Homicide?

Tracy Marciniak at her baby's funeral

(NC-17)  It was nearly Valentine's day, 1992, when Tracy Marciniak's estranged husband showed up at her apartment. A 28-year-old mother of two, Tracy was expecting another baby in just five days. The two argued and he punched her in the stomach. "It felt like it had gone all the way through me," Tracy said. The baby, whom she'd already named Zachariah, was fine on a prenatal visit just the day before, she says. But when she arrived at the hospital that night, doctors couldn't find his heartbeat. Tracy pulled through, but the baby did not.

Because Zachariah was not considered a "born person," prosecutors could not charge the husband with homicide. They attempted to try him under an old state law banning illegal abortion, but his lawyer argued that the baby would have been stillborn anyway. In the end, a jury convicted the husband of reckless injury and sentenced him to 12 years in prison. Though Tracy Marciniak had long supported abortion rights, she became furious when she discovered that the law didn't protect her unborn son--and that women's groups wouldn't back her quest for a state law punishing his killer. Now she is allied with the National Right to Life. Speaking for the federal Unborn Victims of Violence Act, "There were two victims," she says. "He got away with murder."

A decade later, the Unborn Victims of Violence Act of 2004 (Public Law 108-212) is a United States law which recognizes a child in utero as a legal victim, if they are injured or killed during the commission of any of over 60 listed federal crimes of violence. The law defines "child in utero" as "a member of the species Homo sapiens, at any stage of development, who is carried in the womb".

Interestingly, Planned Parenthood went after a pro-abortion senator who dared to vote for the Unborn Victims of Violence Act.

Cathy Alderman, spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, said, “You cannot support fetal personhood measures and be pro-choice.  We no longer believe her to be moderate, and we no longer consider her an ally on women’s health issues.”

The decision by Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains to withdraw its support from Sen. Ellen Roberts, who supports legal abortion, rather clearly reveals that the only 'choice' Planned Parenthood supports is abortion, regardless of the child's stage of development.  

Senator Roberts maintains a “pro-choice” position on abortion, but because she supports justice for pregnant women and their unborn babies, this pro-abortion group no longer supports her.  Pro-Choice?  Women make a choice to keep their baby and have their choice robbed from them by violent attackers who kill their baby, and ”pro-choice” Planned Parenthood withdraws its support from people who respect that.

Let's sort this out.  According to the act, if she's pregnant, and you kill her unborn child, that's murder.  PPhood objects to making it a crime to kill the unborn child that the mom wants to keep.  That clarifies things a bit.

Dynel Catrece Lane was arrested after she attacked a pregnant woman and cut her 7-month-old unborn baby from her womb. In this unbelievable act of violence, the baby died but the woman is expected to survive.

From CBS News, the suspect was arrested at Longmont United Hospital after she and her husband came in with the deceased baby. Apparently Lane’s husband didn’t know about the crime and thought she miscarried their baby. He drove her to the hospital but is not considered a suspect. Lane has at least two children who live with her at their home in Longmont, Colorado.

The victim was seven-months pregnant and was visiting Lane’s home to buy baby clothes advertised on Craigslist.

A 911 recording shows the baby breathed a heavy last gasp before she died.

Boulder County’s District Attorney, explains, “The issues involving an unborn child are complicated under Colorado law. In most circumstances, if a child was not actually born alive, then homicide charges are not possible.”

Update:  In April, 2016, Lane was convicted of three criminal felonies: attempted 1st degree murder, 1st degree assault, and child abuse knowingly/recklessly resulting in death. She was sentenced to 100 years.

The Unborn Victims of Violence Act was strongly opposed by most pro-choice organizations. The laws of 38 states also recognize the unborn child as the legal victim of homicide (and often, other violent crimes) during the entire period of prenatal development (27 states) or during part of the prenatal period (nine states). Legal challenges to these laws, arguing that they violate Roe v. Wade or other U.S. Supreme Court precedents, have been uniformly rejected by both the federal and the state courts, including the supreme courts of California, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota.

