Archive for the ‘education’ Category
how to avoid insulting a prophet?
The term ‘insult’ is probably impossible to define objectively. We all know of people who have been genuinely insulted at what we thought was a valid criticism, and the sceptical and atheist movements in particular have been strong lately on the idea that religions shouldn’t be exempt from valid and robust criticism, and even mockery when it’s called for. After all, there are some quite bizarre and ludicrous claims made from time to time in the name of religion. For example, the Catholic Church’s procedures for establishing a person’s ‘sainthood’ are laughable, and their regular calls for more exorcists to cope with demonic possession are best dealt with by a mix of mockery and the bringing of criminal charges.
With Islam, though, we’re in different territory. I know quite a few Moslems – I work with them and I teach them English. I get on well with them all, and never mention the subject of religion, and neither do they, except, say, to mention Ramadan and the practicalities around that. I don’t doubt though, that my avoidance of any mention of religion has a a degree of self-preservation about it. As an atheist I don’t want to put people on the defensive, but more importantly, don’t want to make myself a target. Watching demonstrations of hatred against those who ‘insult the prophet’, though those demonstrations might take place on the other side of the globe, is an intimidating experience for those of us – and there are many – who happen to believe that all human prophecy is bunk.
And the fact is that, as communities become more mixed and mobile, Moslem demonstrations are taking place in every major western city these days. Like most demonstrations, at least in the west, the majority of participants have peaceful intent, but there is a hostile and violent, usually testosterone-driven periphery.
But demonstrations in the west in recent decades have not featured religion as a major theme, and this raises the question of whether Islam, though still a minor presence, population-wise, in Australia as in other western countries, is a potential threat to the secular state. When we look at countries where Islam is the dominant religion we find it also playing a dominant role in the political organisation of those countries, and recent calls by the President of Indonesia, the world’s largest Moslem country, to criminalise blasphemy [worldwide?], incoherent though they may be, should be a warning to us all of the dangers of religious dominance of any kind.
And I mean of any kind, for anyone familiar with European history will know how horrifically dangerous it is when political figures claim the backing of religious authorities, and, worse, supernatural creator beings, with all the righteousness that this entails.
Moderate Islamic leaders have expressed dismay that legitimate demonstrations against those who refuse to respect long-held beliefs have been hijacked by the angry few. While I sympathise to some extent, it’s clear to me that a long-held belief, or a belief system that has a long history, doesn’t automatically deserve respect on that basis. The argument from antiquity is a well-known logical fallacy. The real form of the fallacy is that a belief’s antiquity has no bearing on its truth. I’m taking the slightly different line that a belief’s antiquity has no bearing on whether or not it should be respected – though you can tie those together by arguing that only the truth is worthy of our respect.
The recent Islamic protests, resulting in the loss of scores of lives, are supposedly caused by an apparently shoddily-made video [I’ve not seen it] which mocks the ‘prophet’ Mohammed. I say ‘supposedly’ because any of us who write about and research religion on the net will know that there are a multitude of anti-Islamic hate sites out there, sites that would certainly out-insult this particular video by a mile, as well as Islamist anti-western and anti-Christian sites of a similar nastiness. Hard to imagine that these protesters, or a proportion of them, don’t know about these sites.
Anyway, regardless of the trigger, the fact is that there are a lot of angry and intolerant Moslems out there just itching for a bit of mayhem, and we need to hold our nerve. I was happy to hear Obama speaking up for free speech, with an almost casual dismissiveness, in response to Yudhoyono’s call for blasphemy laws, just as I was disappointed that a New Zealand politician expressed approval at the arrest of the video’s maker [apparently unaware that the arrest was on unrelated charges]. As far as I can see, the only thing this individual has done wrong is to make a crappy, dishonest video. If this was a serious crime, most of Hollywood would be in jail right now. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case.
We live in a bitsy, complicated world, in which neuro-anatomists, paleo-anthropologists, not to mention doctors, lawyers and tribal chieftains live alongside fervent religionists who know nothing about evolution and would hate it if they did. We have children in our neighbourhoods who are sent to special schools or no schools, to avoid their being tainted with any kind of modern knowledge, while others are groomed to be cutting-edge theorists of the coming singularity. Holding all this diversity together and trying to be optimistic about it is no mean feat. It’s a diversity that we’ve created through our belief in freedom, in non-coercion, with regard to knowledge and behaviour – within obvious limits. I share this belief, together with the hope that, given all the options, we’ll find our way to the best understanding of our world and ourselves, and how that understanding can best guide our actions. It’s on this basis that I hope we can stand firm, defend and argue for the spirit of inquiry and constant questioning – of religion and science and everything else. Inquiry involves criticism – of the claims of so-called prophets, of saint-makers and the producers of crappy videos. They’re all fair game.
a new project
Here’s something new and, so far, very amateurish, technologically speaking. For me, though, it’s a fun thing to occupy my time with, and maybe over time it’ll get a bit better.
I’m going to set up a now video blog for these, if I can manage it.
on thinking like them to learn how they think
An interesting conundrum from Clive Wynne’s book Do Animals Think?
First, imagine you are given four cards and told to test the rule that a card with a vowel on one side must have an even number on the other side. Let’s say the cards in front of you show an E, a K, a 7 and a 4. Which would you turn over? Most people find this a very difficult problem. Most turn over the E and some also turn over the 4. And yet the 4 can tell you nothing: Who cares what’s on the other side of an even number? The rule being tested does not say that the flip-side of an even-numbered card can not be a consonant, only that the flip-side of a card with a vowel cannot be an odd number. So you would learn nothing by turning over the 4. The correct answer is to turn over the E [see if the vowel has an even number on its reverse] and the 7 [check that there’s no vowel there]. Only about 5% even of the college-educated population give the right answer to this one. It’s a tough logical nut to crack.
