I am behind, and in particular I have a backlog of Kindle books in a folder (okay, Kindle calls them "collections") that I keep specifically for Kindle books I've read but haven't yet transcribed notes from -- some for work, some for here, some for fiction projects.
On top of that, I had an ongoing series of thoughts about the election building up, mostly in the form of "hoo geez" and "you gotta be kiddin me" thought balloons popping up in response to things other people said as the election first loomed and then happened. One of the purposes of this weirdly multipurpose blog is to be a safety valve for social media, so that I vent here instead of there, so I was going to rail about people who ask their Trump supporting friends to please stop saying their nasty things in front of them (instead of, you know, actually confronting those friends on their racism, xenophobia, and other abominable beliefs - today's "stop telling racist jokes in front of me, teehee"), and about the "Bernie coulda won it, I tells ya" narrative, and the prematurity of all the other hot takes.
But I think I am, as you must be, too weary of reading postmortem analysis and reactions. Which is not to say I am not engaged - just the opposite, but the last thing I feel like doing right now is swatting down nonsense just to vent about it, because it doesn't feel like it would serve any therapeutic point this time.
I will say that my instinct as a historian says that the dumbest thing you can do is to marry yourself to some model of "what happened" that you read or devise in the first week or two after the election, because you're just going to weigh new data and new models against the one that you've "picked," even though the only reason you've picked it is, ultimately, because of the imagined need for an immediate explanation -- the irrational belief that an incomplete or misleading explanation today is better than an accurate explanation tomorrow. This is a small part of what makes teaching history to people so hard. Among other things, history sometimes includes things they have lived through, and that gives them a remarkable capacity to believe that living as a bystander to an event with very, very small access to data makes them an expert, resistant to the view of the event that has developed in retrospect. This is, of course, a bigger problem than just in the realm of getting people to understand history, but everybody walks down different hallways of the house, and this is one of mine.
Moving on away from the present, away from politics, let me start by finishing off this blog entry on a history of the scientific revolution.
When I started at Hampshire - before I started, actually, at the open house or the pitch at the interview or somewhere in that process - one of the ways they explained the whole approach to things there was by explaining the Div III, which is a mandatory thesis-like project. "See, because there are no majors at Hampshire, and no minors, you can take the things you're interested in and pursue them jointly instead of separately. You don't have to major in psychology and minor in art history. You can do your Div III on the history of the impact of psychological ideas on the visual arts."
I made up that example, but it's a representative one. It's a decent pitch, especially aimed at high school kids (and the parents thereof) who have probably been starved for any kind of serious intellectual or creative stimulus, at least within the bounds of their classrooms.
In the end, though, I had trouble living it out. I wanted to study psychology AND art history. Not just their intersection. I wanted to know about the parts of psychology that had absolutely no impact on art history, and the parts of art history that had nothing to do with psychology. The freedom to cross the streams was well and good, but I quickly took it for granted and wanted to be able to not have to cross the streams.
For instance, I wound up "majoring" - not that Hampshire has majors - in pop culture, but had strong interests in cognitive science and the then-novel study of online culture and communities. What I had zero interest in was combining any of those things for my Div III, which was -- at least in draft form, since I dropped out and transferred before completing it -- a long and rambling thesis on representations of superheroes in comic books and other media, which if it was grounded in anything was grounded more in literary theory and gender studies than cognitive science (though I led up to it with a fifty-page research paper on the role of nostalgia in the history and appeal of Batman, which is at least cogsci-adjacent), and had no overlap with the work I had done on online communities.
So like I've covered before, I have a variegated academic background, and as a grad student in an interdisciplinary program, I took a number of courses on the history and philosophy of science -- if there was such a thing as a "graduate minor," that would pretty much be mine, not because HPS and religious studies are two key branches in the history of ideas -- which would be a valid reason -- but simply because HPS also interested me, even though at that point in my academic career I was supposed to be narrowing my interests, not expanding them.
So it's something I try to keep up with, albeit not at as high a priority as religious studies.
David Wootton's The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution was published with a good deal of fanfare last fall. I'm generally reluctant to jump on the New Release section, for a number of reasons:
1: New releases on scholarly topics are, when they're good work, ultimately of the most value to working scholars in those areas, because those are the readers who are versed in the conversation. After all, if they have something significant to say, other scholars working in that area are going to need to respond to it, and won't have had time yet.
2: New releases on broad historical topics don't always have a particularly good reason to exist, apart from everyone in the field already having read the canonical works on the topic, and those works maybe being out of print. The existence of a new book on the topic is not evidence of the existence of new material. This is a constant source of frustration for me when I write about history, because publishers often stipulate in their style guide that at least half of your sources need to have been published within the last X years, where X is a fairly small number; it is very rarely the case with history that half of the good sources, or a tenth of the good sources, are that recent, especially when you're writing for a general audience and have no need to cite recent journal articles on minor points. (If you're wondering: yes, as a result I have to pad the bibliography with inferior recent work, or recent work that is good but not as directly related to what I'm writing about, in order to balance out the number of older but necessary sources I use.)
3: There is a ... boy, how do I not sound like an asshole here. There is a certain kind of reader I don't want to be. A certain kind of thinker I don't want to be, who's read Malcolm Gladwell and Jared Diamond, both of whom are moderately to completely awful, but nothing that's more than a couple decades old. That's the kind of reading diet that leads to a particularly shallow understanding of things -- but like Gladwell's work in general, to pick on him a little more, it's not a diet that's really designed for actual understanding so much as the satisfied feeling of the illusion of understanding, a junk food eureka.
I made an exception here because the reviews were enough to convince me that #2 and #3 weren't concerns, but that sort of puts a responsibility on me -- even if I'm the only one who perceives or cares about that responsibility -- to keep track of the Invention of Science conversation in the next few years, so I don't make the same mistake I discussed above in my discussion of politics.
Wootton's book traces what he calls the invention of modern science, "between 1572, when Tycho Brahe saw a nova, or new star, and 1704, when Newton published his Opticks... There were systems of knowledge we call 'sciences' before 1572, but the only one which functioned remotely like a modern science, in that it had sophisticated theories based on a substantial body of evidence and could make reliable predictions, was astronomy, and it was astronomy that was transformed in the years after 1572 into the first true science."
This idea, that science before this period was distinct from modern science, is key, and is part of a broader shift in thinking that affected not just the physical sciences but all scholarly pursuits. For that matter, it's not a coincidence that westerners don't really talk about "fiction" as such until the Scientific Revolution, when "nonfiction" becomes rigorously defined. I have banged my head against the wall repeatedly trying to get people to understand this. Obviously I'm not saying that no one wrote any fictitious stories before a certain point in time -- but the modern reader, who thinks of one set of shelves on the library as nonfiction, and another as fiction, is a fairly recent creature. When people describe the Bible or stories in the midrash, for instance, as "fiction," they're imposing a modern frame that didn't exist for the people who created and first received those texts. This isn't splitting hairs, because it's just as important to oppose the fundamentalists who insist that, if the Bible isn't fiction, it is therefore literally true. Again: it's not a coincidence that this claim became as popular when it did, and became politicized, at the point in time that it did. Both of these claims -- that the Bible is fiction, that the Bible is literally true -- are implicitly based on false premises about the nature of sacred texts in antiquity.
To use another example, history as we know it -- that is, the field of history as we know it -- is remarkably recent, in the sense that the idea that the goal of the historian should be to accurately record or recount the details of historical events, drawing on evidence wherever possible, dates to about the Enlightenment, at least in the West. This is kind of fucking crazy, and I feel like people who haven't taken historiography in grad school don't fully believe me when I talk about it, but it goes to Wootton's point. We take scientific thinking for granted now, to an amazing degree -- when you read fantasy novels and whatnot, a ridiculous level of scientific thinking is often ascribed to members of civilizations who would not necessarily be in a position to have developed it, for no apparent reason other than the fact that basic elements of this thinking have so permeated modern thought that it is taken for granted.
The layman often thinks of the history of science as a series of discoveries, rather than creations of different ways of thinking -- and doesn't usually have a good way to explain that most of the scientists famous now for major contributions also pursued wrong avenues (like Newton's extensive work in alchemy) or had no trouble accepting things that would be easily disproven (old beliefs in biology are full of this, and I don't just mean beliefs about race or gender that are motivated by politics and power structure -- there was a simple lack of rigor and attention to detail, by modern standards). If you think science is just a timeline of discoveries, you think the only difference between a clever person in 2016 and a clever person in 1316 is that the clever person in 1316 lives in a world where a bunch of shit hasn't been discovered yet, but that the two basically see their respective worlds the same way and deal with new information the same way, and this is enormously wrong. Even our ability to realize this is not an ability available to all the clever people in history.
