When Rattlesnakes Don’t Rattle Anymore

This is an ecological and a metaphorically sociological and political look at the silencing of a rattle.

Each year in March, in a place called Sweetwater, Texas is the world’s largest rattlesnake round up, sponsored by the local Jaycees. Round up is, of course, a euphemism for mass killing of the snakes.  “Harvesting” would have been another euphemism.  It is a festival of sort – complete with a parade and a beauty contest for Snake Charmer of the year, carnival rides and a cook fest as well. The latter features the many ways a rattler can be prepared and cooked. This has gone on since 1958, I read, and apparently it is regulated in a way so that the rattlesnake population is hardly affected in an adverse way as to have caused a rodent population explosion which would be a bad thing.  I am not sure though if such a study has been made at all.  It is a fund raising event that benefits several civic projects but we’re told that the biggest benefit is in the collection of venom.  Not only does that provide a healthy supply of antidote for rattlesnake bite, there is ongoing research on other benefits from snake venom.  Foremost of the benefits is snake venom’s usefulness in fighting cancer cells and ability to control or mitigate the effects of tumor.

Why think about this at all? The average person will have no qualm with the snake round up.  Certainly the snakes are by themselves a public relations nightmare for anyone who will try to take up their cause, let alone find even a few sympathizers among the public.  Snakes are far from being photogenic and the flicking tongue does not present a pretty picture.  Dogs are still cute even with their drooling tongues hanging out and slobbering profusely but a snake that samples the air with its tongue to catch minute traces of airborne molecules and then swiping them at the roof of their mouth where the information is “read” with pinpoint accuracy is still a sinister look. We must understand that for a creature that has no legs or arms to hold anything close to its nose this is a superior adaptive ability. Yet, among hunters who must walk the fields on a hunt, snakes are as much a target as the prey they’re looking for.  Animal Rights activists may say something but given a choice they’d rather be defending guinea pigs and rats and other experimented-on animals than speak up on behalf of snakes.  Therefore, I will.

First, why does a rattlesnake rattle?  Like many venomous snakes these reptiles do provide warnings to animals which are not their prey or animals they cannot eat or don’t want to.  And venomous snakes that are without the ability to make noise advertise their presence instead in a different way - that is by having loud and bright colorful skin.  Coral snakes, certain vipers and tree snakes are good examples.  Typically non-venomous snakes are bland or have darker coloration.  Interestingly, certain non-venomous snakes pretend to be one by having colorful skin also as a survival adaptation so other creatures will leave them alone or keep their distance.  Poisonous frogs also warn with very bright colorful skin.  The rattle is mistaken by humans as a provocation whereas animals take it for what it is - a warning - and they stay away.  And remember that when a rattler is stalking a rat it is completely silent.

Venom to the snake is a resource it would rather not waste on anything it cannot eat.  It takes a lot for the snake to produce venom so it conserves it whenever it can. And often snakes would rather retreat than confront us and it is a last resort to strike at anything they do not wish to kill and eat.

Now then, when do rattlesnakes no longer rattle?  The story may surprise you.  Naturalists just recently discovered that in places where rattlers are heavily hunted, i.e. for the round up, there was eerie silence instead of the familiar sounds that typically betray the presence of the snakes.  Needless to say, the pickings were slim at these places but there was evidence that rattle snakes were present.  What rattle snakes they caught by sight had fused rattlers that no longer rattle.  The rattles are ring-like keratin tissues (similar material like finger nails or claws) that develop at their tails every time the snake sheds its skin. The rings are connected loosely to each other and when the snake shakes its tail we would hear the familiar rattle.  Some of the rattlers have these appendage atrophied because of a genetic mutation.  The snakes that do not rattle escape detection from the hunters and collectors and there lies the multiplying effect.  As the loud rattlers get caught the silent ones thrive and go on to pass their genes that are inherited by subsequent generations.  Soon we have silent venomous snakes.

We are now told that worse than a spine tingling sound of a rattler nearby is no sound at all.  We no longer benefit from the natural warning.  The rattlesnakes have become silent but are still equipped to defend themselves by striking at anything that threatens them.  It is another one of those unintended consequences that we put upon nature to resolve.  By the way, snake population around the world had been steadily declining that mystifies herpetologists (fancy way to call people who study snakes) who are not able to explain it.  There is, however, an exception in the case of the Burmese python explosive population growth in the Everglades in Florida and black snakes in Hawaii and Guam.  In this case, it is more about a combination of the lack of natural predators to control the snakes and because they are alien species to the habitat their prey is not equipped to identify or avoid them.  The Burmese pythons apparently were released by pet owners when the snakes got too big; the black snakes hitchhiked on airplanes to Guam and Hawaii.

