More photos here.

I thought it was an interesting idea, and was actually quite besotted with it for a while. It never gained anything like mainstream acceptance, though (upon briefly meeting Stephen Jay Gould some time later, I asked him about it, whereupon he rolled his eyes and said “Oh God, that awful book” and proceeded to rattle off a series of devastating objections, many of which you can read at the article linked above).

I hadn’t heard anything about it for a very long time, when today I was walking down the street and saw a man sporting a t-shirt that advertised “The Museum of the Aquatic Ape”. I went home and looked it up, and sure enough, there really is such a place — or a strange little website, anyway. I hardly know what to make of it.

I was surprised, therefore, to see that another Englishman — the Victorian author Samuel Butler — seems to have beaten Dawkins to the punch by a century or so. Yesterday I ran across this quote:

Opinions have vested interests just as men have.

The word “interests” is of particular relevance here, as it shows Mr. Butler taking the “intentional stance” toward ideas themselves. As I’ve stressed often (see here, here and here, for example) it is only by understanding replicators as things that can be seen as having “interests” that we can arrive at naturalistic accounts of intentionality and a Darwinian grounding for the notion of “design“.

I don’t know if anyone else has noticed this connection — a Google search of the quote together with “meme” turned up nothing — but I think Samuel Butler was perhaps the first carrier of the “meme” meme.

Progress has been made. Here’s an article that will explain where we’ve got to so far.

P.S. Don’t miss the bit about the fuzzy beast with seven sexes.

The notions that this paper supports — that intelligence is real, that it is measurable, and that it is in large part heritable — are a good example of PC orthodoxy contradicting the findings of both everyday experience and scientific inquiry. Yet the orthodoxy persists. I recently had a fairly heated dinner-table argument with a Harvard sociologist in which she denied that the idea of ranking “intelligence” had any value at all, because there are so many “kinds” of intelligence. I suggested that even if that were so (and even if we generously leave aside the general problem-solving sort of intelligence that people usually think of and is the metric usually sought), one could still entertain the notion of being more or less intelligent as regards whatever particular “kind” of intelligence one might choose to consider, and that surely we would have to say that someone who did better in every “kind” of intelligence than someone else could fairly be ranked, by any reasonable examiner, as “more intelligent” than that other person.

At this she bobbed and weaved a bit, and then finally gave away the real basis of her resistance by saying that regardless of any of these points, we shouldn’t be conducting such research, as it could be fodder for discrimination. In her mind that was more or less the end of it, and in the interest of friendship and good digestion I let the matter drop.

She’ll be sorry to hear that the research has gone ahead anyway. I’ll try not to mention it.

Have a look here.

So far, so good, and I quite agree. But Mr. Auster, who has an intellectually unfortunate antipathy to Darwinism, took the opportunity once again to rail against it (or to rail, I should say, against what he imagines Darwinism to be).

We read:

Collective suicidal behavior meriting the Darwin Award is no joke. Given the immigration and race policies that are being assiduously followed by every historically white country, the entire white race arguably deserves the Darwin Award. Which raises an interesting question. How can Darwinian evolution, consisting of random genetic mutations which are naturally selected because of their power to help their possessors survive and produce offspring, have produced an entire race that is committing suicide? The wholesale adoption of Darwin Award-winning behavior by the white race would seem to suggest that the Darwinian theory of evolution is not true.

Mr. Auster’s post has touched off a long thread at Mangan’s, but as far as I can tell the main point has been missed all round, more or less, so I’ll just make it briefly here.

That point is that we humans embody a disruptive evolutionary innovation. On our little branch of life’s tree (and so far as we know, only on our little branch), evolution has found an unusual corner of design space: one in which behavior is controlled not only by instinct, but also by culture and memetics. We might say that humans are the first general-purpose behavior machines — or to use a computer metaphor, the first in which hard-wired behavior has to any great extent been replaced (and even in our case only partially so, I hasten to add) by the ability to load and run software.

