Shunya's Notes

Robert Sapolsky: Are Humans Just Another Primate?

A thought-provoking lecture by Robert Sapolsky, professor of neurobiology and primatology at Stanford, in which he tries to discern, to the best of our knowledge, what it is that separates us from other animals. He narrates lots of fascinating experimental results from recent decades. This lecture, archived on Fora.tv, is one of several in a series called Being Human: Connecting to Our Ancient Ancestors.

How Culture Drove Human Evolution

In this engaging piece, Joseph Henrich argues that the rise of cumulative culture in our ancestral lineage contributed to our genetic evolution, starting as far back as 1.8 million years ago with the earliest of the Homo line, i.e., Homo habilis and Homo erectus. Henrich's approach differs from how most "people thinking about human evolution have approached this as a two-part puzzle, as if there was a long period of genetic evolution until either 10,000 years ago or 40,000 years ago, depending on who you're reading, and then only after that did culture matter, and often little or no consideration given to a long period of interaction between genes and culture."

The main questions I've been asking myself over the last couple years are broadly about how culture drove human evolution. Think back to when humans first got the capacity for cumulative cultural evolution—and by this I mean the ability for ideas to accumulate over generations, to get an increasingly complex tool starting from something simple. One generation adds a few things to it, the next generation adds a few more things, and the next generation, until it's so complex that no one in the first generation could have invented it. This was a really important line in human evolution, and we've begun to pursue this idea called the cultural brain hypothesis—this is the idea that the real driver in the expansion of human brains was this growing cumulative body of cultural information, so that what our brains increasingly got good at was the ability to acquire information, store, process and retransmit this non genetic body of information.

More here (via 3QD). You can either listen to a video of his talk or read its transcript. Also checkout a set of related papers.

The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness

A congregation of scientists in Cambridge, UK, recently issued a formal declaration that lots of non-human animals, including mammals, birds, and likely even octopuses are conscious beings. What do they mean by consciousness, you ask? It's a state of awareness of one's body and one's environment, anywhere from basic perceptual awareness to the reflective self-awareness of humans. This declaration will surely strike many of us as ancient news and a long overdue recognition, even as it may annoy the stubborn skeptics among us. 

Below is an abstract about the conference followed by the full declaration. I found the lectures delivered on the occasion quite interesting. I haven't heard them all but I can recommend Irene Pepperberg's "Human-like Consciousness in Non-Humans: Evidence from Grey Parrots" (watch two short videos on these birds: one, two). I also liked Diane Reiss's "Mirror Self-recognition: A Case for Cognitive Convergence in Humans and Other Animals". And if you want to consider the octopus, as DFW enjoined, watch David B. Edelman's "Through the Eyes of an Octopus".

The First Annual Francis Crick Memorial Conference, focusing on "Consciousness in Humans and Non-Human Animals", aims to provide a purely data-driven perspective on the neural correlates of consciousness. The most advanced quantitative techniques for measuring and monitoring consciousness will be presented, with the topics of focus ranging from exploring the properties of neurons deep in the brainstem, to assessing global cerebral function in comatose patients. Model organisms investigated will span the species spectrum from flies to rodents, humans to birds, elephants to dolphins, and will be approached from the viewpoint of three branches of biology: anatomy, physiology, and behavior. Until animals have their own storytellers, humans will always have the most glorious part of the story, and with this proverbial concept in mind, the symposium will address the notion that humans do not alone possess the neurological faculties that constitute consciousness as it is presently understood.

The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness*

On this day of July 7, 2012, a prominent international group of cognitive neuroscientists, neuropharmacologists, neurophysiologists, neuroanatomists and computational neuroscientists gathered at The University of Cambridge to reassess the neurobiological substrates of conscious experience and related behaviors in human and non-human animals. While comparative research on this topic is naturally hampered by the inability of non-human animals, and often humans, to clearly and readily communicate about their internal states, the following observations can be stated unequivocally:

God and the Ivory Tower

Scott Atran on how science should approach religion, esp. in an age where religious faith continues to grow around the world (hint: not how the so-called New Atheists do it). The excerpt below will surprise those who think religion is the leading cause of conflict in human history.

