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No deaths in St. Louis tornado called a miracle

No deaths in St. Louis tornado called a miracle

BRIDGETON, Mo. – The St. Louis area's most powerful tornado in 44 years rips into an airport and through a densely populated suburban area, destroying up to 100 homes, shattering hundreds of panes of glass at the main terminal and blowing a shuttle bus on top of a roof. Yet no one is killed, or even seriously hurt, and the airport reopens less than 24 hours later. How?

Early warnings, good timing and common sense all helped prevent a tragedy Friday night. But on Easter Sunday, many of those cleaning up the mess also thanked a higher power.

"I don't know why God decided to spare our lives but I'm thankful for it," Joni Bellinger, children's minister at hard-hit Ferguson Christian Church, said Sunday.

Lambert Airport reopened for arriving flights Saturday night, and departing flights began Sunday morning. Still, dozens of flights have been canceled, the airport's Concourse C is still closed and complete repairs could take up to two months.

The tornado peaked at an EF-4 level, second-highest on the Enhanced Fujita scale, packing winds of up to 200 mph, National Weather Service meteorologist Wes Browning said. It was the most powerful twister in metropolitan St. Louis since 1967 — and eerily, it followed a path similar to that of the earlier tornado.

Entire subdivisions were destroyed. Cars were tossed about like toys, roofs tossed hundreds of yards and 100-year-old trees sucked out by the roots.

County officials said during a news conference Sunday that 2,700 buildings were damaged. Gov. Jay Nixon said Saturday that up to 100 were uninhabitable. The damage clearly will cost millions of dollars to repair, but a more precise estimate was unavailable Sunday.

The twister destroyed two of the homes John Stein owns on a street in the city of Berkeley, and damaged five others. "Everything you'd find in a war zone except the bodies," Stein said.

Residents in nine communities and unincorporated parts of St. Louis County were still sorting through the rubble Sunday. Ameren Corp. had about 2,000 workers seeking to restore outages that affected 47,000 homes and businesses immediately after the storm. The utility said 18,300 were still without electricity on Sunday, and it could be several days before all power is restored.

Yet the common refrain was: It could have been worse. Stuff was destroyed, not lives.

The normally busy airport took a direct hit, with hundreds of panes of glass shattering from the force of the wind. The shuttle bus on the roof was among dozens of vehicles that were damaged.

But the airport had been quiet Friday night. Few planes on the ground were filled with passengers, and those shook but didn't topple. Just a couple of hundred passengers and workers were in Concourse C, which took the brunt of the damage, airport director Rhonda Hamm-Niebruegge said. Five people suffered minor injuries.

Residents praised the weather service for warning them about the tornado more than a half-hour before it hit. Warning sirens blared at the airport, where security officers and other workers herded people to stairwells and bathrooms.

Residents also paid attention to the sirens, and local TV stations switched from network programming to radar of the pending disaster and stern warnings from meteorologists to seek refuge in basements.

"The bottom line is the 34-minute warning and the heeding of that warning by the citizens has saved countless lives," Nixon said.

Browning agreed.

"The public did what we told them to do," the meteorologist said. "Many came out of the basement without a scratch, and there was nothing left" of their homes.

Bridgeton Mayor Conrad Bowers believes divine intervention also was at work. His own home had moderate damage, but several houses in his neighborhood were obliterated. In many of them, mercifully, no one was home when the twister hit. One family was out for dinner. Another was away playing cards. Another was visiting relatives in Dallas.

"The grace of God," Bowers said. "What else can I say?"

At Ferguson Christian Church, nearly three dozen people were gathered on Good Friday to watch the movie "Passion of the Christ" when the sirens began to blare. Pastor Stacy Garner paused the movie and hurried everyone to the basement. They were out of harm's way as the tornado imploded the sanctuary above them.

Like hundreds of residents in surrounding communities, church members have been back trying to salvage what they could. Their Easter Sunday services were at a college campus. They've had a lot of help from neighbors and friends.

"It's not just our church, but people from all over the neighborhood have come to help and clean up the mess and pick up the pieces, and try to figure out what we're going to do from now on," said Bellinger, the children's minister.


Ed Donahue of the Associated Press in Washington contributed to this report.