That has given us extraordinary flexibility, and the coupling of cultural/memetic evolution to biological evolution has meant that from a behavioral standpoint, human populations can “speciate” in very short intervals (I use the word “speciate” metaphorically here, of course).

What this means is that even more or less biologically identical human populations can have very different outcomes depending on the “software” they run. The results, however, can be every bit as “Darwinian” as you like; the wages of memetic maladaptation is still extinction. (As an extreme example, consider the Shakers, who incorporated into their behavioral software the rule that they mustn’t have children. There are no longer any Shakers.)

So the answer to the question (leaving aside for now the premise of the particular example):

How can Darwinian evolution, consisting of random genetic mutations which are naturally selected because of their power to help their possessors survive and produce offspring, have produced an entire race that is committing suicide?

…is this: that natural selection’s contribution to the scenario was simply the creation of a flexible machine for running behavioral software. That some software, however, might contain lethal bugs is itself no more an indictment of Darwinism than is the historical fact that the fate of nearly every species that has ever lived has been extinction.

Mr. Auster also wrote this, in response to a commenter who said that his example might be a case of previously adaptive behavior becoming maladaptive in a changed environment:

A new or changed environment can explain a species dying out. But it can’t explain a species systematically adopting an entirely new behavior leading to its destruction, since the new behavior, not enhancing survival and reproduction, would not be naturally selected.

But this gets the temporal sequence exactly backward: first comes variation (the new behavior), and then selection. “Destruction” — i.e. extinction — is how selection does its work. In other words: mutation proposes, selection disposes.

Anyway, it’s understandable that secular types and metrocons like Mr. Brooks would happily embrace the emerging view that group selection is the explanatory basis of human morality; without it, altruism was a nagging loose end for the naturalistic worldview. Mr. Brooks writes:

The story of evolution, we have been told, is the story of the survival of the fittest. The strong eat the weak. The creatures that adapt to the environment pass on their selfish genes. Those that do not become extinct.

In this telling, we humans are like all other animals — deeply and thoroughly selfish. We spend our time trying to maximize our outcomes — competing for status, wealth and mating opportunities. Behavior that seems altruistic is really self-interest in disguise. Charity and fellowship are the cultural drapery atop the iron logic of nature.

All this is partially true, of course. Yet every day, it seems, a book crosses my desk, emphasizing a different side of the story. These are books about sympathy, empathy, cooperation and collaboration, written by scientists, evolutionary psychologists, neuroscientists and others. It seems there’s been a shift among those who study this ground, yielding a more nuanced, and often gentler picture of our nature.

Yes, very uplifting indeed. But before we all float away on a fragrant cloud of nuanced, cooperative gentleness, I’ll point out that the “iron logic” of Darwinism is still very much the same. The “story of natural selection” now includes the survival of the fittest group, that’s all. The strong still eat the weak, but now we must also keep in mind that the strong groups eat the weak groups, too. The groups that adapt to their environment pass on their genes. Those groups that do not, become extinct.

The same process that selects for “sympathy, empathy, cooperation and collaboration” within groups also selects for high cohesion (tribalism, religious zeal), hostility toward those outside the group (racism, xenophobia), and competing successfully as a group against other groups (war).

Furthermore, as I argued here, the new moral naturalists are trying to pull a bit of a fast one as far as “objective” morality is concerned; at the very least, what they are willing to settle for as an objective basis for defining good and evil will leave many unsatisfied.

But having said all that, I’ll stop carping. It’s gratifying to see the idea of group selection gaining traction.

Read Mr. Brooks’s column here.

The contrasting view (and the one that I incline toward) is that consciousness arises, in some way that we do not yet understand, from the workings of the brain — which means that before there were any brains in in the world, there was no consciousness — and that reason is a practical affair, a Good Trick that we have learned as a highly effective (and therefore highly adaptive) way of modeling the world so as to predict those aspects of the future that have, over the eons, had some bearing on our reproductive success.

