My father, whom I called Bhayya, grew up in the early part of the last century in the city of Lucknow in northern India. This intersection of period and place was perhaps the acme of Urdu-speaking culture, known ever since all over the subcontinent not only for its sublime literary achievements and the refinement of its manners, but also for its high ideals of decency and civility. One of the many ways in which these were manifested in the tehzeeb or culture of Lucknow was in its uncommon aspiration to male gentleness. This can perhaps best be described as something akin to the opposite of machismo. Even the shadow of aggressiveness was to be suppressed by men, with those unable to do so being considered barbarians or, at the very least, riff-raff.  [Photo shows the Husainabad Imambara in Lucknow.]

Bhayya was a near-perfect product of this enviable culture, and hence I never even heard him raise his voice. Ever. Instead, one glimpsed his manliness in random, small ways. For example, I remember once when I was a child we were driving somewhere in our family car when a huge bumblebee flew in through a slightly open window and proceeded to make our driver almost crash the car, so busy was he ducking and furiously swatting at it. As the bumblebee droned loudly, crashing back and forth between various surfaces, with the rest of us (mostly adults) in the car spastically and violently trying to avoid it, my father sat perfectly still. Then with a single quick and confident motion of his hand, he had grabbed the bee and crushed it to death in his fist. He threw it out the window and didn’t say anything, but the bee had been faster than he, and later at home I noticed his swollen hand.

Bhayya also had the simplicity and frugal habits of someone who has grown up without very much. Hence he would use the same basic bar of laundry soap to bathe, wash his hair and face, and whip into a lather with a small brush for shaving. (I have heard that before I was born, in his eccentric attempts at economy, he even once tried to make large quantities of soap at home with the help of his brother and some vats of fairly toxic chemicals, but luckily my mother put her foot down and that was the end of that.) And shaving gives us another rare instance of his appearing somewhat macho: he always shaved with a razor blade (of the kind in the photo on the right) held simply between his forefingers and thumb. Whether he chose not to use a proper holder for the blade as another step in his economizing campaign, or because of some other personal preference or secret to a good shave, I will never know since I never had the courage to ask him while he was alive. It was quite frightening to watch though, because one felt that if he were startled he might accidentally slit his own jugular, but then, as we know from the bumblebee incident, he wasn’t easily startled. (And no, he did not die in a shaving accident.) All I know is that because of him, every time I shave with my fancy Gillette razor, I feel like a bit of a sissy. But we’ll come back to shaving later.

A peacock’s tail presented an obvious problem for Charles Darwin, in that it doesn’t enhance its owner’s ability to survive. Indeed, it is such an expensive investment of precious resources (to grow it), not to mention an unnecessary burden to carry around, making it much harder to flee from predators, for example, that it is actually a significant handicap. And the peacock is by no means alone in possessing such costly ornament. There are countless other species which exhibit similar traits, such as the humongous antlers of male reindeer. Darwin immediately realized that something other than plain old natural selection is involved here, and he called it sexual selection and devoted most of his book The Descent of Man to it. Here’s the basic idea: in species which reproduce sexually, while natural selection works to increase an individual’s ability to survive to an old(er) age, sexual selection works to increase an individual’s chances of mating with a greater number of partners. For sexually reproducing species, just surviving is not enough. One could presumably increase one’s chances of living longer by not fighting over mates and incurring the many costs of pursuing them to mate with them, for instance, but one would not leave many descendants that way, and such individuals would soon be wiped out of the population. Since bringing up young is very costly, especially for the females of many species, since they often bear all if not most of this cost, it is in their interest to make sure that their descendants have the best genes possibles. In other words, they must try to mate with the best males available. (Males of species who do not invest heavily in child-rearing do not have to be as picky about females because they can just try to mate with as many females as possible.) And here is where sexual selection enters the picture. Males who are able to attract more females will leave more descendants, and they attract females by advertising the quality of their own genes. There are many ways to do this, and the peacock’s tail is one of them.

