Born To Run | Human Evolution | DISCOVER Magazine

More research into the evolution of running:

Unlike many mammals, not to mention primates, people are astonishingly successful endurance runners, "and I don't think it's just a fluke," Lieberman says. He and Bramble argue that not only can humans outlast horses, but over long distances and under the right conditions, they can also outrun just about any other animal on the planet—including dogs, wolves, hyenas, and antelope, the other great endurance runners. From our abundant sweat glands to our Achilles tendons, from our big knee joints to our muscular glutei maximi, human bodies are beautifully tuned running machines. "We're loaded top to bottom with all these features, many of which don't have any role in walking," Lieberman says. Our anatomy suggests that running down prey was once a way of life that ensured hominid survival millions of years ago on the African savanna.

I get email : Pharyngula

PZ Myers responds to and annotates a nasty email message. Classic.:

There is a lot of evidence of paranormal activity[No, actually, there isn't] , how is that explained? [Wishful thinking, selective memory, gullibility. Easy.] The vast majority of people believe in a God [So? You don't get to vote on what reality exists], and many believe Jesus has died for their passage into heaven [And many believe that Mohammed was God's prophet, and that praying to Ganesh will remove obstacles from their lives. Do you?]. Are all of these people (myself included, and I am a very well educated individual and deep thinker if I do say so myself[I don't believe you.]) delusional or weak minded or worse because the have faith? [Yes. Or lazy, or guilt-ridden and brain-washed, or fearful] If you look at the world and see how everything fits so perfectly together I don't understand [Those three words are actually the whole of your argument] how anyone can NOT see that there is "intelligent design" behind the creation of everything[Hey, it's easy…because there is no evidence for creation, but plenty for evolution]. My background is also in biology and the life sciences. I went to Kent State University[Kent State grads everywhere are groaning at the association], then graduated at The Ohio State University [Ditto Ohio State] with a degree in Allied Medicine. [That's nice. Are we playing Trump That Degree?] For a few years while I was "becoming smart"[I think you were deceived] I too began to question the existence of a God. I was deceived[like I said] into thinking[I'm pretty sure you weren't doing that] there really was no need for any supernatural force for everything to be [I peeked ahead. You never bother to tell us anything that requires a supernatural force]. But then I looked how everything just worked. Take the krebs cycle. One of hundres of thousands of different processes that occur in the body. Every step has to happen perfectly.[No it doesn't. Cellular processes are stochastic, driven by thermodynamics. Did you learn nothing about biochemistry?] Every substrate has to perfectly fit it's particular enzyme [Wow. So there must be only One True phosphoglycerate mutase out there then. Have you noticed that there is sequence variation in these enzymes in different species?]. That 1 process, you're trying to tell me, just came about because of chance? [No. That's a very tired creationist canard. Evolution is about chance modulated by selection, a non-chance process] I really don't think so. I can go on and on with different examples but that would be pointless because you know exactly what I'm talking about. [Actually, I know exactly that you don't know what you are talking about.]

New Statesman - Claude Levi-Strauss: the Poet in the Laboratory

Practical deconstruction:

Lévi-Strauss claimed to have discovered the fundamental differences on which all kinship and myth were based, and produced a simple combination of differential oppositions that, he thought, underpin even the most complex and apparently dissimilar myths. Myths were privileged insights into thought, and here his second thesis came into play: "primitive" societies or, as Lévi-Strauss termed them, "societies without writing" are more authentic than societies that have succumbed to writing. Ever since Montaigne, and receiving its fullest expression in Rousseau's noble savage, there had been a current in western thought which saw in "primitive" societies a richer, less alienated relationship between men and their world than that which obtained in "civilisation".

Lévi-Strauss thus promised two things: first, a combinatory schema that would reveal the basic operations of the human mind - all kinship systems would be conceived as variations on a single theme, and all myths would operate around a set of basic differences - and second, a demonstration of the superiority of forms of thought that came before writing, before the fundamental alienation that occurred when writing intruded into an authentic idyll.

