Month: April 2012

Eusociality, Errors, and Behavioral Plasticity

Mark DavisLeave a comment

I encountered an error in E.O. Wilson’s The Social Conquest of Earth where the authors intended to assert an alternative to “kin selection” but instead repeated “multilevel selection,” which is precisely what the authors wanted to draw a distinction with. I am sympathetic, however, if for no other reason than I keep finding errors and issues with my own books and papers.

The critical technical discussion from Nature concerning the topic is available here. As technical discussion, the issues debated are fraught with details like how halictid bees appear to live socially, but are in fact solitary animals that co-exist in tunnel arrangements.

Despite the focus on “spring-loaded traits” as determiners for haplodiploid animals like bees and wasps, the problem of big-brained behavioral plasticity keeps coming up in Wilson’s book. Humanity is a pinnacle because of taming fire, because of the relative levels of energy available in animal flesh versus plant matter, and because of our ability to outrun prey over long distances (yes, our identity emerges from marathon running). But these are solutions that correlate with the rapid growth of our craniums.

So if behavioral plasticity is so very central to who we are, we are faced with an awfully complex problem in trying to simulate that behavior. We can expect that there must be phalanxes of genes involved in setting our developmental path (our nature and the substrate for our nurture). We should, indeed, expect that almost no cognitive capacity is governed by a small set of genes, and that all the relevant genes work in networks through polygeny, epistasis, and related effects (pleiotropy). And we can expect no easy answers as a result, except to assert that AI is exactly as hard as we should have expected, and progress will be inevitably slow in understanding the mind, the brain, and the way we interact.… Read the rest

Mental Religious Math

Mark DavisLeave a comment

The Los Angeles Times reports on an article from Science that shows that analytical thinking and religious belief may be inversely proportional. That may not be news to some, but at least one of the example problems (that the religious failed to complete at higher rates than the non-religious) is quite interesting:

A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

Here there is an initial intuitive leap that says that $1 more than 10 cents is precisely $1.10. Therefore, the ball costs $0.10 or 10 cents. It is easy and clear, but the math undermines that result:

Bat + Ball = $1.10

Bat = Ball + $1.00

(Ball + $1.00) + Ball = $1.10

2*Ball + $1.00 = $1.10

2*Ball = $0.10

Ball = $0.05

Bat = $1.05

This result makes sense if one considers that the cost of the bat must be greater than $1.00 because it is $1.00 more than the ball (and not $1.00 itself). But it is obscured by the initial intuitive leap based on simple subtraction.

But that example is a pretty hard one to reconcile concerning historical and faith-based judgments. I doubt that there is good reason to suspect that mathematical prowess and intuitive dispositions about the costs of things correlates with faith decisions because I suspect that there are other reasons that the faithful believe what they believe. Specifically, most religious faithful believe because they were told to believe by their parents or community. The fact that they do so doesn’t seem to translate into mathematical prowess or ineptness. They may very well score more poorly on these kinds of results because of other individual differences like that those who are more predisposed to critical analytical skills are less likely to have come from highly religious backgrounds, and vice versa.… Read the rest

Brain Size and Fitness

Mark DavisLeave a comment

An interesting data point taken from E.O. Wilson’s The Social Conquest of Earth: bigger brains mean better adaptation to new environments. That seems trivial in a way because it is part of the “folk” evolutionary theory that seems to flow naturally from the assumption of human uniqueness and our ostensive position at the apex of the evolutionary mountain.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. A very narrowly adapted organism could conceivably outcompete an intelligent generalist. The generalist requires massive physiological commitments to the energetic requirements of behavioral plasticity. The specialist is economical, efficient. So it has largely been an article of projective faith in folk theory that the human condition is explainable.

So it is always refreshing when I learn that there is empirical evidence that brings clarity to issues like this:

Big brains are hypothesized to enhance survival of animals by facilitating flexible cognitive responses that buffer individuals against environmental stresses. Although this theory receives partial support from the finding that brain size limits the capacity of animals to behaviourally respond to environmental challenges, the hypothesis that large brains are associated with reduced mortality has never been empirically tested. Using extensive information on avian adult mortality from natural populations, we show here that species with larger brains, relative to their body size, experience lower mortality than species with smaller brains, supporting the general importance of the cognitive buffer hypothesis in the evolution of large brains.