The ecological lesson is that once we tamper with the eco-system by systematically going after either prey or predator the consequence is catastrophic to the health of wild life in general and sometimes to the environment, such as the case of the destructive changes in water systems and wetlands and flooding when beavers were hunted down uncontrollably for their fur early in history.  Anecdotally we hear stories when snakes were hunted down to near extinction in some places that resulted in the rapid population explosion of rats.  Rice and grain production from the field and at granaries was so adversely affected by the rampaging rats the people suffered as well.

Now we have a moral lesson – a metaphor of a sort in social and political discourse.  One of democracy’s most important attribute is freedom of speech.  It is because a democracy works when all sides are heard, discussed and decided upon by the people.  It ceases to be one when a monolithic voice takes over because that almost always happens when the government turns into a dictatorship that strives to silence any and all opposition.  It comes either from the persecution of the press or the press becoming an ally to restricting the voices of dissent with the aim towards the final eradication of anyone who opposes the prevailing ideology.  It works badly for either side of opposing ideologies when one tries to suppress the other’s ability to express.

Today, however, the silencing of opposing ideas is done more subtly.  It is done with what seems like an innocuous activity, even with the appearance of reasonableness.  It is called extreme political correctness.  It used to be an effective method to discourage racial slurs and sexual harassment, which was fine.  Unfortunately, it is now being used to silence anyone who speaks with dissenting opinions.

It has become a force now that the liberals employ with impunity against conservatives and conservative ideas.  Of course, it could also work the other way around but today universities and the political arena are fraught with it. Ms. Condoleezza Rice was forced to cancel a speech at Rutgers University because of protests from students. It marked the beginning of the silencing of opposing views that are contrary to those who profess another. It has now recently evolved into student power that is powerful enough to force a university president to step down and this movement is now escalating in many places of learning.  A symposium on free speech at Yale was disrupted by a student whose own ability to exercise free speech allowed him to at least temporarily stopped the discussions.  The mainstream media also has become an effective purveyor of political correctness and often against conservatism.

When one ideology prevails lopsidedly over another the danger is that the latter will lose its ability to rattle.  The silence will have serious repercussions.  A monolithic society or government will always turn into an indivisibly and inflexibly oppressive aggregation of people when reason and dissenting voices are diminished if not entirely silenced.  That is a dangerous condition.  Whoever is in power must be aware that silence does not mean the demise of an opposition.  It must understand that it is easier when opposing voices are heard – not just for the logical reasons – because that is the best way to understand and know them and perchance to work with them (one can only wish).  Worse than hearing the opposition is the silence that percolates underneath.  History teaches us that political power changes hands, dictatorships are toppled and ideologies change or evolve   even amidst every effort to silence the opposition.  Worse than hearing too much out of the political and sociological discourse is when one side no longer rattles.

As a footnote, in the Genesis story it was not a snake that tempted Eve.  The snake will tell us it does not have prehensile hands, let alone any appendage, to hold a fruit (and it was not an apple either), to entice Eve.  It is also untrue that Viking helmets had horns on them.  It started when a very imaginative costume director decided to put horns on Viking helmets in the first Wagnerian operas.  Since then even female opera singers in cartoons are almost always depicted wearing horned helmets.  Any Viking worth his salted beard would have had no use for horns on his helmet that would only have added extra weight and a hindrance during battle.

Life, Living, Death

Life

It was May, 2000, when at last the human genome project was completed.  What that meant in a nutshell is that the blueprint of what makes us human had been “read”.  Of course, we are not talking about sheets of paper drawings as in a house plan, or even a topographic picture that maps it all out.  It is more complicated than that and what makes it even more astounding is the microscopic size of this blue print.  A single cell is very, very small but imagine increasing its size to that of a basketball.  Inside it is the tennis ball size nucleus where in it resides our twig-like chromosomes (carriers of our individual characteristics).  A chromosome unravels as a very long continuous looped ladder-like structure with rungs connecting two parallel strands.  The analogy is that of pulling a loose thread from a knitted sock where a long strand of yarn unravels in a twisted pattern. The blue print is configured like that – a ladder-like structure twisted about in a helix. Each rung is made up of a pair of chemical bases labeled as the letters A, C, T and G, short for each chemical base name.  Interestingly, which makes it simple in a way, ‘A’ only pairs up with ‘T’ and ‘C’ with ‘G’. Nothing man has ever created comes close to the complexity of the DNA.  We’re told that in each of our DNA is the order and sequencing of these rungs that differentiates us from other living things and from each other.  The DNA is the information molecule that has what it takes to be you or me.