Now consider this problem. Imagine that you are shown four people and told to test the rule that a person must be over the age of twenty-one to drink beer. One person is drinking Coke, one is drinking beer, the third is twenty-three years old, and the fourth, fifteen. Whom must you check [what they are drinking or what age they are] to ensure that the rule is being followed? Here nobody has any trouble. We don’t care what the twenty-three-year-old drinks, nor what age the Coke drinker is, but we do need to check the age of the beer drinker and the beverage of the fifteen-year-old. Nothing could be simpler. Hardly anybody gets this one wrong.
And yet logically these are absolutely identical problems. There is no difference in the type of reasoning required to solve these two puzzles. Why the big difference in performance?
Wynne, a psychologist with a strong interest in, and a wide knowledge of, research in other-species reasoning, is making a very important point with application to the testing of other animals and their ability to solve problems. It’s hopefully obvious that the reason we do so much better with the second problem is that it’s a recognizable real-world problem about obeying the rules and not cheating or doing the ‘wrong thing’. We’re much more motivated to come to a quick and accurate solution than with the much more abstract first problem. So when we set problems for other species to solve, we need to understand that what motivates them to solve a problem might be very different to what motivates humans.
Wynne’s book, which I was motivated to read as further background to, and an extension of, my animals r us post, makes for excellent reading, as he’s healthily sceptical of, and pokes some holes in, research claims about other-species reasoning and mental processes, such as they are. He also provides some fascinating information, scientific and historical, about, inter alia, bats, bees and pigeons. My only quibble, perhaps a minor one, is that, both in the title of his book and throughout the writing, he refers to animals as though we’re not one of them. Not that he has any truck with the ‘we’re special and the proper end of evolution’ view. In fact I really don’t know why he writes of animals in this way – it’s as if he’s half-convinced that our development of language and our complex ‘theories of mind’ have really taken us to some level beyond the mammalian. They haven’t. We’ll never stop being mammals, though we’ll continue to amaze ourselves with what we can do with the difference between ourselves and other mammals.
atheism plus comes to town, perhaps
The other day I attended my first local atheist meetup here in Adelaide for quite some time. Not that I was particularly avoiding them, they’ve just been clashing with other commitments, but it turned out to be an interesting time to return, because it was posted that we might like to have a semi-formal discussion on the ‘atheism plus’ push which is causing a bit of a stir on Free Thought Blogs and elsewhere, and if and how we want to incorporate it.
Controversy! Flying Sparks! Noses out of joint! Death threats! Trolls! Witches! Indifference!
In other words I wasn’t at all sure what to expect. What I did find pleasantly surprising was that the topic got a reasonably good airing and the group came to a more or less loose consensus about behaviour at meet-ups, in order to maintain the sorts of standards that might be expected at club meetings, gabfests and the like. That’s to say, no blatant sexism, racism, intimidation or offensive behaviour, with the convenor, presumably after consultation with the respective parties, or having witnessed the abuse, making an executive decision about behaviour having crossed the line sufficiently far as to require intervention, such as politely but firmly asking the offender to desist, or to leave, or even imposing a ban. Doubtless none of this is particularly binding or enforceable, but it’s only a pub meet-up group after all, Amazing tho’ our Meetings might be.
All of this is certainly Good Progressive Stuff, and it might open up an avenue of complaint for some who have avoided meetings because of one or two blowhards who’ve behaved offensively in the past, but does it put as all in the Atheism+ camp? In other words, is Atheism+ anything more than a movement to encourage or impose civility?
This issue was discussed at the meeting, as were the origins of this movement, or proto-movement; the experiences of Jen McCreight, the elevator affair [not so much a storm in an elevator as a storm outside one], the Dawkins response, and harrassment in general, with a variety of views expressed and criticised. Also discussed was the general issue of the way men treat women, and vice versa. I detected plenty of underlying tensions between some males and some females [for the record, though I can’t recall all the conversation, I can say with some certainty that seven males and two females spoke up on this issue, which is almost more revealing than what was said], with the ‘males don’t have an easy time of it either’ line featuring heavily.
We’d just about reached a positive conclusion on the matter, despite the slightly grumbling note of one or two men, when a late male arrival was asked his opinion of the whole A+ thing. He announced to us all that he considered feminism ‘a travesty’, a remark obviously intended to create a splash. A moment later, he added ‘I mean academic feminism’. Needless to say, academic feminism, and whatever reaction one might have to it, was not at issue at the meeting. What was at issue was civility, particularly between men and women, and the creation of an atmosphere that would make everyone, but particularly women, comfortable and enthusiastic and willing to go on attending and contributing – especially given that the group, like most atheist meet-up groups – was dominated by males. To arrive late to a meetup in which he knew that Atheism+ was to be discussed [the same individual had earlier posted a response to the convenor’s announcement about the topic, which clearly mocked the whole thing], thus indicating his lack of interest, and then to state, as his first contribution to the meetup, that feminism is a travesty, was clearly a deliberate provocation, and it had the obviously desired effect of upsetting at least one of the female minority attending, who was passionately concerned to raise the issues around A+, civility and inclusiveness, precisely because she’d been avoiding meetups in which these kinds of arrogant and bombastic statements were being aired.
There are a few lessons to be drawn from this. First, that it only takes one or two insensitive males, or one or two insensitive comments, to spoil a whole evening, or even a whole movement, for those who feel targeted by them. We should all be aware of this, as we all remember the nasty comments directed at us more clearly than a thousand compliments. Second, it’s very important not to let those comments go unchallenged, as silence will feel like assent to those who feel offended by them.