The Boston Globe on kin selection

The Boston Globe on kin selection

The Big Kerfuffle about Kin Selection (i.e., Nowak et al. versus The World) has finally made the papers: today’s Boston Globe has a piece about it called “Where does good come from?: Harvard’s Edward O. Wilson tries to upend biology again.” I’m not going to reiterate the whole debate, but simply want to give and comment on a few quotes from the paper. I thought the piece was pretty fair; when I talked to the writer, Leon Neyfakh, he seemed pretty much at sea about what kin selection and group selection really were, but he’s done a creditable job on the article.

But of course the whole controversy isn’t really a fit subject for a newspaper article, for it’s not a controversy at all: it’s simply two guys and a woman deeply misunderstanding evolution and trying to parlay this misunderstanding into fame. Had an identical paper not borne the names of Martin Nowak and E. O. Wilson, Neyfakh wouldn’t have written this piece.

Some quotes:

On a recent Monday afternoon, the distinguished Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson was at his home in Lexington, talking on the phone about the knocks he’s been taking lately from the scientific community, and paraphrasing Arthur Schopenhauer to explain his current standing in his field. “All new ideas go through three phases,” Wilson said, with some happy mischief in his voice. “They’re first ridiculed or ignored. Then they meet outrage. Then they are said to have been obvious all along.”

As one of my colleagues said dryly when he read that, “Wilson seems to have missed the point that you need a new idea before you can get to go through those phases!”

“Kin selection is wrong,” Wilson said. “That’s it. It’s wrong.”. .

Over the course of subsequent decades, Wilson came across evidence that made him doubt the connection between genetic relatedness and altruism. Researchers were finding species of insects that shared a lot of genetic material with each other but didn’t behave altruistically, and other species that shared little and did. “Nothing we were finding connected with kin selection,” Wilson said. “I knew that something was going wrong — there was a smell to it.”. . .

Saying that kin selection doesn’t feed into eusociality (societies in which a sterile worker caste tends one or a few reproductive individuals) because some haplodiploids aren’t eusocial and not all eusocials are haplodiploid is like saying that smoking isn’t associated with lung cancer because some smokers don’t get lung cancer and some people who get lung cancer didn’t ever smoke. The question is whether there is an apparently causal association between relatedness (i.e., via inclusive fitness) and altruism. And there is. We’ve long ago realized that haplodiploidy may not be the key factor in the evolution of eusocial insects, but relatedness certainly is. The ancestors of all eusocial insects, including non-haplodiploids like termites, mated only once rather than multiple times, which increases relatedness among their brood; this is exactly what you’d predict if relatedness were important here. Further, “cooperative breeding” in birds, in which the young stay at home and help mom and dad rear the next batch of their brothers and sisters, is correlated with lower promiscuity of the parents. That’s again explained by inclusive fitness, for you’d have less “genetic interest” in rearing future siblings if they had a different father from you (that would reduce your relatedness to future siblings by half).

Anyone who says that “kin selection is dead” is deeply muddled. What is parental care, after all, but a special case of kin selection? Why do Ma and Pa Eagle stay at home and tend the eaglets until they fledge? Why don’t they just go off and build another nest? The reason, of course, is because each parent is related by half (50% sharing of genes) with each chick, so their genes for parental care will be carried in those chicks. This is simply the most obvious case of kin selection, but the principle surely applies to lesser degrees of relatedness.

Dawkins makes strong judgment on the paper:

Richard Dawkins, who played a crucial role in popularizing kin selection with his 1976 book, “The Selfish Gene,” said last week that he has “never met anybody apart from Wilson and Nowak who takes it seriously.” . .

I think the other Wilson—David Sloan Wilson—takes it seriously.

Wilson is not arguing that members of certain species don’t sacrifice themselves for the benefit of their relatives. They do. But it’s his position that kinship and relatedness aren’t essential in causing the development of advanced social behaviors like altruism — that the reason such behaviors catch on is that they’re evolutionarily advantageous on a group level. That socially advanced organisms end up favoring their kin, Wilson argues, is a byproduct of their group membership, not the cause.

“It’s almost universally regarded as a disgrace that Nature published it,” Dawkins said. “Most people feel the reason they published it was the eminence of Wilson and Nowak, not the quality of the paper.” . .

Dawkins is right, of course. As I’ve said before, if the paper were published by three schmoes from Unknown University, it would have been rejected out of hand. Nature screwed up badly on this one, but of course the editors are rubbing their hands and chuckling over all the publicity they’ve gotten—at the expense of good science.