However, Lévi-Strauss's dominance of western thought evaporated after Derrida devoted a 40-page analysis to the anthropologist's foray into the world of the Nambikwara Amazonians. Derrida showed that Lévi-Strauss's position, far from breaking with a Eurocentric model, reproduced it. He demonstrated how the notion that the Nambikwara inhabited a different and better world, one before writing, reflected a long-held western prejudice that ignored the way in which any system of language had all the features of a writing system that Lévi-Strauss considered distinctively modern. The Amazonian enjoyed no more direct and unmediated a relationship with his surroundings than the western anthropologist trying to persuade little girls to break tribal taboos.

Derrida not only demolished Lévi-Strauss's sentimental valorisation of the Amazonians, but took an axe to his "scientific" project. Linguistics was based on the discovery of the phoneme, the basic element of sound difference from which all meaning in a language flowed. Yet the anthropologist's mythemes were always the result of interpretation.

Studying The Liberal Arts - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

True that:

Liberal arts education forces us to decode systems of symbols. We learn how complex systems of symbols can be and what is required to decode them and why that can be a pleasurable process. That skill will come in handy for a large number of future career paths. It will even help you enjoy TV shows more.

The counter arguments that the STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering, & Math) are intrinsically more difficult and draw higher IQ students, or that the Liberal arts are easy to learn and study on your own, are both wrong. Most folks on the STEM side of things think they are better read than they actually are, because they don't know what they don't know about how to read deeply and critically. They don't understand the history, they don't understand culture, and they resist alternative world views.

The truth is STEM teaches you how to do things, and how to develop processes, but has nothing to say about the purpose or meaning of things. So you get a lot of glib rationalization and shallow reasoning. Linear, unimaginative fields for linear, unimaginative people whose only goal in life is to get a job and serve the powers that be. Basically, its the Dunning-Kruger effect and the military industrial complex that prop up STEM and under-value the Liberal arts.

You have to ask: how valued was theoretical physics in the world at large until the Manhattan Project proved you could kill lots of people with math?

Evolution and Creativity: Why Humans Triumphed - WSJ.com

Oddly, this comes from the Wall Street Journal:

Dense populations don't produce innovation in other species. They only do so in human beings, because only human beings indulge in regular exchange of different items among unrelated, unmated individuals and even among strangers. So here is the answer to the puzzle of human takeoff. It was caused by the invention of a collective brain itself made possible by the invention of exchange.

Once human beings started swapping things and thoughts, they stumbled upon divisions of labor, in which specialization led to mutually beneficial collective knowledge. Specialization is the means by which exchange encourages innovation: In getting better at making your product or delivering your service, you come up with new tools. The story of the human race has been a gradual spread of specialization and exchange ever since: Prosperity consists of getting more and more narrow in what you make and more and more diverse in what you buy. Self-sufficiency—subsistence—is poverty.

Evolution defeats libertarianism.

Scientists discover how matter kicked antimatter's ass in the ancient universe

Science FTW:

Using the Tevatron Collider in Batavia, Illinois, scientists discovered that B mesons, a type of subatomic particle, do not decay into equal amounts of matter and antimatter, as previously thought. Rather, they produce about one percent more muons (a heavier counterpart of electrons) than antimuons, resulting in a net gain of positive matter.

Next question: is the B meson a mutation that allowed this universe to survive where others did not?

Cavemen

An interesting take on the prehistoric war between neanderthals and modern homo sapiens:

"That modern humans got to Australia before they penetrated Europe suggests that Neanderthals held them off for millennia. That suggests they weren't that backward."

Instead, moderns were very, very lucky—so lucky that Finlayson calls what happened "survival of the weakest." About 30,000 years ago, the vast forests of Eurasia began to retreat, leaving treeless steppes and tundra and forcing forest animals to disperse over vast distances. Because they evolved in the warm climate of Africa before spreading into Europe, modern humans had a body like marathon runners, adapted to track prey over such distances. But Neanderthals were built like wrestlers. That was great for ambush hunting, which they practiced in the once ubiquitous forests, but a handicap on the steppes, where endurance mattered more. This is the luck part: the open, African type of terrain in which modern humans evolved their less-muscled, more-slender body type "subsequently expanded so greatly" in Europe, writes Finlayson. And that was "pure chance."