And to describe feminism as a travesty is offensive. I felt personally affronted, and I’m only a male, but a male who grew up in the seventies, at the height of second-wave feminism, with its vital historical perspective on patriarchy’s distortion of female value. It profoundly influenced my intellectual development, and still does. Of course I didn’t agree with all feminist discourse, just as I disagreed with some of the discourse on black power that was prevalent at that time, but I fully agreed with the prime thrust of both these movements, equality. Equality of opportunity, equality of treatment, equality of power. How could anyone object to that?
It seems to me that a job of empowerment, in gender terms, still needs to be done within the atheist community, if we’re to call ourselves a community. That might need more than just civility, but it’s a damn good place to start.
is there life on enceladus?
a cool place – and note the tiger stripe
The Curiosity landing has been fabulously successful, and it’ll certainly be worth keeping tabs on the rover’s findings. I posted recently on the possibility of life on Mars, not a couple of billion years ago, as many Mars experts think probable, but right now. The Curiosity rover, as we know, will be investigating this possibility further, but meanwhile there are other possibilities of finding extra-terrestrial life in this solar system, and one of the best places to look, I’m reliably informed, is Enceladus, a tiny moon of Saturn.
Enceladus is only about 500 kilometres in diameter, but its surface has intrigued astronomers ever since Voyager 2revealed detailed features in the early eighties, indicating a wide range of terrains of varying ages. Data from the Cassini spacecraft that performed fly-bys in 2005 showed a geologically active surface, with the most spectacular feature being a large volume of material, mostly water vapour, issuing from the southern polar region. This indicated the existence of ice volcanoes, or cryovolcanoes, which have also been observed elsewhere, and were in fact first observed by Voyager 2 on Triton, Neptune’s largest moon. However, on Enceladus what we have are more like geysers spewing out material from an area known by observers as ‘the tiger stripes’, a series of prominent, geologically active ridges. This material is now known to account for much of the outermost E ring of Saturn, within which Enceladus has its orbit, though a certain amount falls back onto the moon as snow.
Finding water on any object in the solar system obviously excites the souls of astrobiologists. A report from a May 2011 conference on Enceladus stated that this moon “is emerging as the most habitable spot beyond Earth in the Solar System for life as we know it”. However, there are plenty of sceptics, or I should say cautious questioners. First, the existence of water vapour spumes doesn’t necessarily entail liquid water below the surface – for, in spite of the thrill of detecting snow in large quantities on the surface, liquid water is generally regarded as essential to finding life. And even if we assume liquid water…
Some analysts argue that the spumes may be a result of sublimation – a change from a solid, icy state to a vapour, missing out on the liquid phase – or of the decomposition of clathrate deposits. A clathrate is a type of ice lattice that traps gas [methane clathrates are found at the polar regions of Earth]. However, the recent discovery of salt in these plumes has made these possibilities less plausible. Salt is more likely to be associated with liquid water, but hydrogen cyanide, also recently found, would have been expected to react with liquid water to form other compounds, not found as yet. In short, the jury is still out on the presence of liquid water.
And assuming there is liquid water, how could we test for life within it? With great difficulty, obviously. Analysts would be searching for biomarkers, ‘chemicals that appear to have biological rather than geophysical origins’ [Cosmos 44, p78]. Photosynthetic production wouldn’t be an option, so other systems are being hypothesised, including a methanogenic system in which methane is synthesised from carbon dioxide, or a system of metabolizing acetylene, which occurs on Earth. Traces of acetylene have been found on Enceladus. Other biomarkers include amino acids with the right chirality – that’s to say a strong chiral preference, one way [as found on Earth] or its opposite. Amino acids with no chiral preference are likely to be abiotic.
To test for such biomarkers would require new instrumentation and another visit to this intriguing moon. Something else to look forward to. What would we do without anticipation?
let’s talk about the weather
Well there’s much politicking going on currently about the carbon tax, or carbon pricing, and its impact on agw and on the economy, it’s likely impact, or non-impact, on our energy and environmental choices, and also, of course, whether we need worry about climate change generally. In Australia, for those concerned about agw, the local weather has become a mite uncooperative over the past few seasons.
We’ve experienced a double La Nina event since 2010, with memories of the long drought preceding it fast receding, at least for city slickers. 2011 was Australia’s coolest year in a decade. 2010, the drought-breaking year, was Australia’s third wettest on record overall, and the following year, 2011, was our second wettest. The only year, in the past century, that has beaten these, was 1974, also a La Nina year. 2011 was the wettest year on record for the Murray-Darling basin.
The Australian government’s Bureau of Meteorology has produced a handsome volume detailing the 2010-2012 La Nina events, and it’s available free in PDF form from this site.
The El Nino Southern Oscillation [ENSO] is a semi-regular cycle which affects weather conditions in countries and islands within and around the rim of the Pacific Ocean. ENSO events generally last from one southern hemisphere autumn to the next, but it’s not unusual for a La Nina event to last two or three years, as for example the 1998-2001 event, from autumn 1998 to autumn 2001.
Now I’ll take a deep breath and try to explain how these cycles work. Between ENSO events, which of course vary in strength and complexity, the Pacific is described as being in a ‘neutral phase’. But even in this state, temperatures vary throughout the Pacific. For example, in the western tropical Pacific, above New Guinea, there’s an area known as ‘the warm pool’ which regularly has some of the highest ocean temperatures in the world. This has something to do with the thermocline, the region separating warm, well-mixed surface water and cool, deep ocean water [which is richer in nutrients]. The thermocline is deeper in the western Pacific than in the eastern. These temperature gradients, and the way they vary across the Pacific, are the single most important drivers of ENSO events.
In normal conditions, trade winds blow from east to west across the Pacific. These winds are a feature of what is known as the Walker circulation, a current and convection cycle in which the winds drive warm moist air and warm surface waters westward, while the central Pacific remains relatively cool. These warm western waters pump heat and moisture high into the atmosphere, where moist air forms clouds and rain, and the air moves eastward, and then falls in the eastern Pacific. So we have eastward-moving air in the upper atmosphere and westward-moving air at the sea surface.