One of the ideas that is ingrained in the modern mind that Wootton tackles straight off the bat is the idea of scientific progress. People may debate whether or not history itself "progresses" -- after all, everyone bitches and moans about trivial horseshit like "oh, the kids should still learn cursive" because they're attached to the first Polaroid of the world they watched come into focus -- but everyone today basically sees science as constantly moving forward.
This is a very new idea.
As Wootton points out, until the period he's talking about, not only did people not conceive of "the history of humanity ... as a history of progress," but the rate of technological advancement wasn't just slow, it sometimes went backwards. "The Romans were amazed by stories of what Archimedes had been able to do; and fifteenth-century Italian architects explored the ruined buildings of ancient Rome convinced that they were studying a far more advanced civilization of their own." Technologies were developed, lost, forgotten. This is inconceivable now -- so much so that the "lost technology" trope, when it pops up in popular culture, refers not to sophisticated architecture but to ancient electronics, pyramid magic, and other modern or futuristic technologies transposed to an ancient setting.
Wootton also points to the way Shakespeare and his contemporaries depict ancient Rome technologically identical to Renaissance Europe, with mechanical clocks and nautical compasses. In Borges's words, "all characters are treated as if they were Shakespeare's contemporaries. Shakespeare felt the variety of men, but not the variety of historical eras. History did not exist for him." As Wootton points out, this is a misleading charge -- Shakespeare was well versed in history as history was understood in his day. What he lacked was an understanding of historical change of the sort that we now treat as synonymous with "history."
"We might think that gunpowder, the printing press, and the discovery of America in 1492 should have obliged the Renaissance to acquire a sense of the past as lost and gone for ever, but the educated only slowly became aware of the irreversible consequences that flowed from these crucial innovations. It was only with hindsight that they came to symbolize a new era; and it was the Scientific Revolution itself which was chiefly responsible for the Enlightenment's conviction that progress had become unstoppable. By the middle of the eighteenth century, Shakespeare's sense of time had been replaced by our own."
The term "the Scientific Revolution" is itself one that can be interrogated, and Wootton explains that it's only in the 20th century -- the mid-20th century, at that -- that the term came to mean the creation of modern science as exemplified by Newton's physics. The inspiration for the term is not the American or French Revolution -- both of which were referred to as revolutions as they occurred -- but the Industrial Revolution. Like the Scientific Revolution, the Industrial Revolution was named after the fact -- and although it occurred later, it was named first. Wootton correctly points out that any term introduced by historians after the fact is a term that will be challenged by later historians after THAT fact, which is one of the things that will make your eyes glaze over and start unsubscribing from mailing lists. But anyway.
"In medieval universities, the core curriculum consisted of the seven liberal 'arts' and 'sciences': grammar, rhetoric, and logic; mathematics, geometry, music, and astronomy." There is some digression about what was meant by "art" and "science" at the time, the upshot of which is that all seven were considered both, whereas philosophy and theology were sciences but not arts. Anyway. "Moreover, these sciences were organized into a hierarchy: the theologians felt entitled to order the philosophers to demonstrate the rationality of belief in an immortal soul; the philosophers felt entitled to order the mathematicians to prove that all motion in the heavens is circular ... A basic description of the Scientific Revolution is to say that it represented a successful rebellion by the mathematicians against the authority of the philosophers, and of both against the authority of the theologians."
Da Vinci, for instance, said, "No human investigation can be termed true science if it is not capable of mathematical demonstration. If you say that the sciences which begin and end in the mind are true, that is not to be conceded, but is denied for many reasons, and chiefly the fact that the test of experience is absent from the exercises of the mind, and without it nothing can be certain." The reason we no longer class philosophy and theology as sciences is because we think of science as dealing with not just theory but experiment: testable, verifiable, observable, repeatable results. To return to the refrain: this is a relatively new idea.
One of the most interesting parts of Wootton's book is something I'm still pondering: "before Columbus discovered America in 1492, there was no clear-cut and well-established idea of discovery; the idea of discovery is, as will become apparent, a precondition for the invention of science."
Now, maybe I don't need to point this out, but the idea of "Columbus discovering America" is not important to Wootton's claim here: that is, it is not important that other non-Americans came to the continent before he did, nor that, since there were people fucking living here, none of these non-Americans actually discovered the damn thing. What's key is the European world absorbing the idea of Columbus discovering America and subsequently engaging with America: the phenomenon, so to speak, of "Columbus discovered America." There are other books on the physical and cultural effects of Columbus's voyages; this isn't that. This is about the scientific and intellectual reverberation of the concept of "discovery."
(Wootton also argues that, while everyone correctly dismisses the "Columbus proved the Earth was round" nonsense sometimes taught in elementary schools, the voyages to America did nevertheless change the European conception of the globe, by proving the existence of antipodean land masses, which were believed to be impossible. The Columbian contact did change the understanding of the Earth, then, just not in as simplistic a way as changing it from flat to round.)
"It is discovery itself which has transformed our world," Wootton points out, "in a way that simply locating a new land mass could never do. Before discovery history was assumed to repeat itself and tradition to provide a reliable guide to the future; and the greatest achievements of civilization were believed to lie not in the present or the future but in the past, in ancient Greece and classical Rome. It is easy to say that our world has been made by science or by technology, but scientific and technological progress depend on a pre-existing assumption, the assumption that there are discoveries to be made. ... It is this assumption which has transformed the world, for it has made modern science and technology possible."
Wootton backs up his proposition of the 1492 (essentially) invention of the idea of discovery with linguistic evidence, investigating the various Romance language terms for discovery and related concepts, and how they were used. This is the area where I expect to see other historians responding, refuting, or amplifying -- his evidence is compelling enough, but I'm in no position to tell whether he's cherry-picked it, how much he's interpreting it to favor his argument, etc. See what I mean about the problem with recent scholarly works (at least when they're outside your area of expertise)?
This is a key part of his "discovery" argument: "Although there were already ways of saying something had been found for the first time and had never been found before, it was very uncommon before 1492 for people to want to say anything of the sort, because the governing assumption was that there was 'nothing new under the sun.' The introduction of a new meaning for descrobir implied a radical shift in perspective and a transformation in how people understood their own actions. There were, one can properly say, no voyages of discovery before 1486, only voyages of exploration. Discovery was a new type of enterprise which came into existence along with the word."
Wootton makes a distinction between "discovery" and words like "boredom" and "embarrass," in that we accept that before there was a word for it, people felt bored; before "embarrass" acquired its modern meaning in the 19th century, people could feel embarrassed. But "discovery" is "'an actor's concept' ... you have to have the concept in order to perform the action ... So although there were discoveries and inventions before 1486, the invention and dissemination of a word for 'discovery' marks a decisive moment, because it makes discovery an actor's concept: you can set out to make discoveries, knowing that is what you are doing."
There is an interesting digression about the great sociologist of science Robert K Merton, to whom we owe the phrases "role model," "self-fulfilling prophecy," and "unintended consequence," and who wrote an entire book about the phrase "standing on the shoulders of giants." What Merton was unable to popularize was the idea of multiple discovery: the idea that "there are nearly always several people who can lay claim to a discovery, and that where there are not this is because one person has so successfully publicized his own claim that other claims are forestalled."
"We cannot give up the idea that discovery, like a race, is a game in which one person wins and everyone else loses. The sociologist's view is that every race ends with a winner, so that winning is utterly predictable. If the person in the lead trips and falls, the outcome is not that no one wins but that someone else wins. In each race there are multiple potential winners." Think of how many time travel stories revolve around, I don't know, going back in time to keep somebody from inventing the time machine. That's taking the Great Man view of history -- the view that prevailed in the 19th century, when history was portrayed as the result of specific heroic egos. Other than in fiction and, perhaps, biography, it is not a view that is looked on kindly anymore -- no one person, no one thousand people, can be said to be uniquely responsible for the major events of history, not because that person did not do the things they did, not because those things lacked significance, but because other people would do other significant things to move history in largely the same way. If you go back in time and kill Li'l Lincoln when he's a toddler, you don't wake up in a 2016 that still has slavery -- you simply find out that slavery ended under some other presidency instead. We pretty much accept that -- like I said, except in fiction -- but this centrality of the individual in discovery persists, even when as Wootton points out, numerous people independently discovered the sine law of refraction, the law of fall, Boyle's law, oxygen, the telescope.
I am skipping over lots and lots of detail about the effects of the telescope and the microscope, in part because it doesn't excerpt well.