C.S. Lewis considered this physicalist view of reason to be “The Cardinal Difficulty of Naturalism”. Genuine Reason, he argued, must flow according to the logical relations between ground and consequent, while any form of “reason” instantiated as a purely physical system can only proceed according to physical cause and effect. Therefore, he argued, our Reason must cannot rest upon a purely physical foundation, or we wouldn’t be able to trust it.

For Lewis this was a sort of reductio ad absurdum: of course we do consider reason to be trustworthy, and so the only possible basis fit can possibly have is one that transcends the “merely” physical. But as I argued in a post some time ago, there’s another possibility: that our reason actually is quite limited and imperfect, in ways that are hard for us to see — just as we’d expect from a purely practical brain-based system that has been cobbled together over the eons by natural selection. Our trust, in other words, may go too far.

A great deal of clever experimentation and neuro-psychological research has been done since C.S. Lewis died (on November 22nd, 1963, by the way), and the peculiarities, defaults, and curious limitations of human cognition have become far more apparent. Among the more recent ideas about why we reason the way we do is one put forward by Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier in a paper called Why Do Humans Reason? Arguments for an Argumentative Theory. Their premise? As Jonathan Haidt explains:

“Reasoning was not designed to pursue the truth. Reasoning was designed by evolution to help us win arguments.”

Here’s the abstract:

Reasoning is generally seen as a means to improve knowledge and make better decisions. However, much evidence shows that reasoning often leads to epistemic distortions and poor decisions. This suggests that the function of reasoning should be rethought. Our hypothesis is that the function of reasoning is argumentative. It is to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade. Reasoning so conceived is adaptive given the exceptional dependence of humans on communication and their vulnerability to misinformation. A wide range of evidence in the psychology of reasoning and decision making can be reinterpreted and better explained in the light of this hypothesis. Poor performance in standard reasoning tasks is explained by the lack of argumentative context. When the same problems are placed in a proper argumentative setting, people turn out to be skilled arguers. Skilled arguers, however, are not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views. This explains the notorious confirmation bias. This bias is apparent not only when people are actually arguing but also when they are reasoning proactively from the perspective of having to defend their opinions. Reasoning so motivated can distort evaluations and attitudes and allow erroneous beliefs to persist. Proactively used reasoning also favors decisions that are easy to justify but not necessarily better. In all these instances traditionally described as failures or flaws, reasoning does exactly what can be expected of an argumentative device: Look for arguments that support a given conclusion, and, ceteris paribus, favor conclusions for which arguments can be found.

It’s an interesting idea, though my first impression is that it sounds a bit all-or-nothing: while I can easily see how such social factors could have exerted a strong selection pressure, it seems to me that more objective feedback from the real world must have had a major role to play also.

But I’ve only just run across this, and haven’t yet read the paper (or the article linked below), so I can’t say yet if it makes a truly persuasive, well-reasoned argument.

Learn more here.

But don’t touch that dial! I have something I’m sure you’ll enjoy: Ants As Fluids.

Cultural Differences Are Evident Deep in the Brain of Caucasian and Asian People

The lead paragraph:

People in different cultures make different assumptions about the people around them, according to an upcoming study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The researchers studied the brain waves of people with Caucasian and Asian backgrounds and found that cultural differences in how we think about other people are embedded deep in our minds. Cultural differences are evident very deep in the brain, challenging a commonsense notion that culture is skin deep.

The assumption made by the researchers here is that the biology of the human brain, and therefore important aspects of the way it functions, are altered and conditioned by culture — as summed up in the closing paragraph:

“We often feel that culture is like clothes; you strip them off, and we are all humans,” [researcher Shinobu] Kitayama says. “There’s some truth to that, but studies like this begin to demonstrate that culture can go much deeper. What appears to be a natural being, or a human mind, may be culturally shaped or formed.”

Note the presumptive directionality here: culture determines biology. But where do cultural differences come from in the first place? They aren’t drawn from a deck of cards, and they don’t fall from the sky.

