Pics or it didn’t happen!

Image by Rohan Kar, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons I was mulling around the Lincoln Park Zoo today with a friend when a man stepped on me. He was filming a Siberian tiger with a high-end digital video camera, which he held on an expensive mounting. He was fidgeting with all of the camera's features, backing up to get the perfect shot, and he stepped all over my feet. The foot-stomping didn't bother me so much as the man's intent focus on something other than his present surroundings. A beautiful creature stood before him, but his attention was directed at the camera and the filming of the tiger more than it was the tiger itself. Not much later, something similar occurred in the Tropical Birds House. As I was watching the bleeding-heart pigeons, a man, family in tow, came around the corner with a massive video camera. He also had it placed on an expensive mount. Obliviously, he nudged forward until his lens nearly leaned on the display's glass. He fiddled and fidgeted. He zoomed on the critters for a moment, and left. "Do you think he'll ever watch that footage?" my friend asked. "No," I guessed. Without much thought I noted, "It isn't about the footage. He probably just bought that camera, and is filming because he wants to play with it." "So the actual footage is useless," he observed in return. I intuited that the man's camera was a new purchase because I've done the exact same thing with a fresh 'toy'.

Continue ReadingPics or it didn’t happen!

The nasty brutish “Darwinism” concocted by I-don’t-give-a-crap free-marketers

Many conservatives have a "hate-love relation with biology.” Primatologist Frans De Waal terms this "the first great paradox of the American political landscape” in his new book, The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society. In this new book, De Waal has produced another tome of lively writing and thoughtful analysis, reminding us of our exquisite human animal roots. He is out to set the record straight on a gnawing social issue: too many people invoke "evolution" to justify treating each other in contemptuous ways. This has got to stop, because this modern version of "Social Darwinism" paints a highly selective and distorted view of the kind of animals we humans are based on a wildly inaccurate distortion of how natural selection works. Although I am not even halfway into De Waal’s book, I can see that De Waal has launched a sustained broadside against the commonly expressed perspective that evolutionary theory equates to "social Darwinism," an approach embraced by many conservatives. The idea of social Darwinism is that "those who make it [successfully in life] shouldn't let themselves be dragged down by those who don't." The idea was championed by British political philosopher Herbert Spencer in the 19th century. Spencer "decried attempts to equalize society’s playing field," and said of the poor that "the whole effort of nature is to get rid of such, to clear the world of them, and make room for better." De Waal comments that the business world fully embraces this idea and characterizes competition as a "law of biology" that will improve the human race. We thus have "the second great paradox of the American political landscape": Whereas the book found in most American homes and every hotel room urges us on almost every page to show compassion, social Darwinists scoff at such feelings, which only keeps nature from running its course. Poverty is dismissed as proof of laziness, and social justice as a weakness. Why not simply let the poor perish? Many of these conservatives embrace the metaphor of the invisible hand, arguing that this invisible hand "will take care of society's woes." De Waal notes, however, "the invisible hand . . . did nothing to prevent the appalling survival-of-the-greatest scenes in New Orleans" following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Why are the assumptions about biology always on the negative side? [p. 4] . . . What we need is a complete overhaul of assumptions about human nature. Too many economists and politicians model human society on the perpetual struggle they believe exists in nature, but which is a mere projection. [p. 7] . . . Our bodies and minds are made for social life, and we become hopelessly depressed in its absence [p. 10] . . . [It is a great myth] that human society is a voluntary creation of autonomous men. [p.20] . . . When our ancestors left the forest and entered an open, dangerous environment, they became prey and evolved a herd instinct that beats that of many animals. We excel at bodily synchrony and actually derive pleasure from it. [p. 20]. . . . All primates have this tendency [to develop trusting alliances], and some even invest in the community as a whole. Instead of just focusing on their own position, they demonstrate group-oriented behavior. [p. 34] De Waal’s main message is that we are NOT condemned by nature to treat each other badly. Though competition is part of the picture, we have evolved to be predominantly groupish and peace-loving beings who are well-tuned to look out for each other. Not that we always look out for each other admirably, but there is plenty of reason to conclude that human animals are highly social in an empathetic way. Keep this book handy for the next time someone claims that they don't need to care about people who are struggling to make it because nature is “dog eat dog.” That approach to life is a cop-out; it is certainly not justified by Darwin's work.

Continue ReadingThe nasty brutish “Darwinism” concocted by I-don’t-give-a-crap free-marketers

Regulation as a prerequisite to meaningful cooperation

While I was reading up on free market fundamentalism, and I happened across an intriguing article by biologist David Sloan Wilson. As I started reading this article, I was wondering this: Even assuming that a “free market” works wonders in small societies, can societies be scaled up in size guided only by the free market, without formal regulations? D.S. Wilson argues that this is the wrong question. All societies are regulated. The only question is how they are regulated. D.S. Wilson notes that humans are incredibly cooperative, especially in “small face-to-face groups.” In fact, we regulate each other’s conduct so easily in small groups that “we don't even notice it.” This gives us the illusion that there is no regulation keeping things in check. All well-functioning groups, large and small, human and non-human, are highly regulated, however. Small groups often seem to work well without formal regulation, but free market fundamentalists (and others) confuse this lack of formal regulation for the total lack of regulation.

