Suffer the Little Chickens

I am an unapologetic carnivore. I have objections to veal, but then I don't find it particularly appetizing, so I'm sort of off the hook. I hold out hope that there are "humane" ways in which to conduct a livestock industry. I'm prepared to admit that I don't spend a tremendous amount of time thinking about it. While I'm ordering my Triple Whopper.

But I'm not convinced that vegetarian evangelists do, either. Not really. Consider the effect of selective breeding on the animals that we consume for meat, dairy, and other uses. It has been estimated that a mere 10,000 years ago, human beings, our pets, and our livestock accounted for about one tenth of one percent of the terrestrial vertebrate biomass. If it had a spine and lived on land, the odds were better than 99.9% that it was NOT an animal attended by us. Add up the humans living today with animals under our care and that share of the TVB is upwards of 98%. And most of it is bovine.



What is to account for this tremendous evolutionary success? Shepherds! Domesticating cattle, swine, poultry and the rest conferred huge benefits on ourselves, to be sure. But what a deal for the critters! They were able to outsource their most strenuous activities to us, such as acquiring food and mates. Consequently, their brains---no longer taxed by these biologically pressing demands---have shrunk. These animals are not their wild ancestors. They are not cut out for the world at large.

So what to do with them? As romantic as some may consider it to let them loose, that's obviously not an option. The environmental impact would be deep and far-reaching. Mother Nature is not nearly as compassionate as the (largely) well-intentioned folks who'd like to see done. In fact, she is a cruel bitch. There is no Eden waiting for ol' Bessie beyond those barnyard doors.

So what to do? I say we ponder the philosophical issues at hand, raise consciousness about the excesses of the livestock industry, and keep the hamburgers coming. I'll take mine with extra pickles.

The Cooking Apes

I was fortunate to finally get a hold of a copy of Richard Wrangham's marvelous study in human origins, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. It's a slim volume, and a recommended read for anyone interested in accounts of how we got here that do not include talking snakes. Whereas control of fire and the "civilized" custom of eating cooked food have long been held as the innovations of a clever primate that occured after we developed our big brains, Wrangham demonstrates why, in fact, the reverse is true---our big brains and civilized nature were made possible in the first place principally by just these two uniquely human activities.

"So what is this? More 'Just So' stories from the adaptionist peanut gallery?"

Hardly. The author assembles such an array of mutually reinforcing evidence from multiple fields of study that the reader is left with an impression that the core of his thesis should have been obvious all along. By the standard that the measure of a scientific proposition is the difference between what it explains and what is required to explain it, Wrangham's cooking hypothesis ranks among the best theories we have on what kindled the rapid rise of our species from a chimp-like ancestor, and makes us so different from living apes today.

Read this book.

Creationism 1, Evolution 0

A plucky university student takes on the Darwinist establishment in this Chick classic. Sure, you may be aware that evolution is a fraud perpetrated by the devil, but did you also know that it's Jesus holding the atoms together? (Seriously.)

Coquimus, Ergo Sumus

Richard Wrangham is a British anthropologist and primatologist who has been teaching at Harvard for 20 years. His new book, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, which comes out in May, makes a compelling case that the way to humanity was through the stomach. Wrangham noticed that chimpanzees, for instance, can range all day and find little of nutritional value. Indeed, much of their waking lives are spent chewing up really shitty food.

But once our ancestors got hold of fire, and cooked foods as a staple of their diet, less energy spent digesting made room for bigger brains, smaller teeth and guts, and the ultimate rise of the lean, striding animal that replaced chimp-like austrolopithicines. Wrangham evokes the image of communal cooking fires as centers of social development. It puts a whole new poignancy into telling tales around the campfire.

Another theory, the "running man" model---which has been treated on this page---also relies on nutrition as a key element, and finds no rival here. The two, in fact, could be viewed as complimentary. Wrangham's theory even purports to make a prediction of sorts. In order for his theory to stand, use of fire would have to stretch back nearly two million years, well beyond even the most remote archaeological estimates. Of sites that demonstrate earlier use, Wrangham says, "We'll get them."



I tend to think of language and art as early human technologies. Excellent theoretical modeling has been done to show how these innovations were not incidental but key to our evolution. The mastery of fire and developmental doors opened by cooking round the picture out nicely.

Across the Multiverse

Seed Magazine, IMHO the best popular science magazine in print today, explores the promise of the multiverse theory as a new way for thoughtful people to talk past one another.