And yay for me and Dave Queller:

For Wilson to reject kin selection this late in his career has bewildered his many admirers. “It’s sad — he’s already an enormously famous and respected scientist, and it just sort of tarnishes him in people’s eyes,” said Jerry Coyne, the University of Chicago biologist who has written disapprovingly of Wilson’s latest work on his blog. Yet Wilson said he doesn’t have a choice in the matter. “I think that’d be a pretty poor scientist, who couldn’t reverse his view from new evidence,” he said. . . .

Many biologists find these assertions baffling. Said David Queller, a biologist at Rice University who spearheaded the letter to Nature that was signed by 136 other scientists: “At some really fundamental level I don’t understand what Ed Wilson is trying to get across, and I think that’s the response of most of the community.”

Nowak arrogantly responds:

That’s exactly the problem, according to Nowak, whose new book, “SuperCooperators,” co-written with Roger Highfield, summarizes his work as a mathematician on the origins of advanced social behavior. “They don’t know what they’re arguing against,” Nowak said recently at his office, where an oversize print of the Nature cover hangs on the wall. Specifically, Nowak explained, the critics don’t understand the math, and moreover, they don’t realize that the math is the most important part. . .

Yeah, right: 140 biologists, many of whom are mathematical biologists or deeply involved in theory (Dave Queller and Stuart West are just two among many), all fail to grasp what they’re arguing against! Well, those who have vetted the math realize that Nowak et al.’s model says absolutely nothing about a possible connection between relatedness and the origin of eusociality. That’s because their own model does not explore what happens when one varies the degree of relatedness! It therefore can’t say anything about whether relatedness is important in the evolution of eusociality. Responding to this, my colleague remarked, “This is like making three types of jam, where two are nice and one is gross (strawberry, gooseberry and oak leaf), and then saying that because the amount of sugar used wasn’t varied in these three jams (all were about 50% sugar) that sugar doesn’t matter to whether the jam tastes nice.”

Re whether kin selection is, as Nowak et al. assert strongly, something completely different from natural selection, Richard and I had something to say. I’m particularly proud of my analogy:

At a very basic level, critics feel Wilson and his coauthors are wrong to treat kin selection as something separate from natural selection. As Dawkins explains it, kin selection is not a distinct process but a necessary consequence: a subset, rather than an add-on. “What they’re missing is the logical point that kin selection is not separable from neo-Darwinian natural selection,” Dawkins said. “To separate them off would be like talking about Euclidean geometry without talking about the Pythagorean theorem.”

Coyne put it even more simply: “It’s like saying that Chardonnay is not wine.” . . .

Wilson again argues for the non-importance of relatedness:

Wilson is not arguing that members of certain species don’t sacrifice themselves for the benefit of their relatives. They do. But it’s his position that kinship and relatedness aren’t essential in causing the development of advanced social behaviors like altruism — that the reason such behaviors catch on is that they’re evolutionarily advantageous on a group level. That socially advanced organisms end up favoring their kin, Wilson argues, is a byproduct of their group membership, not the cause. . .

Well, if you want to see if kinship is a causal factor in the evolution of any trait, you must make a model in which group sizes and dynamics are the same but the degree of kinship varies. That is exactly what Nowak et al. did not do. Wilson has no idea what he’s talking about here.

And watch out for more evolutionary psychology to come!

So far, Wilson has stopped short of extending his new ideas about the evolution of social behavior to the human race. But that’s not going to last. Asked last week whether group selection happens in humans, Wilson said, “Yes, emphatically.”

“Human beings have an intense desire to form groups, and they always have,” Wilson said. “This powerful tendency we have to form groups and then have the groups compete, which is in every aspect of our social behavior…is basically the driving force that caused the origin of human behavior.”

Wilson will elaborate on this view in his next project, a book he’s tentatively calling “The Social Conquest of Earth,” which he said will be published by W. W. Norton next year. In it, he said, he will explain how socially advanced species have come to dominate the earth, and will lay out a “reexamination of human evolution” informed by his recent turn towards group selection.

