"If you fake the funk, your nose will grow." — Bootsy Collins
I don’t usually put links without my own extended commentary into this blog, but this time I couldn’t resist. Warren Ellis has a wonderful rant about fanatic protesters against genetically modified food.
I don’t usually put links without my own extended commentary into this blog, but this time I couldn’t resist. Warren Ellis has a wonderful rant about fanatic protesters against genetically modified food.
In today’s Science section of The New York Times, there’s an article about so-called “Darwinian literary studies,” which purports to find confirmation of evolutionary psychology in works of literature. Female college students were given two passages from Sir Walter Scott, one describing one of Scott’s “dark heroes, rebellious and promiscuous,” and the other describing one of Scott’s “proper heroes, law-abiding and monogamous.” And lo and behold, it turned out that “the women preferred the proper heroes for long-term unions,” but said that the dark heroes “appealed to them most for short-term affairs.”
The psychologist who did this study says that it “demonstrates that the distinction between long-term and short-term mating strategies” postulated by evolutionary psychology “is instinctive.” The reasoning seems to be that only biological “instinct” could explain the response to a two-centuries-old text by women today.
Of course, this is nonsense. Nobody who knows anything about the history of popular culture, or for that matter who has ever gone to the movies or watched TV, will be the least bit surprised that the stereotypes that Scott drew upon, and contributed to, two hundred years ago are still stereotypes today. The cliches and commonplaces that the evolutionary psychologists draw upon when they make their theories are the same ones that Scott drew upon when he wrote his novels. The study proves nothing whatsoever, because it is completely tautological; it is just like Wittgenstein’s witticism about the man who bought several copies of the newspaper in order to assure himself that what it said was true.
Actually, I think that there is a use for Darwinism in literary studies. But it is not this drivel about literature confirming the hoariest cliches about innate instinct and male/female behavior. It is rather what Morse Peckham suggested years ago: that mutation due to “accident, or chance, or randomness” plays a crucial part in cultural innovation, just as it does in biological evolution. So it is “the brain’s capacity to produce random responses” that causes “the indetermination in human behavior of response to any given stimulus”; this indetermination, in turn, is why we have cultural variability and cultural change, and why no society succeeds in totally controlling the behavior of its members. Continual mutation, not a fixed, innate “human nature” is the lesson that literary study can profitably extract from biology.
In today’s Science section of The New York Times, there’s an article about so-called “Darwinian literary studies,” which purports to find confirmation of evolutionary psychology in works of literature. Female college students were given two passages from Sir Walter Scott, one describing one of Scott’s “dark heroes, rebellious and promiscuous,” and the other describing one of Scott’s “proper heroes, law-abiding and monogamous.” And lo and behold, it turned out that “the women preferred the proper heroes for long-term unions,” but said that the dark heroes “appealed to them most for short-term affairs.”
The psychologist who did this study says that it “demonstrates that the distinction between long-term and short-term mating strategies” postulated by evolutionary psychology “is instinctive.” The reasoning seems to be that only biological “instinct” could explain the response to a two-centuries-old text by women today.
Of course, this is nonsense. Nobody who knows anything about the history of popular culture, or for that matter who has ever gone to the movies or watched TV, will be the least bit surprised that the stereotypes that Scott drew upon, and contributed to, two hundred years ago are still stereotypes today. The cliches and commonplaces that the evolutionary psychologists draw upon when they make their theories are the same ones that Scott drew upon when he wrote his novels. The study proves nothing whatsoever, because it is completely tautological; it is just like Wittgenstein’s witticism about the man who bought several copies of the newspaper in order to assure himself that what it said was true.
Actually, I think that there is a use for Darwinism in literary studies. But it is not this drivel about literature confirming the hoariest cliches about innate instinct and male/female behavior. It is rather what Morse Peckham suggested years ago: that mutation due to “accident, or chance, or randomness” plays a crucial part in cultural innovation, just as it does in biological evolution. It is “the brain’s capacity to produce random responses,” Peckham says, that causes “the indetermination in human behavior of response to any given stimulus”; this indetermination, in turn, is why meanings can never be fixed once and for all (as the deconstructionists are always reminding us), why we have cultural variability and cultural change, and why no society succeeds in totally controlling the behavior of its members. Continual mutation, not a fixed, innate “human nature,” is the lesson that literary study can profitably extract from biology. And it is by drawing on these Darwinian lessons about mutation that Peckham anticipated most of what theorists like Derrida and Foucault said, only without the European metaphysical baggage.