The Southern Oscillation Index [SOI] is a measure of the endlessly varying strength of the Walker Circulation:
The SOI measures the difference in surface air pressure between Tahiti and Darwin. The index is best represented by monthly (or longer) averages as daily or weekly SOI values can fluctuate markedly due to short-lived, day-to-day weather patterns, particularly if a tropical cyclone is present. Sustained positive SOI values above about +8 indicate a La Niña event while sustained negative values below about –8 indicate an El Niño.
The 2010-11 La Nina event was a particularly powerful one. Although it produced only 11 tropical cyclones during the cyclone season [November to April] – which, though it sounds like a lot, is actually less than the average number of cyclones [12] in any particular year, La Nina or not – it produced some 29 tropical depression systems, one level below a cyclone, and well above the usual number of such systems. More importantly for Australia’s north-east coastal residents, 5 of those 11 cyclones were in the severe category, which was well above average. Three of them, Tasha, Yasi and Anthony, crossed the Queensland coast, with Yasi being the most severe cyclone to hit Queensland since 1911, when there was a double cyclone event, again during a La Nina year. Double or multiple cyclone crossings have always been associated with La Nina events, at least as far as our brief recorded history can tell.
The factors affecting the strength and duration of La Nina and El Nino events are, of course, enormously complicated, and further complicated by other weather patterns such as the Indian Ocean Dipole [IOD] and the Southern Annular Mode [SAM]. The IOD, as its name suggests, is a measure of the difference in ocean temperatures at two ‘poles’, in the eastern and the western Indian Ocean. This shows another complex pattern of temperature and pressure variability, both oceanic and atmospheric, with probable throughflow from the Pacific leading to an association between positive IOD events and the El Nino and negative events with La Nina. The SAM, a weather pattern in the Southern Ocean, also known as the Antarctic Oscillation, obviously impacts our southern coastal areas in particular, either enhancing or diminishing ENSO events regionally:
In recent years, a high positive SAM has dominated during autumn–winter, and has been a significant contributor to the ‘big dry’ observed in southern Australia from 1997 to 2010.
The south-west region of Australia, a vital agricultural region, missed out on the wet conditions experienced by the rest of the country as a result of the 2010-11 La Nina. In fact this region experienced its driest year on record in 2010, and this appears to have been at least partially caused by a record high positive SAM event of that year.
Of course the point of this post is to show how complex weather patterns are as a background to climate change. Overall oceanic warming due to climate change increases convection which leads to higher rainfall, air turbulence and storm conditions, none of which are precisely predictable, though our monitoring has greatly improved over the years. I’m sure that most farmers, whose livelihoods are so greatly affected by these conditions, are keeping a ‘a weather eye’ on cycles and oscillations, but city-dwellers are naturally less sensitive to them. For many of them, well, the long drought and the water restrictions are over, the temperatures are far from unbearable, and now the money-grubbing government is slapping on a carbon tax after promising not to. My response would be – inform yourself, learn more about the causes of local, short-term weather conditions as well as global, long-term climatic ones, examine the evidence, and only then start to draw conclusions. And thanks a lot to the Bureau of Metereology for their contribution to informing our understanding.
the height of the 2010-11 La Nina – cold surface waters in the mid-Pacific, warmer waters in the western Pacific
animals r us
I felt a bit disheartened a while back when a teenage lass I know and love declared to me that she ‘hated animals’. Worse, one of her aunties chimed in enthusiastically with, ‘yeah, I hate them too’. I wasn’t sure about taking these assertions seriously, especially the fifteen-year-old’s, but my suppressed response, apart from WTF???, might’ve been, uhh but you do know that you’re animals, right?
In fact I didn’t respond at all, being too taken aback, but I’m sure they knew they were animals, and yet…
Us and them thinking is commonplace. It’s a feature of any species of living thing that they’re concerned with other members of their species, both positively and negatively. We compete with members of our own species for resources, and we also share resources with our own species. We mate, and fight, with our own species. We try to impress our own, either by our scariness or our attractiveness, depending on circumstances. Other species just don’t matter so much to us, except insofar as we need them, or need to avoid them, for our survival.
I’m speaking for species in general here, but humans have learned something about other species that should make a big difference to us, and that is that all species are more or less related. We even have techniques which can tell us just how related we are. We know that we’re a bit more closely related to chimps than we are to gorillas, and that we’re a bit more related to gorillas than we are to gibbons, and that we share a much more common ancestor with tree shrews than we do with lungfish, but the important point is that we know that we’re related to every other organism in the biosphere, without which not, as they say. So to hate animals, if you really mean it, is to be self-defeating in a big way.
And hatred, or dismissiveness, towards other animals, surely comes from an unthinking us-and-them position, a position that needs to be continually questioned and challenged.
I recently read the excellent Shadows of forgotten ancestors by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan. Much of it, especially the second half, is devoted to demolishing claims to human specialness, our separateness from ‘animals’. They do so mainly by examining the lives and behaviour of other primates. Much of the following will derive from their book. I will start with the most general claim, and then look at some specific ones
Humans are different from all other animals, not just in degree, but in kind.
This ultimate us-versus-them claim is questionable in many respects. It usually comes with particular examples: we are the only ones who have x, or can do x, therefore…
But are we the only ones with property x, and if we are, where does this property come from? Humans, we know, are primates. We share a common ancestor with chimps and bonobos going back six million years. Are we different in kind from that common ancestor? If, for argument’s sake, we say that we are, at what point did that qualitative, rather than quantitative, difference emerge? We are still unable to clearly trace our descent back to that common ancestor, but we have plenty of example of earlier hominids to chose from – this site offers some 20 distinct species that might have been along the line of descent. Which one, if any, represented a qualitative transformation? Or do incremental quantitative changes somehow amount to a qualitative transformation? If so, how many changes, and, again, when exactly did the quantitative become qualitative? I don’t think these are fruitful questions, and the more we learn about other species, the more these questions dissolve away.