Wootton also goes into a dispute with relativists, especially "the strong programme," which I think is too inside baseball to get into here, especially since as someone not employed by a university, I have no reason to be invested in the fight. (Okay, that's not entirely true. The Science Wars are important, and impact not only the work I do in educational publishing and reference books, but overall science literacy and public policy. But Wootton's comments on it are not the part of this book that will stay with me the longest, even as they frame the rest of it.) As a fan of Kuhn but not of many of the historians of science who have followed in Kuhn's footsteps -- the relativists, in other words -- but who has also been accused of relativism because I disagree with the way history is constructed by strict realists, I think I agree with Wootton when he says that "this book will look realist to relativists and relativist to realists."
Showing posts with label science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label science. Show all posts
Friday, November 11, 2016
Wednesday, December 9, 2015
recent reading: deep structure of biology
Since the primary purpose of this blog is to keep track of what I'm thinking about what I'm reading - some brief thoughts on things I read in the last couple months that I didn't have time to write up longer thoughts about (but which are part of longer rivers of reading which will undoubtedly entail later stops and longer tarries).
This entry ended up longer than anticipated after just the first book, so perhaps I'll do one entry per book, which also lets me post it earlier than I'd otherwise have time for. So.
These are basically my class notes, really, for a class I'm both constructing and attending all by myself, and I don't expect them to have the same value for you; that's just the nature of this blog.
Deep Structure of Biology --
A succinct summary of the phenomenon of convergent evolution:
"Beyond all reasonable doubt -- and here we can draw on embryology, comparative anatomy, histology, molecular biology, phylogeny, and the fossil record -- the common ancestor of the octopus and the blue whale could not possible have possessed a camera-eye. Each group has independently navigated to the same evolutionary solution, and it is one that not only works very well but has arisen at least five more times, in animals as diverse as snails and, more extraordinarily, jellyfish."
Another example, later:
"The cartilaginous fish and the bony fish both solved the physics of swimming back in the Silurian by evolving streamlined, fusiform morphologies. Some 230 million years later, a group of land-dwelling reptiles rediscovered this same morphology in their evolutionary return to the sea. And around 175 million years later, a group of land-dwelling mammals also rediscovered this same morphology in their own evolutionary return to the sea."
(The "return to the sea" here is a reference to the Devonian era, when the first land-dwelling animals evolved from sea-dwelling ancestors; before the Devonian, life was primarily a watery phenomenon. Today's aquatic reptiles and mammals have an evolutionary family tree that came up to land before returning to the sea.)
"The evolution of an ichthyosaur or porpoise morphology is not trivial. It can be correctly described as nothing less than astonishing that a group of land-dwelling tetrapods, complete with four legs and a tail, could devolve their appendages and their tails back into fins like those of a fish. Highly unlikely, if not impossible? Yet it happened twice, convergently in the reptiles and the mammals, two groups of animals that are not closely related. We have to go back in time as far as the Carboniferous to find a common ancestors for the mammals and the reptiles. Nonetheless, the ichthyosaur and the porpoise both have independently reevolved fins.
"Contrary to the dictum that 'biological evolution has no predictable destination,' I predict with absolute confidence that if any large, fast-swimming organisms exist in the oceans of the moon Europa -- far away in the orbit around Jupiter, swimming under the perpetual ice that covers their world -- then they will have streamlined, fusiform bodies; that is, they will look very similar to a porpoise, an ichthyosaur, a swordfish, or a shark."
Gould argued strongly against this kind of conclusion with his famous "rewinding of the tape" analogy:
"Any replay of the tape would lead evolution down a pathway radically different from the road actually taken ... The diversity of possible itineraries does demonstrate that eventual results cannot be predicted at the outset. Each step proceeds for cause, but no finale can be specified at the start, and none would ever occur a second time in the same way, because any pathway proceeds through thousands of improbable stages."
The Gouldian argument is not disproven by convergent evolution -- that is, you do not have to deny that convergent evolution is a fact to support Gould's view of evolution. But I think it's important to remember that he constructed that view in the 1980s, and even for scientists it can often be easier to fit new evidence into an existing model -- especially when nothing is going to come along that actually proves it one way or the other, by the nature of the theory -- than it is to re-weigh the evidence every time the balance changes and decide all over again. It's always politically dangerous to talk about the fallibility of scientists because climate change and vaccination denialists pounce on it to "prove" that science is "lying" or "wrong" about those things, which is ridiculous: here we are talking about a very small subsection of a very small corner of a particular science, and how one school of thought may have differed given thirty years difference in the accumulation of evidence.
The phenomenon of convergent evolution raises many questions about:
a) extraterrestrial life, with reference to the Gouldian argument -- if the conditions necessary for life are or have been present elsewhere in the universe, has life evolved in a recognizably similar way? and especially, once simple life has evolved, is it inevitable (assuming that the necessary resources are available) that multicellular and more complex life will evolve eventually?
b) the evolution of intelligence: nevermind the "not all people are smart in the same way" discussions, which are interesting in of themselves. Are the differences between potentially evolvable intelligences enormous, even enormous enough to be mutually unrecognizable, or will intelligence evolve more or less convergently, the way sharks and swordfish are significantly different from one another but still evolved substantially similar structures of swimming?
On primate and corvid intelligence:
"It is certainly plausible to argue that surviving the trials and tribulations of a complex social world makes intellectual demands on many primates. Individuals need to know who is who, they need to keep track of who did what to whom, where and when, and to use this information to predict the actions and intentions of other individuals in their social network, as well as understanding how these relationships change over time. In short, the need for effective competition and cooperation with conspecifics may have provided the main selective advantage for the evolution of primate intelligence.
"That said, there is no reason to assume that intelligence is restricted to primates or that such abilities have evolved only once. Indeed, we shall argue that there is good reason to believe that complex mental characteristics have evolved several times and that the existence of intelligence in different, distantly related lineages must have arisen as a result of convergent evolution in species facing similar social and physical problems. ... perhaps the most dramatic case for convergent evolution of cognition comes from comparing primitive cognitive abilities with those of crows, given that the common ancestor of mammals and birds lived over 280 million years ago and that not all birds and mammals share the complex mental abilities found in crows and primates."
On social and cultural evolution in the ocean:
"Steele notes that, in the ocean, environmental noise (after removing predictable cyclical variation: diurnal, lunar, annual) is largely 'red' (greatest over large time and space scales), while, on land, it is more 'white' (roughly constant over all scales, up to a century or continent or so). The fundamental contrasts between the two habitats are illustrated by the methods of the scientists who study them: terrestrial landscape ecologists plot habitats using geographical information systems, while their oceanographic counterparts use the partial differential equations of fluid dynamics to describe the marine environment.
"The environment is the stage for evolution's greatest play: organisms evolve to maximize their fitness given the environment. Two general environmental traits known greatly to influence evolution are connectedness and variability. In these respects, and many others, marine and terrestrial systems differ radically. And so, with these different sets, we might expect immense contrasts in both the action of the evolutionary play and its results, whether it occurs on land or in the ocean. And there are. Looking out my north-facing windows onto the land, most of the primary productivity I see is in large, long-lived, slowly reproducing spruce and maple trees. To the south, in the sea, the primary productivity is in microscopic diatoms and dinoflagellates. There are squid on one side, neutrally buoyant and forming large schools in an open three-dimensional habitat, and foxes on the other, negotiating trees and rocks and roads by themselves or in small groups, anchored by gravity. These are very different creatures in very different environments. Terrestrial and oceanic environments provide a tough challenge for convergence. When traits do converge, something remarkable has occurred.
"... as we move up the trophic web, convergences between oceanic and terrestrial animals begin to appear. The eyes of squid and foxes are an example. But at the trophic peaks and at the highest levels of biological organization, then the convergences between oceanic and terrestrial systems become particularly strong and provoking. A diatom and a spruce tree have little in common other than being autotrophs but, as I will try to show, the social structures and cultures of sperm and killer whales have much in common with those of elephants and humans.
"Phylogenetic constraints play a part in this. The diatom and maple are about as distantly related as any two organisms on Earth, whereas elephants, sperm whales, killer whales, and humans are all mammals and share all the constraints and advantages of the mammalian order, including backbones, air-breathing, warm blood, live birth, and lactation. But their common ancestor, perhaps one million years ago ... was small, likely socially and culturally primitive, certainly nothing like today's large and dominant mammals of land and ocean."
Later in same section:
"However, the most comprehensive convergence between marine and terrestrial mammals is between ... the sperm whale and the elephants. Termed 'the Colossal Convergence' by an editor at American Scientist, it features a wide range of traits in which elephants are more similar to sperm whales than they are to other terrestrial mammals and sperm whales are more similar to elephants than other marine mammals. In both species, females live in largely matrilineal social units of about elevan animals within which there is communal care for the young and communal defense against predators. These social units aggregate to form larger social structures, including groups of about twenty animals. Males leave their mothers' social units, segregate from the females, and grow to become much larger than their mothers, In their late twenties, the males return to the habitat of the females to mate, roving between the female units, competing with each other and being selected by the females.
