Color - President Cool

'Man, though less than some male mammals, exhibits the "Coolidge effect": a new female refreshes his libido. The effect is named after the famous story about President Calvin Coolidge and his wife beig shown around a farm. Learning that a cockerel could have sex dozens of times a day, Mrs. Coolidge said: "Please tell that to the president." On being told, Mr. Coolidge asked, "Same hen every time?" "Oh, no, Mr. President. A different one each time." The president continued: "Tell that to Mrs. Coolidge."

Color - capitalist kingpin

'Humphrey began an essay on the topic with the story of how Henry Ford once asked his representatives to find out which parts of the Model-T never went wrong. They came back with the answer that the kingpin had never gone wrong [whatever the hell that is]; so Ford ordered it made to an inferior specification to save money.'

Red Queen clean-up

Quick hits on Red Queen:

- I think an interesting point about human neoteny is that it seems that humans' extremely early birth [humans are born way before we 'should' be -- we're helpless for years] is that this coincides well with being the complex-learning animal. While most animals gestate for far longer in an egg or womb or pouch, we come prematurely into the world and are thrown very early into learning situations. This makes sense for an animal that will rely more than any other on information it has learned in the world, which it then can relate to new situations through abstraction. I don't know if this theory is big already or anything.

- Ridley discusses Geoffrey Miller's theory [mentioned in previous post] and says that it in a way depends on circular reasoning: Early humans were attracted to big brains, and they were choosy because the men invested a lot of time in parenting, which made the woman try to prove paternity of her kids by sticking with one man -- man and woman enter into a long-term, mostly monogamous relationship and therefore must be quite choosy. Men gave parental care to increase the chance that his kids would survive, because human young were born prematurely and needed lots of help for a long time -- children with only one parent are likely to die. Human children are born prematurely because their heads are so big that they won't fit out of the woman's pelvis if they're born at the normal time. So why are we have such huge heads? Because we're attracted to big brains? But that's what started this whole thing.

Ridley also says that Miller likes the fact that his theory is circular, because the evolutionary forces -- like the despotic fashion -- often are circular effects. True enough, but Ridley's glossing over one well-known factor that could possibly kick-start this cycle: bipedalism. The biomechanics of erect posture demand that human pelvises be quite smaller than those in quadrupeds or even other apes. So bipedalism could push humans to be born sooner, more helpless, more paternal support, female sexual faithfulness, parental choosiness, etc.

Trumping The Red Queen

So The Red Queen ends up basically as one long essay, with Ridley advancing his hypothesis that human intelligence -- the primary factor that makes us us -- is mostly a result of sexual selection: Humans are smart today because our ancestors thought people with big brains were charming and sexy. Early hominids chose to mate disproportionately with especially smart hominids wielding a lot of evolutionary pressure to make the species smarter.

He starts out his conclusive chapter by disqualifying other theories about the roots of human intelligence:

'Man the toolmaker' - Humans needed to be smart so as to invent all these wonderful tools.
Response - This theory is poor because humans brains started growing quickly about 3M years ago while human tools exploded in complexity only about 200k years ago; 2M years ago, for instance, our tools were not more complicated than those of australopithecus.

'Man the hunter' - Humans, unlike their ancestors and other apes, eat a lot of meat; they needed bigger brains to develop better hunting strategies and memories.
Response - No go, because hunting doesn't actually require much intelligence. Lions use keen hunting strategies, some birds can remember where resources are better than us, and other apes can do pretty impressive gathering stuff.

Stephen Jay Gould's accidental hypothesis - Humans grew intelligent as a by-product of becoming 'baby apes'; humans exhibit signs of 'neoteny', which means that we have what biologically looks like an extremely extended childhood compared to apes, and we develop very slowly. Evidence: lack of hair, teeth grow in late, 'gestation' outside the womb, small jaw, head grows for long time, skinny limbs, etc. The upshot of all this is that our brain coincidentally becomes huge -- it is what Gould calls a 'spandrel' -- and can then be used for all of these useful things that human brains are good for, like language. [Unfortunately, Ridley doesn't recap whether Gould explains a mechanism for the development of neoteny -- does he think neoteny arrived through sexual selection, or some natural adaptive mechanism?]
Response - This ignores the well-established theory put forward by Chomsky that there are fundamental linguistic features inherent in all humans; language is clearly not an accident in humans because there are complicated genetic elements involved with it.