It is possible that some kind of group selection for altruism occurred in early human lineages, based on differential reproduction of groups with different degrees of “morality.” But it could also have involved kin selection if, as is likely, members in early human social groups were related. And the evolution of moral codes and behaviors could also have involved individual selection: individuals who behaved nicely could have reaped reproductive benefits since groups were small and individuals intimately acquainted with each other, so they could remember and reward those who were nice, with the expectation of getting the same by behaving the same. Regardless, most animals don’t live in such small groups nor have a memory for interpersonal dynamics. And of course we know, from other observations (evolution of sex ratio, preferential care for relatives, cooperative breeding, etc.) that kin selection certainly does operate in nature.

Passover In LA: Kosher Goodies For Seder

Passover In LA: Kosher Goodies For Seder

Passover, the week-long Jewish holiday that remembers the exodus of the ancient Israelites from slavery in Egypt, fetes its first night or two with elaborate dinners called seders (this year's Passover will begin on Tuesday, April 19). Dietary restrictions are narrowed during Passover (most notably, flour is not allowed), so thinking about food is a necessary Passover pastime. Spirituality aside, it's kind of a big foodie deal. Here are some of the best spots around L.A. to grab Passover goodies, whether you're eating at home or on the town.The biggest kosher grocery store on the West coast, Glatt Mart sells a ton of Israeli and Iranian products along with meat and vegetables, and the prepared-foods counters do brisk business as well.

Tura Satana: Rants and Raves

Rants and Raves: Tura Satana

I am deeply saddened to report that cult vixen Tura Satana passed away yesterday at the age of 73. You can watch a clip of her at her best as Varla in Russ Meyer's "Faster Pussycat Kill, Kill."

I can't remember the first time I saw Tura Satana on screen but I was still young and I can't tell you what an impression she made on me when I saw her in Russ Meyer's "Faster Pussycat Kill, Kill." She was dressed in black with a plunging neckline that revealed some awe-inspiring cleavage. She also had black boots and black leather gloves that seemed to imply she was ready for any kind of action that could come her way. She had long black hair with severe bangs that framed her face in a dramatic and hard way. But what was most memorable was how she obeyed no rules. She was like a force of nature that ripped through a film, and nothing and no one could contain or control her. She was simply breathtaking to watch because she oozed danger and you never knew what she might do.

As a young woman it was impressive to see a woman on screen who was supremely confident and thoroughly unconcerned with what society or anyone thought of her behavior. She was also like sex incarnate, but not a sex object like so many women in Hollywood were. She was like a film noir femme fatale on steroids. She was dangerous like them and able to operate in a man's world. But those 40s femme fatales had to use sex to manipulate men and succeed in a man's world. Tura didn't need to use sex to get what she wanted, she just took whatever she wanted. But she used men -- and even women -- to feed what seemed like an insatiable sexual appetite. Here's just a little taste of her onscreen charisma in "Faster Pussycat Kill, Kill."
Video


Tura Satana was a unique icon. No one before or after her has had quite the same ferocious vitality and sexuality. She will be deeply missed. I may have to turn my "Faster Pussycat" lunchbox into a shrine for her.

Russian Spy Anna Chapman

Anna Chapman: Russian Spy Anna Chapman Trademarks Name

Anna Chapman, the Russian spy who was busted in the US and sent back to her home country, is looking to expand on her celebrity stature by trademarking her name.

Reuters reported that Chapman, 28, filed to trademark the name “Anna Chapman” in August.

"Maybe she wants to open the 'Anna Chapman' dry-cleaner or make cookies," Nikolai Kravtsov, an official at the Russian trademark agency, joked to the news agency.

Since being deported, Chapman has appeared on the front of tabloids and magazines, and made a number of public appearances, achieving celebrity status in her home country. According to the Reuters report, Chapman registered her name for merchandise such as clothing, watches, vodka, and other items. The trademark would last until 2020.

Last year, she and a number of other alleged Russian spies were exposed in the US, and were deported and swapped with US agents held in Russia.

The St. Petersburg Times newspaper reported that Chapman also started her own television show last Friday, saying she “will reveal all the secrets” of her life on the show.

The show is called “Secrets of the World with Anna Chapman.”

Rosemont and Cheney challenged

Rosemont and Cheney challenged under same law

Analysis by Wick Environmental Liaison Dick Kamp 1/27/11

The news in late December, 2010 was a bit puzzling, and a different tangent for the controversial Rosemont Mine issue. Save the Scenic Santa Ritas (SSSR) and FICO pecan orchards, joined by the Center for Biological Diversity were challenging the Coronado National Forest over lack of compliance with the 1972 Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA). FACA is governed by the General Services Administration (GSA).