We share the properties of other animals in many ways, but I’ll pick on sex as one of the clearer examples. Humans long ago realized that the castrating of war captives rendered them less aggressive – though they would’ve had little idea why. They did of course know why such a practise rendered then incapable of producing offspring, another signal benefit. The removal of the testes, whether in humans, cats, dogs, sparrows or quails, has much the same effect; aggression is reduced, as are various other male traits governing behaviour towards females and towards other males. The reason is that the testicles produce most of the androgens – that’s to say the steroids or sex hormones, such as testosterone. The action of testosterone and other sex hormones is strikingly similar across all animal species. Experimenters have added or removed the hormones with increasingly predictable results, not only in mammals and birds, but lizards and fish as well. This isn’t to say, though, that the males of all these species, when their sex hormones aren’t interfered with, are always the more aggressive or dominant gender, for that depends on how much, and what types, of the sex hormones are naturally produced or released. Male and female wolves, gibbons and tree squirrels are about equally aggressive. Species have, over time, developed the ‘right’ hormone levels for their kind – that’s to say, the most adaptive. Give certain birds too much sex hormone, and the males sometimes end up killing each other, and overall numbers fall. In all of this humans are no different.
Of course patterns of sexual behaviour vary among mammals. Most mammals only mate when the female is ‘in heat’, during a particular phase of the estrous cycle, the estrus phase, which precedes ovulation. Menstruating females, though – the menstrual cycle is a subset of the estrous cycle, in which endometrial material is shed during menstruation – including a number of primate species, are not confined in their sexual activity to a particular period [so, no, we’re not the only ones with that ‘freedom’]. Interestingly, though, human societies often have prohibitions against sex during the menstrual period, whereas in other primates, sexual activity actually increases at this time. One of the wonders of human culture.
Humans are the only creatures that make tools
We only need one solid counter-example to demolish these general claims, and in this case we have several to choose from, but I’ll opt here for a very well-attested one; the use of reeds, straws or vine branches by chimps to catch termites. Not all chimps are able to do this, and few are able to do it really well (we tend to forget, with other species, apart from the domestic ones we deal with every day, that they have their bright sparks and their half-wits just as humans do), but it’s a highly developed skill which human researchers haven’t been able to develop. What’s more, it’s a skill that takes years to develop, and older chimps teach it to the young. What chimps have to do is find just the right kind of tool for the job – that is, to be manipulated down a termite hole and retrieved from the hole with as many termites clinging to it as possible, to serve as a dish worthy of the effort and expertise. This requires matching the tool to the termite burrow, which means knowing the characteristics of the various mounds in the neighbourhood, and then having the dexterity, not only to get the tool into the hole with the minimum of disturbance to the termites but, more importantly, to be able to twist it and move it to attract termites to the ‘intruder’, and then withdraw it without knocking all the termites off. If chimps can’t find the right shape and size of tool, they can and do modify it to suit the job, which is no different in kind from early humans modifying stones for cutting and for use as weapons. Such stones are our first well-attested tools, though only, of course, because stone outlasts other materials. This activity is far from simply opportunistic. It requires planning and foresight, and it’s certainly not the only example of tool use in chimps or in other animals, including birds.
Humans are the only self-aware animals
We have to be careful, of course, not to define ‘self-awareness’ and other related concepts in such a way that they can only apply to humans. Similarly, I can think of ways of defining the term which would make it inclusive of a great many species. Because of the great difficulty of accurate definition here, it’s quite useful, as a first approximation, to use a crude, behaviourist approach to the problem, such as the well-known mirror test – first applied, though in a non-rigorous way, by Charles Darwin. All of the great apes can pass this test, as can elephants, some cetaceans, and, probably most surprisingly, European magpies. They all fail the mirror test initially, but soon learn that they’re looking at their own reflection. Humans don’t pass the mirror test before the age of eighteen months, on average – though there are some problems with the reliability of that measure because of possible flaws with the classic mirror test which I won’t go into here. Suffice to say that learning to use mirrors for grooming, etc, is pretty solid evidence of self-awareness in other species.
Humans are the only species able to conceptualize
‘It would be senseless to attribute to an animal a memory that distinguished the order of events in the past, and it would be senseless to attribute to it an expectation of an order of events in the future. It does not have the concepts of order, or any concepts at all.’ [Stuart Hampshire, philosopher]
The above sort of observation, though it wasn’t actually an observation, was commonplace in philosophy well into the 20th century, but research into ‘comparative cognition’ has largely blown this bias away, as you might expect, with a bit of thought. After all where does conceptualisation come from if it isn’t an evolutionary development over time and species? Of course the concept of concepts is a bit murky, but researchers have been able to distinguish three types of concept learning – perceptual, associative and relational – and a more sophisticated type of concept-formation called analogical reasoning. A 2008 survey of the research found that many non-human species were capable of the first three types, with only the higher primates showing evidence of the fourth.
Humans are the only species with language
‘Language is our Rubicon, and no brute will dare to cross it.’ [Max Muller, 19th century linguist]
There has long been a great debate about this one, and much research and effort put in to trying to teach the rudiments of language to chimps and bonobos. Sagan & Druyan dwell at length on this work, though well-known linguists such as Charles Hockett and Steven Pinker suggest that there is a bigger divide than sometimes admitted between other primates and humans in this area. Again, this depends on how tight, loose or technical your definition of language is. Still, no matter how language is defined to exclude non-humans – such as arbitrariness between sound and meaning, and discreteness in the construction of terms – researchers manage to find evidence of it in other creatures. Nobody denies that language has reached a pinnacle of sophistication with humans, but again there are many traces of complex communication in many other species, and it’s of no value to us to try to reduce their import. The Muller quote above indicates how our preoccupation with our own superiority can lead to a hostile attitude to any knowledge that dares to threaten it.