"There are additional nonsocial parallels between sperm whales and elephants. For instance, the species have very similar life histories and are nonterritorial and quite mobile. And both are extreme in other respects. These include body size and brain size: the sperm whale has the larges brain of all species, and the elephant the largest among land animals. Another parallel is in ecological success. Elephants, due to their size, numbers, and feeding methods can restructure habitats while the world's sperm whale population, even though substantially reduced by whaling, currently removes about as much biomass from the oceans as all human marine fisheries combined.
"This convergence between a terrestrial herbivore and a marine teuthivore (the sperm whale principally eats deep-water squid) is striking, especially given the radical contrasts in their habitat and food: quite a puzzle for the evolutionary biologist."
Then the author (Hal Whitehead) goes on to explain his theory, that the convergence begins with the nose, which is interesting but not as interesting, overall, as the Colossal Convergence itself.
Explaining convergence:
"Two prime candidate theories have been proposed:
(1) "One is that convergence is evidence for what might be called the limited scope of biological materials; favored by authors such as Stephen J Gould, this explanation rests largely on the idea that phylogenetic, developmental, and physical constraints restrict the forms that biological systems can take, and, therefore, change tends to be strongly limited to what is developmentally possible. This explanation has been considerably reinforced by the evidence for the deep conservation of regulatory genes across many lineages.
"However, there is also mounting evidence that the genome can be dynamic at this level. These same regulatory genes are capable of producing widely divergent phenotypes at a very fundamental level, and convergence at the very basic level of biological systems, such as the evolution of multicellularity, can occur there through entirely different genetic means.
(2) "An alternative view is that convergence is so common because the adaptive problems faced by organisms in the struggle to survive recur frequently, and so selection tends to favor the same solutions. In this case, it is not the nature of biological materials that is limited but the 'imagination' of the selective forces."
This is the view that would have us predicting the nature of sufficiently large swimming life on Europa, for instance. (Naturally the author points out that both views are probably right in various cases.)
This entry ended up longer than anticipated after just the first book, so perhaps I'll do one entry per book, which also lets me post it earlier than I'd otherwise have time for. So.
These are basically my class notes, really, for a class I'm both constructing and attending all by myself, and I don't expect them to have the same value for you; that's just the nature of this blog.
Deep Structure of Biology --
A succinct summary of the phenomenon of convergent evolution:
"Beyond all reasonable doubt -- and here we can draw on embryology, comparative anatomy, histology, molecular biology, phylogeny, and the fossil record -- the common ancestor of the octopus and the blue whale could not possible have possessed a camera-eye. Each group has independently navigated to the same evolutionary solution, and it is one that not only works very well but has arisen at least five more times, in animals as diverse as snails and, more extraordinarily, jellyfish."
Another example, later:
"The cartilaginous fish and the bony fish both solved the physics of swimming back in the Silurian by evolving streamlined, fusiform morphologies. Some 230 million years later, a group of land-dwelling reptiles rediscovered this same morphology in their evolutionary return to the sea. And around 175 million years later, a group of land-dwelling mammals also rediscovered this same morphology in their own evolutionary return to the sea."
(The "return to the sea" here is a reference to the Devonian era, when the first land-dwelling animals evolved from sea-dwelling ancestors; before the Devonian, life was primarily a watery phenomenon. Today's aquatic reptiles and mammals have an evolutionary family tree that came up to land before returning to the sea.)
"The evolution of an ichthyosaur or porpoise morphology is not trivial. It can be correctly described as nothing less than astonishing that a group of land-dwelling tetrapods, complete with four legs and a tail, could devolve their appendages and their tails back into fins like those of a fish. Highly unlikely, if not impossible? Yet it happened twice, convergently in the reptiles and the mammals, two groups of animals that are not closely related. We have to go back in time as far as the Carboniferous to find a common ancestors for the mammals and the reptiles. Nonetheless, the ichthyosaur and the porpoise both have independently reevolved fins.
"Contrary to the dictum that 'biological evolution has no predictable destination,' I predict with absolute confidence that if any large, fast-swimming organisms exist in the oceans of the moon Europa -- far away in the orbit around Jupiter, swimming under the perpetual ice that covers their world -- then they will have streamlined, fusiform bodies; that is, they will look very similar to a porpoise, an ichthyosaur, a swordfish, or a shark."
Gould argued strongly against this kind of conclusion with his famous "rewinding of the tape" analogy:
"Any replay of the tape would lead evolution down a pathway radically different from the road actually taken ... The diversity of possible itineraries does demonstrate that eventual results cannot be predicted at the outset. Each step proceeds for cause, but no finale can be specified at the start, and none would ever occur a second time in the same way, because any pathway proceeds through thousands of improbable stages."
The Gouldian argument is not disproven by convergent evolution -- that is, you do not have to deny that convergent evolution is a fact to support Gould's view of evolution. But I think it's important to remember that he constructed that view in the 1980s, and even for scientists it can often be easier to fit new evidence into an existing model -- especially when nothing is going to come along that actually proves it one way or the other, by the nature of the theory -- than it is to re-weigh the evidence every time the balance changes and decide all over again. It's always politically dangerous to talk about the fallibility of scientists because climate change and vaccination denialists pounce on it to "prove" that science is "lying" or "wrong" about those things, which is ridiculous: here we are talking about a very small subsection of a very small corner of a particular science, and how one school of thought may have differed given thirty years difference in the accumulation of evidence.
The phenomenon of convergent evolution raises many questions about:
a) extraterrestrial life, with reference to the Gouldian argument -- if the conditions necessary for life are or have been present elsewhere in the universe, has life evolved in a recognizably similar way? and especially, once simple life has evolved, is it inevitable (assuming that the necessary resources are available) that multicellular and more complex life will evolve eventually?
b) the evolution of intelligence: nevermind the "not all people are smart in the same way" discussions, which are interesting in of themselves. Are the differences between potentially evolvable intelligences enormous, even enormous enough to be mutually unrecognizable, or will intelligence evolve more or less convergently, the way sharks and swordfish are significantly different from one another but still evolved substantially similar structures of swimming?
On primate and corvid intelligence:
"It is certainly plausible to argue that surviving the trials and tribulations of a complex social world makes intellectual demands on many primates. Individuals need to know who is who, they need to keep track of who did what to whom, where and when, and to use this information to predict the actions and intentions of other individuals in their social network, as well as understanding how these relationships change over time. In short, the need for effective competition and cooperation with conspecifics may have provided the main selective advantage for the evolution of primate intelligence.
"That said, there is no reason to assume that intelligence is restricted to primates or that such abilities have evolved only once. Indeed, we shall argue that there is good reason to believe that complex mental characteristics have evolved several times and that the existence of intelligence in different, distantly related lineages must have arisen as a result of convergent evolution in species facing similar social and physical problems. ... perhaps the most dramatic case for convergent evolution of cognition comes from comparing primitive cognitive abilities with those of crows, given that the common ancestor of mammals and birds lived over 280 million years ago and that not all birds and mammals share the complex mental abilities found in crows and primates."
On social and cultural evolution in the ocean:
"Steele notes that, in the ocean, environmental noise (after removing predictable cyclical variation: diurnal, lunar, annual) is largely 'red' (greatest over large time and space scales), while, on land, it is more 'white' (roughly constant over all scales, up to a century or continent or so). The fundamental contrasts between the two habitats are illustrated by the methods of the scientists who study them: terrestrial landscape ecologists plot habitats using geographical information systems, while their oceanographic counterparts use the partial differential equations of fluid dynamics to describe the marine environment.
"The environment is the stage for evolution's greatest play: organisms evolve to maximize their fitness given the environment. Two general environmental traits known greatly to influence evolution are connectedness and variability. In these respects, and many others, marine and terrestrial systems differ radically. And so, with these different sets, we might expect immense contrasts in both the action of the evolutionary play and its results, whether it occurs on land or in the ocean. And there are. Looking out my north-facing windows onto the land, most of the primary productivity I see is in large, long-lived, slowly reproducing spruce and maple trees. To the south, in the sea, the primary productivity is in microscopic diatoms and dinoflagellates. There are squid on one side, neutrally buoyant and forming large schools in an open three-dimensional habitat, and foxes on the other, negotiating trees and rocks and roads by themselves or in small groups, anchored by gravity. These are very different creatures in very different environments. Terrestrial and oceanic environments provide a tough challenge for convergence. When traits do converge, something remarkable has occurred.