Moreover, the chief complaint against religion -- that it is history's prime instigator of intergroup conflict -- does not withstand scrutiny. Religious issues motivate only a small minority of recorded wars. The Encyclopedia of Wars surveyed 1,763 violent conflicts across history; only 123 (7 percent) were religious. A BBC-sponsored "God and War" audit, which evaluated major conflicts over 3,500 years and rated them on a 0-to-5 scale for religious motivation (Punic Wars = 0, Crusades = 5), found that more than 60 percent had no religious motivation. Less than 7 percent earned a rating greater than 3. There was little religious motivation for the internecine Russian and Chinese conflicts or the world wars responsible for history's most lethal century of international bloodshed.

Indeed, inclusive concepts such as "humanity" arguably emerged with the rise of universal religions. Sociologist Rodney Stark reveals that early Christianity became the Roman Empire's majority religion not through conquest, but through a social process grounded in trust. Repeated acts of altruism, such as caring for non-Christians during epidemics, facilitated the expansion of social networks that were invested in the religion. Likewise, studies by behavioral economist Joseph Henrich and colleagues on contemporary foragers, farmers, and herders show that professing a world religion is correlated with greater fairness toward passing strangers. This research helps explain what's going on in sub-Saharan Africa, where Islam is spreading rapidly. In Rwanda, for example, people began converting to Islam in droves after Muslims systematically risked their lives to protect Christians and animists from genocide when few others cared.

More here.

Grist and Mills: On the Cultural Origins of Cultural Learning

In this provocative paper, sure to annoy evolutionary psychologists, Cecilia Hayes argues that the "cognitive processes that comprise cultural learning are themselves culturally inherited; they are cultural adaptations [rather than genetic adaptations]. They are products as well as producers of cultural evolution." Here is the abstract (and my two recent related posts are here and here):

Cumulative cultural evolution is what ‘makes us odd’; our capacity to learn facts and techniques from others, and to refine them over generations, plays a major role in making human minds and lives radically different from those of other animals. In this article I discuss cognitive processes that are known collectively as ‘cultural learning’ because they enable cumulative cultural evolution. These cognitive processes include reading, social learning, imitation, teaching, social motivation, and theory of mind. Taking the first of these three types of cultural learning as examples, I ask whether and to what extent these cognitive processes have been adapted genetically or culturally to enable cumulative cultural evolution. I find that recent empirical work in comparative psychology, developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience provides surprisingly little evidence of genetic adaptation, and ample evidence of cultural adaptation. This raises the possibility that it is not only ‘grist’ but also ‘mills’ that are culturally inherited; through social interaction in the course of development, we not only acquire facts about the world and how to deal with it (grist), we also build the cognitive processes that make ‘fact inheritance’ possible (mills).

Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

This article by Bill McKibben is going to scare the pants off you. It pairs quite well with Bartlett's analysis that I blogged about recently.

When we think about global warming at all, the arguments tend to be ideological, theological and economic. But to grasp the seriousness of our predicament, you just need to do a little math. For the past year, an easy and powerful bit of arithmetical analysis first published by financial analysts in the U.K. has been making the rounds of environmental conferences and journals, but it hasn't yet broken through to the larger public. This analysis upends most of the conventional political thinking about climate change. And it allows us to understand our precarious – our almost-but-not-quite-finally hopeless – position with three simple numbers.

Also check out this article on the everyday denial of climate change.

The term "denial" is sometimes used to describe the outright rejection of scientifically accepted information, as in the case of climate skeptics. But for most people, who do genuinely care about the planet, denial takes the form of avoidance rather than rejection. People avoid disturbing information in order to sidestep unpleasant emotions and to maintain positive conceptions of individual and national identity. As a result of this kind of denial, people have a sense of knowing and not knowing about climate change, of having information but not thinking about it in their daily lives. Information from climate science is understood in the abstract but disconnected from social or private life.

Is the Web Driving Us Mad?

"Tweets, texts, emails, posts. New research says the Internet can make us lonely and depressed—and may even create more extreme forms of mental illness." If you habitually spend hours a day on the Web, as I do, this Newsweek article is definitely worth a look (via The Browser).

Questions about the Internet’s deleterious effects on the mind are at least as old as hyperlinks. But even among Web skeptics, the idea that a new technology might influence how we think and feel—let alone contribute to a great American crack-up—was considered silly and naive, like waving a cane at electric light or blaming the television for kids these days. Instead, the Internet was seen as just another medium, a delivery system, not a diabolical machine. It made people happier and more productive. And where was the proof otherwise?

