AIN'T NO gOD

I'LL BE HOME FOR... WHEN?

I've begun working on a book which is taking up lots of writing time. And I've got to keep up with my reading. Wife and I are looking into a condo purchase. My entries here in Blogger may fall off quite dramatically. In fact they've already fallen off dramatically. I'm enjoying writing the book I'm working on. I'm trying to enjoy writing it rather than making it a chore. The book is called tentatively Boomed Out: a mythical memoir of a Silent between generations.

Labels: me

IF IT'S THIS COMPLEX WHO CAN DISCOVER THEIR ROBOTIC SELF?

The following means, I think, that specific behaviors are a process rather than a location on the DNA strand.

"Genes alone don’t make the man — after all, humans and chimps share roughly 98 percent of their DNA. But where, when and how much genes are turned on may be essential in setting people apart from other primates.

"A stretch of human DNA inserted into mice embryos revs the activity of genes in the developing thumb, toe, forelimb and hind limb. But the chimp and rhesus macaque version of this same stretch of DNA spurs only faint activity in the developing limbs, reports a new study in the Sept. 5 Science.

"The research supports the notion that changes in the regulation of genes— rather than changes in the genes themselves — were crucial evolutionary steps in the human ability to use fire, invent wheels and ponder existential questions, like what distinguishes people from our primate cousins."

From a ScienceNews web article by Rachel Ehrenberg

Labels: DNA, evolution, genetics

THE ANTS AND US

The following paragraphs come from the next to last chapter of Edward Wilson's Naturalist. They detail his thinking as he tried to strengthen the evidence for his idea that human culture is not different than ant or monkey cultures. All cultures are heavily indebted to instinctual behavior for their structure and ants and humans share some of these cultural traits in common. It's some more of the science that makes me say that I'm a robot. His idea was attacked mightily when it appeared. Of course, you can see that he's not as much a reductionist as I am when I tell people I'm a robot.

[SNIP]
By this time it was obvious to me that human sociobiology would remain in trouble, both intellectually and politically, until it incorporated culture into its analyses. Otherwise the critics could always cogently argue that since semantically based mind and culture are the defining traits of the human species, explanations of human social behavior without them are useless. This shortcoming was on my mind when Charles Lumsden, a young theoretical physicist from the University of Toronto, arrived in early 1979 to work with me as a postdoctoral research fellow. His interests had lately turned to biology, and he saw great opportunity in the analysis of social behavior. We talked at first about a collaboration on social insects, but soon our conversations gravitated to the subject of heredity and culture. I said, the possible payoff justifies the high risk of failure; let's give it a try. So two or three times a week for eighteen months we sat together and framed the subject piece by piece.

We reasoned as follows. Everyone knows that human social behavior is transmitted by culture, but culture is a product of the brain. The brain in turn is a highly structured organ and a product of genetic evolution. It possesses a host of biases programmed through sensory reception and the propensity to learn certain things and not others. These biases guide culture to a still unknown degree. In the reverse direction, the generic evolution of the most distinctive properties of the brain occurred in an environment dominated by culture. Changes in culture therefore must have affected those properties. So the problem can be more clearly cast in these terms: how have genetic evolution and cultural evolution interacted to create the development of the human mind?

No doubt we went out of our depth in embarking upon this subject. But so was everyone else, and no one can be sure of anything until the attempt is made. Undaunted then, we sifted through a small mountain of literature in cognitive psychology, ethnography, and brain science. We built models in population genetics that incorporated culture as units of learned information. We studied the properties of semantic thought to make our premises as consistent as possible with current linguistic theory.

We were looking for the basic process that directed the evolution of the human mind. We concluded that it is a particular form of interaction between genes and culture. This "gene-culture coevolution." as we called it, is an eternal circle of change in heredity and culture. Over the course of a lifetime, the mind of the individual person creates itself by picking among countless fragments of information, value judgments, and available courses of action within the context of a particular culture. More concretely, the individual comes to select certain marital customs, creation myths, ethical precepts, modes of analysis, and so forth, from among those available. We called these competing behaviors and mental abstractions "culturgens." They are close to what our fellow reductionist Richard Dawkins conceived as "memes."