Humans are the only creatures who know they will die.
We know from an early age that we will die largely because of our sophisticated communications. We learn of the history of our culture, peopled with dead contributors, we see monuments to the dead everywhere, the disappearance of aged pets and relatives is patiently explained to us. Other animals, without these communications, may still feel it in their bones as the time approaches. There’s certainly evidence for mourning in elephants, chimps and many other animals.
Humans are the only ethical animals.
Ethics and social living are an almost essential pairing. The Biblical commandments that still make sense to us are all about making society more predictable and therefore more bearable to us as individuals, which is why they’re common to most religions and cultures. Whilst it may be argued that humans are more consciously and explicitly ethical than other social animals, some recent research has cast doubt on our freedom to choose our ethics. We appear to be driven, genetically, to preserve ourselves and our own, and to rationalise an ethical system around that drive. Other creatures have evolved the same drives and act in similar ways to ourselves.
Humans are the only animals that possess culture
If you think of culture as a process, rather than working back from cultural products, it would be hard to deny that this process exists in many other species. I’ve already pointed out that simple tool-making is passed down from adult chimps to children. This is cultural transmission, and is a basic factor in all culture. Basic tool-making and teaching were presumably the first forms of cultural transmission in humans.
Humans are the only creatures who explore their own origins, and the origins of all else
This may well be the last bastion, but again it doesn’t represent a difference in kind – even supposing that such explorations don’t occur to non-human minds. These types of explorations are the culmination of increasingly sophisticated concept-formation, meme-transmission and theoretical and technological development. With all this, knowledge, ideas and speculations are converging on us at an ever-increasing pace. It’s no surprise, therefore, that the idea of a ‘singularity’ has captured our imagination, tenuous though the idea might be. Interestingly, the idea of the singularity is another instance of quantity building up to a sudden ‘flip’, a qualitative transformation. Another self-serving and self-congratulatory idea perhaps?
We humans are quite fascinating, the more so the more we examine ourselves, but we are learning that what we’re made up of is the same stuff that other life forms are made of, and the similarities are every bit as instructive as the differences. We’re a distinct species, no doubt, but it is counter-productive to think of ourselves as a species apart.
Quickies: food marketing and health claims
save your life, for only $7.63/litre
Grocery industries and food marketers are at loggerheads with consumer groups and health standards authorities at the moment over food labelling. Surprise surprise. Basically it’s about tightening up on truth-in-advertising where health products [or sometimes ‘health products’] are concerned. Plans to do this, and plans to combat this, have been ongoing for decades.
The peak body for the no-change-to-the current-system lobby, which of course advocates ‘self-regulation’, is the Australian Food and Grocery Council, while organisations such as the consumer group Choice, Food Standards Australia New Zealand, and the Public Health Association of Australia favour a tighter, more robust form of scrutiny. Earlier this year it looked like both sides were starting to converge towards an agreement on new standards and closer scrutiny, but a draft proposal in February for independent pre-approval of food packaging was later slammed by the Council, who put a new proposal quite recently. It turned out to be self-regulation with a little bit of post-hoc scrutiny – which is already allowed for.
The grocers’ and marketers’ groups claim that scrutiny followed by rejection of particular packaging would result in prohibitively expensive repackaging costs. Duh, I wonder why they didn’t think of that when they wrote bullshit on their packages. If you tell lies or get things wrong you need to correct it. Consumers are becoming increasingly sophisticated about such things and are demanding more accurate information and less spin [well I hope so anyway].
Particular products have been mentioned as being in the firing line. They include probiotic juices, breads advertised as ‘for women’s well-being’ and protein-added milk which ‘builds muscles’. I suppose that as long as the claims are kept sufficiently vague there won’t be a problem. It’s the specific claims that are the problem – and packagers should know that, and have only themselves to blame if they get them wrong.
In any case the depressing truth seems to be that the food industry is too powerful to be forced into a tougher regulatory regime in the near future. There seems at present to be nothing for it but to negotiate a ‘least worst option’ for consumers.
If you’re wondering about probiotics – I barely knew anything about them until today – this post at science-based medicine, though more than 3 years old, is excellently comprehensive. This quote will give you a good idea about the short-comings of this particular fad:
The raison d’être for probiotics is inherently questionable: Normal bacteria gone, depleted, tuckered out? Take some extra bacteria and replete your ecosystem. Compared to the complexity of the GI [gastro-intestinal] micro environment, probiotics contain just a few bacteria, and not even the most common bowel organisms. It is safe to say that the “good’ bacteria so highly touted in probiotics are but a minor constituent of a complex flora.
the matter of mind
A while ago, in 3 consecutive posts, here, here and here, I reviewed rather sharply a three-person presentation criticising the so called ‘new atheism’. The speakers were the philosopher Roger Scruton, novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson, and Jonathan Ree. Two of the speakers, Scruton and Robinson, were professed Christians, while Ree was a non-believer who would probably style himself as agnostic, but who was peed off by the disrespectful and combative attitudes of Dawkins et al. I myself was peed off, of course, but particularly by Robinson’s tired ‘scientism’ critique, and by her claim, clearly untrue, that modern atheists were ignoring the specialness of human consciousness. Since then I’ve been reading a bit and listening a bit to stuff on consciousness, human and other, and I’m finding that this is an extraordinarily burgeoning field, and one that’s doing no favours for the claim of human specialness, which some believers are still clinging to as a sign of their particular place in the mind of their supernatural creator-being.