"... as we move up the trophic web, convergences between oceanic and terrestrial animals begin to appear. The eyes of squid and foxes are an example. But at the trophic peaks and at the highest levels of biological organization, then the convergences between oceanic and terrestrial systems become particularly strong and provoking. A diatom and a spruce tree have little in common other than being autotrophs but, as I will try to show, the social structures and cultures of sperm and killer whales have much in common with those of elephants and humans.
"Phylogenetic constraints play a part in this. The diatom and maple are about as distantly related as any two organisms on Earth, whereas elephants, sperm whales, killer whales, and humans are all mammals and share all the constraints and advantages of the mammalian order, including backbones, air-breathing, warm blood, live birth, and lactation. But their common ancestor, perhaps one million years ago ... was small, likely socially and culturally primitive, certainly nothing like today's large and dominant mammals of land and ocean."
Later in same section:
"However, the most comprehensive convergence between marine and terrestrial mammals is between ... the sperm whale and the elephants. Termed 'the Colossal Convergence' by an editor at American Scientist, it features a wide range of traits in which elephants are more similar to sperm whales than they are to other terrestrial mammals and sperm whales are more similar to elephants than other marine mammals. In both species, females live in largely matrilineal social units of about elevan animals within which there is communal care for the young and communal defense against predators. These social units aggregate to form larger social structures, including groups of about twenty animals. Males leave their mothers' social units, segregate from the females, and grow to become much larger than their mothers, In their late twenties, the males return to the habitat of the females to mate, roving between the female units, competing with each other and being selected by the females.
"There are additional nonsocial parallels between sperm whales and elephants. For instance, the species have very similar life histories and are nonterritorial and quite mobile. And both are extreme in other respects. These include body size and brain size: the sperm whale has the larges brain of all species, and the elephant the largest among land animals. Another parallel is in ecological success. Elephants, due to their size, numbers, and feeding methods can restructure habitats while the world's sperm whale population, even though substantially reduced by whaling, currently removes about as much biomass from the oceans as all human marine fisheries combined.
"This convergence between a terrestrial herbivore and a marine teuthivore (the sperm whale principally eats deep-water squid) is striking, especially given the radical contrasts in their habitat and food: quite a puzzle for the evolutionary biologist."
Then the author (Hal Whitehead) goes on to explain his theory, that the convergence begins with the nose, which is interesting but not as interesting, overall, as the Colossal Convergence itself.
Explaining convergence:
"Two prime candidate theories have been proposed:
(1) "One is that convergence is evidence for what might be called the limited scope of biological materials; favored by authors such as Stephen J Gould, this explanation rests largely on the idea that phylogenetic, developmental, and physical constraints restrict the forms that biological systems can take, and, therefore, change tends to be strongly limited to what is developmentally possible. This explanation has been considerably reinforced by the evidence for the deep conservation of regulatory genes across many lineages.
"However, there is also mounting evidence that the genome can be dynamic at this level. These same regulatory genes are capable of producing widely divergent phenotypes at a very fundamental level, and convergence at the very basic level of biological systems, such as the evolution of multicellularity, can occur there through entirely different genetic means.
(2) "An alternative view is that convergence is so common because the adaptive problems faced by organisms in the struggle to survive recur frequently, and so selection tends to favor the same solutions. In this case, it is not the nature of biological materials that is limited but the 'imagination' of the selective forces."
This is the view that would have us predicting the nature of sufficiently large swimming life on Europa, for instance. (Naturally the author points out that both views are probably right in various cases.)
Monday, September 14, 2015
the new atheism
I've already mentioned the New Atheism, so as with some of these other early posts, best to have a "defining our terms" post.
I don't -- I wish it didn't need to be said, but it does -- have a problem with atheism. I have more common ground with some of the atheists I know than with most of the Christians I know. The writers and movement that have come to be called the New Atheism are another matter. The big names here are Richard Dawkins, previously best known for introducing the idea of the meme and favoring the gene-centered model of evolution over others; cognitive scientist and philosopher of science Daniel Dennett; and English-American journalist Christopher Hitchens.
Subjectively, one of the differences between the New Atheism and the atheism of Bertrand Russell, for instance, is that the New Atheism lacks a certain ... intellectual rigor.
They don't do their research, is what I'm saying. Dawkins especially has been taken to task for showing little to no familiarity with religious studies, with the history of any particular religion, or with non-Western religions. New Atheists like to dismiss this sort of criticism -- "if we don't believe in any of it, what's the point in studying any of it?" -- but it's exactly the sort of thing that becomes relevant when they start going off about "all the wars religion has started." And it's not just religious content that the New Atheists show little to no familiarity with, but the social sciences in general. Furthermore, there's a clear difference between simply being unaware of the details, and purposefully supporting the conservative Christian agenda by painting fundamentalism and literalism as the purest forms of religion, while coincidentally being the easiest targets.
Objectively, a clear difference between New Atheism and earlier generations is the aggression, anger, and evangelizing associated with the New Atheists. It's pretty fair to paint this as a reaction to the rise in aggression on the part of conservative Christian elements, but New Atheism has also piggybacked on Islamophobia, both before and after 9/11, xenophobia in general, and white Anglo-Americans' hostility towards the cultural markers of others.
The average person is not impacted by New Atheism very much, not in ways we see without speeding up the film -- I think it's a further symptom of, more than a contributing cause to, the tendency of American religion in the last century to grow increasingly conservative as liberals participate less and less rather than fighting back. But certainly it presents nuisances in my work -- religious literacy is so low already, and the New Atheists certainly contribute to worsening it, and have made it virtually impossible to find decent discussions of religion among strangers.
When considering the attitudes and actions of religious people, if we are at all moral and human, we see Goofus, who insists that his path is the only possible true one and that everyone else will burn in hell (or dismisses all other paths as those of ignorant foreigners, or rubs his hands together because he loves being one of the chosen few on the one true path and can't wait till we all die so everyone else will see how wrong they are), differently than we see Gallant, who is as devoted to his path as Goofus is but judges others by their actions and behavior rather than whether their beliefs accord with his own (and may show a healthy interest in other peoples' beliefs, understanding that truly held devotion is not threatened by exposure to different ideas). There is no reason for approaches to atheism to be considered any differently than approaches to religion.
Twenty years ago and maybe even only ten or fifteen, the dumbest positions on religion that I'd overhear were, 90% of the time or more, from moderately to extremely conservative Christians. The dumb moderates were usually the sheltered types who wound up in classes on religion or ancient history and were shocked that history books didn't reassure them that the religion they were raised with was the best, truest, or original. The dumb conservatives espoused a theology a few decades old that they were sure originated the minute Adam woke up.
These days I'm as likely to see "religion started all the wars! religion killed all the peoples!" comments as the first two types. Some of this, of course, is because any framework, any model of the world, will find adherents who can't quite grasp things in granular detail and revert to broad sweeping statements. Some of those raised in arch-conservative households find it easy to adopt the New Atheist rhetoric instead, because ultimately they agree on so much -- their understanding of religion is still fundamentally the same -- and it's easier to go from "Yes it is!" to "No it isn't!" than from either to "actually, the situation is more nuanced than that." But that's basically my point: that the New Atheism as a movement consists exactly of that dumbing-down and simplification, an atheism limited to primary colors and broad gestures, and one that has made itself appealing to internet trolls in just the same ways that Christian fundamentalism did.
I don't -- I wish it didn't need to be said, but it does -- have a problem with atheism. I have more common ground with some of the atheists I know than with most of the Christians I know. The writers and movement that have come to be called the New Atheism are another matter. The big names here are Richard Dawkins, previously best known for introducing the idea of the meme and favoring the gene-centered model of evolution over others; cognitive scientist and philosopher of science Daniel Dennett; and English-American journalist Christopher Hitchens.
Subjectively, one of the differences between the New Atheism and the atheism of Bertrand Russell, for instance, is that the New Atheism lacks a certain ... intellectual rigor.
They don't do their research, is what I'm saying. Dawkins especially has been taken to task for showing little to no familiarity with religious studies, with the history of any particular religion, or with non-Western religions. New Atheists like to dismiss this sort of criticism -- "if we don't believe in any of it, what's the point in studying any of it?" -- but it's exactly the sort of thing that becomes relevant when they start going off about "all the wars religion has started." And it's not just religious content that the New Atheists show little to no familiarity with, but the social sciences in general. Furthermore, there's a clear difference between simply being unaware of the details, and purposefully supporting the conservative Christian agenda by painting fundamentalism and literalism as the purest forms of religion, while coincidentally being the easiest targets.
Objectively, a clear difference between New Atheism and earlier generations is the aggression, anger, and evangelizing associated with the New Atheists. It's pretty fair to paint this as a reaction to the rise in aggression on the part of conservative Christian elements, but New Atheism has also piggybacked on Islamophobia, both before and after 9/11, xenophobia in general, and white Anglo-Americans' hostility towards the cultural markers of others.
The average person is not impacted by New Atheism very much, not in ways we see without speeding up the film -- I think it's a further symptom of, more than a contributing cause to, the tendency of American religion in the last century to grow increasingly conservative as liberals participate less and less rather than fighting back. But certainly it presents nuisances in my work -- religious literacy is so low already, and the New Atheists certainly contribute to worsening it, and have made it virtually impossible to find decent discussions of religion among strangers.
When considering the attitudes and actions of religious people, if we are at all moral and human, we see Goofus, who insists that his path is the only possible true one and that everyone else will burn in hell (or dismisses all other paths as those of ignorant foreigners, or rubs his hands together because he loves being one of the chosen few on the one true path and can't wait till we all die so everyone else will see how wrong they are), differently than we see Gallant, who is as devoted to his path as Goofus is but judges others by their actions and behavior rather than whether their beliefs accord with his own (and may show a healthy interest in other peoples' beliefs, understanding that truly held devotion is not threatened by exposure to different ideas). There is no reason for approaches to atheism to be considered any differently than approaches to religion.
Twenty years ago and maybe even only ten or fifteen, the dumbest positions on religion that I'd overhear were, 90% of the time or more, from moderately to extremely conservative Christians. The dumb moderates were usually the sheltered types who wound up in classes on religion or ancient history and were shocked that history books didn't reassure them that the religion they were raised with was the best, truest, or original. The dumb conservatives espoused a theology a few decades old that they were sure originated the minute Adam woke up.
These days I'm as likely to see "religion started all the wars! religion killed all the peoples!" comments as the first two types. Some of this, of course, is because any framework, any model of the world, will find adherents who can't quite grasp things in granular detail and revert to broad sweeping statements. Some of those raised in arch-conservative households find it easy to adopt the New Atheist rhetoric instead, because ultimately they agree on so much -- their understanding of religion is still fundamentally the same -- and it's easier to go from "Yes it is!" to "No it isn't!" than from either to "actually, the situation is more nuanced than that." But that's basically my point: that the New Atheism as a movement consists exactly of that dumbing-down and simplification, an atheism limited to primary colors and broad gestures, and one that has made itself appealing to internet trolls in just the same ways that Christian fundamentalism did.
Tuesday, September 8, 2015
big ideas, jelly beans
There's something equally appealing and dangerous about what I've thought of, for I guess about 25 years now, as Big Ideas. Capital B capital I. It's not a great term of art, but it's my blog here.
What I mean by Big Ideas -- cause like I said, the label is not specific, I know -- are ideas that come in the form of little explanatory narratives about, in some broad sense, human nature.
They have to be something you can express quickly, even if fully articulating the ramifications of the notion takes longer. The implications of the idea have to be non-trivial, and have to leave you feeling that you understand humanity -- or an individual human you know, or human history -- much better. There's a sensawunda sometimes, like with science fiction or religion.
They have to be essentially unprovable. A model of gravity isn't a Big Idea. Even the evolution of species isn't a Big Idea. But just about everything Malcolm Gladwell publishes, for instance, is about a Big Idea. "People are motivated primarily by comfort" is a Big Idea.
Memetics, previously mentioned, is a Big Idea.
When I was a kid, futurism was all the rage. At the earliest end of my childhood you have Alvin Toffler and Hal Lindsey, for instance -- the former a writer of books like Future Shock and Third Wave that not only dwelled on the changes he believed he saw in the immediate future of post-industrial society, but popularized the idea that people and businesses who weren't prepared for the future were going to be, I don't know, forced into being janitors or some fucking thing -- the pressure to make sure your kid studies Japanese because Japan's going to be a big power or Arabic because the Middle East is a player, that style of thinking, Toffler has a lot to do with laying that particular brick; the latter (yeah, this sentence is structured all sorts of flibbety) a "the Rapture's coming, the Tribulations are gonna getcha" type writer, who helped popularize batshit 19th century eschatologies. Though without that batshit, we wouldn't have The Leftovers today, so Mr Lindsey my hat is off to you.
There's a lot of good drama owes its existence to some awful fucking notions, you know?
That's not a Big Idea.
If you weren't there, or paying attention to this especial stratum of the world wasn't your thing, I don't know if I can really get across to you how big a deal the future was. Not in the Gernsbackian Jetsons House of Tomorrow kind of way, a much more anxious kind of way. But not teen dystopias and zombie pocalypses either! Both the Toffler and Lindsey strains basically say:
Get ready for the future, be good enough for the future, or it will fucking run you over.
That's not an always idea. That's not evergreen. It just feels like it sometimes because we're still in the wake of all that. We pretty much redefined adolescence with all that shit in mind, and it'll take a while to spring back into shape. Meanwhile, some things the kids actually had to deal with that no one pointed out while they were worrying about keeping up with Japanese tech geeks: the student loan debt crisis; the ongoing reduced relative value of a college education; degree inflation; an overpopulation of young lawyers even as law school enrollment skyrockets and public universities continue to spin off law schools as guaranteed moneymakers; changes to the privacy landscape that mean drastically different consequences for both public and private behavior than their parents could have possibly foreseen and most likely still don't understand.
At the other end of my childhood you have the obsession with all things cyber, all things dot, all things com. The late 80s, early 90s, you had Omni Magazine, you had Mondo 2000, you had Wired, you had Jaron Lanier, you had virtual reality around the corner, you had that Jesus Jones video, for some reason you had Lawnmower Man, you had the just-ended Cold War and some big questions about the futures of trade, politics, international relations. Shit played out a little weird as it turns out, but in the moment, there was this obsession with the Next Big Thing (VR-goggles! grape-sized watermelons! post-Soviet capitalism!) that I don't think really died down until the Segway reveal. The internet was going to change the way we live, the way we date, the way we do business, the way we vote, it was going to make everything available to everyone, it was going to make a new generation of billionaire capitalists and fuck everybody else over, etc etc.
My childhood was bookended by different flavors of obsession with the future, is what I'm saying, periods when coming up with Big Ideas about the future was big business -- moreso than at most other points in the 20th century.
So the idea of the Big Idea has been on my radar for a long time. And a lot of them are pretty awful. They're a sugar substitute or a Jelly Belly that tastes like the fruit from the tree of knowledge but doesn't have the nutrients.
There is a Big Idea about Big Ideas, about other stuff too, which I guess goes like this: Most of the time when people are reading nonfiction, they're more invested in a compelling narrative and a satisfying feeling of understanding than they are in what they're reading being true or useful.
Most people do not fucking love science. They fucking love science theater: they love pretty photos and sensawunda.
Self-help books are the lowest form of Big Idea, for instance, a low hanging fruit that everyone understands the awfulness of. They have simplified little models of human behavior that have more in common with a roleplaying game's character creation chapter -- and not even GURPS -- than they do with the real world or a psychology text. They're the "which member of the Monkees are you?" quiz taken way too seriously. But that's what those readers want. That's a form they can digest. It leaves them feeling that they understand something or someone better, or leaves them feeling validated, and that's ultimately what they're actually looking for. Actual true shit would challenge you and offer few easy solutions, and you'd have more work on your plate after the book than before it.
Some Big Ideas I've noticed along the road:
Stupid Big Ideas in Bad Books
Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel was enormously popular with college kids and engineer types for a while, and might still be for all I know. It won a Pulitzer and it's not hard to find historians who will praise it for offering an analysis of world history that refuses to entertain the idea of inherent European superiority. But Diamond is a non-historian trying to hack history by introducing a kind of environmental determinism that no one familiar with history on a more granular level can actually take seriously, unless they are an English aristocrat drinking brandy in a 19th century gentleman's club and telling stories about their last safari. Although I have argued with history profs who enjoy the fact that the book interests some kids in history -- Big Ideas bring people to the table, because there's always someone who doesn't want to do the work unless they're going to be there when we solve the fucking world -- it's not a coincidence that almost 20 years later, the book has changed nothing about the way we teach world history except that some departments now offer a course on the book itself. This is not because history departments are set in their ways -- they've gone through a hell of a lot of other changes in those two decades -- but simply because Diamond's ideas are not very good, and once you put the book down, you can't do much with them.
But people like the big explanatory narrative, and it's a form of history that doesn't require learning a lot of detail. Engineer types love it, because it's basically a history of humanity uncomplicated by the involvement of people.
Pretty much everything Malcolm Gladwell publishes, like I said, is about Big Ideas. He comes up with a cutesy explanatory narrative that sheds light on some aspect of the human condition, you read the review in the New Yorker, you go "whoaa, of course," and you either forget about it or become one of those annoying people who can never forget about it and never shuts up about it.
And none of it is very good. He takes an oversimplified narrative and peppers it with anecdotal evidence -- for which he has, no doubt, a keen eye and an adept hand -- and it never really adds up to much. But it leaves you feeling like you've learned something, the same way a jelly bean can leave you with the aftertaste of Juicy Pear.
Actually Totally Reasonable Big Ideas
Thankfully there's some real stuff out there too.
Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions isn't perfect or without its critics, but I think it remains the best framework for looking at the history of scientific work and scientific progress. Kuhn popularized the idea of "paradigms," the frames of reference and sets of assumptions that necessarily shift when sufficient anomalies accumulate to challenge them, but don't give him too much shit for how the management consulting biz ran with that ball.
Hans Kung took Kuhn's ideas and analyzed the history of Christian theology through this lens. I confess I haven't come to terms with whether I agree with all of Kung's thinking yet, but it's a valuable contribution even if some of it proves to be misleading.
Jeffrey Kottler's Compleat Therapist examines surveys of patient satisfaction and therapeutic results and, finding no significant difference in the success rates of different approaches or schools of thought, determines that it is the relationship between the patient and the therapist that has the biggest influence on therapeutic success, not the therapist's beliefs about mind, personality, behavior, etc. This may sound smaller than some of the above Big Ideas, but you can actually do something with it.
[ETA 9/14: I left out two of the biggest Totally Reasonable Big Ideas, from the perspective of this former history grad student:
Robert Wiebe's organizational hypothesis, which states that the Progressive Era -- roughly the 1880s to the 1920s -- in American history is marked by the shift in focus from regional or state identity to national identity -- not only in politics, but in labor unions, professional guilds like the national bar association, nationwide standards for professions like law/medicine/engineering/teaching, nationwide educational standards. There are many many conclusions you can draw, going on from there -- how this has impacted our politics and informs our present-day life, how it impacted our foreign policy, how American identity plays with intersectionality -- but the basic hypothesis is an incredibly important way to look at American history.
And of course, Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis, which I wrote my first grad school paper on, as did so many other history students.]
But all in all, I'm less interested in separating out the good Big Ideas from the bad ones, and more interested in the phenomenon of Big Ideas in general -- and the related phenomenon I keep bringing up, the junk food intellectual stimulus, the illusion of learning, the feeling of getting smarter and the way that satisfies, well, most people.
It's like slacktivism, I guess, something I wish we didn't have a word for, because once the word got popular, it sort of put a bow on the whole thing and people stopped talking about why it's a problem. If changing your Facebook status or profile photo in order to "show support" for a particular cause scratches your get-up-and-do-something-about-this itch, you're going to leave it at that. If you get enough likes or praise or pats on the back for doing nothing except kind of implying that you care, you're not going to do anything to bring about actual change, because the effort-to-reward ratio doesn't scale enough to motivate you.
So too with learning shit about stuff. If a little Gladwell at your lunch hour, a little History Channel on a Saturday night, makes you feel like you know more, it can be really hard to put that feeling aside and actually eat an apple instead of a clever apple-licious jelly bean.
What I mean by Big Ideas -- cause like I said, the label is not specific, I know -- are ideas that come in the form of little explanatory narratives about, in some broad sense, human nature.
They have to be something you can express quickly, even if fully articulating the ramifications of the notion takes longer. The implications of the idea have to be non-trivial, and have to leave you feeling that you understand humanity -- or an individual human you know, or human history -- much better. There's a sensawunda sometimes, like with science fiction or religion.
They have to be essentially unprovable. A model of gravity isn't a Big Idea. Even the evolution of species isn't a Big Idea. But just about everything Malcolm Gladwell publishes, for instance, is about a Big Idea. "People are motivated primarily by comfort" is a Big Idea.
Memetics, previously mentioned, is a Big Idea.
When I was a kid, futurism was all the rage. At the earliest end of my childhood you have Alvin Toffler and Hal Lindsey, for instance -- the former a writer of books like Future Shock and Third Wave that not only dwelled on the changes he believed he saw in the immediate future of post-industrial society, but popularized the idea that people and businesses who weren't prepared for the future were going to be, I don't know, forced into being janitors or some fucking thing -- the pressure to make sure your kid studies Japanese because Japan's going to be a big power or Arabic because the Middle East is a player, that style of thinking, Toffler has a lot to do with laying that particular brick; the latter (yeah, this sentence is structured all sorts of flibbety) a "the Rapture's coming, the Tribulations are gonna getcha" type writer, who helped popularize batshit 19th century eschatologies. Though without that batshit, we wouldn't have The Leftovers today, so Mr Lindsey my hat is off to you.
There's a lot of good drama owes its existence to some awful fucking notions, you know?
That's not a Big Idea.
If you weren't there, or paying attention to this especial stratum of the world wasn't your thing, I don't know if I can really get across to you how big a deal the future was. Not in the Gernsbackian Jetsons House of Tomorrow kind of way, a much more anxious kind of way. But not teen dystopias and zombie pocalypses either! Both the Toffler and Lindsey strains basically say:
Get ready for the future, be good enough for the future, or it will fucking run you over.
That's not an always idea. That's not evergreen. It just feels like it sometimes because we're still in the wake of all that. We pretty much redefined adolescence with all that shit in mind, and it'll take a while to spring back into shape. Meanwhile, some things the kids actually had to deal with that no one pointed out while they were worrying about keeping up with Japanese tech geeks: the student loan debt crisis; the ongoing reduced relative value of a college education; degree inflation; an overpopulation of young lawyers even as law school enrollment skyrockets and public universities continue to spin off law schools as guaranteed moneymakers; changes to the privacy landscape that mean drastically different consequences for both public and private behavior than their parents could have possibly foreseen and most likely still don't understand.
At the other end of my childhood you have the obsession with all things cyber, all things dot, all things com. The late 80s, early 90s, you had Omni Magazine, you had Mondo 2000, you had Wired, you had Jaron Lanier, you had virtual reality around the corner, you had that Jesus Jones video, for some reason you had Lawnmower Man, you had the just-ended Cold War and some big questions about the futures of trade, politics, international relations. Shit played out a little weird as it turns out, but in the moment, there was this obsession with the Next Big Thing (VR-goggles! grape-sized watermelons! post-Soviet capitalism!) that I don't think really died down until the Segway reveal. The internet was going to change the way we live, the way we date, the way we do business, the way we vote, it was going to make everything available to everyone, it was going to make a new generation of billionaire capitalists and fuck everybody else over, etc etc.
My childhood was bookended by different flavors of obsession with the future, is what I'm saying, periods when coming up with Big Ideas about the future was big business -- moreso than at most other points in the 20th century.
So the idea of the Big Idea has been on my radar for a long time. And a lot of them are pretty awful. They're a sugar substitute or a Jelly Belly that tastes like the fruit from the tree of knowledge but doesn't have the nutrients.
There is a Big Idea about Big Ideas, about other stuff too, which I guess goes like this: Most of the time when people are reading nonfiction, they're more invested in a compelling narrative and a satisfying feeling of understanding than they are in what they're reading being true or useful.
Most people do not fucking love science. They fucking love science theater: they love pretty photos and sensawunda.
Self-help books are the lowest form of Big Idea, for instance, a low hanging fruit that everyone understands the awfulness of. They have simplified little models of human behavior that have more in common with a roleplaying game's character creation chapter -- and not even GURPS -- than they do with the real world or a psychology text. They're the "which member of the Monkees are you?" quiz taken way too seriously. But that's what those readers want. That's a form they can digest. It leaves them feeling that they understand something or someone better, or leaves them feeling validated, and that's ultimately what they're actually looking for. Actual true shit would challenge you and offer few easy solutions, and you'd have more work on your plate after the book than before it.
Some Big Ideas I've noticed along the road:
Stupid Big Ideas in Bad Books
Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel was enormously popular with college kids and engineer types for a while, and might still be for all I know. It won a Pulitzer and it's not hard to find historians who will praise it for offering an analysis of world history that refuses to entertain the idea of inherent European superiority. But Diamond is a non-historian trying to hack history by introducing a kind of environmental determinism that no one familiar with history on a more granular level can actually take seriously, unless they are an English aristocrat drinking brandy in a 19th century gentleman's club and telling stories about their last safari. Although I have argued with history profs who enjoy the fact that the book interests some kids in history -- Big Ideas bring people to the table, because there's always someone who doesn't want to do the work unless they're going to be there when we solve the fucking world -- it's not a coincidence that almost 20 years later, the book has changed nothing about the way we teach world history except that some departments now offer a course on the book itself. This is not because history departments are set in their ways -- they've gone through a hell of a lot of other changes in those two decades -- but simply because Diamond's ideas are not very good, and once you put the book down, you can't do much with them.