Far more likely, in my opinion: the same selection pressures that account for the radiations of biologically varying human groups are at the root of variations in culture. But it’s a two-way street: the memetic environment of culture itself can have a profound effect on differential reproduction, which means that once the ball gets rolling, culture and biology start feeding back into each other (for example, it seems likely to me that the selection pressure on Ashkenazi Jews for various cognitive skills, due to cultural restrictions over many centuries, is what resulted in that population’s having the highest average IQ of any human group).

So: chicken or egg? It’s more like chicken egg foo yung.

(The study might have been somewhat slanted, however; one of the metrics used for confidence in naturalism was “liking Dawkins”.)

Two things stand out: first, that people’s views on intelligent design vs. Darwinian evolution were unformed enough, prior to their participating in the study, as to be influenced in any significant measure by reading the brief synopses given to them of the two positions; second, the conclusion by one of the researchers that the study shows that people “may need to be explicitly taught” that a naturalistic worldview can provide a solid philosophical foundation for purpose and meaning.

Story here.

When that happens to one of our boys, the result looks like this:

According to Wikipedia’s account of the Halo story-line, the Flood were so successful, and so terrifying, that the “ancient Forerunners were forced to kill themselves and all other sentient life nearly 100,000 years before the beginning of Halo in an effort to starve the Flood to death.”

(Kind of like what conservatives are going to have to do to get the deficit under control, I’m afraid. But I digress…)

Well, dear Reader, if you happen to be a South American ant, you’d best be wary, because it seems you might soon find yourself in a similar fix. Have a look here.

People do want there to be absolute moral truths, and many people feel that there can’t be any such truths in the absence of God. Without an absolute authority to appeal to, moral disagreements cannot be resolved, the center will not hold, and society will disintegrate in relativism and nihilism. Plenty of folks will tell you that this is already happening.

But grounding moral truth in divine command — the whim of God — has its problems too. What if God commanded us tomorrow to fry our children in hot oil? We would mutiny in moral revulsion. It seems, then that there is some deeper moral truth to which we expect God to adhere, and with which we would still comply even if He didn’t. So why not cut out the middleman?

What, though, can moral “truth” be under a Godless, naturalistic worldview? Answering this question has has been one of the most pressing challenges for our current crop of atheist intellectuals, many of whom are scientists and philosophers working in the relevant fields of biology, evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience. It’s pressing because before they can wean our civilization away from religion, as they would like to do, they need to come up with a new story about the foundations of morality. People still want their moral truth.

There are at least a couple of ways it can go. One way is to say that yes, there are moral facts, and they are simply “there”, existing alongside other Platonic abstracta like mathematical truths. It is a mathematical fact that any angle inscribed in a semicircle is a right angle; in the same way, it is simply a moral fact that torturing children is evil.

The problem with this (even if we accept the actual existence of Platonic abstracta, which I’m reluctant to do) is that we have objective ways of verifying mathematical facts: if you deny that any angle inscribed in a semicircle is a right angle, I can offer a simple proof. (I can also suggest that you just go out and start inscribing; you’ll soon see that you always get a right angle.)

But we have nothing like that for moral truths. If you and I disagree, say, about whether bestiality is morally wrong, it seems there’s no authority to which we can appeal the matter, other than social convention, religious dogma, and the subjective moral intuitions of our own consciences.

The angle that folks like Sam Harris and Steven Pinker are working these days is to claim that there actually is a naturalistic foundation upon which moral truths can rest. It is nothing more or less than the “fact of the matter” about which codes of behavior best enable intelligent social primates like us to live together successfully in thriving and happy groups. In other words, there are accessible natural facts about which moral systems maximize our fitness.

But wait — is that it? We want bedrock moral truth here, not just what happens to optimize our Darwinian outcomes.

Well, how deep do we really need to drill? Let’s say that reciprocal altruism is such a powerful fitness-maximizer that any intelligent, social life-form will either hit on it and thrive, or miss it and dwindle into misery and extinction. In other words, it is a basic fact of the Universe that a moral system based on reciprocal altruism is the optimal, most fruitful strategy for generating successful and well-functioning social groups.

“That’s all well and good,” the absolutist might say, “but all this is awfully contingent. What if it maximized our fitness to pick a child at random once a week, roast him over a slow fire, and eat him? Then we’d see that as an obvious moral ‘truth’.”