Machiavellian hypothesis - Humans use their big brains to better manipulate other people to their own advantages.
Response - Baboons, like some other animals, manipulate their associates. If human received such a Machiavellian advantage from big brains, wouldn't baboons have also developed bigger, more devious brains?


Thinkness response:

The funny thing about Ridley's theory is that I think he knows what's mostly wrong with it, but he greatly minimizes the negative evidence, at points trying to sweep away some of it by losing it in little parenthetical comments:

'True, we learn a lot more than bats and cuckoos do. We learn mathematics and vocabulary of tens of thousands of words and what people's characters are like. But this is because we have instincts to learn these things (with the possible exception of mathematics), not because we have fewer instincts than bats or cuckoos.'

'The only way, [Miller] suggests, that sufficient evolutionary pressure could suddenly and capriciously be sustained in any species to enlarge an organ far beyond its normal size is sexual selection. "Just as the peahen is satisfied with nothing less than a visually brilliant display of peacock plumage, I postulate that hominid males and females became satisfied with nothign less than psychologically brilliant, fascinating, articulate, entertaining companions." Miller's use of the peacock is deliberate. Wherever else in the animal kingdom we find greatly exaggerated and enlarged ornaments, we have been able to explain them by the runaway, sexy-son, Fisher effect of intense sexual selection (or the equally powerful Good-genes effect, as described in chapter 5).'


This second parenthetical note is quite revealing. Here he says that early humans might have thought big brains were sexy because they were actually advantageous in surviving. Chapter 5 revolves around the big dispute between those who think sexual selection is driven by survival-enhancing traits, and those who think it is driven by random 'despotic fashions' that take off because they do -- animals play into the fashion because they want their offspring to be fashionable and reproductively successful, thereby strengthening the fashion. He ends the chapter with a pretty reasonable synthesis of the two views, essentially concluding that fashion backed up by survival advantages is a stronger, longer-lived effect.

So after making this allowance that perhaps human intelligence is evolutionarily advantageous Ridley decides not to go further into it. He skirts the issue of importance of culture to humans by saying that yes, we learn more than other animals, but we also have more instincts [to learn more], so it's a wash. Hogwash! Yes, we have more instincts to learn more than other animals, but we learn orders of magnitude more than they do. Fundamentally, it's clear that instincts to learn are quite different than instincts to act -- humans are strongly programmed, true: programmed, fundamentally, to pick up information and use it in their lives.

While it is doubtless true that instinct is largely responsible for the fact that people have culture, it is inescapable that a great part of human success is the power of what we learn. The miraculous thing about it, which he inaccurately deemphasizes, is that we learn a lot of things at a high level of abstraction. This gives us both a great facility to go in depth into learning -- our Machiavellian skills far surpass the baboon's -- and maybe more importantly, the potential to learn an endless amount of different things.

He points out that various animals can do many of the individual things that people can do. But he does not acknowledge that only humans have the potential to do an enormous amount of different mental tasks, because we can think abstractly about various situations. Prehistoric people figured out how to ice fish in the Arctic, gather tubers in the savanna, pick fruit in the forest, etc. Our language structure has important biological-genetic underpinnings, but along with that instinct with knowledge comes the power to wield abstract thought in any direction. That flexibility of abstract thought is humans' unique advantage. Other animals have a greater fraction of their actions hard-wired in, while we write and run massive software programs that are specialized to our individual lives and even to each moment within our lives. This explanation of the power of abstract thought could go on forever, and I'm going to stop this round here.

Color -- proof negative

Ridley uses three different metaphors to convey the idea of observation that falls short of proof. None of them are individually good enough to earn their way to thinkness' esteemed Chronic section, but in toto they squeak by:

'A man cuts the legs off a flea to test his theory that the fleas' ears are on their legs. He then tells the flea to jump and it does not, so he concludes that he was right; fleas' ears are in their legs.'

'Crossing over is like an elephant repellent. You know it's working because you don't see any elephants.'

'One scientist gives the analogy of somebody trying to decide what makes his driveway wet: rain, lawn sprinklers, or flooding from the local river. It is no good turning on the sprinkler and observing that it wets the drive or watching rain fall and seeing that it wets the drive.'