As I mentioned then, one of the most prominent ‘new atheists’, Daniel Dennett, was a particularly prominent and respected writer on consciousness, and of course there are plenty of others, philosophers and scientists, thoroughgoing ‘materialists’, whether or not they promote ‘new atheism’ directly, who are doing much to discover and understand the neurophysiological underpinnings, not only of consciousness, but of ‘mind’ more generally. In doing so they’re leaving far behind the dualistic ideas presented by Descartes 350 years ago and still adhered to by prominent thinkers up to the end of the twentieth century, and indeed beyond, if what I hear about Australian philosopher David Chalmer’s ideas about consciousness are true. One philosophically-minded neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio, has taken on this dualism in a more clear-cut way than usual, though without referring to the soulful Christian implications of abandoning a dualism which was arguably first put forward by Descartes precisely to preserve the soul concept, and human specialness.
Damasio’s book, Descartes’ Error, doesn’t deal with consciousness per se [but his interest in consciousness, together with some ideas on how to tackle the problem, are on display here], and I assume that, considering that the book was first published in 1994 [though revised in the mid 2000s, the edition I’ve read], there’s much even in his own area of research, on the importance of emotional factors in affecting our reasoning capacity, that requires updating. This is the first book I’ve read on neurophysiology – though I’ve read plenty of bits and pieces in science mags, and I’ve just finished another book, Sam Harris’s The Moral Landscape, which contains quite a bit of neurophysiology, especially in the end-notes – and it’s pretty daunting for a lay person, trying to locate and keep in mind such brain or neuronal areas as the anterior cingulate, the amygdala, the primary somatosensory cortices, the basal ganglia, the hypothalamus and the autonomic nervous system. Damasio cleverly pulls the reader in, though, by relating the perennially fascinating story of Phineas Gage and his horrific brain injury [I believe I read a version of Damasio’s introductory chapter on Gage years ago in a science mag]. This story is not only intrinsically engaging, but it sets the scene for the brain explorations to follow. Gage ‘recovered’ from his injury, in which a large railway spike, explosively propelled, passed through his brain and skull. He lost an eye, but seemed otherwise unharmed, on a superficial view. However, his behaviour was much altered, and a careful reconstruction of the pathway of the spike [actually a tamping iron] through Gage’s brain, together with an analysis of the descriptions of Gage’s changed state [the accident occurred in 1848] by Dr John Harlow, the physician who first treated him, and by others who treated or knew him – no easy task, as there was more fiction than fact involved – and studies of others who have suffered similar brain injuries or damage, has helped to elucidate how Gage could have so recovered physically while being so psychologically transformed. Damasio’s account, which involves the exhumation and re-examination of poor Gage’s remains as well as detailed study of damage to similar areas of the brain in others, is a detective story more absorbing than anything you’ll find in CSI or Silent Witness, because it tries to get to the heart of how emotional states and responses affect our reasoned decision-making, and to discover which areas of the brain are involved in these complex processes, and how they connect and interact.
Damasio also makes use of the findings of experimental psychology, particularly in game theory, to elucidate the behavioural and thinking patterns of those with Gage’s type of prefrontal brain damage – the Gage matrix, as he calls it. One of the features of people with this damage is an apparent inability to learn and modify behaviour based on previous experience. Though they are often able to articulate the lessons an experience can provide, they seem incapable of acting on what they’ve learned. or retaining the lesson for long. This trait was brought out well in a series of gambling experiments, the details of which I won’t go into here. The principal game was set up to allow people to learn along the way. The initial impression is that the game rewards high-risk strategies, but after a few losses, normal players soon learn that a more conservative, low-risk strategy has the potential to reap greater rewards. Frontal lobe damaged players seem unable to learn this and continue to use the same strategy in spite of massive and mounting losses. There’s much more to it than this, of course, but the lack of this ability to learn seems bound up with an emotional flatness, a lack of normal concern about outcomes.
Of course the bottom line in all this is that, to state the bleeding obvious, brain damage leads to a different kind of mind. We can assume therefore, that consciousness, which is common to a great many creatures, is nothing more than a hugely complex set of brain processes, as are our emotional responses, our memories, our attention and our dreams. We’ve only begun to embark on investigating these processes, and it’s one of the most exciting journeys humans have ever undertaken.
essais à la façon de montaigne: philosophy
Patricia Churchland - the right stuff
I have to say that I have never seen in a discussion in science at a seminar, for example, the viciousness and mean-spiritedness that I regularly witnessed in philosophy.