Now, however, the proof is starting to pile up. The first good, peer-reviewed research is emerging, and the picture is much gloomier than the trumpet blasts of Web utopians have allowed. The current incarnation of the Internet—portable, social, accelerated, and all-pervasive—may be making us not just dumber or lonelier but more depressed and anxious, prone to obsessive-compulsive and attention-deficit disorders, even outright psychotic. Our digitized minds can scan like those of drug addicts, and normal people are breaking down in sad and seemingly new ways.

More here.

Arithmetic, Population and Energy

A brilliant lecture by Dr. Albert A. Bartlett, professor of physics, that looks at population growth, energy use, and sustainability in light of basic arithmetic. Insightful and alarming, Bartlett shows why "sustainable growth" is an oxymoron and how many "experts" do not get this. According to Bartlett, a person in the U.S. on average consumes ~30 times the resources than a person in an underdeveloped country. One encouraging trend I found elsewhere is that per capita energy use in the U.S. has fallen in the last three decades though more than offset by population growth in the U.S., and by growth in population and per capita energy use in developing countries. Hardly a better case can be made for zero population growth and massive investments in renewable energy than the one made by Bartlett (from 2002, via 3QD).

The Social Conquest of Earth

EO Wilson's new book, The Social Conquest of Earth, has reignited an old debate about natural evolution, i.e., the level at which it occurs. In the dominant camp are folks like Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker who hold that evolution occurs via gene selection. In the other camp, folks like Wilson and Jonathan Haidt claim that evolution occurs at multiple levels, including via both gene and group selection. Notably, Charles Darwin himself supported the latter view in Descent of Man.

Not surprisingly, Dawkins and Pinker wrote hostile reviews. Dawkins lamented Wilson's "erroneous and downright perverse misunderstandings of evolutionary theory" and called Darwin's own support of group selection "anomalous". Other reviewers I've read include David Sloan Wilson, Steven Mithen, Jerry Coyne, and Leonard Finkelman. Wilson responded with a vigorous defense of his thesis in a NYT's Stone column. At least to me—a general reader, not a specialist in the field—Wilson's account seems entirely plausible and more than likely. What empirical observations might settle this dispute however seems less than clear.

Whatever the truth, what concerns me more about both camps is their penchant for, in the words of H Allen Orr, Darwinian storytelling. Evolutionary psychologists, who abound in both camps, often try to explain too much of human behavior, including our current morality, through evolutionary selection. While it is undeniable that our basic moral instincts come out of millions of years of evolution, it also seems to me that to explain the prolific range of our behavior, we should look more at the cultural edifice that our humanoid ancestors have developed relatively recently through symbolic language and the resulting explosion of speech, concept formation, and social learning.

Stannard On the Reach of Science

If Stephen Hawking and Lawrence Krauss incline you to the view that physicists today are philosophically naïve, read Russell Stannard.

We said earlier that the job of science is to describe the world. In order to do this, we have to observe it to find out what kind of world it is. But having made the observations (done the experiments) what we write down in our physics textbooks is a description of the world itself, regardless of whether one happens to be observing it. Bohr, and other adherents to his so-called Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, claimed that this was not so. What has been written down is not a description of the world at all, but a description of acts of observation made on the world. All our customary scientific terms such as energy, momentum, position, speed, distance, time, etc. -- they are terms specifically for the description of observations. It is a misuse of language to try and apply them to a world-in-itself divorced from the action of an observation. It is this misuse of language that leads to problems like that posed by the wave/particle paradox. Which is not to say that the world-in-itself does not exist outside the context of someone making an observation of it. Rather, as Werner Heisenberg asserted, all attempts to talk about the world-in-itself are rendered meaningless.

Not that there is anything new in this. The philosopher Immanuel Kant had long ago asserted that one could know nothing about the thing-in-itself. (So much for the death of philosophy.

Finally we ask whether the scientific enterprise, even in this more limited domain of describing only interactions with the world rather than the world itself, might one day achieve complete knowledge. I think not. After all, what do we do our science with? Our brain. But how come we have a brain? It is something that evolved in response to the need of our ancestors to find food, shelter, and avoid predators. It enabled them to survive to the point where they could mate and pass on their genes. The brain was part of their survival kit. Why therefore should anyone think that such an imperfect instrument should be capable of mastering all knowledge regardless of whether it has any relevance to survival?

More here.  Also see a related interesting piece by Gary Gutting, Can Physics and Philosophy Get Along?

On Eating Animals

(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments. A slightly modified version of this essay appeared in the July/Aug 2013 issue of the Humanist.)

