Shunya's Notes

The Inner Lives of Animals

2012-05-21T21:00:00-07:00

(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments.)

It is often said that humans are the only animals to use symbols. So many other claims of human uniqueness have fallen away—thoughts, emotions, intelligence, tool use, sense of fairness—what's so special about symbols, you ask? I share your skepticism, dear reader, and in the next few paragraphs I'll tell you why.

Let's begin by clarifying what "symbol" means here. One way to do this is to contrast symbols with signs. A sign, such as a red light, a grimace, a growl, or a thunderstorm, signifies something direct and tangible, making us think or act in response to the thing signified. Issuing and responding to signs is commonplace in Animalia. A symbol, on the other hand, is "something that represents something else by association, resemblance, or convention". A symbol allows us to think about the thing or idea symbolized outside its immediate context, such as the word "water" for the liquid, "7" for a certain quantity, and "flag" for a community. What is symbolized doesn't even have to be real, such as God, and herein lies the power of symbols—they are the building blocks of abstract and reflective thought. Evidence of material symbols used by humans dates back at least 60-100K years, when burial objects and decorated beads start to appear in archaeological finds. Linguistic symbols were almost certainly in use long before then.

According to Susanne Langer, symbols serve "to liberate thought from the immediate stimuli of a physically present world; and that liberation marks the essential difference between human and nonhuman mentality ... Words, pictures, and memory images are symbols that may be combined and varied in a thousand ways." It is only through symbolic thought that we imagine the past or the future—mental time-travel, including episodic memory, requires the use of symbols. Indeed, language is really a system of symbolic communication, combining words (which are symbols) and syntax. If non-human animals lack symbols, what and how do they really think?

Do Animals Live Only in the Moment?

If it's true that we are the only species that uses symbols, then nonhuman animals (henceforth animals), including intelligent problem-solvers, live purely in the moment and perceive only their immediate environments. They follow habit and reflex, have at best associative feelings and emotional states, and cannot think about anything in the past or the future, nor wilfully imagine fond objects they cannot see. For instance, per this view, a hungry dog cannot imagine in her mind a food bowl, nor imagine her pup that died yesterday (because this needs a mental image, i.e., a symbol for the bowl and the pup), nor plan with intent for a future event. Sure, past events may impact animal moods in the present—as from a beating a dog may have received—but the dog would not be able to recall the face or the location of the beater in her mind, until he reappears in person and awakens associative feelings. A lack of symbols would also imply that animals have no consciousness, if we assume that consciousness needs at least a minimal "awareness of self", which is an abstract, symbolic idea. Animals like birds and mammals then, implies this view, live entirely in a state of "momentary sentience". They do little more than feel pleasure and pain, act out of instinct, and respond to signs using the physical abilities that evolution has granted them.

Could this portrait be true? As support for this "no symbols" model of the animal mind, defenders claim that animals display no actual evidence of symbol use. But how solid is this claim? Can we reliably say that symbols are not being used in some cases? For instance, take the mating dance ritual of Blue-footed Boobies, during which the male gives the female "a small stone or stick. He then tips his beak, tail, and wing tips to the sky and whistles." If there were any symbolic import in the stone vs. the stick, or its size and weight, or in the type of whistle, how would we know it? When a chipmunk stashes away nuts for the winter, is that purely instinctive or is a certain symbolic conception of a cold, nutless future mixed in? Do elephants invest a certain amount of symbolism in mourning their dead? There may well be no symbolic import in these examples, but if there were some, how would we know? Then there is the vast range of non-visual expression in the animal world where symbols may exist but to which we are quite oblivious. Herein lies a genuine epistemological problem: how do we know the inner experience of animals like chipmunks, monkeys, and elephants, each with its unique and frequently prodigious capacities of sight, smell, memory, taste, sound, locomotion, spatial cognition, echolocation, geomagnetic sensors, and more?

One reason to be skeptical of the "no symbols" model of animal minds is based on a consideration of the astonishing problems many animals solve to survive and the complex social behaviors they actually display. Is all that possible without any symbols? Some of it may be but some may not be. Can a baboon order, classify, and track over a lifetime its complex social-hierarchical relations with hundreds of individuals without symbolic concepts about them? Mary Midgley adds, "Many animals move continually from one food source to another, often with their young to provision, and sometimes with responsibility for a whole pack or herd. They have to be able to think how long this or that will last, or when it will recur. If they had not enough memory and anticipation of order to fit their plans into the probable train of events, with alterations for altered circumstances, they often could not survive."

In recent decades, experiments and systematic observations have seriously questioned the "no symbols" model. We now know that many animals, including chimpanzees, whales, dolphins, and even African Grey parrots, at least have the capacity for symbol use. The behavior of the bonobo in Susan Savage-Rumbaugh's video is a great argument for why symbol use is likely continuous with other animals. Three years ago a chimp "jolted the research community by providing some of the strongest evidence yet that nonhumans could plan ahead". At least one study describes how Capuchin monkeys were taught the use of certain symbols. While evidence for a capacity does not constitute evidence for its active use, these findings are notable. Does evolution commonly provision unused capacities?

In fact, a range of studies have revealed animal behaviors that, in humans, involve symbol use. Some birds "can recall past events and use the information to plan for the future". Many species "show behavioral manifestations of different features of episodic memory". Tool-using beavers have "been observed gathering material they need before starting to build, which shows forethought." The ability to correctly order numerical quantities exists in many species. Flexible and contextual deceptive behaviors, such as playing-dead to escape certain types of predators, are practiced by some birds and mammals. Behaviors suggesting metacognition—the knowledge of what one knows—have been detected in rats. Pigs are apparently capable of "visual perspective taking, which is the ability to assume what the other [weaker pig] sees and to adjust one's own behavior accordingly", suggesting "a degree of theory of mind". Several species have passed the mirror self-recognition test—including magpies, which belong to a distant evolutionary lineage from us—even as many other animals may get more of their "sense of self" from better developed aural, olfactory, tactile, and other sensory information. While not conclusive, these findings are significant enough to have thrown wide open the big question: What can we justifiably say about the inner lives of animals?