Francis Collins who was the Director of the Human Project Genome called the success equivalent to having read the language of life.  The language, however, had to be incredibly boring.  Just imagine reading a million-page-book with repetitive sequences of nothing but CG, GC, AT, TA over and over.  So scientists rely on computers to do the reading of over 3.1 billion rungs in that ladder.  All mammals have about the same number, some amphibians may have more but I read that there is a plant – a fern actually – that has a hundred times more as ours.  Now, try writing the blue print for that one.  Apparently someone did to make the determination that it is 100 times more than ours.

Every living thing has DNA, including plants.  We share 50 % of our DNA with a banana!  We and chimpanzees share 98 %.  Incredible as that may seem – about the banana, in particular – it is not at all, because we are told that everything that lives has in its ancestry a history that goes all the way back to a single cell life form just a little less than 4 billion years ago.  Let’s set aside for the moment the arguments from each opposing camps of creationism and evolution.  In fact, it is actually not about which side is right or wrong because, and this is very important, both can be right. Indeed, if we stop the debate and just say that the chronology of creation and evolution seems to match up except for the fact that we have “days” in creation and a few billion years here and there in evolution.  The fact of the matter is that the diversity of life is so phenomenal that from one end we have microscopic planktons and 150-ton blue whales at the other and everything in between. But we find DNA to be the most absolute common denominator.  In other words, no living thing is without a DNA, and DNA has a way of relating one living thing to another.

The Dalai Lama may be right after all although one Australian TV host made fun of it by joking with the revered spiritual leader that he (the latter) can order pizza by saying, “make me one with everything”.  Not only was that perplexing to the Dalai Lama he failed to catch the punch line. The TV reporter was teasing him about the spiritual concept that in the end we are all related one to the other and that means with every living thing.

From the frozen tundra to the black depths of a deep ocean to the vicinity of boiling sulfur lakes and volcanic calderas life manages to manifest its many forms. It has extraordinary adaptable attribute, it is flourishing, and defies imagination.  Life finds a niche anywhere and everywhere.  How did life become so easily possible here?  And why the inter dependence?  Everywhere we look we are reminded of the “balance of nature” but what does that really mean? Fortunately, the reason you are reading this is because life had produced us - a thinking intelligent creature with an ability to ask these questions.  Foremost of those questions is one that had been asked since the dawn of civilization that remains unanswered today; at least not to the unanimous satisfaction of everyone. First, there is this – is there really a meaning to life, and if there is, what is it?  And there is something we often forget to ask.  In life’s diverse landscape – from the simple amoeba to the jelly fish to the complex organization of harvester ants and termite colonies to how families of capuchin monkeys operate, and so on and on – how did one organism emerged to lay claim of dominion over others. Yet, we second guess with this, “Is human life more meaningful than all others and should not everything be considered along that line?  It is often times unintended hubris on our part to assume that we are responsible for many things that go wrong around us when it comes to the welfare and survival of other species.  That is why we have “protected species acts” imposed by governments when we destroy the habitats of other living things, so we need to limit our use of energy or reduce its ill effects and apportion the resources lest we destroy the environment, prevent cruelty to animals. That is deemed a civilized response; although the killing of people and the methods used have grown in sophistication war after war and expectedly through to the next one.  Even today the world has in its stockpile weapons with enough power to destroy itself many times over.  The quest for life’s meaning will lose its relevance.

The rise in worldwide population is self-ascribed to our nurturing nature and it didn’t take long to double it from 3 to 6 billion people despite the fact that the road we took to get there is littered with a history of tribal wars and escalating conflict that defy the very premise by which civilized society is based and the promise of lasting peace is a broken refrain repeated over and over. 

Civilization, its rise for the betterment of society, revolves around the value of life – human life. The New International version of Genesis says, “Then God said, ‘Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground." That we had done.  The other Biblical versions even used the word “dominion” over other creatures.  God rested on the seventh day after six days of creation.