Each time an individual modifies his memories or makes decisions, he entrains intricate sequences of physiological events that run first from the perception of visual images, sounds, and other stimuli, then to the storage and recall of information from long-term memory, and finally to the emotional assessment of perceived objects and ideas. Not all culturgens are treated equally; cognition has not evolved as a wholly neutral filter. The mind incorporates and uses some far more readily than others. Examples of heredity-bound culture that Lumsden and I found from the research literature include the peculiarities of color vision, phoneme formation, odor perception, preferred visual designs, and facial expressions used to denote emotions. All are diagnostic of the human species, all part of what must reasonably be called human nature.

Such physiologically based preferences, called "epigenetic rules," channel cultural transmission in one direction instead of another. By this means they influence the outcome of cultural evolution. It is here, through the physical events of cognition, that the genes act to shape mental development and culture.

The full cycle of gene-culture coevolution as we conceived it is the following. Some choices confer greater survival and reproductive rates. As a consequence, certain epigenetic rules, those that predispose the mind toward the selection of successful culturgens, are favored during the course of genetic evolution. Over many generations, the human population as a whole has moved toward one particular "human nature" out of a vast number of natures possible. It has fashioned certain patterns of cultural diversity from an even greater number of patterns possible.
[PASTE]

Labels: Edward Wilson, Naturalist, sociobiology

SCIENCE’S HUMANISTIC STANDARDS

In the book, Naturalist, by Edward O. Wilson, Wilson describes a colleague’s—Bert Hölldobler—standards for honesty and, in those standards, anyone can see that humanistic science offers standards every bit as rigorous as any moral code based on what kings hand down to their subjects as do religious standards.

“He was a scientist's scientist. He simply loved science as a way of knowing. I believe he would have practiced it without an audience or financial reward. He played no political games. If new data did not fit, he quickly shifted to a new position. He was one of the few scientists I have known actually willing to abandon a hypothesis. He was meticulous about crediting others, quick to praise research when it was original and solid, harsh in his rejection when it was slovenly. The tone of his conversation was explicitly and uncompromisingly ethical, a posture born neither of arrogance nor of self-regard, but from the conviction of his humanistic philosophy that without self-imposed high standards, life loses its meaning.” (p. 303)

Labels: Edward Wilson, humanism, science

AUTUMN???????

Labels: Bible Belt, Code of Honor, Edward Wilson, Java House, South

THE ROBOTIC HUMAN THINKING MACHINE

I get a kick out of calling myself a robot in various social situations. Some think I’m joking. Others might be offended, and, as for myself, I don’t know how serious I am, but the evidence continues to mount up that this wonderful reasoning process we humans pride ourselves on is nothing more than an adaptation, an instinct for thinking. Well, if thought is instinctive, how much credit can we take for employing it consciously? If we are not really consciously applying logic and reason, then what does it mean to think? The following is an brief bit of a paper by two evolutionary psychologists which seems to indicate that thinking is instinctive rather than consciously employed. If you can, you should try to get ahold of the entire paper, if not the book in which it appears.

“Taken together, the data showing design specificity, precocious development, cross-cultural universality, and neural dissociability implicate the existence of an evolved, species-typical neurocomputational specialization.

“In short, the neurocognitive system that causes reasoning about social exchange shows evidence of being what Pinker (1994) has called a cognitive instinct: It is complexly organized for solving a well-defined adaptive problem our ancestors faced in the past, it reliably develops in all normal humans, it develops without any conscious effort and in the absence of explicit instruction, it is applied without any conscious awareness of its underlying logic, and it is functionally and neurally distinct from more general abilities to process information or behave intelligently.” Leda Cosmides and John Tooby in “Neurocognitive Adaptations Designed for Social Exchange,” Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology (p. 585)

Labels: evolutionary psychology, Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, John Tooby, Leda Cosmides, Pinker

LIES MY TEACHERS TOLD ME

The following sentiment made me recall that book, Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me, I mentioned several months back. In summary he pointed out that people with educations have not become liberalized (unlike me). Instead, they become more conservative. So why should Chinese citizens be any different? The passage is from Newsweek (Aug.18-Aug.25), p.31.