Since the 1970s, many cognitive ethologists and other specialists who study animals have challenged old orthodoxies about animal minds, including many implications of the "no symbols" model. This has invited accusations of naïve anthropomorphism from some who appeal to "reason" and "parsimony" (as if these weren't eternally corruptible human constructs. Their accusations in fact remind me of the "relativism" bogey). To be fair, it is also true that many animal lovers tend to inflate or misrepresent the capacities of animals; our folk stories, animated cartoons, and casual talk routinely assign human-like thought to them. Though we share a lot in common, humans are clearly not the same as other animals, who almost certainly don't sit around and argue about their models of the human mind. Having said that, how deeply does one's head have to be buried in the sand to defend the "no-symbols" model today, versus one that is more elastic and non-binary on the question of symbol use and is better able to account for observed animal behaviors?

A model, for instance, that embraces a gradualist and nonlinear evolutionary approach to animal minds, and permits many species some symbols both inside and out, giving them a certain sense of time, episodic memory, and intent. (Arguably, we too use lots of prelinguistic symbols that remain inside, and of which we are only partly aware. Human social and sexual relations, for instance, abound in subterranean and primordial symbols of power and desire—all part of the substrate in which our newly learned and linguistic symbols likely take hold.) Migratory cranes and whales have navigation skills far superior to anything humans possess, but this does not mean humans have zero navigation sense. Likewise for symbol use. Where humans have the crane-like advantage is in our ability to "learn massive numbers of arbitrary symbols" and to give expression to them (in art, ritual, language, etc.)—adaptations fueled by our more complex social lives.

Frans de Waal writes, "There will always be tension between those who view animals as only slightly more flexible than machines and those who see them as only slightly less rational than human beings." The problem of other minds is even worse across the species barrier. Science may never be able to settle whether animals use symbols in their inner lives, or whether they live entirely in the moment. We're stuck with reasoned interpretation of carefully observed behavior. And at the end of it, long after running the animals through our speciocentric hoops, if certain behaviors leave room for doubt about their symbolic content, why not give animals the benefit of the doubt? As JM Coetzee puts it, "Why should it be the doubters who always get the benefit of the doubt?"

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This essay was motivated by an exchange on another 3QD thread with my friend, Chris Schoen, to whom I'm grateful for that discussion.
More writing by Namit Arora?
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Two Hundred Years of Surgery

2012-05-15T22:26:08-07:00

Atul Gawande reviews the last two years years of the surgical profession, from the days before anesthesia and antiseptics (yikes!).

Consider, for instance, amputation of the leg. The procedure had long been recognized as lifesaving, in particular for compound fractures and other wounds prone to sepsis, and at the same time horrific. Before the discovery of anesthesia, orderlies pinned the patient down while an assistant exerted pressure on the femoral artery or applied a tourniquet on the upper thigh. Surgeons using the circular method proceeded through the limb in layers, taking a long curved knife in a circle through the skin first, then, a few inches higher up, through the muscle, and finally, with the assistant retracting the muscle to expose the bone a few inches higher still, taking an amputation saw smoothly through the bone so as not to leave splintered protrusions. Surgeons using the flap method, popularized by the British surgeon Robert Liston, stabbed through the skin and muscle close to the bone and cut swiftly through at an oblique angle on one side so as to leave a flap covering the stump.

The limits of patients' tolerance for pain forced surgeons to choose slashing speed over precision. With either the flap method or the circular method, amputation could be accomplished in less than a minute, though the subsequent ligation of the severed blood vessels and suturing of the muscle and skin over the stump sometimes required 20 or 30 minutes when performed by less experienced surgeons. No matter how swiftly the amputation was performed, however, the suffering that patients experienced was terrible. Few were able to put it into words. Among those who did was Professor George Wilson. In 1843, he underwent a Syme amputation — ankle disarticulation — performed by the great surgeon James Syme himself. Four years later, when opponents of anesthetic agents attempted to dismiss them as “needless luxuries,” Wilson felt obliged to pen a description of his experience:

The horror of great darkness, and the sense of desertion by God and man, bordering close on despair, which swept through my mind and overwhelmed my heart, I can never forget, however gladly I would do so. During the operation, in spite of the pain it occasioned, my senses were preternaturally acute, as I have been told they generally are in patients in such circumstances. I still recall with unwelcome vividness the spreading out of the instruments: the twisting of the tourniquet: the first incision: the fingering of the sawed bone: the sponge pressed on the flap: the tying of the blood-vessels: the stitching of the skin: the bloody dismembered limb lying on the floor.

A 50-Year Plan for Energy

2012-05-05T17:49:46-07:00

In this TED talk, Amory Lovins, an energy researcher, lays out a plan for a whole new private-sector energy industry that will save trillions while decimating fossil fuel use, creating jobs, reducing oil conflicts, and growing the economy. For more, visit ReinventingFire.com.

The Slow Explosion of Speech

2012-05-04T22:05:08-07:00

In this review of James R. Hurford's The Origins of Grammar, Nick Enfield presents a significant viewpoint on how we humans, from a stage when our ancestors were without language, came to acquire language in all its modern complexity.

