I've been doing research for a story about chimps who learned ASL, and
came across this amusing discussion between Lucy and Roger Fouts, who taught Lucy ASL:
Lucy was observed lying, something that was once considered uniquely
human, because it is evidence of a sense of self. In this sign-language
conversation, Fouts asks Lucy about a pile of chimpanzee feces on the floor:
Fouts: WHAT THAT?
Lucy: WHAT THAT?
Fouts: YOU KNOW. WHAT THAT?
Lucy: DIRTY DIRTY.
Fouts: WHOSE DIRTY DIRTY?
Lucy: SUE (a graduate student).
Fouts: IT NOT SUE. WHOSE THAT?
Lucy: ROGER!
Fouts: NO! NOT MINE. WHOSE?
Lucy: LUCY DIRTY DIRTY. SORRY LUCY.
There's more about Lucy here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_%28Chimpanzee%29
Beliefnet is running an exchange of columns between them to debate the meaning and value of religious moderation. They're having a thoughtful, respectful conversation, and it's clear Sam sees Andrew pretty much as I do. Andrew is one of an apparently vanishing species - an actual *thinking* Christian, and he's able to demonstrate that's not an oxymoron.
It's good reading and fine food for thought.
"It's like sleep. I suspect that pleasure is mainly used to turn off parts of the brain so you can keep fresh the memories of things you're trying to learn."
...
"However, it has a bug, which is, if you gain control of it, you'll keep doing it. If you can control your pleasure center, then you can turn off your brain. That's a very serious bug, and it causes addiction."
- Marvin Minsky, AI researcher, Jan 07 issue of Discover.
"I have a problem. I'm an introvert. I'm not shy. I'm not afraid of being in public. But I am horrible at chit-chat and gossip. If I spend an evening at a social function with people I don't know or don't like, I get home and feel like I've spent all day at the ocean. It's that fighting-the-waves and drained-by-the-sun kind of tired. I would rather spend four hours with my head stapled to the carpet. I would be more comfortable that way."
Does this resonate with you? Check out the rest of it here.
Stephen Jay Gould introduced the idea of "punctuated equilibrium", which is to say that evolutionary change is relatively calm until something comes along to stir things up. A common culprit is climate change, and the occasional meteorite can radically change the game.
I recently picked up a book by William Calvin called The Ascent of Mind, which builds a case that human evolution took off 2.5 million years ago due to a severe ice age. We know about the ice age through studies of rock and soil layers dating back to that time, and an examination of fossil skulls before and since show sharp growth in brain capacity at the 2.5 million year point.
Calvin published his book in 1991.
Today I came across this:
As you can see, it shows the various forms humans have developed in the past, where they are on the timeline, and the spike in cranial capacity after 2.5 million years. You can also see that some species didn't make it. Actually, NONE of them made it to the present time, except ours.
There's a lot of debate about why. Perhaps some previous species were more susceptible to a particular disease, or couldn't compete with other competing human species, couldn't adapt to climate changes, or simply had a run of very bad luck. Millions of years ago, hominins didn't number anywhere near like we do now; a entire species could be concentrated in a relatively small part of the African Rift Valley. It wouldn't take a huge event to wipe them out.
Today humanity numbers over six billion strong. We may owe a lot to an ice age that bred a meaner, tougher, smarter ancient ancestor.
Zachary Guiles is in the news because he dared to go to school wearing a t-shirt that reframes Bush's stance as a leader in a time of war. Here's an image of the t-shirt in question:
(If anyone knows of a source for a better image, I'd appreciate a link to it)
An appeals court recently ruled that attempts by Zac's school to censor his shirt was illegal, upholding his - and any other student's - First Amendment right to political expression. And BTW - Zac is reportedly a straight-A student.
Let a million protest t-shirts bloom!
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It’s a truth borne out in biology and economics: Selfishness pays. Viruses can steal enzymes to reproduce. Tax evaders can take advantage of public services to survive and thrive. And, according to game theory, the cheats win out over the altruists every time.
Yet cooperation is a hallmark of human society, allowing for the creation of everything from the local grange to the United Nations. Cooperation can also be found in the animal world. Lions hunt in packs. Ants and bees create colonies. So how could cooperation evolve in a cheater’s world?
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Three researchers at Brown University think they've hit on the answer. I've always been interested in this question, and their theory sounds entirely plausible and can probably be tested.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20
I have just one quibble with the piece, and it's their use of the term altruism. I've never believed that altruism = unselfishness.
Altruism is another survival strategy, based on the cooperation model. It is ultimately selfish (in the sense of looking out for one's own interest, not in the sense of taking unfair advantage of others) in that the person practicing altruism aims to encourage broader cooperation, and benefit from that cooperation.
That's a perfectly valid and sensible strategy, and this article examines how it works.
What do you get when you cross Super Size Me with a Purina Dog Food commercial? You get The Monkey Chow Diaries.
