Responses to those who drag us down

You know how you hear we shouldn't have a space program or NEA or NIH because they don't help people? Zack Weiner of SMBC has a response.

Also, here's a good post analyzing the bloviating about how Medicaid will be the end of of rational civilization. Heh. That train has left the station, ship has sailed, dog has moved on.

And an review of Robert Bellah's book Religion in Human Evolution.

Cooperation and the Divine

(Picture from Where the Hell Is Matt?)


The thing humans do more than anything else is interact with other human beings. We are supercooperators. Nothing on this planet is even close to us in our ability to cooperate with one another. We can, easily, be members of multiple groups, some of which might be in competition or conflict with one another. A Baptist in Wisconsin can cooperate with a Musllim in Arizona and have nothing more in common with one another than a rejection of the qualifications of a politician. (Not all cooperations are positive.) 

There are a number of articles coming out (notable in Martin Nowak's Scientific American article here.) that are starting to really examine cooperation scientifically and from the perspective of evolution. Cooperation has been a problem within human evolution for a while. Why cooperate? Why not cheat? Don't cheaters win?

Not really.

The problem of cooperation appears to have been a human conceptual difficulty rather than an actual problem. It is sort of like the bumblebee myth. You know the one. Bumblebees violate the laws of aerodynamics but still fly. Aren't scientists dumb?

The actual bumblebee story is much more interesting. Yes, bumblebees violate the Bernoulli principle underlying fixed and rotor wing flight dynamics. To call them "laws" is incorrect. They are models of flight where some components of the model-- such as the viscosity of the medium-- can be negligible. If you tried to fly an airbus in honey the results would be somewhat different. To something the size and mass of an insect, however, viscosity matters a great deal and new principles must be applied.

Cooperation has had a rocky road. First, there was the fact that Darwin came up with his ideas in the midst of Industrial Revolution England. The idea of the ascent of man being the result of individual triumph was attractive. Then there was Raymond Dart who first came up with man rising from the murderous ape. And all the rest. The result of which is this idea that human beings are competitors first and cooperators a distant second if not third. Then the math models kept suggesting that cheaters and individuals were favored by evolution. Where would such behavior come from if not from evolution?

It's interesting how such ideas get established and then accepted without really being examined further. The idea of the "rugged individual" succeeding against all odds is such a powerful narrative tic that it seems to blind us to reality. The fact of the matter which you can see driving down the street, checking out at a super market or standing in line for a movie is we cooperate all the time. We do it so naturally, so easily, so comfortably it is like the air we breathe.

The article referenced above has expanded the math models significantly. It turns out that while initially there is a leaning towards cheating and favor the individual over the group, after a few generations there is a shift towards cooperation. Nowak has identified not one mechanism for the evolution of cooperation but five. (See here.)

But remember that the actions that result in natural selection of organisms do not necessarily have evolutionary origins. Chimps don't have sex because they are trying to get their genes propagated. They do it because it feels good. People don't cooperate because it will make their group genes propagate. They do it because they value the group's existence, because they want to feel included, because they value the shared experience, because they are emotionally moved.

Enter Matt Harding.

You may remember Harding as the originator of the dancing video. Harding traveled around the world getting himself filmed dancing (Badly. Very badly.) in front of a lot of landmarks and locations. In Africa there wasn't much to dance in front of so he danced with some kids. He thought this was exciting and a whole lot more interesting than dancing in front of monuments. Harding put together the video along with a music background. Nothing engenders the group experience like music. But it wasn't enough.

So he did it again. This time he filmed people dancing (Some badly. Some not so badly.) with him. This time the center of the view was him dancing with kids, adults, dogs-- anything that was there. This time he did it with his girlfriend/fiance and eventually wife.

Time passed. They had a child. Something still wasn't quite right. The videos were good but he wanted a bit more.

So he did it again. This time he and his wife did it together. This time he tried to pull together the essence of the experience into a work of art-- although I don't think Harding would ever use those words. The result is extraordinary. It's at the Harding link above. I suggest you go watch it. Then watch all of the videos on the site page.