Such ornaments must be costly to function effectively as advertisements of fitness and health, because if they were not, it would be easy to fake them. For example, males of a certain species might start growing fake muscles which only look like real muscles (but are cheaper to grow) to appear strong. If this were the case, females would quickly start using some other criterion (like seeing if the male can actually lift a heavy weight) to make their choices. A costly investment in ornament is more difficult for less-fit males (such as diseased ones, for example) to make, and it is this that makes the ornament an honest display of fitness. (Now you know why men feel the need to buy Porches!) So, while the tail of a peacock may start as an advertisement of health and overall fitness (“look at me, I am so good at finding food and avoiding predators that I can afford to grow and maintain this expensive tail, and am still strong enough to get away from that fox which wants to eat me!”), there is something more that can happen as was shown by Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher: runaway sexual selection.

What Fisher showed mathematically was that once such a process of sexual selection (where a male develops a trait that causes at least some females to prefer him) gets started, this male trait and the female tendency to prefer it become genetically correlated in descendants, and will spread quickly through the population in what he described as a “runaway process.” And as they spread, both traits (the male ornament and the female tendency to prefer males who have it) tend to themselves become exaggerated. With peahens unable to resist the sight of an awesome male tail, peacocks try to outdo each other by growing bigger and bigger and fancier tails. Of course, a point is reached where the natural selection costs of the tail actually start outweighing the sexual selection benefits of being able to impress potential mates, and a kind of equilibrium is reached. But not before this process of evolution giving rise to such whimsically resplendent ornaments as the peacock’s tail we see today.

An interesting theory of the origins of the relative hairlessness of humans relies on such a process of sexual selection. In The Descent of Man, Darwin himself dismissed more utilitarian explanations for the human loss of hair in favor of a sexual selection process, believing that in our ancestral men there arose an arbitrary preference for less hairy women, and that was enough (in what we would now call a Fisherian runaway process) to eventually result in our almost total loss of body hair, especially in women. Others, like Alfred Russell Wallace, believed that less body hair, at least initially, arose for actual utilitarian reasons, such as getting rid of lice, and being able to see whether one’s potential mate has lice or other parasites and the condition and color of their skin–an important indicator of health, with a sexual selection process then following. Recent work suggests that Wallace was probably right, and that the invention of fire and clothing to keep warm without body hair made it possible for humans to lose it. (By the way, pubic and underarm hair may have been retained as a way of efficiently dispersing sexual pheromones, whose importance is much underappreciated in our society.)

So what does this have to do with shaving? Well, nothing much yet, though as you can see, our relative hairlessness may have much in common with a peacock’s tail, at least in terms of how they came about. Now, you probably know that in the realm of culture, memes often spread in ways that are analogous to the way that genes spread through populations. This is how fashions, for example, get started. An arbitrary preference for pants that are flared a bit at the bottom gets going somehow, and before you know it a huge runaway fashion-selection process is in full sway, and you see huge bell-bottomed pants everywhere. I believe our present overall cultural tendency to prefer being clean-shaven probably also worked something like this. At some point a century or more ago, when shaving technology was not very advanced, it may have been an indication of success (or “fitness”) for a man to be clean-shaven, just as clean and expensive clothes would be: it meant that he had the resources and the leisure to go to a barber regularly. Or maybe there just spontaneously arose a preference for shaved men among women (they look more youthful, after all), and then the practice (or meme) spread through the culture in a runaway selection process, no different in principle from the cyclical vogue for thin ties, or wide collars, or short(er) hair for men than for women.