Some years ago in a Montana slaughterhouse, a Black Angus cow awaiting execution suddenly went berserk, jumped a five-foot fence, and escaped. She ran through the streets for hours, dodging cops, animal control officers, cars, trucks, and a train. Cornered near the Missouri river, the frightened animal jumped into its icy waters and made it across, where a tranquilizer gun brought her down. Her "daring escape" stole the hearts of the locals, some of whom had even cheered her on. The story got international media coverage. Telephone polls were held, calls demanding her freedom poured into local TV stations. Sensing the public mood, the slaughterhouse manager made a show of "granting clemency" to what he dubbed “the brave cow.” Given a name, Molly, the cow was sent to a nearby farm to live out her days grazing under open skies—which warmed the cockles of many a heart.

Cattle trying to escape slaughterhouses are not uncommon. Few of their stories end happily though. Some years ago in Omaha, six cows escaped at once. Five were quickly recaptured; one kept running until Omaha police cornered her in an alley and pumped her with bullets. The cow, bellowing miserably and hobbling like a drunk for several seconds before collapsing, died on the street in a pool of blood. This brought howls of protest, some from folks who had witnessed the killing. They called the police’s handling inhumane and needlessly cruel.

It’s tempting to see these commiserating folks as animal lovers—and that's how they likely see themselves—until one remembers what they eat for dinner. A typical slaughterhouse in the United States kills over a thousand Mollys a day—lined up, shot in the head, and often cut-open and bled while still conscious, an end no less cruel and full of bellowing—all because Americans keep buying neatly-packaged slices of their corpses in supermarkets. Raised unnaturally and inhumanely, over a million protesting birds and mammals are violently killed in the U.S. every hour (that's 300 per second!). Is it then unreasonable to say that nearly all meat-eaters in America participate quite directly in a cycle of suffering and cruelty of staggering scale?

Yet the idea persists that Americans love animals, largely because of their love and concern for a class of animals called "pets" (and other "cute animals" like dolphins, polar bears, and pandas). Most Americans have had at least one pet at some point in their lives, and many see their pets as extensions of their families; they photograph their pets, swap stories about them, buy them gifts and treats, spend money on their sicknesses, support taxes to build shelters for them, and mourn their deaths. Yet, the question continues to rankle, as Elizabeth Kolbert put it:

"How is it that Americans, so solicitous of the animals they keep as pets, are so indifferent toward the ones they cook for dinner? The answer cannot lie in the beasts themselves. Pigs, after all, are quite companionable, and dogs are said to be delicious."[1]

What might explain this disjunction? From humankind's long community with farm animals, how has it come to this?

The Emotional World of Farm Animals

Here is a delightful documentary "about the thinking and feeling side of animals that are all too often just viewed as food. Jefferey Masson ... leads viewers through the personal journey he underwent while writing his latest book, The Pig Who Sang to The Moon. This journey into the sentient, emotional lives of farm animals brings Masson to animal sanctuaries around the country where caregivers and the animals themselves tell their harrowing stories of rescue and escape. Masson delves into the rich ancestry of these curious and intelligent animals and interviews top experts in animal behavior who offer scientific perspectives on these amazing creatures." (52 mins)

Education, Khan Academy Style

In this interesting video, Salman Khan "talks about how and why he created the remarkable Khan Academy, a carefully structured series of educational videos offering complete curricula in math and, now, other subjects. He shows the power of interactive exercises, and calls for teachers to consider flipping the traditional classroom script — give students video lectures to watch at home, and do "homework" in the classroom with the teacher available to help."

Humankind's Best Friend

Dogs may have been a better friend to humanity than we ever realized, according to an article by Dr. Pat Shipman in American Scientist. They may have played a crucial role in helping modern humans outcompete our Neanderthal cousins.

Many theories have been proposed for why Neanderthals couldn't seem to compete with the invaders, when modern humans arrived in Europe some 35-45,000 years ago, including climate change, the newcomers' better social organization, or their greater facility for language. But new lines of evidence are beginning to suggest another possibility: that it might have been the domesticated dog that gave H. sapiens sapiens the edge over Neanderthals (and, one must presume, Denisovans). There's now mounting evidence that modern humans were domesticating dogs by 35,000 years ago, during the same period when modern human populations began to increase and Neanderthal populations were in decline. Dogs were used for hunting and as pack animals, as they are used even into modern times by some groups. Studies reveal that dogs can significantly increase the success of a hunt and the amount of meat brought in to a community who uses them.