If you could travel back to a time around the dawn of humankind, and if you encountered a people there whose only form of language was a list of one-word interjections like Yuck, Wow, Oops, Hey!, No, and Huh?, would you say that these people were of a different species, not quite human? Would they be like today’s apes that simply don’t have it in them to fully acquire a modern human language? Or would they be the same as us only less well equipped for communication, like the eighteenth-century man who is every bit human but happens not to have been born in a world with telephones? If the latter were true, then language would be more technology than biology, more something we build than something that grows. It’s clear that the earliest humans did not possess language as we know it. The question is whether this was because language as we know it hadn’t yet been invented.

In James R. Hurford’s towering account of our species’ path from being once without language to now being emphatically with it, he proposes that just such a monophrase language of the Yuck/Wow variety was an important early human achievement. And, Hurford argues, while our earliest forms of language had no grammatical rules by which words were combined to form sentences, they were far from primitive call systems.

More here. Also see this 3QD thread for a discussion on language, syntax, and symbol use among animals, where I've weighed in too.

"Like this only India will progress"

2012-04-20T20:29:14-07:00

Satire may well be the best way of dealing with this latest absurdity in a culture obsessed with fair skin. This piece by Suchi Govindarajan in Himal is brilliantly funny!

I am very much connected to Internetworks these days. My friends are sending me every day new new links, and I am expanding my world too much. But yesterday one shocking video I saw. One married girl is thinking about those shame-shame areas of her body, that too while having coffee with her husband! Some animation is coming when she is bathing, showing all brown parts shining and becoming like snow-white, and then she is gallivanting like anything with the husband wearing chaddis. I was shocked. But my friend Kiccha is saying, "So what, there are so many fairness creams these days, and that too for different-different parts of your body: underarms, ears, elbows, teeth, brain, etc."

See, I am very much in favour of fairness and just society. Fairness is very much important even to break caste, creed and religion. You are knowing Ramaswamy's daughter? She went off and married American Christian boy. Aiyyo, it was big scandal, and parents completely cut her off. They didn't even say that she is married. But within one year, the couple were blessed with fair-skinned issue. Seeing such a white baby (blue eyes also), their hearts and all melted. Now they are even wheeling the baby in a pram on famous Besantnagar beach in Madras. All are envying them now. This is the real power of fairness.

But why you want to marry Americans? You can even solve this problem with age-old wisdom! If pregnant ladies are taking saffron with milk, it will be reducing melanin production in the baby and it will come out like a ball of maida flour. This saffron science is all proven and published on email. If you want, I can forward.

More here.

The Evolved Apprentice

2012-04-15T00:00:00-07:00

Kim Sterelny, a leading philosopher of biology (and author of the bestseller Dawkins vs. Gould) has a new book, The Evolved Apprentice: How Evolution Made Humans Unique. Here is a brief description (and an essay by Sterelny):

Over the last three million years or so, our lineage has diverged sharply from those of our great ape relatives. Change has been rapid (in evolutionary terms) and pervasive. Morphology, life history, social life, sexual behavior, and foraging patterns have all shifted sharply away from other great apes. No other great ape lineage--including those of chimpanzees and gorillas--seems to have undergone such a profound transformation. In The Evolved Apprentice, Kim Sterelny argues that the divergence stems from the fact that humans gradually came to enrich the learning environment of the next generation. Humans came to cooperate in sharing information, and to cooperate ecologically and reproductively as well, and these changes initiated positive feedback loops that drove us further from other great apes.

Sterelny develops a new theory of the evolution of human cognition and human social life that emphasizes the gradual evolution of information sharing practices across generations and how information sharing transformed human minds and social lives. Sterelny proposes that humans developed a new form of ecological interaction with their environment, cooperative foraging, which led to positive feedback linking ecological cooperation, cultural learning, and environmental change. The ability to cope with the immense variety of human ancestral environments and social forms, he argues, depended not just on adapted minds but also on adapted developmental environments.

Chris Schoen on Free Will

2012-04-14T00:00:00-07:00

The old debate on free will has lately flared up again. Are we "biochemical puppets, swayed by forces beyond our conscious control", or "authors of our own actions, beliefs, and desires"? Or something in between? The Chronicle of Higher Education recently invited several thinkers to weigh in on the question of free will, which then spawned additional commentaries. One that I really enjoyed reading is this essay by my friend, Chris Schoen. The Iris Murdoch quote he provides with commentary towards the end is particularly insightful.

Sometimes people have arguments they don't want to have in order to shore up some principle they wish they didn't have to defend. Actually, most debate can probably be characterized this way, though it doesn't always nestle up against outright absurdity the way that the argument I will speak of here is so prone to do, namely the argument that something called "Determinism" means that something else called "Free Will" cannot exist.

This is a rather hot debate right now, largely because advocates of the "incompatibilist" or "hard determinist" view I have just described believe they smell blood in the water and have moved in for the kill. Sam Harris, the smartest man who was ever wrong about everything, has a recent book out on the topic ("Free Will,") and Jerry Coyne, the smartest horse ever to be led to water while steadfastly refusing to drink, has made this topic a regular staple on his blog.

The conversation has lately found its way into the pages of the Chronicle of Higher Education, which recently featured five essays on the debate by Coyne and some of the top names in neuroscience and philosophy of mind.

More here.

A Film on Bismillah Khan

2012-04-13T00:00:00-07:00

A friend pointed me to this wonderful 1989 film on the life and times of Bismillah Khan (1916-2006), a musician as great as any that India has produced. It reveals Khan's enduring sense of place, his syncretic faith, his modesty and egalitarianism, and his extraordinary talent and devotion to music. The film presents many vanishing old world values, stories, and traditions of musical learning, with footage of the narrow alleys of Varanasi and its ghats by the Ganga, which Khan loved and missed on his travels. Though a pious Muslim, he also revered the Goddess Saraswati and often played at the famous Vishwanath temple on the ghats of Varanasi. (90 min, Hindi, no subtitles.)