[He says this last mistake is the 'fallacy of affirming the consequent' -- a.k.a. post hoc ergo propter hoc?]

Ridley's response

I earlier criticized the section of The Red Queen in which Ridley seemed to claim that every major thing people do, even contemporary humans' choices not to maximize their numerical reproductive success -- 'the emancipation from evolution' -- was actually to help our genes replicate themselves. I suggested that people may have been serving evolution-derived desires without actually maximizing their reproductive success or that of their genes.

Now, much later in the book, Ridley seems to be acknowledging that. He summarizes the research of William Irons as showing that modern people in rich countries choose to not have lots of babies so that they can put more resources into their few children's upbringing, such as paying for their increasingly complicated schooling. No shit, man. Glad the government gave you a million dollars to figure that one out.

And then he goes on to mostly agree with the point I made before about evolutionary desires: "There has been no genetic change since we were hunter-gatherers, but deep in the mind of hte modern man is a simple male hunter-gatherer rule: Strive to acquire power and use it to lure women who will bear heirs; strive to acquire wealth and use it to buy other men's wives who will bear bastards... Likewise, deep in the mind of a modern woman is the same basic hunter-gatherer calculator, too recently evolved to have changed much: Strive to acquire a provider husband who will invest food and care in your children; strive to find a lover who can give those children first-class genes. Onle if she is very lucky will they be the same man.'

I guess this is mostly true. Ridley says, sometime earlier in the book [the index is bad and I can't find it] that psychologists and sociologists are misguided into thinking that there is no human nature, and that the differences between people are more significant than the similarities. He, on the other hand, says he is more interested in universal human nature, and his explanation of evolutionary tendencies on sex relations reflects this.

If I were to do a somewhat similar analysis I would probably look more at how the more basic evolutionary pushes play out in current social settings. Yes, men want to have wives and want to cheat. But they also wear condoms while cheating, and they are gay, and they decide to not get married, and decide to not have any kids, and a million other sexual behaviors. I am definitely interested in the evolutionary factors involved -- some people with different inclinations might not be -- but I would probably be more likely to study some of these other behaviors that Ridley basically discounts from human nature. [Which is good, because, you know, he's already written some really good books on this shit.]

[Middle]sex specific

Okay, it didn't take long before I got the missing section of Middlesex beamed to me by a lovely friend in lovely Wisconsin. [Hopefully I'll get some cheese curds beamed next.]

The punctuation may be a little off, but the words are damn good:

"Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in 'sadness', 'joy', or 'regret'. Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feelings. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions, like 'the happiness that attends disaster' or 'the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy'. I'd like to show how 'intimations of morality brought on by aging family members' connects with 'the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age'. I'd like to have a word for 'the sadness inspired by failing restaurants', as well as for 'the excitement of getting a room with a mini-bar.'"

Amen.

But the words got in the way

My brother recently read me a great passage from Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex, which relates to this whole question of abstractness. In this section he talks about how he [I don't know if this is a character or a narrating voice or what] thinks that the usual words used to describe feelings don't really work. He doesn't feel 'hate' or 'love' or 'happiness' or 'jealousy'. Rather, he wants a word to describe the feelings you get at very particular real-world moments. Unfortunately, I can't remember any of such moments right now [argh], but they're things like when you suddenly remember a word that was stumping you, or something like that. [Perhaps my brother will chime in with something to make this explanation a little better.]

The important point is that these bins that exist in our language, like love or hate, don't necessarily describe the analog feelings we actually experience. Isn't the love for your mother different than the love for your spouse? Yes, you could use a qualifier, like 'romantic', or 'motherly', but aren't there many types of romantic love? Or maybe 'love' is sort of a misleading word? It seems to me that feeling and thought are analog, concrete quantities that don't fit perfectly in the abstract word bins that we have created, which is one reason why writing is hard.

This also really speaks to a long-running argument I've had with a couple of friends about how important Wittgenstein's philosophy is. [Unfortunately, everything I know about him is hearsay, so this is really pretty shitty argumentation on my part.] But a couple of my argument mates, quite sharp folks, have really praised Wittgenstein and his claim about how language truly defines human existence, and how the human experience is fundamentally and fully shaped by language.