And finally, I come full-circle back to shaving technology with a last example of a completely runaway process which came to my attention by way of this year’s Super Bowl show on TV. One of the truly great advances in shaving razors came in 1971 when two blades were put close next to each other on a razor. This resulted in a much smoother, more comfortable shave, and the age of the Gillette Trac II began. But as you may know, the preference for more blades was not to stop there. If two blades were better than one, then three had to be better than two: in 1998 we were given the Gillette Mach 3 with three blades. (This is the razor that I use, though I am not sure if it is really any better than two-bladed ones.) Not to be outdone, a few years ago Schick introduced its Quattro with four blades! Being a sucker for marketing, I immediately bought it, but found that the blade is so wide that it is hard to shave the small areas on one’s upper lip, under the nose, etc. But in an almost unbelievable move, and with a $100 million marketing campaign for its launch, Gillette is fighting back by unveiling its Fusion razor on TV during the Super Bowl. The Fusion is a true peacock’s tail with six blades! I wonder what my father would have thought of that.

[An extensive archive of Justin Smith’s writing can be found at www.jehsmith.com]

I’ve always loved borders.  I still have a photo album from a 1978 tip across the United States, and remarkably the great bulk of them –matted, square prints from those old, flat cameras– are of my sister and me in Montessori school T-shirts and short shorts, sporting identical bowl cuts, grinning contentedly in front of signs such as ‘You Are Now Leaving Wyoming’, and ‘Welcome to South Dakota’.  I believed we were making history that summer, in the back of our grandparents’ AMC Hornet station wagon that always smelled like burnt butter.  Who before us had crossed so many borders?  We heard ‘50 Ways to Leave your Lover’ on the AM radio, endured a plague of locusts in Nebraska, saw scattered dinosaur-themed monuments, and, when the outer edge of my right knee would by gravity and heat-induced lethargy drift into contact with the outer edge of her left, she would say ‘gross’ and insert a napkin between them.  The skin too is a border and sometimes must be secured.

Years later, I discovered that I enjoyed travelling to places principally in view of the places my destinations were next to.  In Leningrad, I fantasized about Finland; in Istanbul, I couldn’t stop thinking about what life is like in Bulgaria; in Egypt, I wanted nothing more than to cross into Libya; and in Argentina, it was Paraguay that captured my imagination.  I hate my whereabouts on principle just as I loathe the specious present and yearn for some authentic future. 

Sometimes my curiosity overpowers me and I depart to see what is on the other side.  In Leningrad I pretended I was sick so that the Soviets would give me an exit-entry visa to go to Helsinki for medical care.  I departed on the train with the Kalevala and a russko-finskii razgovornik filled with Finnish phrases written in the Cyrillic alphabet.  From the former, I still remember the opening lines of a spell intended to keep away bears: ‘O bear.  O honey-paws.  O handsome chubby lad of the forest’.  From the latter I can still remember the numbers one through five, which, transliterating back into the Latin alphabet, look something like this: yksi, kaksi, kolme, nelja, viisi.  I spent all the money I had on a hotel room and a vending-machine sandwich, and returned to the Soviet Union the next day, rather less gloriously than Lenin before me.  To the Finland Station, yes, but without even a plan for myself, let alone for world revolution.  This is what always happens when I succumb to my longing for neighboring territories.  I realize I am there for no good reason, and I return.    

In 1978, from some point in Minnesota, we crossed into Canada.  My six-year-old mind struggled to grasp the difference between national and state boundaries.  I knew that on the map the boundary between Minnesota and Canada consisted in dashes followed by two dots instead of one, and this I found significant.  They made us stop at the border, not just to ask us about any produce we might be carrying, but about our very identity.  We ate lunch, I believe, at a border truck stop, and turned right around, and our grandparents announced to us that we were now ‘world travellers’. 

In 1987 or so my mother sent me to sailing camp along the British Columbian coast, but what we didn’t know when I set off from Sacramento was that I would be stuck on a boat run by proselytizing Christians.  The summer prior I had been stuck at a Christian horse camp, but at least when you’re on a Christian horse you can jump off and run to the nearest payphone to demand to be picked up.  When you’re on a Christian boat, you have no choice but to wait it out, which is hard when you are 15 and have recently discovered Trotsky and Kafka, and want nothing so much as to get back to Victoria and find that punk-rock chick who invited you to some show just because you looked cool.  But no, you’re stuck on ‘night watch’ 100 ‘knots’ up the coast of Vancouver Island.  What the hell were we watching for, pirates?  I remember pulling up a bucket of seawater and stirring it to see the bioluminescent sea creatures glow.  ‘Explain that, Christians’, I remember thinking.  No doubt they would have thought themselves capable. 