What Genes Can’t Do, by Lenny Moss, doesn’t quite deliver on its title’s promise of a thorough critique of genetic determinism. The book is much more limited in its scope than the title would suggest. But within its own boundaries, the book does argue cogently and make some important points. Moss is a philosopher with a background in cell biology; he’s able to go into detail on both the history of biologiy, and on current work in the field…
What Genes Can’t Do, by Lenny Moss, doesn’t quite deliver on its title’s promise of a thorough critique of genetic determinism. The book is much more limited in its scope than the title would suggest. But within its own boundaries, the book does argue cogently and make some important points. Moss is a philosopher with a background in cell biology; he’s able to go into detail on both the history of biologiy, and on current work in the field…
Continue reading “What Genes Can’t Do”
In the Science section of today’s New York Times, there’s an interesting and (as usual) problematic article about the evolution of human beings’ “ability to enjoy music”. All human cultures seem to value and make music; this is a problem for evolutionary theory, because music “does nothing evident to help survival.” How could it therefore have evolved?…
In the Science section of today’s New York Times, there’s an interesting and (as usual) problematic article about the evolution of human beings’ “ability to enjoy music”. All human cultures seem to value and make music; this is a problem for evolutionary theory, because music “does nothing evident to help survival.” How could it therefore have evolved?…
Continue reading “Evolution of Music”
Another ludicrous scientific study (via Metafilter) showing that it’s possible to “prove” nearly any pre-established thesis, as long as you extrapolate from a small enough sample and generalize wildly without any sense of context: ” Satoshi Kanazawa, a psychologist at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, compiled a database of the biographies of 280 great scientists,” and discovered that almost none of them continued to do important work once they got married and had children. Well, it is often said (though I have no idea whether this is more than an anecdotal observation) that scientists, in particular do their best work when they are young. If true, this may have to do with the energy of youth, or with a fresh mind free of preconceptions, or who knows what else. In any case, certain creative endeavors (discoveries in mathematics, perhaps) seem to be done best at a younger age, while others (writing long novels?) seem to be done best by people who are older. As for marriage and children, it is obvious that the higher the age, the larger percentage of people will have been married and have had kids. (Not to mention that, as I am experiencing daily, having a small child consumes a great deal of your time, energy, and attention, unless you are a complete pig who leaves it all to your partner, or so rich, as well as indifferent, that you can hire servants to do all the work for you). But these are mere trifles for Kanazawa. Not only does he take his database of scientists (chosen according to what criteria? we are not told in the newspaper account at least) as representative of the larger category of “creative genius and crime” (!), but he further concludes that the reason for the alleged fall-off in creativity after marriage and having children is that “a single psychological mechanism is responsible for this: the competitive edge among young men to fight for glory and gain the attention of women. That craving drives the all-important male hormone, testosterone. After a man settles down, the testosterone level falls, as does his creative output, Kanazawa theorises.” I suppose Kanazawa considers the testosterone/creativity link to be so obvious that it does not need to be tested, or even explained. Yet another case of a “social scientist” who wouldn’t understand culture and society if they bit him on the ass.