This doesn't really make sense to me, because it seems so convincing to me that feelings and thoughts don't actually fit into our linguistic boxes, which are inherently imperfect descriptors. I have not really defined this debate very clearly, and the 'correctness' of the positions may hinge heavily on what exactly was being debated, but what's more important is just the thoughts that were involved. It is certainly true that language thoroughly influences how we see everything, but it sounds to me like this guy was living so far in his head that he fooled himself into thinking that humanity resided entirely in the mental world.

This also may have some implications for a friend I recently stayed up late at night talking philosophy with. A big part of him is pulled to the thought that love is the motive force and defining, uniting aspect of human existence and the universe. This is certainly a valuable feeling, but it might be worth tempering our faith in that one maxim with the knowledge that language is inherently a little dodgy; can this one word, subject to all the effects of various human uses, really capture all that's important? 'Love' has been so abused by ad slogans and cheap songs. Or do those ads and songs just depict an aspect of humanity, important as the rest? Hm. End post.

Appreciation of the analog

David Brooks wrote an interesting, completely misguided op-ed about how Iraq is actually going well, because it's muddling through the complicated process of making a democracy. [Talkingpointsmemo, as one would expect, has the lucid take-down: 'The failure to do proper planning for post-war Iraq, it turns out, wasn't a matter of hidebound ideologues who ignored and attacked expertise and experience. It was the happy result of America's tradition of non-ideological pragmatism.']

But the op-ed has other values for thinkness, namely this mention of the 20th-century political philosopher Michael Oakeshott. Oakeshott, he says, drew a big distinction between 'technical' and 'practical' knowledge. A recipe, for example, is technical knowledge, in that it can be put into words and written down. A cook, on the other hand, has practical knowledge she has gained through experience, and could never be boiled down entirely to words.

This is very similar to what thinkness calls 'analog/digital': the distinction between abstract ideas -- such as those written in words -- and concrete physical existence in the world [even if that physicality is contained within someone's brain, as is the cook's practical knowledge]. I will have to do some reading up on Oakeshott, it seems.

By the way, thinkness' archetypal illustration of the difference between these categories is how someone crosses the street. You could try to estimate how far away the cars are, how fast they're moving, how wide the street is, how fast you walk, [etc.], and calculate when to cross the street; or you could just use the analog visual memory and skill inside your brain, which you don't really understand in a conscious way, to tell you when to cross.

Dean's success is imminent -- sort of...

There is a growing brouhaha emerging between Dean and the more moderate wing of the Democratic party, such as the Democratic Leadership Council. First Dean steals all their thunder by bashing Bush and jumping out in front of the pack. Then Graham says he, unlike Dean, is from the electable wing of the Democratic Party, while Dean says he [Dean] is from the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party. Then some anonymous Democrats, getting more pissed that a perceived-lefty outside is making all the hay, run an ad in New Hampshire and South Carolina equating Dean with Bin Laden [or something], and Dean says Ouch!, lay off the below-the-belt shots, guys, to no avail. Then Dean says the DLC is actually the 'Republican wing of the Democratic party', and Lieberman says Dean can't win because he's impetuous and hey, this is just another example.

William Safire, pitying the Dems more than anything else, makes a lot of logical leaps and hopes that Dean wins the nomination so that he doesn't run as a third-party candidate so that Bush doesn't win in a super-landslide so that American isn't tarnished by having an election like the ones that happen in all those countries we make fun of and/or invade. [Even Safire admitted it was convoluted.] But he is onto something else, though he may not notice it. [Yes, this crackpot theory of mine is even more loosely connected than his outright point.] He writes, 'This gets down to the Rockefeller-Goldwater level of eye-gouging that is not forgotten at the national convention.' This is true. And it's in the long run good for Democrats, because i think Dean may be the Democratic Goldwater.

Goldwater comes along right when the national Republican Party had been in the shitter for, oh, 'bout 30 years. He defines a new, somewhat radical direction for the party, greatly angering the old Northeast-Republican-stalwart section of the GOP. He loses the '64 election in a landslide to Johnson, who had big ears, and in the process a big wedge emerges between the moderate and conservative wings of the GOP. It looks like just another dismal low for the Republican Party.

But lo and behold, in just four years Nixon patches together enough pieces of the party to win the pres election in '68, Reagan comes to the fore in '80, the GOP takes Congress in '94, and the whole world comes under the sway of the Republican party in 2001. In many analyses of this long-running Republican revolution, they point to the Goldwater campaign as the very beginning.

Then: Democrats rule the national political scene for decades; Goldwater comes along, energizes the political base, causes rift in the party, loses a landslide election; Republicans build on Goldwater momentum and gradually take over the joint.

Now: Republicans rule the national political scene for decades; Dean comes along, loses a landslide election, energizes the base, causes rift in party; Dems build on Dean momentum and gradually swing pendulum back the other way.

And no one is better positioned to take advantage of this than Hillary -- emotional fave of the left, recent hawk and moderate-policy supporter -- to take over in 2008. Except she will also have to contend with Gore, who sees his three-election 2000-2008 narrative arc as similar to Nixon's in 1960-1968 -- lose a very close election mostly because of uncharismatic personality, sit out the next one while maturing, then ride the newly-radicalized party to victory in the next election. Gore's story fits in lock-and-key with the Dean-Goldwater comparison!

Color - Flying abhors a vacuum

I really like this line from Kant, as quoted in a book by Robert Fogelin, as quoted in a story by Edward Rothstein: '[A dove] cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space.'

I don't necessarily understand exactly how Kant compares this to the limits on reason, but the line and the story are of interest.

Scientist prematurely writes off philosophy

As you may have noticed, I am currently in the throes of trying to figure out exactly how to steer this blog. [This question tightly parallels an investigation of what I will study next year in school, and, perhaps consequently, I will work on after that.] I am pretty sure it will focus on something like evolution and/or consciousness. Are these fields really really big? Yes. Are they connected? Maybe. I think I am looking at lots of questions that relate to the appearance of complexity, the emergence of amazing phenomena through lots of intereactions of more limited phenomena. This type of magic explains how an aimless, chance-based process like natural selection can produce very complicated, specialized organisms. It also explains how a complicated net of relatively simple neurons can produce human consciousness. Those rudimentary life simulations on the computer could help explain both evolution and consciousness, no?

In any case, I have been looking at a bunch of work by the guy who wrote that great Scientific American article on synesthesia and its potential connections with metaphor. It turns out this guy, VS Ramachandran, writes and lectures a lot about neurobiology, consciousness, art, and metaphor. For instance, he recently gave a series of lectures called the Emerging Mind which elaborated on some of the stuff presented in the Sci Am article. The Emerging Mind lectures are based on three articles by Ramachandran and William Hirstein published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies [all of which are linked from the BBC's links page for the lecture series].

Ramachandran's work is really a gold mine for the type of stuff I am studying, and his research and writing are great, but I have to admit I have already run into a big flaw in one of his big theories. It appears in 'Three Laws of Qualia', the first of the three reports in the Journal of Consciousness Studies. In the beginning of this paper he defines and explains qualia, which are essentially the qualities of a perceptible characteristic that make the characteristic more than simply a quantifiable phenomenon. Explanation is necessary.

Ramachandran as an example suggests you are a 'superscientist' from the future who knows everything about how the brain works, but you are completely colorblind. [He specifies that the condition is purely due to a defect in the eye -- your brain works normally.] In an interest to understand this whole color vision thing, you take your various scientific tools and examine a human eyes, finding exactly what wavelengths each cell reacts to, and then you poll a bunch of people to find out what they call light at various wavelengths. You then take a test subject and point out to her a detailed diagram showing exactly what's happening in her eye and brain when you subject her to a wavelength light that the other humans seem to call 'red'. She says Sure, that seems to make sense, but that really has little to do with her actual experience of seeing red. The gap between your scientific explanation of red vision and her personal explanation of red vision is called a quale, plural qualia.

Ramachandran says that philosophers have for centuries imposed a fairly artificial block in between people by saying that two people will never really be able to talk about seeing the same red, because they have different subjective experiences of it. He says that this difference only really comes about because of using different literal languages, that people could share identical experiences and qualia if only they didn't have to talk about it. But how can people share thoughts on redness without talking about it? Ramachandran says you, the colorblind superscientist, could simply splice a neuron cable carrying color information from the color-processing part of a normal brain into the color-processing part of your [normal] brain, and then you would perceive the same red quale. "But if you skip the translation and use a cable of neurons, so that the nerve impulses themselves go directly to the area, then perhaps you’ll say, 'Oh my God, I see what you mean.'" He then gets a little cocky about the significance of this connection: "The possibility of this demolishes the philosophers' argument that there is a barrier which is insurmountable."