Laugh It Off

My friends in Ethiopia each took a turn with the camera. Dragged from

home to home, served coffee and more, and lots of laughing involved.

  These kids have probably added years to my life, healthwise.

An ancient remedy, "Laughter does good like a medicine," is now scientifically proven.  

Norman Cousins, who suffered from inflammatory arthritis, claimed that ten minutes of hearty guffawing while watching Marx Brothers movies brought him two hours of pain-free sleep and that both inflammation and pain were significantly reduced.  It's in his book, Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient. 

Ok, that's pretty far outside what we might expect, no?

It's reasonable.  Look it up.  Research since Cousins wrote the book has shown that laughter ...

1. reduces levels of stress hormones such as cortisol, epinephrine, and dopamine; 
2. increases health-enhancing hormones (such as endorphins), neurotransmitters, and infection-fighting antibodies; and 
3. improves blood flow to the heart

—all resulting in greater relaxation and resistance to disease, as well as improved mood and positive outlook.  Laughter is depression's enemy.

Community actually works well for these folks.  They depend on each other for most things 
from help building their homes to supervising their children to hauling in the nets. And they 
laugh when I try to speak their language and they try to speak mine.  

Africa, and some of the world's nicest people.

So then, laughter is surprisingly healthy and helpful.

Interestingly, so are heartfelt tears, love, loving friends, proximity and affection, affirmation, and a healthy diet. Who knew?

At the other end of the spectrum, anger, bitterness, unforgiveness, stress, selfishness, and fast food will erode your health.  And life.

Ancient wisdom; worth a second look.

Pv.17:22, for starters, and there's more where that came from.

Peter Principle Problem

In a typical workplace, employees tend to be promoted up to incompetence. The principle is based on employees being promoted as long as they are productive.

At some point they will stall because they're no longer impressive performers. They rise to their level of incompetence and stay there.

Over time, every position in the hierarchy will be filled by someone who lacks what it takes to do the job well.

It's not a joke; it's a common problem that must be solved to stay competitive; reorganize, down-size, spin-off, cross-train, reassign, ... The larger the organization, the larger the problem.

 "The Peter Principle" was published in book form in 1968. The author sums it up by saying: "the cream rises until it sours."

Ignorance ignores its own ignorance.  

"Poor performers do not learn from feedback 

suggesting a need to improve."

~Joyce Ehrlinger

Ehrlinger, Joyce; Johnson, Kerri; Banner, Matthew;
Dunning, David; Kruger, Justin (2008).
"Why the unskilled are unaware: Further explorations
of (absent) self-insight among the incompetent".
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes

The principle plays out most visibly with the transition into and through middle management, and it may leak upward from there.

In more recent scholarly work, we have the Dunning-Kruger Effect where unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority.  They mistakenly rate their ability much higher than is accurate. This bias is attributed to their inadequate ability to recognize their own ineptitude. By comparison, genuinely capable individuals tend to underestimate their relative competence, often thinking that tasks which are easy for them are also easy for others.  Again, middle management is the most visible venue.

The planning fallacy is a great example.

It's scary if you think about it.  The only hope we have of knowing we're helpful is if we think we're probably not all that great.  Reasonable humility, perhaps required for some measure of right thinking.  

Mount Stupid!
Ok, one more time down the mountain.

It's a lesson we must learn in each area of life.  I forget who in my early career days was the first to clobber me so effectively with that particular truth.  They required of me that I aggressively pursue all the stuff I didn't yet know.  It wouldn't be so bad, except fifty years later, there's still so many stinking things left to learn.

This particular article was occasioned by the discovery of yet another area in my own thinking that needs such an adjustment. Like I didn't have enough to do.

The Spice of Life

This is a short section of a DNA

molecule.  

DNA is fascinating.  It's a long, perhaps a 40-inch long complex molecule; a connected group of atoms, ordered and arranged in a unique, one-of-a-kind arrangement for each individual creature. There is a copy of the individual's DNA in every cell of the body from hair follicles to flakes of skin in a foot callous. You'd know that if you watched NCIS.

