Home
Weiye Loh's Library tagged → View Popular, Search in Google
2. Babies are cannibals and your breasts may be sexists.
A male baby requires almost 1,000 megajoules of energy in his first year of life. “That is the equivalent,” Williams writes, “of one thousand light trucks moving one hundred miles per hour.” And do you know where he gets all that energy? Not from the sun, unless you are a fern that somehow learned how to read the Internet (good job!). No, it’s from your boobs. HE’S EATING YOU. That little dude sucks it right out of you like the world’s chubbiest and least stealthy vampire. Which, of course, is exactly how it’s supposed to be—but it’s not surprising that so many women are leery of breast-feeding. On top of that, breasts (at least in rhesus macaque monkeys, whose milk is similar to humans) can actually determine whether a nursing baby is a boy or a girl, and adjust their milk production accordingly. Milk for girls is thin but abundant, while boy milk is fattier and scarcer—the theory being that girls then must stick closer to their mothers for frequent feedings, thus absorbing their social roles, while boys are easily sated and have time to play and explore. Um, way to prop up the patriarchy by reinforcing gender roles, monkey boobs.
The team let their neural network society evolve over generations, keeping track not only of the strategies that emerged, but also of the level of intelligence their networks evolved. They found it was during phases in which cooperation first starts to emerge in a society that brains tend to become bigger. "The strongest selection for larger, more intelligent brains, occurred when the social groups were first beginning to start cooperating, which then kicked off an evolutionary Machiavellian arms race of one individual trying to outsmart the other by investing in a larger brain. Our digital organisms typically start to evolve more complex 'brains' when their societies first begin to develop cooperation." explains Jackson.
And the more intelligent brains also produced more intelligent strategies, involving forgiveness and patience as well as deceit and trickery. Their results, so the scientists argue, provide some evidence for the social intelligence hypothesis. So next time you're tempted to do the dirty on someone, remember: without cooperation and kindness, you may never have evolved the brain that enables you to cheat in the first place.
You’ll see various interpretations. Those concerned about global warming (including at least one study author) are stressing that a longer evolutionary timeline implies the bears’ adaptation to climate change in the past was a slow process (meaning the speed of change now poses new threats). Those questioning the vulnerability of this species to warming will point to its successful survival through two previous warm intervals between ice ages as evidence the bear can deal with reduced ice and other big environmental shifts. Finally, there are basic questions about the robustness of the conclusions, which are based on a new line of genetic analysis not previously applied to polar bears. [April 20, 7:22 a.m. | Insert | I think this work bolsters the view of scientists who've been calling for a conservation strategy for polar bears and other ice-dependent species focused on areas of the Arctic where sea ice is projected to endure well into this greenhouse-heated era. Watch this presentation.]
-
James Gorman of the science staff at The Times captures this complexity well in his news story:
The report comes to no conclusion about how sensitive the bears are to the current loss of the sea ice that they live on, and the evolutionary tale it presents can be read in different ways.
The findings challenge the idea that the bears adapted very quickly, but confirm that they have made it through warming periods and loss of sea ice before. It may have been touch and go for the bears, however, because the authors find evidence of evolutionary bottlenecks, probably during warm periods, when only small populations survived, even though warming was occurring much more slowly than it is now. [Read the rest.]
One of the most familiar memes we hear from the climate-change deniers is the phrase, “Global warming ended in 1998 and it’s been cooling since then.” You find something along these lines on most of the AGW denier books and websites, and it is repeated endlessly as if somehow repetition makes it more true. This is just like creationists who continually repeat the phony argument that “evolution violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics”, even though this is patently false. As has been pointed out many times, the Second Law only applies to closed systems. The earth is not a closed system since it receives energy from the sun. Yet in every creationist book and website and debate for many decades now you’ll hear them repeat it over and over again, since it sounds impressive to their scientifically unsophisticated audience and apparently they cannot understand why it’s wrong, or they don’t care as long as it suits their political agenda.