It so happens that Bismillah Khan presided over the union that made my existence possible in the world! He played at my parents wedding in 1959, when he was a rising star, as a favor to my maternal grandfather who was a pretty senior official in the UP state bureaucracy. The photos on the right are from that occasion.

Undercover in a Slaughterhouse

2012-04-11T21:50:58-07:00

How do self-professed animal lovers reconcile their love of animals with eating them? To eat animals today is to almost always participate in a gigantic cycle of industrialized violence and brutality against animals. Animal lovers eating animals—despite today's plant alternatives—now strikes me as one of the more unsettling examples of self-deception, denial, and moral blindness in human affairs. Yet another instance of the banality of evil? In Every Twelve Seconds, Timothy Pachirat, who took up a job in a slaughterhouse to learn how society normalizes violence against animals, describes his experiences. Here is an interview with the author.

Avi: What are the main strategies used to hide violence in the slaughterhouse?

Timothy: The first and most obvious is that the violence of industrialized killing is hidden from society at large. Over 8.5 billion animals are killed for food each year in the United States [nearly a million per hour], but this killing is carried out by a small minority of largely immigrant workers who labor behind opaque walls, most often in rural, isolated locations far from urban centers. Furthermore, laws supported by the meat and livestock industries are currently under consideration in six states that criminalize the publicizing of what happens in slaughterhouses and other animal facilities without the consent of the slaughterhouse owners. Iowa's House of Representatives, for example, forwarded a bill to the Iowa Senate last year that would make it a felony to distribute or possess video, audio, or printed material gleaned through unauthorized access to a slaughterhouse or animal facility.

Second, the slaughterhouse as a whole is divided into compartmentalized departments. The front office is isolated from the fabrication department, which is in turn isolated from the cooler, which is in turn isolated from the kill floor. It is entirely possible to spend years working in the front office, fabrication department, or cooler of an industrialized slaughterhouse that slaughters over half a million cattle per year without ever once encountering a live animal much less witnessing one being killed.

But third and most importantly, the work of killing is hidden even at the site where one might expect it to be most visible: the kill floor itself. The complex division of labor and space acts to compartmentalize and neutralize the experience of "killing work" for each of the workers on the kill floor.

More here (via The Browser). Also check out my previous posts on this topic:

1. Slaughter in America
2. The Lives of Animals
3. Asian Food for Thought
4. Flesh of Your Flesh

Jinasena on God the Creator

2012-04-05T20:21:31-07:00

In 9th century CE India, a Jain teacher called Jinasena composed a work called Mahapurana. The following is a quote from it.

Some foolish men declare that [a] Creator made the world. The doctrine that the world was created is ill-advised, and should be rejected. If god created the world, where was he before creation? If you say he was transcendent then, and needed no support, where is he now? No single being had the skill to make the world—for how can an immaterial god create that which is material? How could god have made the world without any raw material? If you say he made this first, and then the world, you are faced with an endless regression. If you declare that the raw material arose naturally you fall into another fallacy, for the whole universe might thus have been its own creator, and have risen equally naturally. If god created the world by an act of will, without any raw material, then it is just his will made nothing else and who will believe this silly stuff? If he is ever perfect, and complete, how could the will to create have arisen in him? If, on the other hand, he is not perfect, he could no more create the universe than a potter could. If he is formless, actionless, and all-embracing, how could he have created the world? Such a soul, devoid of all modality, would have no desire to create anything. If you say that he created to no purpose, because it was his nature to do so then god is pointless. If he created in some kind of sport, it was the sport of a foolish child, leading to trouble. If he created out of love for living things and [in his] need of them he made the world, why did he not make creation wholly blissful, free from misfortune? Thus the doctrine that the world was created by god makes no sense at all.

One thing led to another, as it often does on the web, and I ended up ordering Primal Myths : Creation Myths Around the World.

Is There a Universal Grammar?

2012-04-01T13:28:46-07:00

Do humans have an innate universal grammar, i.e., are we all born with certain foundational rules of language "hard-wired" in our brain—and which we don't need to learn? The dominant theory in linguistics, long associated with Noam Chomsky, says yes. However, this is not entirely accepted in the field, and challengers have only increased. Many now lean away from innate universal rules, and towards innate capacities or instincts that are shaped by culture into rules. Here is an excellent article on the debate and the work of a leading challenger, Dan Everett.

A Christian missionary sets out to convert a remote Amazonian tribe. He lives with them for years in primitive conditions, learns their extremely difficult language, risks his life battling malaria, giant anacondas, and sometimes the tribe itself. In a plot twist, instead of converting them he loses his faith, morphing from an evangelist trying to translate the Bible into an academic determined to understand the people he's come to respect and love.

Along the way, the former missionary discovers that the language these people speak doesn't follow one of the fundamental tenets of linguistics, a finding that would seem to turn the field on its head, undermine basic assumptions about how children learn to communicate, and dethrone the discipline's long-reigning king, who also happens to be among the most well-known and influential intellectuals of the 20th century.

More here. Some discussion on this article, including by Everett, took place here. This builds upon a really good New Yorker essay from 2007, The Interpreter (which carried the photo above). Also check out The Myth of Language Universals, which argues that the "claims of Universal Grammar ... are either empirically false, unfalsifiable, or misleading in that they refer to tendencies rather than strict universals."

Krauss on the Universe

2012-03-26T21:26:37-07:00

Physicist Lawrence Krauss has a new book, A Universe from Nothing. I happen to like Krauss and have seen some of his lectures. He is brilliant, entertaining, and good at distilling cosmology for non-specialists (and the emerging picture of the cosmos is incredibly mind-bending). In his role as a science educator, I've also seen him as smarter on religion than the better known neo-atheists like Dawkins and Harris (which admittedly is not saying much, and Krauss seems to have gotten worse).