I’m not a philosopher, nor am I an academic, a scientist, a pro journalist or anything more than a dilettante, so clearly I’m superior to and able to pass judgement on all of these types. As a fairly avid but unfocussed reader from an early age I didn’t really encounter philosophy until my late teens, with Friedrich Nietzsche. Naturally I found this pretty strong but exciting stuff, especially as an anti-authoritarian auto-didact, which is how I saw myself. Nietzsche’s various denigrations always had the appearance of sophistication, no matter how obscure they could sometimes be. He was the smart-alec to end all smart-alecs, and I was particularly keen on his take on Christianity, a religion I personally found as meaningless as any other. The ever self-assertive Nietszche naturally saw enslavement to a supernatural Lord as perniciously anaemic, and enslavement to other more human-based ideologies wasn’t much better, but this seemed to leave him with a commitment problem, a lack of faith in anything but his shifting, carping self. I was also a little unnerved by the angry, almost ranting tone that he seemed to be battling, sometimes unsuccessfully, to contain. I read other ‘popular’ philosophical books, such as Camus’ The Rebel and The Myth of Sisyphus, and a selection of Schopenhauer’s writings [you might say that my intellectual life was being dictated by Penguin Classics and Penguin Modern Classics], and I even had a go at a couple of Plato’s dialogues. I only gradually became aware that there were ‘issues’ in philosophy rather than just a bunch of more or less stimulating thinkers [and I’m still rather more attracted by interesting personalities in philosophy than by its subject matter]. In any case my interest in philosophy was largely peripheral, sometimes coming more to the fore through personal friendships with intellectual types. I had a go at Kant, Hegel and Heidegger and found them largely impenetrable: much easier to read about their philosophies through the work of more lucid commentators than to tackle their own writings. This led me to Anglo-American philosophy and its battle with the Continentals. I was in favour of the former simply for its lucidity and its modesty. I read books and essays by the likes of David Pears, Donald Davidson, Hilary Putnam, Elizabeth Anscombe, Bernard Williams, Wilfred Sellars, Nelson Goodman and Philippa Foot, as well as tackling, and frankly being quite exhilarated by, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, but even so I didn’t see philosophy as being central to my life, and I often wondered if the ‘enlightenment’ I got from reading these philosophers was worth the considerable effort required. Perhaps the problem lay with me.
Meanwhile I continued to read fiction and to dream of being a writer of some sort. In my mid-twenties I read a novel which had a major impact on me, The Magic Mountain [Der Zauberberg] by Thomas Mann. Its central character, Hans Castorp, was about my age at the time, and his ‘time out’ in a sanatorium in the Alps, doing little but reading, conversing with interesting people, and endlessly speculating, seemed a bit like the story of my own shiftless life, but the section of the book that most inspired me involved the hero’s reflections, gleaned from readings, on the origin of life, matter and the universe. The sorts of reflections that aren’t answered by philosophy, but rather by science. It suddenly occurred to me that my understanding of science was far more hazy than my understanding of philosophy, and that the questions that scientific inquiry ventured to answer were the really interesting questions, by and large. So I became a regular reader of Scientific American, the most prominent popular science magazine of the time [one of the first articles I read there was about a new pandemic, AIDS, which might be about to sweep through the west], and I read my first full book on a science topic, The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, which was causing much controversy at the time [the early eighties]. Since then, my interest in scientific questions and answers has far outweighed my interest in philosophy, though my understanding in both areas has always been sketchy and full of holes.
So to return to the present. The other day a very bright almost 16 year-old, who is my sometime step-grand-daughter, told me that she hated philosophy [with all the black-and-white passion of the teen age], though people had told her it should be ‘just up her alley’. I felt naturally a bit defensive for that old, somewhat faded interest of mine [though I still read philosophy in dribs and drabs, and have links to philosophy blogs here], but I didn’t know how to begin to respond in a way that would have any impact on her.
What I would’ve liked to say is – go with whatever stimulates, provokes and excites you. Go with whatever draws insights and original thinking from you, or with whatever makes you want to learn or explore further. Try not to think in terms of categories [this is philosophy, this is history, this is science], try to think in terms of the wow factor – wow, so that’s how that works, that’s why she behaves like that, that’s why that war was fought, that’s how we got into this mess, etc. I would also say that there’s been a lot of boring and probably useless philosophical writing over the years, stuff that gets bogged down in argument and point-scoring rather than striving for insight. I also suspect that whole philosophical ‘categories’ constitute intellectual dead-ends, but I won’t try to justify that suspicion here. Unfortunately, philosophy as an academic discipline has become a little caught up with itself, with some philosophers being really uncomfortable about addressing a lay audience. When, very occasionally, I leave comments on philosophy blogs I’m usually completely ignored, especially by those academic-style philosophy blogs that use syllogisms a lot, and terms like ceteris paribus and mutatis mutandis. Still, there are other philosophy blogs that are more open and inviting, yet I’m often daunted at the very thought of commenting, perhaps because philosophers are always arguing. Sometimes you just want to learn rather than to argue, and with philosophy blogs/journals etc, often the only thing you learn is that x is good at arguing – or not, as the case may be.
With all this in mind I read approvingly of Patricia Churchland’s journey as a philosopher here, via Three Quarks Daily [a blog with more of the wow factor than just about any human being could cope with]. Churchland is very much a pro-science philosopher, and her latest book, Braintrust: what neuroscience tells us about morality, has the sort of title that attracts me much more than your standard philosophy text on ethics. I’m currently reading an updated version of Antonio Demasio’s Descartes’ Error, a book that treats of the neurophysiological bases of emotions and their influence on decision-making. These sorts of explorations take us so much further than the conceptual analyses that much philosophy has become bogged down in. I was also amused and sadly unsurprised to read that Churchland’s scientific colleagues [she recently went to ‘medical school’ – presumably that means some kind of university – to study the circuitry of the brain] have treated her much better than her philosophical ones. This can be explained, I think, in terms of tenuous orthodoxies that are based on numbers and power rather than evidence. We see this particularly in religions, when doctrines aren’t settled, and orthodoxy and heresy become matters to obsess over. Since there’s no evidence either way, and therefore no pathway of testing and verification, it all becomes a matter of power struggles, persuasiveness and sometimes violence. Philosophical disputation may be more low-key and contained than religious disputation, but it isn’t immune from these problems.
Perhaps the worst thing that ever happened to philosophy was its re-presentation, over the last couple of centuries, as an academic discipline. This led to an obvious problem of insularity, a problem that earlier ‘natural philosophers’, going back to Aristotle, and including Epicurus, Lucretius and even David Hume, didn’t have to deal with. There’s much to be said for open borders and cross-fertilization, for nations as well as fields of intellectual inquiry. If this means that philosophy loses much of its distinctive character, then so be it. That distinctive character is of more recent vintage, and is perhaps more artificial in nature, than is generally admitted.