“Such sentiments are common on the mainland. But people like Zhang were supposed to be different: he's what Chinese call a hai gui—"sea turtle"—referring to someone who has lived overseas. (The phrase is a pun on haiwai guilai, meaning "returned from overseas.") Their numbers are growing by the tens of thousands every year, and as the sons and daughters of the elite, they have an outsize influence once they move back to China. In the West there's long been an assumption that this cohort would import Western values along with their iPods. They were envisioned as the bridge to a more open, liberal, Western-friendly China.”

ME AND WOODY, ATHEISTS, BUT I’M NOT DEPRESSED

The following passages are lifted from a Newsweek article occasioned by the release of Woody's new film, “Vicky Christian Barcelona”. I recommend it as one of his best. But what do I know? Anyhow, the themes of his life occur even in interviews. But do we really know since all we have is what the interviewer passes on to us?

[SNIP]
Allen says the indifference of the universe has obsessed him since he was a child. "My mother always said I was a very cheerful kid until I was 5 years old, and then I turned gloomy."

SCIENCE DECAYS IN US

I was reading through an article at ScienceNews.org about possible changes to our standard model of particle physics created by some not too recent observations “at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y., from 1989 to 2002” when I came upon the following:

[SNIP]
Studies of the decay of kaons hint at possible flaws in standard model of particle physics.

Physicists had hoped to gather five times as much data, but budget cuts led the Department of Energy to abruptly end the Brookhaven experiment in 2002, Littenberg says. However, if the trend of finding a higher decay rate in this rare mode continues with other experiments expected to start at the Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex in Tokai-mura — researchers are shipping their Brookhaven kaon detector there — as well as at CERN in Geneva, the standard model could be in for a revision.

By Ron Cowen for web edition : Tuesday, August 19th, 2008 (SN: 7/19/08, p.16).
[PASTE]

The experiment in question is not the important thing I want to call attention to here in my blog. Note the time frame of the experiments and who came into office when! What?! Budget cuts in the science programs of America? Who would have thought that such a thing would happen here? And look how we’re shipping our stuff to other countries so that these experiments can continue. Another major loss in prestige for America. And who caused it? The answer is obvious and self-explanatory.

Frankly, we can be happy that scientists believe in sharing resources and findings, though that is not always the case. I’m currently reading Naturalist by Edward Wilson and the departmental politics he describes does show that some members of the scientific community do have agendas based on personal pride. Which is natural, so why are we shipping our experiments to other countries?

Labels: Bush Jr., particle physics, science

MONDAY MORNING AT THE MON AMI

Labels: evolutionary psychology, suicide, Vicky Christina Barcelona, Woody Allen

IRONIC WILSON UNAWARES

Naturalist Edward Wilson was ironic in a statement he made in his memoir, Naturalist (pp. 168-69): “Much of the Pacific fauna has gone under in the path of pigs, goats, rats, Argentine ants, beard grass, and other highly competitive forms introduced by human commerce. Strangers have savaged the islands of the world.”

I’m sure Wilson would agree with what I’m about to say, but at the moment he wrote the previous sentences, he forgot what he now knows only too well. All one needs add to what Wilson wrote is the thought that the human animal is the most competitive stranger who has most “savaged” not only islands of the globe but the globe itself—water, earth and air. So these other competitive strangers are no worse and no better than humankind itself. Isn’t that ironic in the deepest sense—we and the other competitive species dominating the globe?

Labels: Edward Wilson, enviroment