-
Picking 1998 as a starting point is a classic example of cherry-picking data to show what you want it to show, and a deliberate attempt to distort the actual record. As climatologists have known for years, 1998 was an exceptionally warm year due to a record El Niño, which boosted average global temperature way above the overall trend from the past few decades. During El Niño years, the marine circulation patterns release a lot of tropical heat from the oceans and raise overall global temperature for a short time. Likewise, 2008 was a La Niña year, and it was cooler than normal. These are part of the year-to-year “noise” in the system of global temperatures that is well known to scientists. Scientists nevertake a single year’s temperature and then connect it to another data point and claim it’s a “trend.” Instead, the only rigorous and scientifically defensible method is to look at the long-term trends in climate over decades and “smooth” the curve using rolling averages, so that a more statistically meaningful curve fit can be performed.
-
Cherry-picking can be played both ways. If I pick any year prior to 1998-2000 and connect with any data point from 2001 onwards, I get a warming trend. In fact, the only way a AGW denier could get their “no warming since 1998″ misrepresentation is to deliberately and consciously look at the curve, pick 1998 to start, and only compare it to 1999-2001. Any other long-term combination of the data shows warming. Thus, this distortion of the data that Will keeps repeating is not just a simple misreading of the facts. Since the meme is quoted from 2009, this means that the deniers were consciously and fraudulently trying to distort the data to suit their purposes. The fact that this lie keeps being perpetuated despite the fact that scientists have offered numerous corrections shows the AGW deniers have the same casual disregard for the truth that creationists do. Such practices demonstrate the absymal level of their scientific integrity, and speaks to the fact that AGW deniers are not climate scientists, but people with political agendas who cherry-pick data, quote-mine out of context, and use whatever lies and half-truths they need to support their cause. The parallel with creationists and other science deniers could not be any clearer.
The barrage began on March 23rd at Uncommon Descent, where Sal Cordova picked up several quotes from a recent Rationally Speaking post (on “Universal Darwinism” — he got the link wrong, don’t know for sure if by unintelligent design or what). Cordova ended the short post by summarizing my position thus: “Dennett is wrong, Dobzhansky is wrong, Dawkins is wrong, and Pross (the author Pigliucci critiques) is wrong. Grand slam!” To which he added: “Duane Gish said it better: ‘Nothing in evolution makes sense in light of biology.’”
Of course I did not say anything like “Dennett, Dobzhansky, Dawkins and Pross are wrong” across the board, and instead disagreed with specific statements and positions taken by these writers. But apparently if you are a creation-fundamentalist the very concept of honest disagreement and open discussion eludes you. And so does the idea that the nature of science makes it an open-ended enterprise where progress is made in part precisely because people disagree.
-
Dobzhansky exaggerated when he famously wrote (not in a technical paper) that “nothing in biology makes sense if not in the light of evolution.” I stated the obvious: plenty of research has been done in biology (e.g., during much of the molecular biology revolution) by moving evolution to a background condition, without explicitly taking it on board. But this is as controversial as to say that much research has been done in physics (e.g., non-equilibrium thermodynamics) without explicitly taking on board quantum theory. To go from there to say that one can therefore reject/deny either evolutionary biology or quantum physics is nonsense on stilts.
-
My second claim was that I think that some of my fellow atheists of late have been a bit too quick at declaring things like consciousness to be an “illusion", since such conclusion is based on questionable metaphysical grounds and indeed is pitted against some of the best neurobiological evidence to date. But are the good folks (ahem) at Uncommon Descent now saying that people who think consciousness is a real phenomenon are somehow bound to accept metaphysical fables concerning the existence and postmortem survival of the soul? I don’t think so.
- 1 more annotation(s)...
The Evolutionary Challenge for moral realism is, roughly, the challenge to explain our having many true moral beliefs, given that those beliefs are the products of evolutionary forces that would be indifferent to the moral truth. This challenge is widely thought not to apply to mathematical realism. In this article, I argue that it does. Along the way, I substantially clarify the Evolutionary Challenge, discuss its relation to more familiar epistemological challenges, and broach the problem of moral disagreement. I conclude that there may be no epistemological ground on which to be a moral antirealist and a mathematical realist.