I am biologically inclined. Anybody who's read these posts is surely aware of that by now. If there are poles of orientation in my psyche they tend to be  material, human centric and scientifically directed. I don't have a lot of truck with things termed "spiritual." After all, it was our mammalian ancestors that gave us the limbic system that gets fired when we work together on a joint project or see Yosemite or meet our newborn child for the first time. 


That said, it is not our mammalian heritage that conceived of the project, recognized the transcendence of Yosemite and named our first born son. 


We can never leave behind where we came from. It is with us root and branch as we breathe in and out. We must remember we are not limited by it. There is such a thing as an organism transcending its biology. When we pursue goals that could never have been dictated to us by our evolutionary heritage. When we aspire to things that cannot possibly be explained by reproductive success. When we reach out to strangers to do nothing more than show our common ground by dancing on it. 

It is the only thing worthy of the word "divine."

Back from the Dead and Ready to Party

I apologize for not showing up here for a bit. I'm sure both of my readers have been disappointed beyond measure.

Reader #1: Hey Freddie? Who was that blogger we used to read? Poppy? Kissy? Something?

Reader #2: I don't know anybody by that name. Put on the TV. Nova's got something interesting.

There are a number of reasons (no excuses) for this to have happened. Finishing the first cut of a novel. Some nuisance medical issues. Work. Family. The phase of the moon. Fluctuations in the element Carbon.

But one reason did seem to flocculate to the top of the pond: I got burnt out.

Ken Kesey said that he was in a writer's workshop when he realized that a bad book took just as much work as a good book. So are these science articles. One can argue their quality but they take a lot of work. After the last batch I just didn't have it in me to blog about anything for a while.

Clearly, something has to change.

What I've decided to do is lighten them up some. Show some science. Talk about some things that interest me that are not science. Have a bit more fun with less effort.

Yeah. Good luck with that.

In that vein here is the first one: A quick look at a bunch of interesting articles. Have fun.

U.S. Tightens Rules on Antibiotics and Livestock: 80% of all antibiotics used in the USA are used in livestock. Imagine the sea of excrement that comes from livestock and works its evil way to the sea. Now lace that wonderful river with antibiotics. Now listen to all of the rhetoric regarding antibiotic resistant bacteria and physicians prescribing antibiotics. Cognitive dissonance anyone?

Teamwork Builds Big Brains: What humans do better than any other species is cooperate with one another. Now there's solid evidence that it may serve as at least one of the sources of the selection pressure for all of that tissue between our ears.

Egg shaped dinosaur evolution: The big question about the Cretaceous extinction isn't that dinosaurs died. It's that mammal and birds lived when dinosaurs died. What is the selection mechanism of the Cretaceous extinction? Now one idea is that the life cycle of the dinosaurs might have made them vulnerable to the sort of extinction event that happened at the K-T boundary. Probably doesn't explain the demise of marine reptiles or pterosaurs.

New wrinkles in Dark Matter here and here: Something makes the rims of galaxies turn faster than they should. That's the original evidence of dark matter: a large amount of that something that has a gravitational effect but is otherwise unobserved. Yet it doesn't seem to show up around here: the locality around Sol. Why not?

Non-DNA DNA like molecules: DNA and RNA for the longest time were considered the sole possible mechanism for genetic inheritance. Not necessarily so. This does open two questions: 1) do we have to have DNA and RNA for extraterrestrial life and 2) Why did DNA and RNA become sole proprietors on earth?

Beating Down the Earth with Asteroids: The Late Heavy Bombardment is when the Earth was pummeled again and again with huge rocks. Big craters. Big events. It was supposed to have stopped about 3.7 billion years ago. New evidence suggests that it actually stopped about 1.8 billion years ago. Prokaryotic life is thought to have started about 3.5 billion years ago-- close to the end of the Late Heavy Bombardment. Now it looks like the early life forms might have happily tolerated being occasionally obliterated by a white hot impact. Eukaryotes, however, are thought to have originated 1.6-2.1 billion years ago. Hm. Interesting coincidence.

Wind Farms may have a role in climate change: They mix night time cool are on the ground with warmer upper air. Ah we live in interesting times.


