Olivia Judson offers this:

grasshoppers that have to take measures to avoid spiders grow more slowly and lay fewer eggs than grasshoppers in spider-free zones. In areas of Yellowstone where wolves are abundant, female elk give birth to fewer young. Birds that perceive their breeding area to be full of animals that will eat their eggs or young may skip breeding altogether, or lay fewer eggs than usual. In other words, predators keep prey numbers down simply by being scary.

But aren't there many more examples where the opposite is true - where predation urges growth? Where - even more counter-intuitively - predator and prey are cooperating on some level? As my teacher Michael Pollan elegantly demonstrated in Botany of Desire, predator prey relationships can turn into mutualism: The apple tree, rather than trying to poison its predator, instead pulls a kind of evolutionary judo move and uses the fact that it's being eaten to its benefit. Of course the apple did this by luck (the right configuration of genes at the right moment), but the fable of the apple seems useful in this recessionary world: When someone comes to eat you, the impulse is to react like the grasshopper - but if you can figure out a way to act like the apple, that looks like a far better strategy.

Death at sea

I did a story for Crosscurrents about the strange season we've been having off the California coast. In it - mea culpa - I sin by saying some of these animal deaths are natural while the "dead zones" are not. It's such a convenient shorthand for a 4 minute radio piece. You can see how it has become a convenient (though blinding) shorthand for our thinking.
But a fun story for those armchair naturalists who want to know why all these animals are having such a hard time this year.

Photo by Chad King/NOAA

Surgery versus therapy

If you carefully squint at the top right corner of this picture you'll see me running the upper North Fork of the Kaweah. I love kayaking. But as a kid I popped my right shoulder out doing it - a lot (I had some bad habits - plus I've always had loose shoulders). By the time I was in college my shoulder would slip out if I so much as made an expressive gesture ("Just go that way, over th-aargahhaaaaaa!"). So I got surgery. The doctor told me he "tightened everything up" and "cleaned it out" and he gave me the video to prove that he hadn't just been messing with me while I was under. So I gobble Vicodin, wear the sling for a few months, and am not allowed to kayak for a full year. That was spring of 2000. And all was well until spring of 2009.
We were up in Downieville to run Pauly Creek (I don't have pictures but there are great ones here). It's a short run with lots of waterfalls and I was feeling great. I ran the big (20 foot or so) drop at the bottom which I'd never done before (because my friend Eric nearly died there and his stories spooked me). It was still early in the day so we drove back up to the top and I convinced a small contingent to hike a couple miles upstream to get a little more for our money. None of us had ever seen it before, and the light was starting to turn amber with evening as I led the crew down the first drop. Things went well until about the fifth rapid. I had lined up to charge from right to left, break through a hole, and end up in an eddy on the far side of the creek. But just as I reached for my first paddle stroke a hidden rock caught the downstream edge of my boat and stopped it dead. The rest of my body rotated around that pivot point like a cracking whip. As I went under, the paddle blade caught the water. You are supposed to have a loose hand - so that you release the paddle shaft in these situations were the opposing forces are getting big. I had a death grip. (more after the jump)

David Brooks calls some attention to that Goldhill article. He's saying - look: enough with futzing with the window treatments, we've got to do something about the sinkhole under the corner of the house. I feel the same way, and yet...

There's a tendency for us journalists to crave fundamental change - because it's exciting. And because we like to believe that good ideas can change the world (because that's our stock and trade). History is full of examples though, of big changes leading to big problems. There's more success when the changes are of the tinkering sort - a gradual sort of coevolutionary growth between insurers, government, business and medicine.

The all-natural-Heidi-force in me wants big change of course. It wants a system that doesn't push treatment (and kill hundreds of thousands a year with overtreatment). The inner Heidi applauds Bruce McCall's Shouts an Murmurs:

Did You Know: Human illness adds two trillion dollars annually to America’s gross domestic product. Are you contributing your fair share?

and this brilliant miniature:

Q. & A. of the Month
Q: My current statement lists two hundred and thirty-one charges for “brain surgery,” even though I have had no brain surgery. How can I rectify this?
A: Invalid question. Brain surgery is not covered under your plan.

People think doctors are all-knowing

Just got off a call going over the release of a poll by the Campaign for Effective Patient Care. The biggest takeaway for me was this: 65 percent of people in California think that their medical care is backed up by solid scientific evidence. Of course in reality - as Shannon Brownlee writes in the group's report -

In a landmark 2008 report, the prestigious Institute of Medicine reported that at most half of the care that doctors deliver is evidence-based.

This is important to the health care debate - people have been awful upset about comparative treatment reviews (the extremists think looking at how effective something is and how much it costs will lead to death panels). But at the same time nobody wants care that's not effective - we all want our doctors to know what treatments work and what don't. How to explain this contradiction? Well this poll explains it. People oppose comparative effectiveness research because they (65 percent) think their doctor already knows what's best for them. So a minority that sees this research as cover for a rationing regime is not drowned out by the reasonable majority who should be saying we want to stop spending so much (and being injured by) care that doesn't work.

How health care killed David Goldhill's dad

The Atlantic recently published a great piece of contrarian thinking on health care. David Goldhill points out that all the incentives in our medical system encourage more treatment - and that's making us sicker (plus, it killed his dad, or at least made the end of his life unpleasant).

All of the actors in health care—from doctors to insurers to pharmaceutical companies—work in a heavily regulated, massively subsidized industry full of structural distortions. They all want to serve patients well. But they also all behave rationally in response to the economic incentives those distortions create. Accidentally, but relentlessly, America has built a health-care system with incentives that inexorably generate terrible and perverse results. Incentives that emphasize health care over any other aspect of health and well-being. That emphasize treatment over prevention. That disguise true costs. That favor complexity, and discourage transparent competition based on price or quality. That result in a generational pyramid scheme rather than sustainable financing.

So far so good. I'm pretty convinced that we have too much medical treatment and that there are some foundational problems causing that. But Goldhill thinks these problems all come down to one thing: Lack of market pressure. It's an interesting point, but one that I think has some problems. But before I get to his proposal, here's one more interesting critique: