There is some justification for that because a zebra, visually speaking, is literally marked, but there are other aspects to this. For instance, in Western Eurasia, where I live, horses are more familiar and widespread than zebras, and this is basically down to human exploitation of them. Historically, the exploitation of horses is vastly important and the domestication of the horse is a necessary pre-requisite to that. I feel unqualified to comment on the issue of veganism and horses because I’m aware of disparate views and my own encounters with them are somewhat limited, though also a lot more extensive than the average contemporary Western urbanite because I grew up in the country, used to hunt sab and have been on a lot of demos with mounted police present. It’s odd to think that up until a little over a century ago, these animals would’ve been an everyday part of life for most people in these isles regardless of where they lived.
I’m aware also that I’m thinking rather in terms of a binary opposition between zebras and horses rather than a ternary one between horses, asses and zebras. I can’t help thinking, though, that zebras and asses have a lot in common compared to zebras and horses, such as their tails and manes being more similar. I don’t have a firm impression of how large zebras are either, and I’m aware that there are three species of them and just talking about “zebras” generically is fairly vague.
But the question I’m working up to is this (actually there are two): Is a horse a plain zebra, or a zebra a stripy horse? It could equally well be, is a donkey a plain zebra or a zebra a stripy donkey? I should probably also explain why I’ve been calling them asses. The reason for this is that donkeys to me seems to refer to the domesticated species, but there are two other species of ass who are wild. I’m not being frivolous here, incidentally. My question is, are the extinct ancestors of today’s equines primitively stripy or primitively plain? Or did they have a different appearance than either of these? It seems to me that we assume in many pictures of prehistoric equines that they were primarily plain, although some have stripy portions of their coats. When we do this, are we being “horse-centric” or is it based in science? Are zebras the unusual ones? How could we find out?
The other question also sounds nonsensical but isn’t: is a zebra black with white stripes or white with black stripes? This doesn’t seem to make sense until you see one of the unusual individual zebras who are the other way round than usual, and at that point you realise that it is in fact normally a particular way round. Right now, I can’t remember which. But this is a secondary point.
Equines are members of a declining clade, that of odd-toed ungulates or perissodactyls. This order’s heyday was back in the earlier part of the Cenozoic and includes the largest land mammal ever, the Indricotherium, which shows convergent evolution with the giant sauropod dinosaurs of the Mesozoic. Nowadays there are the relatively widespread equines, the rhinos and the tapirs, and so we’re in the peculiar position of having a small order with one or two extremely populous species, namely the donkey and horse, a couple in the middle and a relatively large number of species who are largely recently extinct because of us, or severely endangered for the same reason. However bad the domestication of the horse and donkey may have been for individual members of those species, it’s turned out to be good for their survival as species.
Domestic zebras don’t happen. This is because they don’t meet six criteria making a species suitable for this, which incidentally humans may have done themselves – we may ourselves be domesticated. These criteria are that they must:
Eat food that’s easily available where humans live.
Reach maturity quickly.
Don’t panic easily when startled.
Be docile.
Breed easily in captivity.
Have a social hierarchy.
Zebras only conform to some of these. For instance, they do graze like horses but they’re quite aggressive. They’re unpredictable and have been known to attack humans. The same is true of horses but to a much lesser degree. This seems like a good adaptation for resisting being dominated by other species, such as ourselves, but ironically it seems to have led to them becoming much rarer than horses, or perhaps staying at a similar level of population for longer. Remarkably, one of the effects of domestication is often that the animals resulting have black and/or white patches, so the fact that zebras aren’t but are still black and white is interesting.
One problem with working out whether they were primitively striped or not is that fossil horses are of course just bones and teeth on the whole. I’m not aware of either frozen or tar pit equines, although they may exist, so the problem is they tend to be fossilised in such a way as not to preserve skin or hair. There’s another issue too. It may not be a question of stripes versus plain so much as the distribution of the stripes or the presence of other patterns. There are melanistic zebra foals with white spots on a black background, as it were. It seems there could be several ways of working out what happened when.
Zebras are stripy for a reason and the question arises of what selective factors might have led to this. Perhaps surprisingly, it doesn’t seem to be connected to protection from large predators. They can be smelt by lions and other carnivores from further off than the stripes would make a noticeable difference to their appearance. It’s thought that the real reason is to confuse biting insects, which is also the cause of their tail anatomy, which acts as a fly swatter. Asses have the same kind of tails. Therefore, is it possible that the stripiness or otherwise of an equine could be related to their tail anatomy? Not entirely, since asses are not striped, but horses are the ones with divergent tails and zebras and asses both have the original in that respect. However, these are only two of a dozen and a half theories about this.
Just to answer the question of whether zebras are black with white stripes or the other way round, zebra skin is black and it’s an adaptation for some of their coat to appear white, so they are black with white stripes rather than the other way round. This becomes evident when you see a zebra who is striped as a “negative” of the common type, because they actually look like white animals with black stripes. There are also three living species of zebras with slightly different skin patterns: Grévy’s, Mountain and the Plains Zebra. They’re in a subgenus referred to as Hippotigris, and there are two others, the asses in the unsurprisingly named Asinus – these have three living species, two of whom are Eurasian and one Afrikan. Finally, there’s the horse itself, presumably in a subgenus called Equus, and although there are two subspecies of these, namely the tarpan and Przewalski’s horse, the latter has a different number of chromosomes, so I don’t understand why it’s considered the same species. European horses, now extinct, were also a separate species, and some of these were piebald, as can be seen in cave paintings. Przewalski’s horse and the ancestors of modern domesticated horses diverged during the last Ice Age, roughly in Crô-Magnon times. It may be that the tarpan and Przewalski’s horse are the same species and horses a separate one.
There used to be a fourth subgenus: Amerihippus. Unsurprisingly, these are American, and in fact horses originally evolved in North America although they died out before Columbus. Once again, the presence of horses and their possible domestication in America might have made a huge difference to the course of history, but of course nobody knows if their temperament was more like zebras or horses and asses, and of course whether they were striped, plain or something else. There are Pre-Columbian native figurines of horses. It used to be thought that American horses were wiped out during the last Ice Age, but in fact they seem to have survived it. Genetic studies have shown that there were horses unrelated to those introduced by Spanish settlers in North America, and only two years after Cortez arrived, there were people on horseback in the Carolinas, even though meticulous paperwork recorded that none of the horses brought by the Conquistadores had escaped or been otherwise lost. There is a political element in the idea that American horses died out in the Ice Age, because it makes it seem that anything worthwhile was introduced by the Europeans. However, this does still raise the question of why horses seem to be so much more important in Eurasian cultures than Native American, and also makes me wonder if their ancestors had always been in America. Native American dog breeds are remarkable in that although they are still of the same appearance and behaviour as the breeds present before the Europeans, they are actually now entirely descended from Old World dogs. How this happened is a mystery. Native American horses today can have curly or very long manes compared to Old World horses. They are also sometimes piebald. More remarkably, some of them have slightly stripy legs! This, I think, is a clue.
The other hypotheses regarding zebra stripes include the idea that they create cooling convection currents by forming alternating hot and cold strips of air, that they help zebras recognise each other and that they’re warning colouration for what are apparently quite aggressive animals. If these situations apply to North America at the time the ancestors of today’s Afrikan zebras left, it’s feasible that they were already striped.
It’s said that the reason for the long manes and hairy tails of horses is connected to the North American climate. If this is so, it would be expected that their ancestors wouldn’t have had these before it became quite so harsh. It seems that the cold of the Ice Ages led to horses evolving these features, and in fact Przewalski’s horses have spikier manes than the more familiar horses, although their tails are still similar. As mentioned previously, the Palæarctic and Nearctic zoögeographical realms are sometimes united into a single Holarctic realm, consisting of North America and Eurasia, and the mammalian and other fauna of this vast region, comprising fifteen percent of the planet’s land surface excluding Antarctica, is shared between the two continents, such as wolves, bears, formerly woolly mammoths, beavers and so forth. However, of course there are differences – coyotes spring to mind very close to being wolves but not quite – and the question arises of whether the North American horses are the same species as Eurasian horses. I presume that if they couldn’t breed true, this would’ve been noticed by now, so the alternatives seem to be that native North American horses are either hybrids with Eurasian horses with some North American horse DNA, just as some Homo sapiens have Denisovan and/or Neanderthal DNA, or that the horses in question have always been two subspecies. The former possibility is particularly interesting because of the presence of faintly striped legs among them. If this is from a separate species of native North American horse hybridised with Eurasian horses, maybe that species was more obviously striped.
I’ve largely ignored asses in all this, which is probably a mistake. I do have the impression, and it’s just a hunch, that asses and zebras are closer to each other than zebras and horses. One reason I think this is that there are native Afrikan asses but no native Afrikan horses. Zebras are smaller than horses at around a dozen hands and weigh from 250 to 450 kilos. Adult plains zebras can be as little as ten hands and Afrikan wild asses actually slightly larger. It’s easy to get hypnotised by the apparently central, “standard” equines we’re familiar with in Europe and ignore a possible alternate route of zebra ancestry.
So, to conclude, this is what I think, and this isn’t based on genetics. It’s scientifically established that equines are essentially American animals. Incidentally, there also used to be native South American horses which I’ve ignored for the purposes of this post. The original members of Equus had coats of various colours and patterns, including piebald, black and different shades of brown. Some of these had faint stripes, and these traits were widely distributed through the first species of the genus, Equus simplicidens, also known as the American zebra and found in Idaho, Texas and presumably other places. They’re supposed to have looked like this (the one on the left):
I don’t know what the reasoning behind the idea that the American zebra was striped is. I do know that the apparently most basal population of humans, the San, has considerable genetic variation in skin tone so my conclusion is that the American zebra was probably quite variable but had a brown and fawn striped variety. I also wonder if the South American horses were a lot more like zebras due to living in similar climates to today’s Afrika south of the Sahara.
A Box Of Chocolates 