New characteristics of the Permian Extinction: Biochemical evidence of "the animals died from a lack of dissolved oxygen in the water, an excess of carbon dioxide, a reduced ability to make shells from calcium carbonate, altered ocean acidity and higher water temperatures." Curious. That sounds very familiar.

Concerns about GM crops: Use of herbicide causes select for increased resistance to herbicides. Many GM crops have built in resistance to such herbicides allowing enormous quantities of herbicides to be dumped on them to kill the weeds and leave the crops. Result: increased weed resistance to herbicides. Wow! Who would have thought it?

New model of solar system formation: Jupiter started out as a little guy. But when he grew up he changed everything.

Mouse Brain in Silico: Scientists are building a virtual mouse brain. From which they will learn enough to build a virtual human brain. What will they think about?

Brain Scans of Comatose Patients and Consciousness: This is just scary. Is there brain death? And would anyone but the patient really know?

When Men are Less Moral Than Women: American men, anyway.

And that's it for now.

 

Music, Altruism and Human Cognition

My father was convinced that early exposure to music was important and from the time I was born (some time around the K-T boundary) he played classical music in the house. When I was very young-- perhaps three-- he bought me a small 78 rpm record player and a set of record albums. The story in the family is I would put on a record, sit and listen to it and then, when the record was over put the needle back on and listen to it again. Some years later I found those albums and the grooves had been worn off. They were flat as glass.

I've been playing music ever since. Think of me as a determined, gifted amateur-- except for the "gifted" part.

Music is basic to the human brain. Even severely demented patients, patients that have lost their ability to speak, to remember language, to recognized loved ones, can still react to music. Stroke victims that have lost the ability to speak can often regain that ability by learning to sing.

Some of it is basic physics. A440 is the standard tuning note against which other notes are tuned. Double that frequency to 880 and we hear the same note higher in pitch. Cut it in half and we have the same note lower in pitch. The interval between frequency multiples can be divided into thirds, fourths and fifths. (See here.) In the west we have divided the interval between one frequency and its double into the octave. Other cultures divide it differently. However, all cultures recognize the multiple. Most, but not all, recognize thirds, fourths and fifths.

But it's more than that.

Bruce Chatwin wrote a book (The Songlines) where he discussed some of the mythology of song in Australian aboriginal culture. Songlines are paths across the land taken by creator beings. Chatwin suggested that the songs were also navigational instruments. Pius Piailug was the navigator on the Hōkūleʻa on its long voyage to Tahiti. He used old methods of the islanders including watching stars and currents to find his way. There's a scene the documentary Papa Mau where he is shown teaching navigation to children. He teaches it in song. Its obvious why: we remember music much, much better than we remember almost anything else.

I believe music is more fundamental to our humanity than language. We sang before we spoke but probably not before we walked.

Okay, keep that in mind. Now we change subjects to evolutionary altruism.

Like physics, there's a lot of unknowns in evolution. The big hole in physics is gravity and the reconciliation of quantum physics and relativity. One of the big hole in evolution is altruism. You can see the evidence of the conflict since E. O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins are fighting about it. (See here.)

Biological altruism is fairly succinctly defined. It's the circumstance where a reproductive entity decreases its own chances of reproduction (termed "fitness") to increase the chances of another organism. A monkey giving a warning call is putting himself at risk by announcing his position and decreasing the risk to the rest of the troop.

But, in evolutionary terms, why would there be a selection of any organism to reduce its own fitness?

One idea on the origin of altruism is kin selection. If you share food with everybody, relatives and non-relatives alike, you put your gene pool at risk. But if you share only with relatives then you are not only propagating your own genes but that portion of your genetic heritage you share with your relatives. In these circumstances altruism has a positive reproductive benefit rather than another one. To bring it back to the monkey, if your troop has a significant proportion of relatives, the money benefits his larger shared gene pool at the risk of his individual survival. That can be a win. There's a cost/benefit proposition. As long as the cost (in genes) is less than the benefit (genetic survival) then selection tends towards the behavior. If the C/B shifts the other way, there's a selection against the behavior.
But kin selection falls apart when there's not a high enough relatedness in the group. One model is reciprocal altruism: I help you in the hopes that you'll help me later. Both of us benefit and our fitness is thereby increased. This falls shortly into group selection, which is what Dawkins and Wilson are fighting about. Group selection suggests there are circumstances where a particular gene or genes can spread throughout the population because of the benefit they bestow on the group as a whole independent of whether they give a benefit to a particular individual.

The problem of altruism in animals is one thing. In humans it's a different problem. We don't know directly if animals act altruistically but we know humans do. There are scores of actions humans take that actively reduce their reproductive fitness for no reproductive benefit. Think firemen. Think the military. These are often lumped into behavior that has a benefit for the individual: status, wealth, security. These benefits are supposed to increase the fitness of the individual. Yet, it doesn't take much examination at least in modern society to see that while these benefits may (or may not) benefit the individual reproductively. In terms of reproduction, volunteering to serve the country falls pretty short of sitting in front of the television eating Ho-Hos and squirting out babies. So it's not productive to do this in evolutionary terms.

Yet we do it all the time. We adopt children-- no reproductive advantage there. We adopt pets instead of children. We invest time, money, effort in saving starving children in Bangladesh. White people marched in Alabama for the rights of blacks. They marched specifically to increase their own competitive disadvantage.

We see around us all the time how people compete. Ingeniously. Duplicitously. Fairly. Viciously. The competitive mechanisms are obvious. It's easy to forget how fundamentally cooperative we are even when it doesn't do us much good to do so. The competitive mechanisms are all in light of what we normally thing of as Darwinian evolution-- "nature red in tooth and claw." But cooperation and altruism are just as important if not more so. We didn't manage to kill off the saber cats because we were the biggest badass on the grassland. We killed off the saber cats because we were better at working together than anything else, kin or not.

In music, you'll often see people who are part of completely different musical experiences play together. Somebody from Cameroon might play with somebody from Tibet. Or a South African singer might play with Chilean piper. Language barriers don't matter. Cultural barriers don't matter. They just play. This happens all the time. It happens so comfortably and easily we don't even consider it as odd. Why shouldn't they be able to play together? Maybe because it ought to be impossible?

After all, if two people can't speak together why should ever expect them to sing together?

But they do.

I like to imagine a Homo erectus band out there in Africa on a moonlit night singing together. Around a fire. The bonds of fellowship caused by that music strengthening them beyond mere family ties.

And the next morning, that band goes out and gets that damned saber cat.

Where It Comes From

I like to talk about science. however, Readercon is coming up and one of the panels I hope to be on is where you get your ideas. So this is my first stab at it.

First, I want to shift the concept of "ideas" to what I think is a better term, "material." In SF we tend to think of ideas as the basis of a story. Consider these three examples:

•  A Fire Upon the Deep, Vernor Vinge: Computation gets more efficient as you proceed away from the galactic core enabling higher order functions 
• Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein: A human raised as a martian.
• A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr: After the apocalypse knowledge kept as part of a Catholic monastery

Certainly, these might describe a important idea for the work. However, nobody can say the idea comprises the work. I don't believe that a story accretes around an idea like the shell of a mollusc, as attractive as a pearl metaphor might be.

I think a writer brings everything he has to bear on a given story. Everything is material. Everything is material. The thoughts you had at your dead mother's funeral. The look of your puppy as it died in the street. The inappropriate thoughts you kept to yourself the first time you undressed at gym.

When I went to Clarion, Robin Scott Wilson said that writing was the only professions where you could drop your drawers, point to a big pimple on your butt and say look at that!


See? Everything is material.

So the problem with "ideas"-- or rather, material-- should be more what to leave out rather than what to put in. Material is everywhere. Looking at technology news today: "The Facebook Camera." Okay. Consider a world where every image is public. What does that mean? "Climate change allows once rare British butterfly to thrive." What is the state of Georgia going to do when the climate pushes animals currently living only in Florida north?

The point is not the material. The point is how you see the material.

Think of a black box. You want to know what's inside of it. What do you do? You pick it up. You feel its shape. You shake it. Stand it one one end and listen. Stand it on the other end and listen. What do you do when you get a new car? Take it out for a drive. Lean into the curves a bit. Check out the radio. What do you do when you get a new phone? Call somebody. Check the menus.

The first step of a writerly mind is to pick up a piece of material and examine it. Cuttlefish communicate by color. Interesting. How do they communicate? Flash pictures? Shapes? Maybe they use some sort of code.

The next step is sort of like how babies play with blocks. They fit them together and take them apart. They match them by color. By shape. By which ones fit with which other ones.

Back to the cuttlefish: What does a cuttlefish think about? Mating and eating probably. Do they play? Can a cuttlefish get bored? What does it mean for a cuttlefish to be bored-- what does it mean to play at all? If a cuttlefish was playing would we know it? Would we know it if it were bored? What would cuttlefish playing look like? Or cuttlefish boredom?

The writerly mind might try to answer these questions. Research is one answer-- put "bored cuttlefish" into Google and see what you get. Or you can imagine a bored cuttlefish. How? When I'm bored I might do something I know I like-- eat, maybe. Walk around. What would a cuttlefish do? Well, bored eating for a cuttlefish involves hunting. So it might go looking for a crab. That's a lot of work to alleviate boredom. The idea is to alleviate boredom without too much effort. Well, the cuttlefish has this color thing. Maybe it flashes at nothing-- doesn't sound satisfying, does it? Think like a cuttlefish. Hey! Look at this neat pattern. Where's Joe? Go find him. Hey, ,Joe! Check this out.

The idea is just there to catch interest. The material are the sticks from which you build the story. But what makes the story go is playing with the two.

Evolution, Embryogenesis and Science Fiction

(Picture from here.)

Here's a very good article on the evolution of the animal developmental process. It's not so good at explaining plant embryogenesis (wikipedia article here.) If you followed the articles conclusions, plants would be a form of degenerate animals since they also have embryogenesis. I'm not going to go into it in this post but I suggest reading it.

My own suspicion is that the process of multicellular organization that led to the evolution of development probably predated either plants or animals. The organizational principles might have been in play (see Volvox for example) but the actual process of developing embryogenesis likely have evolved separately between the plants and animals. When I read about it I see little similarity other than the fact that both higher plants and animals have a definable pattern of developing adult organisms from dissimilar embryonic precursors.

The evolution of fungal life cycles and that of slime molds likely also have evolved separately. Fungi look like they have evolved from animals or at least an animal precursor. (See here.) There is some genetic evidence that the gilled mushrooms and puffball fruiting bodies may have evolved fairly recently and may also have arisen separately as many as four times. (See here.) What's less clear is how fruiting mechanisms of fungi evolved at all.

Slime molds (Myxomycetes) are interesting in that they have a single celled form and a multicelled form. When they mate they form a plasmodium, a large structure consisting of nuclei without any intervening cell membranes. The plasmodium then extends itself (and sometimes appears to actually move) by cytoplasmic stream and consumes the food source. When the food source wanes, it forms a fruiting body that looks mushroom like and develops spores.

These sorts of strategies are important in Science Fiction. SF aliens even in their most extreme form are usually animal in nature. There are a few exceptions: the living planet in Stanislaw Lem's  Solaris. And the microbial gods of of Ken MacLeod's Engines of Light trilogy. SF Plant intelligences are essentially animals in plant suits. (See here.) Which is only marginally better than humans in alien suits.

It doesn't have to be that way.

I'm a big fan of using the strange and wonderful biological world of earth as inspiration for alien worlds. And, certainly, the animal kingdom is filled with the truly strange and completely non-human. But I'm also among the first to admit that this is animal chauvinism.

We have no idea of the shape of life on other worlds. I think we can suggest that if there are the ingredients and opportunity for a carbon based origin of life that life will in fact arise. And we can further speculate with evidence that the result will go as far as  a similar metabolic path as earth's: using light to fix CO2 into carbon polymers and thereby releasing oxygen and metabolizing the resulting organic compounds in the presence of the resulting oxygen.Note the caveats: it says nothing about non-carbon life. We can't even say that life has to take a cellular path-- there are some very interesting experiments involving organic compounds unconstrained by chemical cells but constrained by physical components such as the cavities in lava rock. Or that individual cells are the preferred path. The slime mold plasmodium mentioned above is fairly large-- sometimes meters across-- and has no cell membraines. It is, in effect, a single cell.

We have no idea what things are like out there.We know only a little more about what things are right here.

The stories we want to tell are about human beings. Aliens are one wrench in the tool chest writers can use to tinker with the human experience and see how it works.This is, in my opinion, one of the distinctions between SF and fantasy. SF has at least the toe of one foot in the world we live in, the world of thermodynamics and the Cretaceous. Fantasy does not need that toe. In a fantasy world we can have creatures that pursue evil for no reason except they're evil. In the SF world, evil villains at least have to pursue evil because it makes them look cool. This is a technical evaluation not a judgement of quality. It's just a distinction. A work of fantasy does not have to conform to physics though it may choose to. A work of SF is informed by physics even if the physics are ignored.

I've been talking about biology for a bit now. My intention is not just to say Look at that! Isn't it cool? though that is certainly true. Instead, I'm saying that the biological world can serve as a tremendous well of metaphorical construction. Along with history, anthropology and archaeology, biology can help determine motivations, develop character and make stories.

Even with slime molds.

Changing Human Paleobiology

(Picture from here.)

One of the things that changes over time is our perspective on our ancestors. It wasn't so long ago that we thought of Neanderthals as stupid, shambling brutes. Now we know they may have had brains that rivaled ours, speech and red hair. Our perspective of our ancient ancestors is also undergoing a revision.

Lucy is one of our earliest relatives. She's a representative of Australopithecus afarensis from about 3.2 million yers ago.  Two years ago a new species of Australopithecus, A. sediba, was discovered also in Africa. A. sediba has a brain that is more organized like a human's than others.(See here.) She also has a tool maker's hand-- a hand much more capable of using tools than other members of her genus. However, she also has a foot that is more primitive than Lucy. (See here.) A. sediba is dated to about 2 million years ago.

Human beings belong to genus Homo. Home first appears with Homo habilis 2.33 to 1.8 million years ago.Which make one wonder if there was an overlap between the origin of Homo and the existence of A. sediba. It certainly makes the origin of genus Homo more interesting. Possibly, we'll discover another member of Australopithecus that will join the bipdal gait of Lucy with genus Homo.

The rhino in the room for this discussion is what traits are derived traits that humans inherited from non-human ancestors and what humans evolved on their own.Traits that we identify as hallmarks of our humanity include bipedal gate and the human brain. A. afarensis was fully bipedal but didn't have a human brain. A. sediba had, organizationally at least, something that might have evolved into a human brain but didn't have a human foot to back it up.

Adding to that is a recent find of another Australopithecus, a contemporary of Lucy, that had more of a tree dwelling foot than Lucy did. (See here.)

Questions about. Did Lucy or another Lucy-like relative serve as the ancestor of Homo habilis and the brain organization derive separately from A. sediba? Or did A. sediba, or something like her, serve as an ancestor to Homo habilis and the foot derive separately? Or, is there a third Australopithecus species waiting to be found?

What we've been calling late derived traits are being pushed back all the time. Baboons had been shown to be able to distinguish gibberish from actual words-- an astonishing feat for a species that doesn't talk. (See here also.) Clearly, they are not determining this by the meaning of the words. Instead, they must be using some sort of statistical mechanism to detect patterns. Humans probably do the same thing. However, the lineage from which humans arose split from the baboon line thirty million years ago. Baboons

My point is the the dividing line between what an ancient genus Homo and an ancient genus Australopithecus may not have been all that great.

A new study that came out in the last few weeks looks at the number of large predators over time. These days there are only a few predators over 70 kg. But as recently as three million years ago there were many more. About two million years ago the number of large predators crashed. The study ruled out climate change or other more typical "natural" disasters. But it couldn't rule out that humans, or equivalents, might have done it.

The granularity of the time domain is broad-- 500k years. Which is problematic since if the actual date moves one way or the other genus Homo might not be responsible. If it's too early, Homo wasn't around to do the job. If it's too late then Homo was around for quite a while without making any impact.

But as I read the article, I kept remembering A. sediba. Baboons. Chimps. And all the other animals we've arrogantly claimed couldn't use tools, communicate or think.

If humans didn't do the deed there might still be other candidates.