Back in port, I found the punk-rock chick and she got me into a show.  A group of us spent the night on the floor of some kid’s parents’ home, assured that the parents were away on the mainland.  There was plenty of Southern Comfort and marijuana.  We listened to Crass.  A skinhead girl wearing tennis shoes recounted her recent trip to Montreal, and how when she was sleeping on the sidewalk there some other skinheads stole her Docs.  Montreal’s bad ass, everyone agreed. 

It would be 15 years before I would come back to Canada, and the next time it would be to Montreal, and, apparently, for good.  Earlier in this space I disputed Montreal’s claim to bad-ass status by any interesting measure.  I do see plenty of squeegee punks with tattooed faces lurking about in traffic, accosting drivers, hoping to strike that perfect balance between threatening and pitiable.  I hear they’re on a circuit between here and BC.  Some are old and particularly worn out, and sometimes I imagine I recognize the skin chick sans Docs, now in her thirties, like me, but now of an altogether different species. 

In those 15 years I never once thought about crossing into Canada.  Living in New York, I never developed a trace of the transborder fugue syndrome that brought me to Finland and Bulgaria from Russia and Turkey.  Into my psychical geography I factored New Jersey and Long Island, and a sliver of Connecticut, and most of that mass of land we call ‘Upstate’.  But Canada was as non-existent.  All my fugues in those days were trans-Atlantic.

I do not wish to complain about Canada for a second time, as I had initially planned to do.  I was in a foul mood when I wrote my first essay on the place, and I apologize to all those I offended.  I will say nothing about Stephen Harper, that hair-helmeted, Mattel-doll version of Newt Gingrich, nor about the complacent idiocy that clings, generation after generation, to a borrowed and vestigial queen.  Recently, I’ve been re-reading Montaigne, and this affects my mood dramatically.  You will get off easy if I don’t drift off into a discourse on my favorite sauces.  Come to think of it, that québécois gravy with cheese curd known as poutine is just fine, and so, even, is sirop d’érable.   

It is noteworthy, though, what an important part of Canada’s own psychogeography is its southern border.  The Canadians live pressed up against it like it were a source of heat.  From my 14th-floor window, facing the South, I imagine I can see the Adirondacks of Upstate.  But increasingly it is not, for me, in facing South that I have the sharpest feeling of what it is like to be in Canada.  This I have facing North, or even, with eyes closed, feeling North by I don’t know which sense.  Just as I get settled in a place where the border is all-important, accounting for 85% of the commerce of goods and at least as much of what Leibniz far too optimistically called the ‘commerce of light’, I find that borders have ceased to matter so much for me. 

This country, along with Russia, is one of the only two in the world to habitually leave out a good percentage of its land mass in the maps it makes of itself.  This is a shame, for it is that great mass, like the dark matter of the universe, that gives the place its weight.  Without that great mass that is left off the maps, that never figures into the squeegee punks’ circuit, that is largely neglected in CBC weather reports, I don’t think I could bear the place.  Russia’s vast expanse to the East is cumbersome, and always seems too much for Muscovy to bear.  Canada’s North in contrast is a source of power (literally) and majesty.  Baffin, Kugluktuk, and Vuntut are toponyms charged with life and wonder.  Handsome chubby creatures roam wide up there, I like to imagine.  The very thought of them frees a would-be fuguer, if only for a moment, from this string of makeshift border camps that most are content to call Canada.   