-
Perhaps the trouble started with Theodozius Dobzhansky, one of the fathers of modern evolutionary theory, who famously said that nothing makes sense in biology except in the light of evolution (the phrase is, in fact, approvingly quoted by Pross). Problem is, Dobzhansky was writing for an audience of science high school teachers, and his statement is patently wrong, as an even cursory examination of the history of biology makes clear. For instance, developmental biologists had done a lot of highly fruitful research throughout the 19th and 20th centuries even as they ignored Darwin. And molecular biologists made spectacular progress from the 1950’s though the onset of the 21st century, again pretty much completing ignoring evolution. This is not to say that evolutionary theory doesn’t help in understanding developmental and molecular systems, but it is a stretch of the record to make claims such as those of Dobzhansky. (It would be like saying, for instance, that nothing makes sense in physics except in the light of quantum mechanics. Plenty of things in physics make perfect sense even as one brackets quantum mechanics and considers it a background theory.)
-
Of course, Darwinian evolution is indeed applicable to some non biological systems, particularly to so-called genetic algorithms, a type of evolving computer program whose properties have been studied by computational scientists over the past few decades. Indeed, genetic algorithms mimic biological evolution so closely that a number of population geneticists I know have been annoyed by repeated claims of computer scientists to have discovered this or that principle describing such systems, apparently without realizing that many of those discoveries had already been made by theoretical population geneticists decades earlier.
- 1 more annotation(s)...
Religion solves our central problem: that we are human (to quote Jennifer Hecht), and the universe is not. It’s not really about explanation or even comfort, not exactly. It’s about seizing control, or at least imagining we have. To be fully conscious of our frailty and mortality in a hostile and indifferent universe and powerless to do anything about it would have been simply unacceptable to the human mind. So we created powerful beings whom we could ultimately control — through prayer, sacrifice, behavior changes, ritual, spinning around three times, what have you.
It's disputed whether the great British geneticist Ronald Fisher was really the first to explain why evolution favours equal numbers of sons and daughters but the result still bears his name: Fisher's principle. Begin by considering a diploid species, in which each organism has two copies of each chromosome, one coming from the mother and one from the father. This means that half of each generation's genetic material must come from female parents and half from male parents.
-
Assume that mating within the population is random. This will mean that each male and female organism can expect to pass on the same quantity of genetic material to the next generation as any other member of the same sex. In practice this probably couldn't happen, but it's a useful model. Now consider a population with more males than females. The total amount of genetic material passed on by the males is equal to that passed on by the females, because each child contains an equal amount of both. Since there are more males, it follows that the expected share for each individual male will be lower than that for each female, and any given female can expect to pass on more genes than any given male.
-
Think of each parent as an investor, looking to get the greatest genetic return on their finite number of children. In the population considered above it's clear that there's a better "payoff" associated with daughters than with sons, so natural selection will favour organisms which go against the population's male bias and produce more female offspring. They will have more grandchildren, and therefore the female-biased sex ratio will become more common until the population has equal numbers of both sexes. Conversely, it pays to have more sons in female-majority populations. The equal sex ratio is thus the only one which can't be beaten by a different strategy and hence is said to be stable.
Notice that we're talking about a stable strategy rather than an optimal one. A population's maximum possible growth is proportional to the number of females, so its members could probably all do better if they universally adopted a somewhat daughter-biased sex ratio. However, natural selection would favour any individual in the population which bucked this trend to produce more sons so this strategy would not be stable. Having half male children and half female may not be the optimum strategy but it is unbeatable: no strategy competing against it can do better so natural selection will favour the status quo.
biological contributions to violence may be greatly outweighed by the sociological.
-
To reduce male violence, it is not sufficient to reform men, as the defenders of the male warrior hypothesis recommend. Nor will it suffice to empower women. This will reduce domestic violence, but not war, because women can be as aggressive as men. Warfare did not decline precipitously with women's suffrage, and during recent conflicts with Russia, 43 percent of Chechen suicide bombers have been women. Crucially, we must reduce the incentives for violence.