Another ludicrous scientific study (via Metafilter) showing that it’s possible to “prove” nearly any pre-established thesis, as long as you extrapolate from a small enough sample and generalize wildly without any sense of context: ” Satoshi Kanazawa, a psychologist at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, compiled a database of the biographies of 280 great scientists,” and discovered that almost none of them continued to do important work once they got married and had children. Well, it is often said (though I have no idea whether this is more than an anecdotal observation) that scientists, in particular do their best work when they are young. If true, this may have to do with the energy of youth, or with a fresh mind free of preconceptions, or who knows what else. In any case, certain creative endeavors (discoveries in mathematics, perhaps) seem to be done best at a younger age, while others (writing long novels?) seem to be done best by people who are older. As for marriage and children, it is obvious that the higher the age, the larger percentage of people will have been married and have had kids. (Not to mention that, as I am experiencing daily, having a small child consumes a great deal of your time, energy, and attention, unless you are a complete pig who leaves it all to your partner, or so rich, as well as indifferent, that you can hire servants to do all the work for you). But these are mere trifles for Kanazawa. Not only does he take his database of scientists (chosen according to what criteria? we are not told in the newspaper account at least) as representative of the larger category of “creative genius and crime” (!), but he further concludes that the reason for the alleged fall-off in creativity after marriage and having children is that “a single psychological mechanism is responsible for this: the competitive edge among young men to fight for glory and gain the attention of women. That craving drives the all-important male hormone, testosterone. After a man settles down, the testosterone level falls, as does his creative output, Kanazawa theorises.” I suppose Kanazawa considers the testosterone/creativity link to be so obvious that it does not need to be tested, or even explained. I suppose, as well, that he doesn’t think women are capable of high-level creativity. Yet another case of a “social scientist” who wouldn’t understand culture and society if they bit him on the ass.
Scientists have recently discovered a mechanism for genetic repair used by the Y chromosome in human males. The Y chromosome does not have a partner chromosome to pair with, and recombine with during meiosis. Recombination is one of the ways that chromosomes compensate for mutations, transcription errors, and other potentially lethal alterations; so, without the opportunity to recombine, the Y chromosome would seem extremely vulnerable, and indeed this has often been used to explain why it is so much smaller than the X chromosome, or any of the other paired chromosomes in human cells. But it turns out the Y chromosome has a way of compensating for this difficulty. Large areas of the chromosome are palindromic, that is to say, they read the same in either direction. This means that the chromosome is able to, and in fact does, fold over and recombine with itself. This explains why, although the Y chromosome has far less genes than the X or any of the other, it does in fact have something like 78 active genes, which is more than anyone expected. This discovery is interesting, although scarcely earth-shattering. But the scientists who made it cannot resist the temptation to blow it up into something far more significant than it really is: “Men and women differ by 1 to 2 percent of their genomes, Dr. Page said, which is the same as the difference between a man and a male chimpanzee or between a woman and a female chimpanzee…We all recite the mantra that we are 99 percent identical and take political comfort in it, Dr. Page said. But the reality is that the genetic difference between males and females absolutely dwarfs all other differences in the human genome.” Can Dr. Page be serious? Even if his calculations of the numbers of genes involved is correct (which I doubt), all this shows is that not all genes are equally important, or equally active. While interspecies gene comparisons can give us a sense of how closely related two species are, they do not give us any indication of how “similar” or “dissimilar” those two species are, in any meaningful sense of those words. To say that human males are as similar to chimpanzee males as they are to human females is nonsense, if only because human beings and chimpanzees cannot interbreed and produce fertile (or any) offspring. The second half of Dr. Page’s comment–with its cliched invocation of opposing “political correctness”–suggests that he is overinterpreting his results in accordance with an agenda that has nothing to do with science. All in all, I’m reminded of a witticism my brother once uttered: “Isn’t it strange that I have 98.5% of my genes in common with a chimpanzee, but only 50% of my genes in common with my own son?”