This self-organizing ability to function as cooperative groups is "so perfectly natural" because it evolved by a long process of natural selection, in humans no less than bees. By the same token, functioning as large cooperative groups is not natural. Large human groups scarcely existed until the advent of agriculture a mere 10 thousand years ago. This means that new cultural constructions are required that interface with our genetically evolved psychology for human society to function adaptively at a large scale.

Wilson’s approach makes intuitive sense. Throughout the Pleistocene (from about 2 MYA until 10,000 years ago), people lived in small groups. They lacked written language and written laws. They used unwritten techniques (presumably customs, habits, ostracism and various other informal methods of social control and punishment) to coordinate community efforts and punish cheaters. These informal methods worked well enough and long enough that we can now sit here and ponder how well they worked. But just because those ancient forms of regulations weren’t written down doesn’t mean they didn’t exist. And it doesn't mean that ancient societies weren't tightly regulated. Just as human households are highly regulated without formal rules, so are small societies. So are non-human societies:

These social preferences go beyond our own species. Cooperation and cheating are behavioral options for all social species, even bacteria, and cooperation survives only to the extent that it is protected against cheating. The eternal conflict between cooperation and cheating even takes place within our own bodies, in the form of genes and cell lineages that manage to game the system at the expense of the organism upon which they depend. We call them diseases, but they are really the failure of a vast system of regulations that enable us to function as organisms as well as we do . . .

What about the eusocial insects, such as ants, wasps and bees? Wilson would argue that a well-functioning hive doesn’t simply happen, and it certainly isn’t driven by something as simplistic as the “self-interest” of individual bees:

[B]ee behavior cannot be reduced to a single principle of self-interest, any more than human behavior. There are solid citizens and cheaters even among the bees, and the cheaters are held at bay only by a regulatory system called "policing" by the biologists who study them.

According to D.S. Wilson, you’ll find regulation (informal or formal) everywhere you find a well-functioning society of living organisms. Further, a human society based merely on individual selfishness can’t self-regulate because we can no longer depend on selfishness to be well-tuned or consistent thanks to Daniel Kahneman’s brilliant destruction of rational choice theory. Regulation runs a continuum from informal to formal. It is not like regulation itself just showed up for the first time in modern human societies. D.S. Wilson argues that in all large-scale societies, “regulation is required or cooperation will disappear, like water draining from a bathtub.” Without some form of regulation, all societies become rudderless and unproductive. Therefore, there must always be some form of regulation. The question to decide is “What kind of regulation?”

Let there be no more talk of unfettered competition as a moral virtue. Cooperative social life requires regulation. Regulation comes naturally for small human groups but must be engineered for large human groups. Some forms of regulation will work well and others will work poorly. We can argue at length about smart vs. dumb regulation but the concept of no regulation should be forever laid to rest . . . We also need to change the metaphors that guide behavior in everyday life to avoid the disastrous consequences of our current metaphor-guided behaviors. That is why the metaphor of the invisible hand should be declared dead.

I would agree that the “invisible hand” is shorthand for the informal regulations that have been since prehistoric times to facilitate social coordination of small primitive societies. Rather than declaring the “invisible hand” to be dead, though, it might be more accurate to suggest that the “invisible hand” lives on in modern societies, quietly and substantially supplementing our formal regulations. Seen in this way, the “invisible hand,” used in the complete absence of consciously planned social regulations and laws, is not a method for creating or maintaining a complex functioning modern society. Rather, it is the path back to the Pleistocene.

Continue ReadingRegulation as a prerequisite to meaningful cooperation

Daniel Dennet discusses “The Computational Perspective” to evolution

Edge.org recently posted Daniel Dennett's discussion of "The Computational Perspective." At the linked site, you'll find the video of Dennett's lecture, along with Dennett's PowerPoint slides. Dennett's focus was whether things that are more complex can result from less complex things. Dennett assures us that the answer is yes, and that this is exactly what Darwin demonstrated. darwin-insight-we-dont-need-to-know-how-to-make-machines This same principle was demonstrated by Alan Turing: turing-insight The net result is "competency without comprehension." For the second half of his talk, Dennett applied this same principle to the magnificent aspects of human culture, including the words of our languages, which have "tremendous replicative power." culture Dennet concludes that humans are the effect of the purposes of life, not the causes. We tend to project our views back onto nature, and we have the capacity to "discover the reasons everywhere in the tree of life." Looking forward, we are also "the first intelligent designers of the Tree of Life." At the this same page at Edge.org, you can also view 45-minute lectures regarding evolution by Alvaro Fischer, Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, Steven Pinker, Matt Ridley, Helena Cronin, Nicholas Humhrey, Ian McEwan.

Continue ReadingDaniel Dennet discusses “The Computational Perspective” to evolution

Guess this author

The more things change, the more they stay the same, it seems. See if you can guess who authored this quotation on capitalism vs. socialism: (all emphases are mine)

The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil. We see before us a huge community of producers the members of which are unceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labor—not by force, but on the whole in faithful compliance with legally established rules. In this respect, it is important to realize that the means of production—that is to say, the entire productive capacity that is needed for producing consumer goods as well as additional capital goods—may legally be, and for the most part are, the private property of individuals. For the sake of simplicity, in the discussion that follows I shall call “workers” all those who do not share in the ownership of the means of production—although this does not quite correspond to the customary use of the term. The owner of the means of production is in a position to purchase the labor power of the worker. By using the means of production, the worker produces new goods which become the property of the capitalist.

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