“But you see,” comes the reply, “it seems that the world is so constituted that doing what you suggest doesn’t maximize our fitness. Instead, it turns out that there are other things that clearly do — things like the Golden Rule — and with careful study we can learn what they are, with enough certainty that we can say with confidence that any society that does roast and eat its children is making a factual moral error.”

“Well”, says the absolutist, “that may be, but even so you still haven’t got me an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. Why should some brute fact about the superior Darwinian fitness of altruistic groups mean that we ‘ought’ to be altruistic? Even if we do develop a metrical science of human well-being, and learn very clearly what types of behavior increase and diminish it, all we’ve done is establish some facts about social animals. But there is still nothing in Nature that makes it a moral fact that we ought to encourage behavior that will maximize human well-being; that is still just a subjective valuation on our part.”

To which our Sam Harris might answer:

“So what? If you can know with certainty that one direction leads to a maximally miserable world, and the other to a maximally happy one, what deeper moral ‘truth’ do you need? Your insistence on supernatural bedrock is nothing more than an intellectual fetish, of no practical value. Why should anyone care about that?”

So there it is, if I understand it all correctly: there are natural moral facts, because there are optimal strategies for maximizing well-being — strategies that are optimal for any intelligent social creature. And this is different from simply positing moral facts as Platonic objects, because we can actually use the tools of natural science to discover what these optimal moral systems are.

Are you convinced? I’m not — but I will say it is certainly an interesting argument, and not without its merits. And again, to be fair, I haven’t even read Sam Harris’s book yet, so I should be careful about putting words in his mouth. I do think I get the gist of it, though; these ideas have been in the air for a while now (I even had a chance to discuss them briefly with Steven Pinker up in Wellfleet a couple of summers ago, after a talk he gave for our local library, and what he said then was pretty much what Sam Harris appears to be saying here).

There are a lot more questions to ask, and soft spots to poke at, but it’s late now; they can wait for another post.

What the article doesn’t explain is why this illusion would have helped us find objects good for throwing far. I assume it has something to do with the fact that air resistance is proportional to surface area — so of two differently sized objects with the same weight, the smaller one will have less surface area, and therefore will be less subject to drag as it flies through the air.

The article is here.

Simply put, life is fractal. At our everyday scale, we see each other as individual men and women. Zoom in, and we find that we are systems of interacting organs. Zoom in again, and we see that each organ is a society of cells. Zoom in again, and we see that each cell is, in turn, a system of interacting organelles.

But we can also zoom out beyond the level of the individual animal, and if we do we find that many of the properties of the organism and its subsystems appear here as well. Indeed, for some living things, it’s hard to say just what the “natural” level of organization really is: with ants, for example, the individual is just a tiny, stupid, dispensable machine, while the colony as a whole displays a flexible, emergent intelligence, and draws upon an impressive repertoire of behavior in the pursuit of its “interests”. One could say that the individual ant stands in relation to the colony as the individual neuron stands to the human brain. Is the natural “unit” of the family Formicidae, then, the ant or the colony? (And just what are the sorts of things that can have “interests”?)

Previously I’ve extended this metaphor — the idea of human societies as living organisms — to include the idea of immuno-suppression as a potentially lethal cultural pathology. Now Dennis Mangan, in a thought-provoking post, suggests that as living organisms, cultures may also be strengthened by the biological response known as hormesis.

Read it here.

The bacterium in question was taken from an arsenic-rich environment — one to which it had presumably adapted by developing a tolerance for the stuff — and then fed a steady diet of arsenic. Over time it swapped out some phosphorus for arsenic (and not without, apparently, some ill effects). It’s a good “proof of concept”, certainly, and a significant broadening of what we know to be possible, but hardly the “second genesis” we were hearing about yesterday.

Commenter JK was right to ask about adaptation.

More here.

(Having turned up in California, chances are it will soon be demanding in-state tuition rates.)

Story here.

Natalie Angier explains.