Scientists have recently discovered a mechanism for genetic repair used by the Y chromosome in human males. The Y chromosome does not have a partner chromosome to pair with, and recombine with during meiosis. Recombination is one of the ways that chromosomes compensate for mutations, transcription errors, and other potentially lethal alterations; so, without the opportunity to recombine, the Y chromosome would seem extremely vulnerable, and indeed this has often been used to explain why it is so much smaller than the X chromosome, or any of the other paired chromosomes in human cells. But it turns out the Y chromosome has a way of compensating for this difficulty. Large areas of the chromosome are palindromic, that is to say, they read the same in either direction. This means that the chromosome is able to, and in fact does, fold over and recombine with itself. This explains why, although the Y chromosome has far less genes than the X or any of the other, it does in fact have something like 78 active genes, which is more than anyone expected. This discovery is interesting, although scarcely earth-shattering. But the scientists who made it cannot resist the temptation to blow it up into something far more significant than it really is: “Men and women differ by 1 to 2 percent of their genomes, Dr. Page said, which is the same as the difference between a man and a male chimpanzee or between a woman and a female chimpanzee…We all recite the mantra that we are 99 percent identical and take political comfort in it, Dr. Page said. But the reality is that the genetic difference between males and females absolutely dwarfs all other differences in the human genome.” Can Dr. Page be serious? Even if his calculations of the numbers of genes involved is correct (which I doubt), all this shows is that not all genes are equally important, or equally active. While interspecies gene comparisons can give us a sense of how closely related two species are, they do not give us any indication of how “similar” or “dissimilar” those two species are, in any meaningful sense of those words. To say that human males are as similar to chimpanzee males as they are to human females is nonsense, if only because human beings and chimpanzees cannot interbreed and produce fertile (or any) offspring. The second half of Dr. Page’s comment–with its cliched invocation of opposing “political correctness”–suggests that he is overinterpreting his results in accordance with an agenda that has nothing to do with science. All in all, I’m reminded of a witticism my brother once uttered: “Isn’t it strange that I have 98.5% of my genes in common with a chimpanzee, but only 50% of my genes in common with my own son?”
Mark Buchanan’s Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Science of Networks is an excellent piece of science writing; it’s the best introduction I have found so far to the recent developments in network theory: discoveries about how networks are structured to permit no more than “six degrees of separation” between any point and any other point, and how “tipping points” develop, at which small changes have very large consequences. These theories are extending our understanding of how patterns work: how the same forms of emergent order can be found in ecosystems, in economies, in neural structures in the brain, and so on. The material is different in each case, but the mathematics is the same. I find these developments exciting, while at the same time I remain a bit skeptical, feeling that such results can easily be oversold….
Mark Buchanan’s Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Science of Networks is an excellent piece of science writing; it’s the best introduction I have found so far to the recent developments in network theory: discoveries about how networks are structured to permit no more than “six degrees of separation” between any point and any other point, and how “tipping points” develop, at which small changes have very large consequences. These theories are extending our understanding of how patterns work: how the same forms of emergent order can be found in ecosystems, in economies, in neural structures in the brain, and so on. The material is different in each case, but the mathematics is the same. I find these developments exciting, while at the same time I remain a bit skeptical, feeling that such results can easily be oversold….
Continue reading “Nexus”
Antonio R. Damasio is a neurobiologist, and one of the scientists whose work has seemed most provocative and interesting to me recently. I just finished reading is new book, Looking for Spinoza…
Antonio R. Damasio is a neurobiologist, and one of the scientists whose work has seemed most provocative and interesting to me recently. I just finished reading is new book, Looking for Spinoza…
Continue reading “Antonio Damasio”
An article in The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on a new study that casts doubt upon “academic research that asserts the educational benefits of diversity.” According to this new study, “students of all ethnic backgrounds feel that as minority enrollment grows, the quality of their education diminishes and incidents of discrimination increase.” If “diversity” doesn’t improve the quality of education, then one of the main arguments for affirmative action has been refuted. Or so the study suggests. But (as Jerry Springer used to say) there’s more to this story…
An article in The Chronicle of Higher Education (paid registration needed to access text–sorry) reports on a new study that casts doubt upon “academic research that asserts the educational benefits of diversity.” According to this new study, “students of all ethnic backgrounds feel that as minority enrollment grows, the quality of their education diminishes and incidents of discrimination increase.” If “diversity” doesn’t improve the quality of education, then one of the main arguments for affirmative action has been refuted. Or so the study suggests. But (as Jerry Springer used to say) there’s more to this story…
Continue reading “The Value of “Diversity””
Hit Song Science is a new technology that allegedly can analyze new songs and tell whether or not they will be hits…
Hit Song Science is a new technology that allegedly can analyze new songs and tell whether or not they will be hits…
Continue reading “Hit Song Science”