On the other hand, historical, scientific and archeological evidence paint a different albeit parallel picture.  The development of life had gone on for billions of years and the fossil record is filled with life flourishing only to be snuffed out abruptly, then re-emerging to develop once more and then die out again.  There were five major mass extinctions but there were two dozen extinction events; the former were truly about extinctions in a massive scale cutting across a wide swath of organisms, while the latter was about certain species being wiped out due to competition or catastrophic events affecting specific habitats.  Incredibly life always managed to re-emerge, with species coming out better adapted than the previous ones. Dinosaurs whose fossils are the main draw in many natural science museums ruled for over 160 million years but incredibly were wiped out 67 million years ago by a catastrophic event suspected to be an asteroid impact.  It was that mass extinction that ushered in the age of the mammals. It was not until about just two hundred thousand years ago that our nearest ancestors appeared and it was likely not for another hundred thousand years after that when the first humanoids walked away from the safety of the forests to the plains of the savannah. 

Life, however one looks at its origin, is very persistent.  Life is not content with mere survival but it appears to have a goal towards perfection. 

Here is my last word on the subject of creation versus evolution.  If science has established that every living thing has a blue print of its DNA it is faced with the question as to whether it was written intentionally by a Creator or the language just simply manifested itself as a random occurrence over a period of time.  That is what faces every scientist and religious leader who wants to tackle the issue because regardless of which side one decides to hold on to there is always the lingering question, “So, what was it before this or that?” You see, even if we accept that science has proven, for example, that the whole universe began as an explosion from a single point at the beginning of time, there will always be the question, “So before that so called explosion, what was there?” A shrug is of course not a very good answer.  Stephen Hawking, the wheelchair bound physics laureate and bestselling author who is heavily involved in the quest for the Theory of Everything, answers with, “the universe has no boundary”, in time and space, whatever that means. The universe just simply existed all along and for that reason he supposes that it has no need for a Creator.  On the other hand if one camp agrees, for example, that evolution is a subset of creation whereby a Creator used evolution as a tool to make creation possible then the conversation could be less intractable.  But that is not likely to happen and that being the case it is therefore best not to engage debating it at all.

Life as we know it today is a complex phenomenon but only because we are here to contemplate it, examine it from both the spiritual and scientific points of view, to be astounded and awed by it, to be grateful for it and to cherish it.  However, more importantly and limited only to our humanity, we must live it.

Living

If life is God’s gift to every person, then living that life however one chooses to do it is a measure of the value we put into it. The manner by which we live that life also reflects how we relate to those around us – our closest loved ones, friends, co-workers and the community of people around us.  If life is the hardware then the manner of how we live is the operating program that sits in our brain and governed by software that is in our mind. 

“All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.”

William Shakespeare

Indeed, but we must never forget that the stage we get, the one we grew up in, the very place where everyone we know also inhabits, may not always be the one we prefer or dream about.  A suburban home in the western world is a lofty place, almost heavenly like to someone living in the streets of Calcutta, the remote region in Outer Mongolia, or the impoverished section of every congested city from Rio de Janeiro in Brazil to Mogadishu in Somalia to Tondo in Manila, Philippines.  But life must be lived whatever the stage we live in or by the state of one’s existence because life is persistent, resourceful and enduring.  Yet, often we somehow manage to devalue it, destroy it, and most of all despite all the prevailing chances and golden opportunities, we just simply waste it.

If I must, and often I do, use another metaphor, our birth, our entry into the world begins at the “Start” button and from there living is our operating system.  The program may do well for a while, for some it does run splendidly because the stage is set in a stable two-parent, middle class family in a developed society, for others (by a huge margin) it is rough going that may begin with poor child care and diminished opportunities. Nevertheless, in many instances not only that life prevails, someone who is like a drop in the ocean of poverty and hardship floats up and sparkle as a gem from a scattering flotsam. In both cases the “Start” button may not have been equal but in many instances life was well lived because we had seen it countless times from history and we expect that for many in generations to come.

Continuing with the metaphor, just like with the computer program, life allows living to have a “Reboot” option and again we saw countless examples of rough starts getting a fresh re-booting for a life well lived.  There had been Booker T. Washington’s and Horatio Alger’s in history. Today we have J.K. Rawling, Daymond John and Chris Gardner, to name just a few.  They all had rough “Starts” but each one took the opportunity to “Reboot”.