It was the book's subtitle, however, that really caught my attention: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing. This is what Krauss has set out to explain—surely one of the greatest mysteries of all time, and perhaps the ultimate question in metaphysics. Can Krauss be serious, I thought? Then I read David Albert's excellent review and I'm persuaded that we are no closer to answering that question than we were before this book, and I am really stunned that Krauss thinks he is answering it. Another reviewer has supplied what may be a more accurate subtitle: "How It Is That There Happens to Be This Something rather than Some Other Something." Sure, this is not sexy but at least it's not false marketing. Here is Albert's review:

Lawrence M. Krauss, a well-known cosmologist and prolific popular-science writer, apparently means to announce to the world, in this new book, that the laws of quantum mechanics have in them the makings of a thoroughly scientific and adamantly secular explanation of why there is something rather than nothing. Period. Case closed. End of story. I kid you not. Look at the subtitle. Look at how Richard Dawkins sums it up in his afterword: “Even the last remaining trump card of the theologian, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?,’ shrivels up before your eyes as you read these pages. If ‘On the Origin of Species’ was biology’s deadliest blow to supernaturalism, we may come to see ‘A Universe From Nothing’ as the equivalent from cosmology. The title means exactly what it says. And what it says is devastating.”

Well, let’s see. ... Where, for starters, are the laws of quantum mechanics themselves supposed to have come from? Krauss is more or less upfront, as it turns out, about not having a clue about that. He acknowledges (albeit in a parenthesis, and just a few pages before the end of the book) that everything he has been talking about simply takes the basic principles of quantum mechanics for granted. “I have no idea if this notion can be usefully dispensed with,” he writes, “or at least I don’t know of any productive work in this regard.” And what if he did know of some productive work in that regard? What if he were in a position to announce, for instance, that the truth of the quantum-mechanical laws can be traced back to the fact that the world has some other, deeper property X? Wouldn’t we still be in a position to ask why X rather than Y? And is there a last such question? Is there some point at which the possibility of asking any further such questions somehow definitively comes to an end? How would that work? What would that be like?

More here. Also see this interview in which Robert Wright brilliantly and relentlessly grills Krauss on the facile claim in the book's subtitle.

Are There Human Races?

2012-03-25T14:16:33-07:00

People now use the term "race" to refer to a host of human differences. Very often people tend to essentialize it with traits of character and intelligence, and are then deemed "racist" by others. Can talk of "human races" have a defensible biological specificity, or is it only a dubious social construct that we should promptly abandon? The answer is: it depends on what one means by "race".

Jerry A. Coyne makes a fair case below for the term's relevance in science. However, in his final paragraph, he falters seriously in saying that races "are certainly not 'sociocultural constructs.'"—they are that, too, as is plainly evident in how so many non-biologists use the term. Indeed, given all the baggage, perhaps we are better off switching to other terms like 'peoples', 'ethnicities', 'groups', 'castes', etc.

One of the touchiest subjects in human evolutionary biology—or human biology in general—is the question of whether there are human races. Back in the bad old days, it was taken for granted that the answer was not only “yes,” but that there was a ranking of races (invariably done by white biologists), with Caucasians on top, Asians a bit lower, and blacks invariably on the bottom. The sad history of biologically based racism has been documented in many places, including Steve Gould’s book The Mismeasure of Man (yes, I know it’s flawed).

But from that sordid scientific past has come a backlash: the subject of human races, or even the idea that they exist, has become taboo. And this despite the palpable morphological differences between human groups—differences that must be based on genetic differences and would, if seen in other species, lead to their classification as either races or subspecies (the terms are pretty interchangeable in biology). Racial delimitation could, critics say, lead to a resurgence of racism, racial profiling, or even eugenics.

So do races exist?

More here.

What Isn't For Sale?

2012-03-22T00:00:00-07:00

Philosopher and Harvard professor Michael Sandel, who I admire and have blogged about before, has a nice article on the limits of markets in which he explores the "price we pay for living in a society where everything is up for sale."

This is a debate we didn’t have during the era of market triumphalism. As a result, without quite realizing it—without ever deciding to do so—we drifted from having a market economy to being a market society.

The difference is this: A market economy is a tool—a valuable and effective tool—for organizing productive activity. A market society is a way of life in which market values seep into every aspect of human endeavor. It’s a place where social relations are made over in the image of the market.

The great missing debate in contemporary politics is about the role and reach of markets. Do we want a market economy, or a market society? What role should markets play in public life and personal relations? How can we decide which goods should be bought and sold, and which should be governed by nonmarket values? Where should money’s writ not run?

More here. (On this topic, see also my post on Debra Satz.)

Vinay Lal on the "Imperialism of Categories"

2012-03-21T00:00:00-07:00

Professor Vinay Lal "is a cultural critic, historian, scholar and writer who divides his time between Los Angeles and New Delhi. He writes widely on the history and culture of colonial and modern India, popular and public culture in India (especially cinema), historiography, the politics of world history, the Indian diaspora, global politics, contemporary American politics, the life and thought of Mohandas Gandhi, Hinduism, and the politics of knowledge systems." [From Wikipedia.]

In this impassioned lecture bubbling with insights (and red meat for leftists), he discusses the "imperialism of categories", i.e., the taxonomy of classifications, analyses, and judgments that postcolonial societies have adopted wholesale from the West. He then talks about what one can do by way of resistance and alternative conceptions (see also my related essay). On his blog, Lal Salaam (leftist pun surely intended), he probes in more detail the issues raised in this lecture. This was part of a 2010 meeting that "brought together academics and activists from around the world to share their experiences in understanding and resisting Western hegemony in various areas, including agriculture, education, health care, history, media, politics and science." Many other lectures are archived here but I haven't seen any yet.