From Sol et. al., Big-brained birds survive better in nature. The emphasis in the title on “nature” suggests that perhaps they fail in captivity? Avian ennui?… Read the rest

The Orchard of Belief

Mark DavisLeave a comment

CherriesOne of the most important impacts of the “new atheists” was to break religious discussion out of its silos. Before their recent rise, it was easy for the sophisticated secularist to laugh at the Pat Robertsons because they seemed absurd caricatures of Christianity in America. It was equally irrelevant to the Catholic theologian what analytical philosophy was up to in worrying over the meaning of meaning. And Muslims largely kept to their mosques. But with the critiques of the new atheism came a new willingness to hold remarkable, frank, and intelligent discussions about religion and modern life.

Take Andrew Sullivan’s article in Newsweek that attacks a range of Christian movements within the US through the critical lens of the Jefferson Bible. Sullivan promotes the sermon-on-the-mount Jesus as a radical guru focused exclusively on love. The surrounding texts and their subsequent grafting onto church doctrines are the source of strife both within Christianity and in its interactions with other peoples down through history.

And so as Andrew Sullivan cherry picks on Jefferson’s intellectual plantation, Gary Cutting of Notre Dame points out that there is not much fruit on the vine in the New York Times:

Read alone, the Sermon on the Mount will either confuse us or merely reinforce the moral prejudices we bring to it.

The moral messaging is just too diffuse for Cutting to be able to render into a ethical road map: Should we try to maximize happiness or focus on individual rights? Is the state the proper vehicle for charity? Is democracy better than totalitarianism? These are all contemporary notions that are beside the point in the orchard of Sullivan’s love.

We can contrast this sparring with Ross Douthat at Slate in his ongoing debate cycle centered on his new book, Bad Religion, that picks at the same line of criticism as Sullivan with regard to some of the current strains of evangelism in America.… Read the rest

Signals and Noise: Chapter 7 (Parsimony)

Mark DavisLeave a comment

Monotony is the essential character of those late nights, so familiar to Zach and all his fellows. Monotony, but restful and calm, withholding the sharp edges and the intaglios of faces that define everyday interactions, while still remaining a part of the web of life. He could send an AetherNote or email and get a response, but without the complexities of the face had he been talking to the person. There were gigabytes of missed nuance, pursing lips, pauses, dilating pupils, flush responses—all lost behind the veil of electronica. Moreover, he could pause for that brief moment without any awkwardness, and they could pause as well, waiting for the ideas to filter out of the calamity of neural collisions. When everyone can order thoughts a hair faster than ever before in history, yet still interact deep into the night like they were sitting at a pub or around a campfire, there is an acceleration of competitiveness, a capacity for intellectual posturing. The new assholes, the new religionists, the new atheists, the new technologists, the strident politicos, the snarky personalities—everyone primps and props their online identities behind this veil of witty pretense, hearts racing as they snap at the refresh icon, waiting for the cannonball retort.

Democratizing it is, but with the side effect of drowning out the instant, unfiltered and emotive response on the one hand, and the dramatically conditioned and elaboratively intellectualized riposte on the other. There was too much lag for spontaneity and too little for detailed flourish. It is a channel that emphasizes bluster and bombast in securely short constructs. And thought followed suit. Thought on the average got better, but the best thought was drowned out by the long tails of opinions washing through them like the wake of a whale.… Read the rest

Arcosanti and Private Language

Mark DavisLeave a comment

We (meaning my family) visited Paolo Soleri‘s Arcosanti in the high desert north of Phoenix today. Arcosanti is an attempt at an “arcology” meaning a dense urban structure that lives in harmony with the ecosystem around it. The term is a portmanteau of “architecture” and “ecology,” and the original motivator for the site was to prove that dense urban living without cars and yards could be ecologically sensible and could inspire a sense of connectedness and community that has been lost in the suburbanization of America.