The garden-variety understanding of the concept emerged out of the past two decades as an answer to the "fine tuning" argument, which holds that a universe with us in it is too improbable to have happened by accident (i.e., there must have been a designer).

Not so fast, say naturalists, If there is a problem with the odds, simply increase the number of universes. The theory follows that ours is just one tiny bubble in a great froth of universes coming into and going out of existence all the time, each with its own unique set of constants---some hospitable to life as we know it, others not so much. We happen to inhabit the sort that makes things like us. We know this is true because here we are.

But with science leaving very few places these days in which for The Designer to hide, whether it's in supposedly irreducible structures at the cellular level, or within the great fog of quantum weirdness, the plastic properties of the multiverse proposition are beginning to attract some favorable attention from theologians.

And so the God meme stumbles its way across the path of least resistance.

Here at last is a free range of the imagination where The One Who Is Greater Than That Which Can Be Conceived may finally flourish into, well, whatever we want. When it comes to the possibility of a multiverse, one feature of particular interest to professional and amateur theologians alike is a lack of falsifiability. There is no limit the extent to which brains can generate a never-ending froth of multiverse scenarios all their own. In fact it comes quite naturally to us, as neuroscientists are coming to see in their study of how we make what we call decisions. It turns out that the task of our massive prefrontal cortex in regulating behavior is not to simply issue orders from Central Command, but to imagine all of the possible outcomes at once and select for the ones we deem best suited to our advantage.

We are all multiverse theorists.

Marathon Man

Seed Magazine considers the theory that endurance running is an adaptive trait hailing back to the period between australopithecines and modern humans. At some point around 2 million years ago, plodding, plant-munching Lucy developed into a fleet-footed bipedal locomotor, with springy tendons, powerful buttocks, and a mechanism for holding our head in place during rapid movement.

In other words, our ancestors was some runnin' fools.

New morphological evidence shows that shorter toes are also ideally suited to swift, long-distance trekking. Shorter toes, like those of Homo erectus, appear in the fossil record at about the same time as smaller, flesh-cutting teeth. Somehow, our predecessors had evolved to support a high-calorie diet of meat and fruits many, many thousands of years before the first spear tip, or bow and arrow. The theory suggests that we simply ran our prey to death, which is not so difficult, apparently.

“Running an animal to heatstroke is something that most humans can do, and that other animals can’t,” says [anthropologist Daniel] Lieberman. “It’s a compelling explanation for why these capabilities evolved, and frankly, nobody’s come up with a better idea yet.”

Man, I can't even run to catch the bus. Shit. I'm not sure this theory is where it's at.

What Really Happened to the Dinosaurs

Creation "science" takes on evolutionist dogma.

WARNING! Do not read unless you are ready for your precious, Darwinist house of cards to come crashing down.

Is Art?

Denis Dutton rubs a lot of aesthetes the wrong way with his new book, The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution. Dutton invites readers to entertain the notion that art is shaped by aesthetic preferences buried deep in our evolutionary past. Postmodern bullshit artists worry that good science about what humans like and why might jeopardize their racket as the self-appointed arbiters of taste.

"Why, then, should we find art museums everywhere packed with modern art? Whence the profound sense of the artist's triumph in the presence of Duchamp's Fountain, if what we really want are quotidian depictions of bucolic landscapes reminiscent of our Pleistocene-era origins, as philistines like Dutton contend?"

It should be remembered that the vagaries of modern art are lost on the average art consumer. And it should come as no surprise also that the status of being able to truly appreciate the counterintuitive, often deliberately obscure ins and outs of modern art is one that signals an elite, cultivated, and altogether acquired sensibility, or skill. Art snobs even have a name for the art that's for "everybody else." Kitsch.



Dutton courts the worst from his critics when he speculates that Schoenberg's atonal symphonies, which any uncultured swine at the local WalMart would take for random noise, won't stand the test of time because the unconventional works don't jive with our inner caveman. Schoenberg fans get the message that evolutionary theorists have implied they are all under some mass delusion. But I do not believe Dutton is trying to make the point that it's impossible to appreciate dissonant compositions, only that innate preferences over the long run will tend to deplete the population of individuals available to pass on the very distinct language and vocabulary required to appreciate it as intended. I don't detect an attempt to disqualify atonality as an art form.

In the face of Dutton's claim, an explanation for inscrutable modern forms is demanded, and deserved. This is precisely where the New Zealand scholar positions a strong word of caution against the traditional aesthetic approach. Rather than try to come up with a definition of art that encompasses the "hard cases" like Piss Christ, Dutton suggests that we first work our way backward through clearer, more established examples, using what we can learn about how art has stimulated and even shaped us throughout our evolutionary history to explain how more recent departures from the norm could have been given rise.