If the dogs carried the meat, humans would have saved a lot of energy, so each kill would have provided a greater net gain in food—even after feeding the dogs. Additional food generally has marked effects on the health of a group. Better-fed females can have more babies, can provide them with more milk and can have babies at shorter intervals. Before long, using pack dogs could have caused the human population to increase.

Dogs may also have contributed more directly to human hunting success. To discover how big a difference dogs could make, Vesa Ruusila and Mauri Pesonen of the Finnish Game and Fisheries Institute investigated what may be the closest easily studied analog to a mammoth hunt: the Finnish moose hunt. Finns use large dogs such as Norwegian elkhounds or Finnish spitzes to find moose and keep them in place by barking until humans can approach and shoot them. In hunting groups of fewer than 10 people, the average carcass weight per hunter without dogs was 8.4 kilograms per day. With dogs, the yield went up to 13.1 kilograms per hunter per day—an increase of 56 percent.

Shipman reminds us, too, that domestication is a two-way street: as dogs were selected to communicate better with humans, there might have been selective pressure making humans also better able to communicate with dogs. Interestingly, humans have a unique feature among living primates, which might have aided in our domestication of canids: the whites of our eyes.

The mutation causing white sclerae is universal in humans, but it turns up occasionally in apes, too. In decades of observations at Gombe National Park in Tanzania, Jane Goodall observed two chimps, probably brothers, who had white sclerae. A third, female chimp developed white sclerae as an adult. But the trait has not spread or reappeared in that population. The advantage of the white sclerae must be related to something that ancient humans did commonly and chimps don’t do or do rarely. Although chimps hunt small prey, often cooperatively, meat makes up less than 2 percent of their diet, whereas Paleolithic humans hunted much larger game that apparently provided a significant part of their diet. Obviously, silent communication among humans would be advantageous for hunting in groups. But there is another skilled gaze-reader: the domestic dog.

A dog will follow the gaze of a videotaped human if the human first attracts the dog’s attention by speaking to it and looking at it, according to results published by Ernõ Téglás, of the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, and his colleagues. Indeed, dogs perform as well as human infants at following the gaze of a speaker in tests in which the speaker’s head is held still.

But why didn't Neanderthals domesticate dogs? We might wonder. Could it be that, like other extant primates, they also didn't have visible sclerae, putting them at a disadvantage with the wolves?

More here.

The Inner Lives of Animals

(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?

Two Hundred Years of Surgery

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

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

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.

The Evolved Apprentice

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

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. Also check out a previous link post on this blog, Eddy Nahmias on Free Will.

Is There a Universal Grammar?

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

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?

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.

The Secret Lives of Molecules

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!

Why Are Men So Violent?

Most answers to this question posit a warlike propensity in men that is shaped by evolution. Jesse Prinz, professor of philosophy at the City University of New York, goes beyond this biological line of inquiry to look for the answers in the social history of humans.

It will not have gone unnoticed that men are more violent than women. Men perpetrate about 90 percent of the world's homicides and start all of the wars. But why? A recent article in a prominent science journal contends that evolution has shaped men to be warriors. More specifically, the authors claim that men are biologically programmed to form coalitions that aggress against neighbors, and they do so in order to get women, either through force or by procuring resources that would make them more desirable. The male warrior hypothesis is alluring because it makes sense of male violence, but it is based on a dubious interpretation of the science. In my new book, I point out that such evolutionary explanations of behavior are often worse than competing historical explanations. The same is true in this case. There are simpler historical explanations of male violence, and understanding these is important for coping with the problem.

A historical explanation of male violence does not eschew biological factors, but it minimizes them and assumes that men and woman are psychologically similar. Consider the biological fact that men have more upper-body strength than women, and assume that both men and women want to obtain as many desirable resources as they can. In hunter-gatherer societies, this strength differential doesn't allow men to fully dominate women, because they depend on the food that women gather. But things change with the advent of intensive agriculture and herding. Strength gives men an advantage over women once heavy ploughs and large animals become central aspects of food production. With this, men become the sole providers, and women start to depend on men economically. The economic dependency allows men to mistreat women, to philander, and to take over labor markets and political institutions. Once men have absolute power, they are reluctant to give it up. It took two world wars and a post-industrial economy for women to obtain basic opportunities and rights.

This historical story can help to explain why men are more violent than women.

More here.