They asked the Coronado to cease allowing Augusta Resource/Rosemont to attend cooperating (local, tribal, state, fed) agency committee meetings and to establish a FACA committee. They claimed that by allowing Rosemont to attend the agency meetings, with no anti-Rosemont public representation, the Forest Service had an illegal FACA committee.

Assistant Forest Supervisor Reta Ford rather quickly dismissed these grounds as well as their proposal that either a new process begin to develop a draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS)-or that a formal FACA process begin A process bureaucratic and formal representing every type of interest likely to be impacted by the mine. The groups reserved the right to take legal action quickly if Coronado didn't resolve the situation.

FICO attorney Dinah Bear said in an email, "The principal exemption... applicable in the context of cooperating agencies is the (1995) provision that exempts meetings attended only by state, local and tribal governmental representatives. There are other exceptions - such as meetings of the CIA ... this situation is a series of intergovernmental meetings that would normally be exempt from FACA ... that we are arguing are not exempt by virtue of Rosemont's regular attendance."

There are very important questions of whether or not the Coronado is adequately addressing substantive issues as geochemistry and centuries long water quality impacts of a potential mine. New Coronado Supervisor Jim Upchurch referred to these in an interview as "the core issues that we have to get a handle on in NEPA and the Draft EIS for Rosemont."

Then there is FACA: not really NEPA but a very twisted public participation issue.

To get a sense of the range of FACA issues that have hit the courts: Several organizations sued Vice President Dick Cheney over his 2001 secret energy policy committee that was strongly influenced by Enron's Ken Lay, Exxon-Mobil, the American Petroleum Institute, etc. Initially the GSA itself questioned the committee but dropped out early in legal disputes, and ultimately in 2005 an appeals court allowed the committee proceedings to remain secret.

The Fish and Wildlife service was successfully sued in the mid-90s for producing a scientific report on a sturgeon, that utilized scientists as a committee to write the report. The courts scrapped the study to not "allow the government to use the product of a tainted procedure (that) would circumvent the very policy that serves as the foundation of [FACA]."

The Forest Service, in creating the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan to protect the spotted owl was successfully sued for accepting policy advice from selected academic advisors who joined agencies, tribes and local governments.

After that case, during the Clinton years, the Forest Service issued guidelines stating that meetings with individuals or single groups can be held "to hear their opinions, views, and advice; however, no group can become a preferred source of advice for the agency without sparking FACA concerns"

The courts and the GSA (who the courts seem to frequently ignore) have given a lot of interpretations to what is the proper implementation of FACA.

A tired-sounding Upchurch rejected reopening the advisor process using FACA as a compromise solution to the groups concerns. "We want to be able to produce a document that addresses core issues to get public comment then we open it up to everybody. When we start to bring in a few representatives under FACA it can be a slippery slope. Everyone should be involved and not a few"

Upchurch added, "I can't read the minds of the groups who wrote us the letter to know whether they will turn this over to the courts."

SSSR attorney Roger Flynn said, "Basically the DEIS will be tainted coming out in coming months; and either it cannot be used, or from here on out they allow a public advisory process to take place."

As Upchurch and the groups dig in their heels the scent of litigation is present.

The courts have ample precedents to decide that the advisory process was carried out in violation of FACA, and perhaps also of NEPA due to Rosemont representing the project proponent at the advisory meetings. Or not. How regular a basis Rosemont sat in meetings will be evident in the documents that Upchurch promises the groups will have by January 31.

Upchurch could change his mind and establish a formal FACA process that would involve pro- and anti-mining interests, along with agency representatives to help him in gathering information to make a yes or no record of decision under the 1872 Mining Act.

As an alternative, [erhaps the cooperating agencies group could start over with a new technically more rigorous process, meet without Rosemont and the public, and take as much time as necessary to ask for more information to develop a DEIS that has an alternatives analysis that is difficult to challenge.

Pima County has complained multiple times that the interadvisory agency process was not leading to a DEIS supporting the development of informed alternative environmental scenarios under NEPA. Rosemont has felt it has all gone fine. They are two players.

All of this back and forth may simply slow down the DEIS process. For decision-maker Upchurch, on a learning curve to address a very serious and controversial issue, this probably is not a bad thing. More time may be just what is needed before the public debates a scientifically complicated and esoteric Rosemont draft EIS.