Trujillo's Castle on a Hill

2012-03-20T00:00:00-07:00

On our recent visit to the Dominican Republic, we passed through San Cristobal, a quiet city of a little over two-hundred thousand souls, in the shadow of its nation's bustling capital, Santo Domingo, which lies an hour-and-a-half to the east. Its one claim to fame is as the birthplace of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, a brutal strong-man dictator, considered one of the worst in Latin American history, who ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961. During his decades–long tenure, ordinary Dominicans were spied upon; tens thousands of were abducted and tortured or "disappeared." Centers for torture were established and run by Trujillo's secret intelligence organization. And tens of thousands of Haitian laborers and those suspected of being Haitian laborers were brazenly massacred. Meanwhile, Trujillo was also building roads and schools for the middle classes, as well as transferring ownership of all the major sugar, lumber, and other agricultural industries to himself, his family members, or his supporters. Trujillo's family and supporters enjoyed outlandish wealth, while the campesinos and the laborers in the bateys remained in abject poverty with little hope of a better life.

Trujillo built two mansions in his hometown of San Cristobal, at enormous cost. His favorite, Mahogany House, was looted and vandalized after his assassination and now sits as an empty shell. The other, Castillo del Cerro, or "the castle on the hill," he rejected the first day he saw it and never spent a single night within. It has been converted to a police training academy, which seems fitting, since it looks like a prison from the outside. We stopped by there for a brief tour. From the ornate ceilings, after the fashion of European castles, to the gleaming marble floors, to the wedding-cake ballroom, to the imported, handcrafted tiles, it's clear the sort of opulence Trujillo enjoyed in his lifetime. Also on display is a replica of the electric chair that was regularly used to torture and kill his citizens. A large, evocative mural of a country dance is said to have angered Trujillo, because the party-goers look sad. We're told the artist was only painting what he thought was real, and that he fled the country in fear for his life. In another room, the molding lining the ceiling depicts tiny figures of people in the electric chair. Trujillo apparently hated that touch of inspiration, as well. I had to wonder whether the details that enraged Trujillo were intended to please him, or if they were a kind of silent protest.

Much of Dominican literature seems devoted to exploring this period of their history. For an oustanding example of Dominican literature in English, find In the Time of the Butterflies, a novel by Julia Alvarez recounting the story of the three Mirabal Sisters, dissidents whom Trujillo had murdered and whose deaths would galvanize his opposition. A Dominican film from 2010, Tropico de sangre (Rains of Injustice), covers similar territory from a different point of view. In 2000, Peruvian Nobel Laureate, Mario Vargas Llosa, also wrote La fiesta del chivo (The Feast of the Goat), about Trujillo's regime, his assassination, and its political aftermath.

(Want more pictures of Castillo del Cerro, or the Dominican Republic?)

Cuevas del Pomier

2012-03-19T00:05:50-07:00

The Pomier Caves are located within a ragged limestone quarry a few miles north of San Cristobal in the Dominican Republic. When we visited earlier this month, it took us some time to find them, since there is no signage indicating the way to these 55 protected caves, nor that they represent the largest collection of ancient rock art in the Caribbean. Inside the caves the 6,000 pictographs and petroglyphs—the oldest of which date to about 2,000 years ago—were created over a period of 1,500 years by the Taino, Carib, and Igneri peoples. They had inhabited Hispaniola and the other Caribbean islands beginning about 8,000 years ago until their cultures were destroyed by European colonization, starting in 1492.

We visited the first three caves, guided by the local ranger. Inside the air was fresh enough to breathe easily, though it was humid, and in some spaces we saw bats darting around. It was absolutely dark and we could not have made any progress without the aid of our guide and a few flashlights. The floor of the cave started out wide, smooth, and flat, but as we went deeper into the caves systems, passing from one into the next, the going often got more challenging, the way suddenly littered with jagged rocks. Here we had to scramble up a jumble of small boulders. There we had to slide down a dry wash. Around us, the beams of our flashlights revealed deep passageways and cavernous chambers. Great stalactites clinging to the ceiling and walls, stalagmites spiking up from the floor, gave the interiors a lushly organic irregularity, like the inside of a monster's gullet. And as we walked, the guide pointed out the drawings on the walls around us. We were allowed to photograph only a single group (photo above), using our flashlights for illumination; we were permitted to use the camera flash only if it was not aimed at the drawings.

The drawings are mostly monochromatic line art, in "ink" made from a mixture of charcoal and animal fat, although there are also a few low relief etchings in some of the caves. They depict birds, lizards, human figures, and abstract designs. Many of the human figures appear to be holding long wands or pipes to their faces. Little is known about what the images actually depict, why they were painted, what they mean, or what purpose they served, since the cultures that created them were destroyed hundreds of years before the caves were rediscovered in the mid-nineteenth century. However, based on apparent similarities with surviving tribes in Venezuela, archaeologists speculate that the figures of people holding long sticks to their faces might be representations of individuals snorting cahoba, a hallucinogenic substance that is inhaled through long pipes. Shamans may have drawn on the cave walls whatever was revealed to them during their cahoba ritual.

It was spine-tingling to be sitting there, mere inches from this neolithic graffiti. Amid the disorienting contours of the caves, the hot, wet breath of the darkness, we confronted the remnants of a culture, ancient and alien, their indecipherable message from across the ages. Such moments hold enough human familiarity and open mystery that it's almost possible to glimpse, from the corner of your eye, an unimagined range of the human experience.

(Want more pictures of Cuevas del Pomier, or the Dominican Republic?)

The Writer's Job

2012-03-18T18:19:07-07:00

Tim Parks has a great piece on how the writing profession has changed in recent decades, how the market forces have altered the behavior of writers, and the importance of being grounded about one's motivations, expectations, and rewards in the writing life.