Most DNA molecules are formed in two strands that spiral around each other in a double-helix.  The strands are connected by bonds across the gap between creating base pairs.

A gene is the term used to describe a segment of the DNA molecule, and the number of base pairs in a gene segment is in the hundreds of thousands; not a simple thing.  The number of genes in the DNA of a life form varies widely.  Humans have about 22,000 genes which is more than a chicken has but less than a grape.  The actual number of genes in human DNA is still a matter of study and debate with ranges from 21,671 to 38,621 depending on whose work you follow.

Each gene controls a particular function within its host cell.  There's a lot going on in in there, apparently.  There's a copy of our DNA in each cell.

Take a break and watch the video here.  Note the production and industry processes, all of which are directed in their activity by DNA; it's the layout of logistics, just-in-time delivery, manufacturing, and transportation.  It handles factory systems maintenance and repair as well in parallel with production tasks.

The complexity of a cell is roughly equivalent to a large city like San Antonio.  And remember that cells are grouped together by task and function; skin, muscle, food processing, communications, data storage and analysis, sensor processing and rendering, and construction.  It's perhaps like an industrialized city with a primary product line.

Now broaden your perspective a bit and visualize those industrial cities as right next to each other, and run up the number of cities until you hit around 50 billion cities working together.  Each city is a labor and production center, and working together with those neighboring cities ... that's your heart.  Fifty billion cities, busy with work, cooperating to keep your blood flowing.

You have perhaps 100 trillion such little industrial cities working together in your body!

If you're curious about the cell and all the parts, here's a short Khan Academy class (right) on how it works.

And a narrated 3D look at the processes (left) for after you've got all the parts named.

And if your imagination is captured, see Inside the Living Body (lower right).

An overly simplistic view of life deprives us of the extraordinary beauty found there, does it not?  

Education is the spice of life.

Behavior Genetics

Our DNA decides who and what we are.  Our behavior is predictable before birth.  True?

No, but there are fascinating pieces that surface in the inquiry.  Nailing down the genes that perhaps would determine a particular behavior trait has been a difficult task.  The simple and perhaps popularly preferred result would be a 'hard-wired' brain where genes would unerringly create in us our personality type, our character traits, and our response to a particular type of situation.

To be violent or not, to be an addict or not, to be compassionate or not; the logical path suggests our brain operates like a computer with automatic responses built into the programming.  Popular science writers, much like the news media, have perhaps taken the simplest explanation as complete, suggesting everything from a brain circuit for bungee jumping to a plan for raising your child based on their DNA with a commercially available genetic profile.  The 'Gay Gene' has been similarly popularized.

Unfortunately, the science doesn't adequately support the premise, and the genetic contribution to character and personality development appears to be much more complex.

The surprising news from the human genome project in '01 is that we have a pitiful 25,000 genes or less, about twice that of a fruit fly and less than a mouse.  The expectation of a stunningly complex program defining the magnificence of humanity was squashed.  Just 25,000 lines of code won't make a decent word processor, much less a self-aware world-conqueror.

"We simply do not have enough genes for this idea of biological determinism to be right," asserted Craig Venter, president of Celera Genomics, one of the two teams that cracked the human genome.

The debate regarding possible DNA related traits has two sides, one of which is potentially charged.

"Venter has wasted little time in playing down the importance of the genes he has catalogued. He cites the example of colon cancer, which is often associated with a defective 'colon cancer gene'. Even though some patients carry this mutated gene in every cell, the cancer only occurs in the colon because it is triggered by toxins secreted by bacteria in the gut. Cancer, argues Venter, is an environmental disease. Strong support for this viewpoint appeared last year in the New England Journal of Medicine. Researchers in Scandinavia studying 45,000 pairs of twins concluded that cancer is largely caused by environmental rather than inherited factors, a surprising conclusion after a decade of headlines touting the discovery of the 'breast cancer gene,' the 'colon cancer gene,' and many more."  Dr. Kevin Davies, author of Cracking the Genome: Inside the Race to Unlock Human DNA (Free Press, 2001). A graduate of Oxford University, he holds a doctorate in genetics from the University of London.