But there's considerable resistance to the idea that reverse-engineering art through deep time is a fruitful endeavor. Every well-reasoned reconstruction of the conditions in which certain cultural elements must have emerged is sure to be met with the darling accusation of being nothing more than a "Just So" story. This clever move alone is enough for many detractors to declare the matter closed. Skeptics of the evolutionary approach to aesthetics (or language) should ask themselves whether evidence abounds of a common ancestor between humans and chimpanzees, or does it not? We have no such fossil. We haven't the animal's genome, but we have human DNA, and chimp DNA, and the ability to extrapolate from the available data that such a creature almost certainly existed. Is this a "Just So" story?

Dutton illuminates the kind of research that might support testable hypotheses, including studies which seem to outline some kind of shared, aesthetic sensibility which transcends cultural boundaries. The task is to isolate what may have fixed those values. Impossible, comes the charge, any attempt to assign cultural predispositions universally meets with the problem of cross-contamination. Still, one is unlikely to find an educated person making this argument who is also willing to reject the science of heredity because horizontal transmission of viral strains could fudge the picture.

The rear guard of social science has nothing to fear from maximalists aimed at synthesizing multiple fields of study in order to yeild predictive models of human behavior. The hard won gains of anthropology and sociology become more vital than ever in this new consilience, so that researchers from outside the discipline don't have to reinvent the wheel.

[Edit: Steven Pinker stands by his "auditory cheesecake" remark. Although an enthusiastic supporter of consilience, whose own views about evolutionary psychology have changed over the years, he maintains his position that art is not adaptive.]

Expelled!

Christopher Hitchens chronicles the long, sad history of Creationism's pathetic assault on evolution, which was dealt another blow in Texas this week when the Board of Education retired a state science curriculum which compelled instructors to pretend that evolution theory is the equivalent of a pretty good guess---giving blinkered creationist clowns their opening to suggest an alternative theory: Goddidit.

Had the geniuses in the vanguard of evangelical Christianity's "culture war" actually succeeded in upholding the guidelines, Hitchens points out, it would only have set the table for some serious blowback. What proponents of "equal time" for creation stories may be missing is that people who care about good science education are beginning to rally behind proposals from people like materialist philosopher Dan Dennett that indeed equal time be given to as many of the thousands of available creation myths as you can cram into a textbook.

During the seminal Dover, Pa trial a few years ago, a marvelous new meme was born when previously published "creationist" propaganda was discovered to have been repurposed as an "intelligent design" manifesto. Buried within the text was a typo resulting from the sloppy replacement of the word "creationist" with the slightly more scientific "design proponent". So much for the claim that "intelligent design" is anything less than creationism in scientific garb. Lawyers on the prevailing side of the case were able to herald that they had discovered the missing link between creationism and intelligent design. Behold, the cdesign proponentist.

It may have been the low point for a once-prominent political lobby whose demographic base is in swift retreat. "Victories" like the one they sought in Texas would only hasten their decline.

"Evolutionary"

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner told reporters at a Council on Foreign Relations event today that the United States is "open" to suggestions from China's top banker that nations take steps to extend the special drawing rights of the International Monetary Fund toward a new global reserve currency. The dollar tracked down by less than two percent before picking back up by the time the Secretary clarified the government's position, several minutes later. Bottom line: the adminstration wants to send very clear signals that a strong dollar is in America's best interest, and as the president himself pointedly assured during his press conference last night, the United States has no plans to see a "new global currency" replace the dollar.

Geithner, demonstrating a bracingly misplaced confidence in his audience, explained that his understanding of the Chinese proposal had to do with moving the dollar itself, in its own "evolutionary" progression, toward a reserve currency that is more responsive to the demands placed upon it by the global market. As he put it:

We’re actually quite open to that suggestion – you should see it as rather evolutionary rather building on the current architecture rather than moving us to global monetary union.

Of course the effective headline out of this foolhardy attempt at drawing a reasonable distinction has been "Bumbling Treasury Secretary Supports Dumping Dollar". That's the reward for intellectual honesty these days. I won't pretend to understand the full scope of this issue, but I for one am very happy at least to see some mental flexibility from Mr. Geithner. To his credit, he resists the temptation to paint every scenario as black and white.

You never know, keep treating people like adults and they might just start acting like it.