In a peculiar sense, it is okay to refer to our individual selves as “we” without belonging to royalty, yet be scientifically precise since our bodies which have a thousand billion cells harbor ten thousand billion bacteria. Germs are Us. The male of our species may find it particularly hard to accept the idea that it is cooperation and not competition that drives evolution. The story of how we got here is replete with extraordinary examples of networking and compromises over the last four billion years. The question “What is Life?” asked by Erwin Schrodinger half a century ago has been answered in the most concise manner by Lynn Margulis. Life is bacteria. “Any organism, if not itself a live bacterium, is then a descendant, one way or another, of a bacterium or, more likely, mergers of several kinds of bacteria. Bacteria initially populated the planet, and have never relinquished their hold.”

Life on our planet began with bacteria. They precede what you may know as the smallest unit of life or a “cell”. Human and most animal and plant cells have a nucleus which serves as a repository of their DNA, but bacteria (or prokaryotes) are simpler living organisms which do not even have a nucleus. They existed alone on earth for almost two billion years. The greatest revolution in biology was set off when two of these bacteria began a symbiotic relationship, forming the eukaryotic cell; one which has a distinct nucleus as well as pieces of circular extra-nuclear DNA bound in little dark bodies called mitochondria. Mitochondria, it turns out, were once independently living bacteria which apparently fused with another bacterial cell that they invaded. Through a process of cooperative living, different varieties of bacteria came together to give birth to “cells”. These eukaryotes which emerged as a confederacy of bacteria, existed as unicellular organisms for another billion years until they learnt to live in groups or colonies, eventually joining together to form the multi-cellular organism. The proliferation of all the splendid life forms and species we see today has occurred in only the last 600 hundred million years, humans arriving on the scene very recently.

To place the existence of humans into perspective, there is an interesting way to look at the history of our earth in 24 hours as described below:

Or as Lynn Margulis says, “The entire human history from cave to condo represents less than 1% of the history of life.” The great biologist Lewis Thomas had the best description when he wrote, “Perhaps we have had a shared hunch about our real origin longer than we think. It is there like a linguistic fossil, buried in the ancient root from which we take our species’ name. The word for earth at the beginning of the Indo-European language thousand of years ago (no one knows for sure how long ago) was dhghem. From this word meaning simply earth came our word humus, the handiwork of soil bacteria. Also to teach us the lesson, humble, human and humane.”

Here are a few more humbling facts. Microbial life is 25 times the mass of animal life and equals the total mass of plant life on earth. There are 500 pounds of microbes per acre of agricultural soil. There are more bacteria in one human’s mouth than all humans that have ever lived on earth. In fact, bacteria make up 10% of our dry body weight. Some live and replicate in the various organs of our body, and others have become a permanent part of our DNA. The mouth, gut and vagina harbor their own garden of living flora. There is increasing evidence that a balanced existence of these pathogens is critical for the health of the host, and that significant metabolic functions are performed by these microorganisms.

Disease states may occur when the normal symbiotic relationship between pathogens living in one of our organs is disturbed. For example, we often develop diarrhea while taking antibiotics. This happens because antibiotics kill some of the microbes, causing a redistribution of the growth advantage among the many species of pathogens that reside normally in our gut and result in diarrhea. Another example is Crohn’s disease. This is a chronic inflammatory reaction that may affect any part of the gastrointestinal tract. Analysis of the mucosa associated bacteria of patients with active disease suggests that patients have a reduction in the diversity of intestinal bacteria. Interestingly, this disease is common in parts of the world where infestation of the gut by the helminthic worms is rare such as in the developed countries, and uncommon in the third world where people frequently carry worms. Exposure to helminths may help prevent or even ameliorate Crohn’s disease. Researchers from the University of Iowa put this hypothesis to test using the eggs of Trichuris suis, the porcine whipworm, to treat patients with Crohn’s disease. All patients ingested 2500 live T suis ova every three weeks for 24 weeks. The eggs hatch in the duodenum, releasing larvae that ultimately grow in 6–8 weeks into adult worms, but cannot replicate in the human host, dying after completing their short life-cycle. By repeatedly giving the eggs by mouth, a constant source of adult worms can be maintained in the gut without causing disease. While in the gut of Crohn’s disease patients, these worms reset the balance of pathogens back to normal and the inflammation disappears. In fact, the trial yielded a response rate of nearly 80% with no side effects. While a disturbed normal gut flora can produce a chronic inflammatory disease, introducing a live worm may reset the balance.