For one week (it started this past Saturday), this guy is going to eat nothing but ZuPreem Diet Primate Food. And he's keeping a blog of it, of course! Check in every day to see if he's still alive, if he's suffering from cravings, and if he's turned into a monkey or something.
"Pliny The Elder, the Roman savant who compiled the eclectic 37-book encyclopedia Historia Naturalis nearly 2,000 years ago, was obsessed with the written word. He pored over countless Greek and Latin texts, instructing his personal secretary to read aloud to him even when he was dining or soaking in the bath.
"And when he traveled the streets of Rome, he insisted on being carried everywhere by slaves so he could continue reading."
Apparently Pakistani surgeons find the light of cellphones useful also. From textually.org:
Medical Operations by the Light of Cellphones
This is wild. According to a report on a private television network, hospital surgeons in Lahore, Pakistan have been carrying out medical operations using the light from cellphone screens at times, due to persistent power failures in the national electricity supply. Cellular News reports.
"The report, carried in the Islamic Republic News Agency said that electricity shortages have affected almost every sector of life in the country. Reports say that Karachi is the other worst hit place with thousands of its industrial units working in one shift and low outputs affecting export targets. The report did not identify which of the city's hospitals are using this form of emergency lighting."
The killing had a big impact on Dutch politics and society and provoked a passionate debate on the balance between local values, immigrant values and tolerance.
When Theo's body was recovered a note was found pinned to his chest by a knife. The note was a death threat addressed to the woman who wrote Submission.
That woman is Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She serves in the Dutch national legislature, and now lives in Rushdie-style seclusion with heavy-duty security. She knows better than most the price to be paid for making high-profile criticisms of Islam.
There's a blog about her with several interviews - including comments on the current uproar over the Danish cartoons - and coverage of the global protests.
I think her perspective, based on experience, is more instructive than anything I can say. She's a very interesting person - smart, informed, attractive, outspoken, creative - and uniquely positioned to understand the sharpening and increasingly violent chasm separating the West and Islam.
The Ayaan Hirsi Ali blog is here: http://ayaanhirsiali.web-log.nl/categor
Her bio is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayaan_Hirs
In that vein, I came across a fascinating resource today; it's called "Y? The National Forum on People's Differences", and it's run by a fellow Phil Milano. A man who has worked with him, Eric Deggans, describes what Phil does:
What reaction might you get if you asked black people why their lips are so big?
Or an Indian woman why she wears the dot on her forehead? Or a white person if they smell like wet dogs after a few minutes in the rain?
Phil Milano has been having these kinds of conversations for years, in an online community called Y? The National Forum on People's Differences -- a judgement-free corner of cyberspace, where people can ask the kind of cross-cultural questions they've always wanted to pose, but were too afraid to ask.
I first met Phil more than ten years ago, when he offered me a job. Then working as a recruiter for the Florida Times-Union, he was hoping to hire the Jacksonville paper's first black music critic in me. And when I told him Jacksonville felt too much like a lateral move, he mentioned a music writing gig opening up at a paper across the state, the St. Petersburg Times.
Even then, I could tell Phil was the kind of guy who was fearless about talking across race. Not like so many people who claim to oppose political correctness, when all they really want is the freedom to disregard the sensitivities and perspective of other cultures. Phil wanted to cut through the clutter in a constructive way -- respecting others' sensibilities while challenging people on both sides of the conversation to ask the questions really on their minds.
Way too smart to stay at the Times Union, Phil has since spun his ideas off into a book, I Can't Belive You Asked That, and a regular column, Dare to Ask, which appears in more than 30 newspapers in 14 states.
A typical column features a question -- "I've noticed white people don't have rhythm when it comes to dancing," was a recent one -- with replies from the mostly-young folks on his online forum and then an authoritative answer from an expert (on dancing, Phil quotes choreographer Wade Robson saying black folks are more improvisational and white folks more technical).
I mention all this because, on this anniversary of Martin Luther King's Birthday, there are still precious few media sources focused on connecting people rather than dividing them. People are so busy feeling aggrieved, persecuted and put-upon -- often for very good reason -- there's not much percentage in trying to unite them, anymore.
But Phil's trying. Through a number of platforms. So check one or two out, and you just might learn that the question you've always wanted to ask wasn't such a dumb notion after all...
http://www.yforum.com/column.html
How is that possible?
It boils down to this; human children are prone to behavior by imitation. Chimps simply see things as they are and act accordingly.
For monkeys, that's adaptive behavior. What the human children did was also adaptive - in the context of being successful among many other humans. Turns out, the impulse to go along to get along is very basic and powerful - as I've observed before.
As one researcher commmented, "We don't appreciate just how automatically we rely on imitation, because usually it serves us so well. "It is so adaptive that it almost never sticks out this way," he added. "You have to create very artificial circumstances to see it."
Now we do.