A tiny number of ideas can go a long way, as we've seen. And the Internet makes that more and more likely. What's happening is that we might, in fact, be at a time in our history where we're being domesticated by these great big societal things, such as Facebook and the Internet. We're being domesticated by them, because fewer and fewer and fewer of us have to be innovators to get by. And so, in the cold calculus of evolution by natural selection, at no greater time in history than ever before, copiers are probably doing better than innovators. Because innovation is extraordinarily hard. My worry is that we could be moving in that direction, towards becoming more and more sort of docile copiers.
Both evolution and global warming are “controversial issues” in the public sphere, but are not controversial in the world of science. There is some overlap between the two issues, but far more people are climate change deniers than evolution deniers. What is interesting to skeptics, however, is the similarity in the techniques that are used by both camps to promote their views. The scientific issues are presented as “not being settled,” or that there is considerable debate among scientists over the validity of claims.
Evolution and global warming opponents also demonize the opposition by accusing them of fraud or other wrong-doing. Denialists in both camps practice “anomaly mongering,” in which a small detail seemingly incompatible with either evolution or global warming is considered to undermine either evolution or climate science. Although in both cases, reputable, established science is under attack for ideological reasons, the underlying ideology differs: for creationism, the ideology of course is religious; for global warming, the ideology is political and/or economic.
if we understand the evolutionary basis of consciousness, maybe this will help us envision new ways our consciousness might evolve further in the future. That could be fun in terms of dreaming up new stories. I also believe that part of what inhibits us from taking effective action against long-term problems—like the global environmental crisis — may be found in the evolutionary origins of our ability to be aware.
-
In 1992, psychologist Bruce Bridgeman wrote that “Consciousness is the operation of the plan-executing mechanism, enabling behavior to be driven by plans rather than immediate environmental contingencies.” No theory of consciousness is likely to account for all of its varied senses, but at least in terms of consciousness-as-operation-of-the-plan-executing-mechanism, due to some very simple “facts of light,” dwelling on land may have been a necessary condition for giving us the ability to survey the contents of our mind. “Buena vista consciousness,” for lack of a better term, might have been the first kind of consciousness that selection pressures could have brought about.
-
Maybe you’re eating a sandwich right now. There is a child, far away, who is not, and who is about to die for lack of food. Surely, if that child were beside you, you would share your sandwich. But, then, what’s keeping you from sharing that sandwich anyway? The shipping costs? That’s easily avoided – we find someone on the ground who can buy the sandwich locally. If you think through the various possibilities, the only answer you eventually come to is that the starving child is too far removed from your state of awareness to really matter to you. Likewise with any number of a host of environmental devastations that are going on at this moment.
- 2 more annotation(s)...
we may be doomed as a species precisely because of the way in which our complexity arose. Paraphrasing the science writer Philip Ball, nature seems to have activated a time bomb, and our complexity is only a short-term fix.
-
complexity is not really naturally selected, but instead arises as a short-term fix to the effects of selection inefficiency. At first reading, this assertion seems counterintuitive, but the root of the paradox is simply our dogmatic way of thinking, where complex traits are expected to be an outcome of natural selection.
Over on the Google+, Robin Hanson asks a leading question:
Explain why people shouldn’t try to form their own physics opinions, but instead accept the judgements of expert physicists, but they should try to form their own opinions on economic policy, and not just accept expert opinion there.
-
Why do we — or should we — accept the judgements of natural scientists more readily than those of social scientists?
Although that’s not an easy question, the basic point is not difficult to figure out: in the public imagination, natural scientists have figured out a lot more reliable and non-obvious things about the world, compared to what non-experts would guess, than social scientists have. The insights of quantum mechanics and relativity are not things that most of us can even think sensibly about without quite a bit of background study. Social scientists, meanwhile, talk about things most people are relatively familiar with.
-
The ratio of “things that have been discovered by this discipline” to “things I could have figured out for myself” just seems much larger in natural science than in social science.
- 7 more annotation(s)...
Selected Tags
Related Tags
Top Contributors
Groups interested in Evolution
Diigo is about better ways to research, share and collaborate on information. Learn more »
Join Diigo