But there is a huge problem involved with this mind experiment. The entire philosophical -- perhaps poetic -- point on this subject is that there are very significant subjective associations that come along with qualia. One obvious source of these subjective associations is personal experience. A person's reaction to seeing red are colored [ha] by his experience with red: seeing blood oozing out of your little knee when you fall on the asphalt, seeing hearts colored red on a zillion Hallmark cards, seeing red-wine and tomato-sauce permanently stain a crisp, white shirt, etc. [I would also argue that it's likely your opinion of red is informed by all of the things that aren't red: grass, the sky, the ocean, etc.]

Is it possible that the you, upon first gaining color vision, would have the same reaction to red as anyone else who has been seeing red all his life? No fargin way. Even if you avoid the problem of language and receive the same exact nerve signal connoting redness, that nerve signal will precipitate an entirely different reaction from other brain sections; ultimately, this means that the superscientist will never had the same red quale as anyone else. This difference applies to any human you performed this neuron-cable hookup on, but it would be particularly dramatic on someone who has never seen color before. The philosophers' point certainly holds some truth, although we could argue that compared to people who have never seen red, everybody else's experiences are relatively co-similar.

Literal hits the big-time

Earlier I showed how 'literal' frequently means exactly the opposite. This new use [some might call it a misuse] hit the biggest story of the week: 'The former Iraqi strongman was "literally a rat trapped in a hole," said NBC's Tom Brokaw.'

Internet killed the political party?

This is a quite-interesting take on how Internet organizing is, Everett Ehrlich says, going to do away with political parties. He says Ronald Coase hypothesized in 1937 that the cost of gathering information determines the size of an organization, and with the Internet making information gathering orders easier, the organization is outmoded.

Howard Dean, he argues, has successfully run what's essentially an Internet-powered third-party campaign, stealing the Democratic pedigree only after he assembled his own loosely-organized support structure -- 'that's why former vice president Al Gore's endorsement of Dean last week felt so strange -- less like the traditional benediction of a fellow member of the party "club" than a senior executive welcoming the successful leveraged buyout specialist.'

I think the overall point is quite interesting, but I don't actually buy Ehrlich's thesis, and for reasons that he himself points out, but underestimates. He says, 'The real question is whether -- really, how -- the two parties, like any other waning duopoly, will use non-market means to preserve their fading power -- by, for example, keeping third-party candidates out of televised debates, making it harder for other parties to get public funding or closing off "open" primaries that invite marauding forms of political organization.' Yes. This is how. And they'll think of new means. Ultimately, there is not enough of a push to make politics a more responsive market -- either from the populace or the representatives -- to fight against these 'non-market means to preserve their fading power.' The US happily gives a monopoly to Major League Baseball, and it'll continue doing the same for the Republicrats.

In fact, Ehrlich also spells out another reason why the two-party system will remain -- Dean did, after all, move his supposedly third-party campaign into the two-party system, no? 'Other candidates -- John Kerry, John Edwards, Wesley Clark -- are competing to take control of the party's fundraising, organizational and media operations. But Dean is not interested in taking control of those depreciating assets. He is creating his own party, his own lists, his own money, his own organization. What he wants are the Democratic brand name and legacy, the party's last remaining assets of value, as part of his marketing strategy.'

So yes, candidates may, like Dean, become somewhat more creative in their organizing, but they will stick with the parties we got. The two-parties' 'last remaining assets of value' are enough to keep them ensconced as the two powers dominating this rigged duopoly.

Evolution did not kill evolution

I just started reading The Red Queen, by Matt Ridley, a book about how sex is the dominant force in human evolution and human nature. It's a pretty interesting book, and Ridley's a pretty smart theorist/writer -- although I've not yet read it [how typical], I hear his book Nature Via Nurture does a good job of debunking this false dichotomy -- but I hit on one significant problem in the first chapter, which is pretty much the thesis of the book.

He says: 'Before, say, 1970, most students of animal behavior and virtually all students of human behavior were content to describe what they found without reference to a function. The gene-centered view of the world changed this for good. By 1980 no detail of animal courtship mattered unless it could be explained in terms of the selective competition of genes. And by 1990 the notion that human beings were the only animals exempt from this logic was beginning to look ever more absurd. If man has evolved the ability to override his evolutionary imperatives, then there must have been an advantage to his genes in doing so. Therefore, even the emancipation from evolution that we so fondly imagine we have achieved must itself have evolved because it suited the replication of genes.'