You know who I'm taking about - people in leadership positions who reject the "reality-based community", who seem determined to view the world through a bizarre prism of their own making, disconnected from any recognizable cause or effect.
And the base, the root for this viewpoint is....what? Is it "faith-based?" Is it an extreme need for security? How does an outlook that literally flies in the face of reality persist? Is it somehow adaptive?
Yes, it is. And here's why.
One universal truism among all forms of life is this - there's safety in numbers. It's axiomatic from the cellular level up. Among people, this takes the form of networks of trust. Tribal affinities run deeply because for eons, they were THE basis for human survival. It's about your gang - your family, your people, your town, your city, your country. Why are we so fiercely loyal to our folks? Because they're familiar. They may be nuts, but we understand and know how to deal with their particular brand of nuttiness, and therein lies security.
No, that's not rational. It's emotional.
The trouble with rationality, with being reality-based, is that you must neccesarily stand apart from your peeps and examine things objectively, as they are, without regard for the emotional ties you have. Many people are incapable of doing that. Anything - ANYTHING - that imposes a sense of distance between themselves and people they - rightly or wrongly - trust is automatically a source of suspicion, fear and loathing. Even facts.
So how is this adaptive? Simply this: half the battle in maintaining security through safety in numbers is keeping everyone together and on the same page. Fictions, lies, half-truths, sugarcoated stories will serve. Cults know this. Charismatic personalities understand it instinctively. Religious conservatives have practiced the game for millenia. They genuinely fear the consequences of independent thought. Anything that might potentially splinter the tribe is regarded as a threat.
It has lasted because it's effective. When an opposing group vies for resources, it matters less how you keep your people together; the important point is that they're all tight with each other and they can be rallied to do whatever is needed to fend off competition. It works. Look at who owns Congress, the White House, and is about to lock down the Supreme Court.
Now and then, however, reality intrudes. We face problems today that require reason, require a deeper understanding of who, what, why, when, where and how. This is the new adaption. The time when we could rely mainly on social cohesion for survival has long ago passed. We have to feed that emotional need, but understand that education, reason and reality-based thinking are not threats.
Ever experienced the frustration of trying to reason with a tribal thinker, and coming away feeling that such people can't be reasoned with? For you, reason is an effective tool for understanding the world. For the tribal thinker, reason is something to be feared. Small wonder there's a disconnect. You ARE talking in different languages - a rational one vs. an emotional one.
If the tribal planet refuses to recognize the power of reason, it will eventually perish. If they remain in leadership positions, they could take the rest of us down with them.
Turns out that's even more true than I imagined. Science journalist and author Carl Zimmer comments on a new study that clarifies the relationships between deception, social intelligence, and brain size.
It's long been noticed that social mammals have the largest brains. This study makes a convincing case that social interaction actually drives brain expansion and intelligence overall. It notes that homoid brain sizes have expanded in sync with the increasing tendency for people to gather in large groups.
It makes sense, it passes the common sense smell test. Dealing with people is demanding. Identifying, attributing (good or bad, friend or foe, trustworthy or unreliable?) remembering those attributes, competing, cooperating.
Neural density and intelligence may very closely correlate with human density.
This could explain why large urban areas mostly vote Democratic ;)
Check it out - Zimmer is a pleasure to read. His style is much like Jared Diamond.
http://www.corante.com/loom/archives/00
Richard Wrangham: The Evolution of Cooking
"We always tend to think that humans have just had a continuous surge in brain size over the last two million years, but actually over the last thirty thousand years brain size has decreased by 10 to 15 percent. [...] This gracility is exactly the same pattern we see in the evolution of dogs from wolves, or bonobos from chimpanzees, or domesticated foxes from wild foxes. In all these cases an increasing gracility of the bone is an incidental effect.
I think that we have to start thinking about the idea that humans in the last 30, 40, or 50 thousand years have been domesticating ourselves. If we're following the bonobo or dog pattern, we're moving toward a form of ourselves with more and more juvenile behavior. [...] I think that current evidence is that we're in the middle of an evolutionary event in which tooth size is falling, jaw size is falling, brain size is falling, and it's quite reasonable to imagine that we're continuing to tame ourselves."
RICHARD WRANGHAM is a professor of biology and anthropology at Harvard University who studies chimpanzees, and their behavior, in Uganda. His main interest is in the question of human evolution from a behavioral perspective. He is the author, with Dale Peterson, of Demonic Males: Apes, and the Origins Of Human Violence.
How often will people go along to get along - even when they know they are right and the group is wrong?
A couple of highlights:
The study concludes that having even ONE peer agree with a correct conclusion strongly bolsters a person's courage to make the same, correct choice. Supporting the truth in the face of false conventional wisdom DOES sway others.
The desire to go along to get along correlates with self-esteem. The less a person has, the more likely they are willing to accept other people's judgment in place of their own.
We know these things instinctually on a social level, but this study lays it out neatly, with numbers. It says a lot about how social pressure trumps clear reasoning.
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