In the twentieth century people stopped just reading novels and poems and started studying them. It was a revolution. Suddenly everybody studied literature. At school it was obligatory. They did literature exams. They understood that when there are metaphors and patterns of symbolism and character development etc. then you have “literature.” They supposed that if you could analyze it, you could very probably do it yourself. Since enormous kudos was afforded to writers, and since it was now accepted that nobody needed to be tied to dull careers by such accidents of birth as class, color, sex, or even IQ, large numbers of people (myself included!) began to write. These people felt they knew what literature was and how to make it.

In the second half of the century the cost of publishing fell considerably, the number of fiction and poetry titles per annum shot up (about forty thousand fiction titles are published in the US each year), profits were squeezed, discounting was savage. A situation was soon reached where a precious few authors sold vast numbers of books while vast numbers of writers sold precious few books. Such however was the now towering and indeed international celebrity of the former that the latter threw themselves even more eagerly into the fray, partly because they needed their declining advances more often, partly in the hope of achieving such celebrity themselves.

It became clear that the task of the writer was not just to deliver a book, but to promote himself in every possible way. He launches a website, a Facebook page (I’m no exception), perhaps hires his own publicist. He attends literary festivals all over the world, for no payment. He sits on the jury for literary prizes for very little money, writes articles in return for a one-line mention of his recent publication, completes dozens of internet interviews, offers endorsements for the books of fellow writers in the hope that the compliment will be returned. It would not be hard to add to this list.

Bilgrami on Gandhi

2012-03-17T09:21:25-07:00

Akeel Bilgrami, Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, has written a very interesting essay on Gandhi's philosophy. Bilgrami is struck by the integrity of Gandhi's ideas, in the sense that they derive "from ideas that were very remote from politics. They flowed from the most abstract epistemological and methodological commitments." Here is a brief excerpt for a flavor of Bilgrami's argument (via 3QD):

What I mean by truth as a cognitive notion is that it is a property of sentences or propositions that describe the world. Thus when we have reason to think that the sentences to which we give assent exhibit this property, then we have knowledge of the world, a knowledge that can then be progressively accumulated and put to use through continuing inquiry building on past knowledge. [Gandhi's] recoil from such a notion of truth, which intellectualizes our relations to the world, is that it views the world as the object of study, study that makes it alien to our moral experience of it, to our most everyday practical relations to it. He symbolically conveyed this by his own daily act of spinning cotton. This idea of truth, unlike our quotidian practical relations to nature, makes nature out to be the sort of distant thing to be studied by scientific methods. Reality will then not be the reality of moral experience. It will become something alien to that experience, wholly external and objectified.

It is no surprise then that we will look upon reality as something to be mastered and conquered, an attitude that leads directly to the technological frame of mind that governs modern societies, and which in turn takes us away from our communal localities where moral experience and our practical relations to the world flourish. It takes us towards increasingly abstract places and structures such as nations and eventually global economies. In such places and such forms of life, there is no scope for exemplary action to take hold, and no basis possible for a moral vision in which value is not linked to 'imperative' and 'principle', and then, inevitably, to the attitudes of criticism and the entire moral psychology which ultimately underlies violence in our social relations. To find a basis for tolerance and non-violence under circumstances such as these, we are compelled to turn to arguments of the sort Mill tried to provide in which modesty and tolerance are supposed to derive from a notion of truth (cognitively understood) which is always elusive, never something which we can be confident of having achieved because it is not given in our moral experience, but is predicated of propositions that purport to describe a reality which is distant from our own practical and moral experience of it.

All these various elements of his opposition to Mill and his own alternative conception of tolerance and non-violence were laid open by Gandhi and systematically integrated by these arguments implicit in his many scattered writings.

Top Five Regrets of the Dying

2012-03-16T21:57:20-07:00

An Australian nurse, Bronnie Ware, has for many years provided palliative care to patients in the final weeks of their lives. She has recorded the top five regrets of the dying people in her care. Here they are:

1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

2. I wish I hadn't worked so hard.

3. I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

More here.

Cargo

2012-02-29T19:00:36-08:00

Flash fiction by Usha Alexander

“I re-read your letter concerning your great-great-grandmother,” Sam said, opening a yellowed logbook upon his rosewood desk, the cargo manifest of a ship called Goodgrace, owned and captained by his great-grandfather Samuel Collins. Each page was encased in a plastic sleeve, which he turned delicately.

“My old grandma remembered her, the stories she told.” Brenda’s face was serious but not sad as she spoke. “She was probably just a teenager when she came over. She got pregnant on the ship and had her first baby soon after she landed. A boy. It took a lot of digging to learn the name of the ship.” Brenda peered sideways at the high, teak bookshelves surrounding her.

Brenda wasn’t what the old man expected when he first received the letter requesting access to his family records; though, he’d been unaware of having any expectations until the moment she appeared. Statuesque, in a breezy white top and dark slacks, she stood with both hands clutching a faux leather purse against her stomach. Her blackish hair diffused toward her shoulders in fuzzy ringlets, charmingly augmented with silver linings. He wondered how many white men—likely uninvited—had interceded in generations past to render in her that walnut-brown skin, the indeterminate fall of her hair, surely a world apart from the African ancestress she’d come in search of.

“Impressive library for one family,” she remarked with awe.

“Yes.” He smiled, spread his arms, encouragingly. “Do feel free to have a look around.” He watched her step gingerly among the stacks, perusing the titles of ancient volumes, the pickled histories and cracked tomes gathered by generations of his Connecticut forebears. He admired the broad contours of her brow and cheek, arching and flexing when she paused to read, noting his Harvard diplomas on the wall, remarking on the age and historical value of his books. He could see that she was educated, if from a humble background. She’d probably attended a state school, maybe the first in her family to graduate college. Such things he’d learned to discern from the way a person walked, talked, dressed, smiled, since spending his retirement years as a volunteer physician at public clinic in New Haven.