Popularly touted and culturally volatile, the emerging science is significant on several fronts, not the least of which is the emerging opportunity to choose your children based on preimplantation or in-utero DNA testing, the modern version of eugenics where children become a marketable, made-to-order product.  Possibly helpful?  Absolutely, but with potential for troublesome extremes.

From an engineering perspective, triggering
gene expression is just incredible.

Now comes the fun part.  Cause or effect?

Did the gene cause the behavior or did the behavior trigger the gene?

The roll of environment and experience is now being understood as one of the triggers for gene expression (activation). For 100 people with some common genetic trait, only a few might see the expected manifestation.  Why?  

Gene C controls fur pigmentation in Himalayan rabbits.
Because the gene is active when environmental temperatures
are between 15 and 25°C, the rabbit reared at 20°C (left)
has pigmentation on its ears, nose, and feet, where its body
loses the most heat. The rabbit reared at temperatures above
30°C (right) has no fur pigmentation, because gene C is inactive
at these higher temperatures.

We knew that, didn't we.  What we may not have considered is
the impact of experience on genetic expression.

We do understand that our genes illuminate much about our physiology.  The as yet inadequately addressed question is the roll of what we experience in gene activation (expression).   Does the environment in which a child is raised trigger gene-level activity?  Can living with street crime or domestic violence change specific gene-level activity in those affected?  

Only recently have we begun to see how experience (environment) can trigger gene expression and affect the development of everything from mental traits (order/disorder) to physical traits (stability/deterioration) and even male-pattern baldness ...
... in women.  Heredity vs. environment, determinism vs. indeterminism (free will) continues.  

",,, it is important to keep in mind that there is a very complex interaction between our genes and our environment that defines our phenotype and who we are."  Lobo, I. (2008) Environmental influences on gene expression. Nature Education 1(1):39

The debate continues furiously, of course.  Both sides are perhaps mostly right, and we'll be the fortunate recipients of their research and medical advances.  One thing we know for certain, though, is that the simplistic answer of genetic determinism has fallen by the wayside.  We shoulda spotted that one coming.

Adult Education

Learn for a lifetime, or miss all the good parts.  We get to choose, but there's effort involved.

When we finished school, we were ready for life, equipped with everything we needed to know. That's what we thought, and it never occurred to us that we'd need to continue serious learning for the rest of our lives.

Moving thoughtfully forward then, how do we tackle life and its opportunities?

Helps: listening to those with experience! Whether they have artisanal skills or business acumen or relational abilities, all are helpful, and perhaps especially the interpersonal relationship insights you might acquire.

Hindrances: thinking that the knowledge we have is equal to wisdom and experience. It's not, at least not yet; for now it's just information.

Best source for advanced study: others! When we're early in the process, it helps to have others who think like we do to reinforce the good parts. Once we're well begun, we need to hear clearly those who disagree with us and understand how they came to that point of view. Absolutely essential.

Worst source: mainstream and social media. When we find ourselves agreeing with a given source these days, we need to remember that most are deliberately one-sided.

“For the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see. In the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture.”  ― Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion

Curious what it looks like?  Here's a summary ...

There's enough here for a multi-year personal study.

The most useful information is the last column, how we might relate
genuinely to others. This is an aggregation of several studies, the most
 notable being Kegan's Structures of Complexity of Mind.

If you're going to grow up, it isn't over until you reach the goal. There are markers along the way, if you're interested.

It's hard enough making it through adolescence and education, it's hard enough becoming a responsible adult, a marriage partner, a parent. All that is just the beginning.  😃

Ahead is the extraordinary world of identity and character, service and sacrifice, and meaningful life.  Growth and change are continuous, and there is so much to learn along the way.

___________________________________________________
An annoying note to self: those of us who think we've arrived ... haven't.