Life is not a gift were it not accompanied by the chance to live it.  If life were a canvass, living is the variety of colors we have at our disposal to paint whatever landscape we choose that shall become our life portrait. We live and we work, we love and we enjoy, we toil and then we rest.  Each of us can be defined in just a few ways.  The free spirits live free, others live for free, some exceptional individuals live to work, while a majority of us work for a living. 

Lest we obsess over work we must know that if each life can be contained in just one sentence, the individual is the subject, his life the predicate and how he lives is the verb but work should just be well within a parenthesis. We are born, we grow up and parenthetically we work, hopefully have a family and blessedly have children and grandchildren but then we, without exception, retire - hopefully for many more years thereafter.  The latter is what it is all about and it must count because a complete sentence always ends with a period.  No one, however one tries, can ever have a fragmented sentence, a prepositional phrase or independent clause.  At some point, sooner or later, we all end with a period.  And enough with the metaphors. That last phrase, as you know, is what a fragmented sentence looks like – undeserving of a period.

Death

Every life, from the simple to the complex, begins with the raising of a curtain. Everyone who lives long enough has a chance to play on stage, under bright lights for the very few but for many under subdued lighting and anonymity for some, but like everything all must face the final curtain.

And now the end is near

So I face the final curtain

My friend, I'll say it clear

I'll state my case of which I'm certain

I've lived a life that's full

I've traveled each and every highway

And more, much more than this

I did it my way

Paul Anka

We all would like to have “lived a life that’s full” but even if we fall short of our dreams and aspirations we hope to have left something to mark our passing.  For the few there will be accolades and applause; however, much to their wish, an encore is impossible.  Everyone else will do his or her best.  Along the way we do get sporadic applause lines from loved ones and friends and colleagues but it is not the size of the stage but the quality of how well we lived that matters.  Such quality should not be measured by how much wealth and material we leave behind to our heirs because often a person is remembered for the immeasurable deeds of kindness, love and caring for others.

Mankind though had always asked this. “What is it for me when I begin to cross that threshold of mortality and find that beyond that curtain there is nothing but nothingness?” Well, if that is the case then really there is not much we can do – we will not be able to regret, to second guess, and certainly not able to have a do over.  There is no mulligan.  But then we are also allowed to speculate with this, “The good deeds I did were all for naught then?”

To those who ask the last question are reminded by the likes of Mother Theresa, the countless first responders to a disaster, the doctors and nurses who volunteered to face the scourge of Ebola head on, the soldier who was willing to sacrifice himself to save a comrade, and many more examples.  These people do those things because it is already rewarding enough to see a face relieved of pain and anguish at the moment of rescue, the smile of a recovering child and the gratitude of a soldier who will get to go home to his family.  These people who do these deeds do not wait to see what’s beyond that curtain because a well lived life today is his or her reward – in the present tense.

I cannot seem to get too far away from metaphors.  In the end do we shut down the computer of life or is it just an exit?  I notice the new Windows 10 has a sleep option.  The Dalai Lama and partly in the Hindu religion the possibility is more than suggested.  What if life, living and death follow the laws of the universe?

 

You will have to bear with me here.  The first Law of Thermodynamics says that energy cannot be created or destroyed and can only be transformed from one form to another.  Einstein added to that by saying that matter and energy are interchangeable, as evidenced by nuclear power – matter converted to energy.  The combined energy and matter in the universe remains constant throughout from the start of the Big Bang – the moment of creation.  From that beginning nothing can be added or subtracted.

Now, as we all know the universe is the ultimate recycler.  Nothing is ever wasted.  What God created apparently cannot be violated in any way. Even at the sub particle level where protons collide at near light speed at the Large Hadron Collider they merely splinter to their basic components even for mere nanoseconds only to re-emerge in other forms – but never destroyed.

Is it then too farfetched to think that what religion teaches as transformation of the body to the soul to re-emerge in a heavenly state or its lower opposite, or in the form of reincarnation proposed in the Hindu religion or what is behind the Dalai Lama’s re-emergence for the 14th time or the end of days in the Book of Revelation and other interpretations have some validity?  I am only asking the question to accommodate all the various faith that man had been subscribing to for millennia.  It is true that we can set this all aside, lest we begin a contentious debate, but it must be worth to ask, “Surely there is more to just have a life begin, live it, and then death, isn’t it?”  If God gave us the intellect to ask these questions then these must be well within our operating system.  It has been programmed.  It must be in our DNA.  Thus we go back to the beginning of this musing – at the beginning where life began.