But people like the big explanatory narrative, and it's a form of history that doesn't require learning a lot of detail. Engineer types love it, because it's basically a history of humanity uncomplicated by the involvement of people.
Pretty much everything Malcolm Gladwell publishes, like I said, is about Big Ideas. He comes up with a cutesy explanatory narrative that sheds light on some aspect of the human condition, you read the review in the New Yorker, you go "whoaa, of course," and you either forget about it or become one of those annoying people who can never forget about it and never shuts up about it.
And none of it is very good. He takes an oversimplified narrative and peppers it with anecdotal evidence -- for which he has, no doubt, a keen eye and an adept hand -- and it never really adds up to much. But it leaves you feeling like you've learned something, the same way a jelly bean can leave you with the aftertaste of Juicy Pear.
Actually Totally Reasonable Big Ideas
Thankfully there's some real stuff out there too.
Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions isn't perfect or without its critics, but I think it remains the best framework for looking at the history of scientific work and scientific progress. Kuhn popularized the idea of "paradigms," the frames of reference and sets of assumptions that necessarily shift when sufficient anomalies accumulate to challenge them, but don't give him too much shit for how the management consulting biz ran with that ball.
Hans Kung took Kuhn's ideas and analyzed the history of Christian theology through this lens. I confess I haven't come to terms with whether I agree with all of Kung's thinking yet, but it's a valuable contribution even if some of it proves to be misleading.
Jeffrey Kottler's Compleat Therapist examines surveys of patient satisfaction and therapeutic results and, finding no significant difference in the success rates of different approaches or schools of thought, determines that it is the relationship between the patient and the therapist that has the biggest influence on therapeutic success, not the therapist's beliefs about mind, personality, behavior, etc. This may sound smaller than some of the above Big Ideas, but you can actually do something with it.
[ETA 9/14: I left out two of the biggest Totally Reasonable Big Ideas, from the perspective of this former history grad student:
Robert Wiebe's organizational hypothesis, which states that the Progressive Era -- roughly the 1880s to the 1920s -- in American history is marked by the shift in focus from regional or state identity to national identity -- not only in politics, but in labor unions, professional guilds like the national bar association, nationwide standards for professions like law/medicine/engineering/teaching, nationwide educational standards. There are many many conclusions you can draw, going on from there -- how this has impacted our politics and informs our present-day life, how it impacted our foreign policy, how American identity plays with intersectionality -- but the basic hypothesis is an incredibly important way to look at American history.
And of course, Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis, which I wrote my first grad school paper on, as did so many other history students.]
But all in all, I'm less interested in separating out the good Big Ideas from the bad ones, and more interested in the phenomenon of Big Ideas in general -- and the related phenomenon I keep bringing up, the junk food intellectual stimulus, the illusion of learning, the feeling of getting smarter and the way that satisfies, well, most people.
It's like slacktivism, I guess, something I wish we didn't have a word for, because once the word got popular, it sort of put a bow on the whole thing and people stopped talking about why it's a problem. If changing your Facebook status or profile photo in order to "show support" for a particular cause scratches your get-up-and-do-something-about-this itch, you're going to leave it at that. If you get enough likes or praise or pats on the back for doing nothing except kind of implying that you care, you're not going to do anything to bring about actual change, because the effort-to-reward ratio doesn't scale enough to motivate you.
So too with learning shit about stuff. If a little Gladwell at your lunch hour, a little History Channel on a Saturday night, makes you feel like you know more, it can be really hard to put that feeling aside and actually eat an apple instead of a clever apple-licious jelly bean.
Wednesday, August 19, 2015
thanks for all the fish
One reason this blog exists is because I have a habit of setting out reading/learning goals for myself that I refer to as curriculums, a habit that extends back to high school (when a teacher's willingness to let me do some independent studies was pretty much the only way I graduated), the methodologies of which have changed with the times and my capacities. My approach to education and especially to the way I group subjects together is very informed by the beginning of my college years at Hampshire, where pretty much everything is interdisciplinary and there are no traditional majors. More traditional colleges, where I finished my degree and went on to grad school, seemed structured to limit the directions my learning took rather than to teach me to incorporate whatever ingredients I brought to the table -- obviously I realize the pragmatic reasons for this, but it's just not my constitutional makeup.
Then again, I'm not a scientist, or a history teacher, or an engineer. I'm a writer. There isn't really any subject that is completely irrelevant to my job.
So as part of this, I started sketching out curriculums (and yes, I consciously reject the Latin plural here) in roughly five year chunks, composed of a list of areas of fiction or specific authors I wanted to read, along with nonfiction areas I wanted to learn more about. These are intentionally sketchy, because part of the process is learning what there is to learn.
Which leads us up to now, and my Ocean Studies curriculum, and the marine biology component of that, which was inspired by my lifelong fear of sea monsters and a flurry of cool internet stories about squids and octopuses. For a variety of reasons -- parents who met at MIT, genre writing that benefits from scientific literacy, believing that science leads to wonder rather than demystifying the world -- I try to keep up with at least a basic level of science reading, whether it's as simple as reading Scientific American every month or a little more involved like this curriculum.
The latest book in that Ocean Studies curric? The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins. This is a much more interesting and solid work than the squid books that have gotten a lot of attention lately, and in addressing the possibility of various behaviors of specific cetacean species as culture, the authors also address larger questions of animal culture like: what exactly do we mean by "culture," especially when we're referring to nonhumans? What is the evolutionary role of culture? What are the prerequisites for culture?
All the arguments against cetacean culture are brought up and addressed, which is refreshing given how many animal culture books are just full of pseudoscience and wishful thinking -- and the extent to which dolphins especially are a lightning rod for that sort of thing. But one of the really interesting things for me as a genre writer was that last question: the prerequisites for culture. Of course we don't really know, but there are certain characteristics that, when possessed by a species, seem to indicate that that species will engage in behaviors that appear to be culture:
* Large brains
* Prolonged mother-infant dependency
* Menopause
* "Stupid" (that is, maladaptive) behavior
* Ecological success
* Wide-ranging habitats
* Large-scale cooperation
* Indication of coevolution of genes and culture
Obviously you could write a shitty Malcolm Gladwell book or shitty pro-tips for middle-managers book with this as your backbone, and thank God that's not my life. But it's food for thought for an sf writer.
Then again, I'm not a scientist, or a history teacher, or an engineer. I'm a writer. There isn't really any subject that is completely irrelevant to my job.
So as part of this, I started sketching out curriculums (and yes, I consciously reject the Latin plural here) in roughly five year chunks, composed of a list of areas of fiction or specific authors I wanted to read, along with nonfiction areas I wanted to learn more about. These are intentionally sketchy, because part of the process is learning what there is to learn.
Which leads us up to now, and my Ocean Studies curriculum, and the marine biology component of that, which was inspired by my lifelong fear of sea monsters and a flurry of cool internet stories about squids and octopuses. For a variety of reasons -- parents who met at MIT, genre writing that benefits from scientific literacy, believing that science leads to wonder rather than demystifying the world -- I try to keep up with at least a basic level of science reading, whether it's as simple as reading Scientific American every month or a little more involved like this curriculum.
The latest book in that Ocean Studies curric? The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins. This is a much more interesting and solid work than the squid books that have gotten a lot of attention lately, and in addressing the possibility of various behaviors of specific cetacean species as culture, the authors also address larger questions of animal culture like: what exactly do we mean by "culture," especially when we're referring to nonhumans? What is the evolutionary role of culture? What are the prerequisites for culture?
All the arguments against cetacean culture are brought up and addressed, which is refreshing given how many animal culture books are just full of pseudoscience and wishful thinking -- and the extent to which dolphins especially are a lightning rod for that sort of thing. But one of the really interesting things for me as a genre writer was that last question: the prerequisites for culture. Of course we don't really know, but there are certain characteristics that, when possessed by a species, seem to indicate that that species will engage in behaviors that appear to be culture:
* Large brains
* Prolonged mother-infant dependency
* Menopause
* "Stupid" (that is, maladaptive) behavior
* Ecological success
* Wide-ranging habitats
* Large-scale cooperation
* Indication of coevolution of genes and culture
Obviously you could write a shitty Malcolm Gladwell book or shitty pro-tips for middle-managers book with this as your backbone, and thank God that's not my life. But it's food for thought for an sf writer.
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