The facility is both amazing in its vision and somewhat dated in its approach. The limitations arise from its beginnings in the 70s and the available technology at that time. Only recently have photovoltaic panels been introduced. There is no real exploitation of wind power. Food self-sufficiency is only beginning to be addressed with greenhouses. It’s no biotecture but, arguably, it is a primary intellectual bedrock for new urbanism and green building.

We hiked out to the observation platform, we toured the ceramics facility and foundry, we bought bells and T-shirts, and I picked up a copy of Paolo Soleri: What If? Collected Writings 1986-2000.

It’s a flawed book filled with a unique form of craziness. I remember that Teilhard de Chardin-style abstract craziness from my late teenage years when I read Omega Seed, but early on in this new compendium there is an admission by the compiler that there very well may be a private aspect to the ideas that fuel the Soleri way of art that are inaccessible to rational thinking and imperfect in any linguistic rendering:

For the best artists, thought runs on a track alongside art and does not touch it, does not converge, leaving for the art the nondiscursive, the ineffable part that cannot be treated adequately by thought, by ratiocination.

… Read the rest

Nesting and Spring-loaded Parasitism

Mark DavisLeave a comment

While enjoying your eggs, you should consider what primitive social insects do with theirs. Why? Because it may be essential to our understanding of social behavior and, hence, the notion of moral and ethical behavior. I’m reading Nowak, Tarnita, and E.O. Wilson’s 2010 article (and 43 pages of supporting materials), “The evolution of eusociality” from Nature (466/doi:10.1038/nature09205).

This is a contentious paper, I should add, because it postulates “multilevel selection” that operate at the group or species level. It is remarkable in several ways. First, it uses mathematical terminology to explain aspects if the theory of eusociality (literally: “good sociality” but, theoretically, the highest levels of social interaction) that we rarely see in papers on evolutionary theory. Specifically, ideas like “global updating” are introduced to explain why traditional methods of explaining eusociality are plagued by false assumptions about the spatial distribution of mating opportunities. I’m reminded of my own critique of the microevolution versus macroevolution distinction that pervades anti-evolution arguments: why would nature (or God for that matter) prevent hybridization of species while making it easy for genetic drift within a species? We either have a failure of imagination, the deliberate introduction of barriers to hybridization just to fool all of us or maintain a prescribed order, or we have a continuous transition from micro to macro effects (hint: there is actually no real distinction).

But back to eggs. E.O. Wilson and colleagues suggest that the earliest forms of sociality were among the parasitic wasps, like the Tarantula Hawk. Accumulate prey, stuff eggs into them, and then move on. Next, icky stuff happens in the prey. One allele change can turn the move on behavior off when the local environment is sufficiently rich, however, and then moms and offspring hang around in colonies together.… Read the rest

Enjoy the eggs

Mark DavisLeave a comment

Eostre was a Germanic pagan deity, likely dating to Indo-European origins, and reflective of spring rebirth in northern European mythology. Jacob Grimm, of the Brothers Grimm, analyzed the linguistic and mythological origins of Easter and connected the modern beliefs to syncretization during European Christianization.

Still, Easter was about bunnies and fertility, with eggs representative of the latter. This was abstract symbolism. With syncretization, however, the traditions of human sacrifice drawn from Middle Eastern religion were overlain on the old forest beliefs about dawn and fertility. These sacrificial tendencies extend backward to the horrors of the Old Testament. We begin with Isaac and Jacob, but continue on to the genocide of the Amalekites by the Jews, including:

Thus says the Lord of hosts, “I have noted what Amalek did to Israel in opposing them on the way when they came up out of Egypt. Now go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction all that they have. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.” (1 Sam. 15:2-3)

Old Testament killing and sacrifice continues on and on:

 …you must attack that town and completely destroy all its inhabitants, as well as all the livestock. Then you must pile all the plunder in the middle of the open square and burn it. Burn the entire town as a burnt offering to the Lord your God. That town must remain a ruin forever; it may never be rebuilt. (Deuteronomy 13:13-19)

If you give me victory over the Ammonites, I will give to the LORD the first thing coming out of my house to greet me when I return in triumph.  I will sacrifice it [a daughter] as a burnt offering.

… Read the rest