“Here,” Sam said, inviting her to sit at his desk. He pointed to a page in the mouldering ledger. Brenda stopped and looked at him. He was surprised to see her formerly smooth brow now pinched with panic, as though he’d opened a page in her diary. He felt suddenly awkward, a voyeur pouring over her family secrets. But he determined to remain aloof. How could he, after all, take responsibility for the great errors of history?

“The Goodgrace made only two crossings before human cargo was outlawed.” He faltered, noticing for the first time how ridiculous was the ship’s name. “They’re listed here by sex and age. Sometimes an identifying detail or two.” He added, “Only about three-hundred slaves, in all. It never was the main family business.”

Brenda sat, primly, squinted a long while at the ledger, shoulders hunched, silent, drawing a finger slowly down each page.

He drummed his fingers upon his cheek. Why had he invited her to come? What had he hoped to gain from this awkward encounter with his legacy?

She gasped, her finger stopping under a scrawl: girl 15? tall comely enogh

Beads of sweat clustered upon the curve of Brenda’s nose. She closed her eyes and raised one hand to cover her open mouth, rested the other long forearm against the polished rosewood. Was she trembling?

Sam looked at Brenda, and then beyond her. He imagined her as a girl with dark black skin, shimmering with youth, imagined Captain Collins viewing her; taking her; selling her at auction. Counting his profits. Sam thought of his inheritance. He thought of his family, seeing it now enlarged by an unknown multitude of new and foreign characters, each one real as Captain Collins, as Brenda, as the tall, comely girl, who had toiled in the violence of bondage to the end of her days.

__________________________________________

The image above is of a holding chamber at the old slave market in Zanzibar. Some two-hundred individuals were held in this space for a week at a time, without food or exit; fetid water filled the space between the shelves.

Doniger on Contemporary Indian Prudishness

2012-02-28T00:00:00-08:00

A key feature of Hindu society today is its powerful strain of sexual prudery. Hindu conservatives see nothing wrong with it of course, and consider it the very essence of Hinduism. They usually blame "phoren" influences for the loosening sexual mores in their midst. Meanwhile, the liberals argue the reverse, and point to a remarkable Hindu past that produced open-minded texts like the Kama Sutra and the erotic temple sculptures of Khajuraho and Konark. They scratch their heads and wonder how this shift happened, and usually blame it on later historical interventions, such as the conservatism of the Muslim ruling elite and the puritanical Protestantism of Europeans.

In this engaging talk (20 mins), Wendy Doniger pokes holes in these simple narratives. She argues that the Europeans, when excavating the Hindu past, possessed the colonizer's lens of scholarship, which has profoundly shaped modern Hindu self-knowledge. The Anglicized Hindus, as I've written elsewhere, began understanding themselves and their culture "through the eyes of the colonizer—using the latter’s concepts, categories, and judgments." Doniger speaks of two prominent ideals in the history of the Hindus, the erotic and the ascetic, that have long coexisted despite being in tension. She notes that while the British oozed Victorian Virtues, Hinduism too had a long and indigenous strain of prudery that predates European colonization. Not surprisingly, this strain got valorized in colonial times, helping create a more standardized "Hinduism" based on the European idea of "religion", at the heart of which they placed the most austere spiritual texts like the Bhagavad Gita, demoting other strands of folk spirituality. Listen to her full argument, and to her Q&A exchange later with Lawrence Cohen.

A Brief History of Paper

2012-02-27T07:00:00-08:00

Here is an article with some interesting facts on paper. For example, "28 percent of all wood cut in the U.S. is used for papermaking" vs. 35 percent elsewhere due to less recycling. But like oil, with 5 percent of the world population, the U.S. consumes 30 percent of all paper.

Take a minute to look around the room you’re in and notice how many things are made out of paper. There may be books, a few magazines, some printer paper, and perhaps a poster on the wall. Yet, if you consider that each person in the United States uses 749 pounds (340kg) of paper every year (adding up to a whopping 187 billion pounds (85 billion kg) per year for the entire population, by far the largest per capita consumption rate of paper for any country in the world), then you realize that paper comes in many more forms than meets the eye.

World consumption of paper has grown 400 percent in the last 40 years. Now nearly 4 billion trees or 35 percent of the total trees cut around the world are used in paper industries on every continent. Besides what you can see around you, paper comes in many forms from tissue paper to cardboard packaging to stereo speakers to electrical plugs to home insulation to the sole inserts in your tennis shoes. In short, paper is everywhere.

Apparently, the "average American uses about the equivalent of one 100-foot-tall Douglas fir tree in paper and wood products each year." Check out some pictures of the handmade paper process.

The Caging of America

2012-02-26T11:48:52-08:00

The rate of incarceration in the U.S. is the highest in the world. The number of prisoners has more than tripled to over 0.7 percent of Americans (2.4 million) in the last 30 years, including over 50,000 in solitary confinement. The "money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education." At the same time, crime in America has fallen sharply during the same period. Are the two related? What sort of ideas inform criminal justice in America? Is the privatizing of prisons the right solution? Adam Gopnik offers some excellent food for thought.

For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones. More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States ...

The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.) Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized.

More here. Also see my earlier post on this from April 2007.

The Secret Lives of Molecules

2012-02-23T23:25:30-08:00

Drew Berry presents "stunning and scientifically accurate animations to illustrate how the molecules in our cells move and interact." Even more astonishing is how all this stuff adds up to make a consciousness that is now typing these words into a computer!