There are two significant problems with this conclusion. The first is that, as Ridley himself points out later, culture is, in fact immensely important for people, and he seems to be underestimating that here in this quite important paragraph. Just a couple pages later he writes, 'Whereas every deer or every sparrow is self-reliant and does everything every other deer or sparrow does, the same is not true of a man or a woman, and has not been for thousands of years. Every individual is a specialist of some sort, whether he or she is a welder, a housewife, a playwright, or a prostitute.'

Well, yes. And specialization is just emblematic of the great power of society to change humans' lives from how they used to be. It may be that society's power is enough to divert people away from behaviors that are favorable to their maximal genetic success. One example identified by Ridley is the Catholic clergy, which has opted to sacrifice any procreative success due to mainly sociological reasons. Is it so hard to believe that sociological factors -- religion, fashion, any other cultural elements -- could dissuade people from ruthlessly maximizing their genetic success at every opportunity?

The other problem is that he has seemingly muddled the exact manner in which genes actually affect people's actions. His central point here -- 'If man has evolved the ability to override his evolutionary imperatives, then there must have been an advantage to his genes in doing so' -- ignores the fact that human actions are not guided by what is actually beneficial for their genes' replication, but by what was generally good for their genes' replication when human nature [as Ridley defines it] was essentially completed around 100k years ago. Genomes are not smart enough to consciously adapt to their environments [and genes do not switch on/off in coordinated, conscious fashion to respond to social pressures] so we can conclude that the genetic forces pushing us are basically not what is best for genes now, necessarily, but what was best for those genes 100k years ago.

I would say a more accurate way of looking at it is that humans still cater to their evolutionary imperatives, but the means by which people can maximize the satisfaction of their evolutionary imperatives has changed, due to different cultural factors. Humans, essentially, always do what they 'want' to do -- that is, attempt to maximize satisfaction, which is partaking in some combination of various natural pleasurable commodities, like sex, humor, beauty, discovery, love, power, revenge, dominance, etc. But there are a huge range of different pleasures, and they are constantly in conflict. In modern society, there may be certain decisions that are more appealing than they were before because our calculus weighing these different pleasures has changed.

Okay, this is complicated, and certainly not airtight, but I just wanted to point out a potential weak point here. Evolution will continue to be a big part of thinkness, and I think I'll read all of Ridley's books. Hope this is of at least some interest to folks.

The Muslim Martin Luther

The Globe Ideas section suggests it may have found a leader of a Muslim reformation: Tariq Ramadan, a moderate Muslim leader in France. My brother's been talking for a while about how what Islam needs is a reformation, and I think it's true. Yes, Islam may have split along Sunni/Shi'a lines, but did that actually reform the religion away from its excesses, liberalize it, and make it more flexible? Not all that much, it seems.

But perhaps Ramadan, or people like him, can accomplish that. These must be religious people -- excluding folks like the recently departed Edward Said -- because they need to be able to influence those who draw a lot of their guidance from Islam. This story is the first mention I've heard of a candidate.

The story depicts some controversy about Ramadan, mentioning the claims that he is anti-Jewish. From reading the story, I can't really see all that much of it. Granted, it's a pretty touchy time to be speaking critically about Muslim/Jewish issues in Europe, but I think his comments were not offensive, and it sounds like he's doing a lot of good in enlightening a path for Muslims to remain devout while being politically moderate and socially modern.

Literally not literally

Okay, I've been gone for long. But I'm back. I was sick and travelling. It seems that blogging, for me, is kind of like exercising: easy to do when you're doing it, tough when you lost the momentum.

My brother notices that I'm a big hypocrite. [Took him long enough.] He notices that in a recent post I said that America had crossed the Rubicon in its transition to empire, 'in about the most literal way possible.' When I said that, I meant that it was similar to the original meaning of 'crossing the Rubicon' in that that event signified the end of the Roman republic. But of course it could be more literal: if the nation actually crossed a river called the Rubicon. I think my use of the work 'about' may provide a little exculpatory qualification, but maybe just a shred.

And he points out that since I posted last month about people's abuse of the word 'literally', you might think that I would be more careful. You might also be wrong.