Microbes not only make up 10% of our body weight, a single organism is capable of a myriad of pathogenic manifestations. An example of this involves the virus called Varicella Zoster. Most of us get infected with this virus in childhood where it causes chicken pox. Once the clinical infection subsides however, not all viral particles disappear. Some of them find refuge in the nerves, where they remain in a latent form. As adults, we can experience a reactivation of these viruses, and depending on the competence of the host’s immune system, Varicella Zoster is capable of causing a variety of diseases as shown in the diagram, including the painful disease called Shingles.

Acute diseases are commonly ascribed to pathogens today. It is likely that many of the chronic diseases such as cancer, diabetes, heart disease, inflammatory bowel diseases, even mental disorders like schizophrenia have some association with pathogens. Cancers are chronic diseases that reach clinical manifestation after passing through a number of stages including initiation in a single cell, expansion, invasion, evasion of the immune responses and finally metastasis. Already, some 15% of cancers globally have been etiologically linked to pathogens. To name just a few, associations between cervical cancer and the human papilloma virus (HPV), liver cancers and hepatitis viruses, certain types of lymphomas and herpes viruses, adult T-cell leukemia and HTLV virus, and gastric cancer and helicobacter pylori are now proved and accepted. The encouraging news is that if pathogens are identified as the etiologic agents, then preventive measures such as vaccines can be designed. This has already been accomplished for cervical cancer where the vaccine against HPV is quite effective. Below are a few recent examples to illustrate how more and more malignant diseases are being linked to an infectious etiology:

• There is an inordinately high incidence of lung cancer among women in Taiwan who do not smoke. Recently, HPV has been found in their tumors. This is the same family of viruses known to be the causative agent for cervical dysplasia and cancer in women. The same is not true for non-smoking women who develop cancer elsewhere implying that there may be other etiological agents (pathogens) involved. This makes sense if you think of lung cancer like pneumonia. Pneumonia could be caused by viral, bacterial, or fungal agents, but the organ response is quite similar and by looking at an X-ray of the lungs, we cannot say whether the pneumonic patch is viral or bacterial. In the same manner, lung cancer could be caused by a variety of pathogens.
• Aplastic anemia, a potentially lethal bone marrow failure syndrome, is more common in the rural areas of Thailand and has been linked to drinking un-bottled water. Having eliminated the chemical and physical causes, an as yet unidentified pathogen is strongly suspected as the probable cause.
• The human genome sequencing has yielded over 1000 retroviruses that have apparently been subdued over millennia of evolution, and made a permanent part of our genome. Yet only two retroviruses have so far been found to be associated with human diseases (HIV and HTLV). This is not because there are no other retrovirally induced cancers, but rather because of the enormous technical difficulties related to accurately identifying these elusive agents. Using an exquisitely sensitive “Viral Chip” which can screen for the presence of hundreds of viruses, researchers have been able to show just last week that a potential causal link exists between a retrovirus called XMRV and a rare familial type of prostate cancer. “In order to understand cancer, we must understand the microorganisms that reside in and control our body functions just as aggressively as the DNA sequences that make up our genes”. (L. Margulis).

It is high time that we start paying due respect to our formidable microbial fellow passengers on the planet. In the words of Niles Eldredge, “For microbes will not only inherit the earth (should, for example, we complex multicellular creatures fall prey to the next spasm of mass extinction); microbes got here long before we did, and in a very real sense, they already “own,” and most certainly run, the global system.”