Two points: First neanderthals probably had the same intellectual capacity we have today; Second, modern humans evolved to run.

Thanks Evolution!

Good list of 10 features of human beings that demonstrate evolution. Kind of gives me goosebumps.

[Via Andrew Sullivan]

Self-Powered Gadgets

At least someone is working on useful things for the future. Teeny-tiny power supplies that convert pressure waves into energy:

The field behind this innovation is "piezoelectrics," which aims to develop self-powering electronics, eliminating the need for replaceable power supplies, such as batteries. Piezoelectrics are actually materials, such as crystals or ceramics, which generate a significant amount of voltage when a form of mechanical stress is applied, such as a push.

The concept isn’t new. It was used in sonar devices during World War I, and is applied today in car cigarette lighters. Pressing down the lighter button causes impact on a piezoelectric crystal that in turn produces enough voltage to create a spark and ignite the gas.

Can't wait for the piezoelectric ride at Tomorrowland.

Cognitive Play With Pattern

A very nice essay on the need for reconciliation between art and science, including an excellent reading of Nabokov's Lolita and The Enchanted Hunters. The premise of the essay is this:

To consider art and story in evolutionary terms we have to decide whether they are biological adaptations: are they features that natural selection has designed into humans over time because they led to higher rates of survival and reproduction? I argue in a book I’ve recently written, On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition and Fiction, that art and storytelling are adaptations. These behaviors are species-wide, engaged in spontaneously by all normal individuals and spontaneously encouraged in infants by their parents.

Art is a form of cognitive play with pattern. Just as communication exists in many species, even in bacteria, and human language derives from but redirects animal communication along many unforeseen new routes, so play exists in many species, but the unique cognitive play of human art redirects it in new ways and to new functions.

For me, one of those functions is to understand the difference implied in the word "play" which contrasts with and compliments the necessary work of scientific knowledge. Science deals with facts, cataloging and cross-referencing, seeking out and correcting error. Art is something different. It is an open-ended argument about the meaning of patterns. It is an attempt to replicate the way the mind looks at patterns, connects one idea to the next, and draws conclusions. And as the word "play" suggests it can be a game, something done at leisure, something that is rehearsed and performed, something without a goal or end. A pleasure in itself.

And it is this capacity for art to transcend the everyday considerations of life, to take us out of our own head-space, and open us up to a world of possibilities beyond necessity, that is its greatest value.

Science and Racism

Andrew Sullivan links to an article that allows him to say something stupid without having to actually say it himself. Basically, that left-wing science goes soft and fundamentalist when faced with the issue of racial differences and always moves to attack anyone who brings up the issue. It's oh so un-scientific, says the right. Here's the relevant quote from Selwyn Duke:

Why, miracle of miracles, all these two-legged cosmic accidents, the product of a billions-of-years journey from the primordial soup to primacy among creatures, whose evolution was influenced by perhaps millions of factors, wound up being precisely the same. It's really the best argument for God I've ever heard, as such a statistical impossibility could only exist if it was ordained by the one with whom all things are possible.

No one in the scientific community would ever argue that every individual is the same as every other. We've all got our own unique genes and mutations that we're striving to pass on to the next generation. But the sorts of big group differences that most racists go for? No. The big differences between populations have never been shown to be meaningful and at a genetic level don't seem to actually exist.

We're not clones, but humanity is not made up of multiple species either.

A racist is someone who exploits superficial differences between groups as though they were real and meaningful for personal power and profit. A scientist is someone who identifies real differences between individuals in order to make predictions about likely outcomes (like susceptibility to certain diseases, etc.).

The problem with people like James Watson is that he's willing to write off an entire continent because he can't separate his scientific opinions from his racist views. Folks like Duke and Sullivan are in danger of doing the same if they can't see the difference.

The Right hates science when it challenges their preconceptions, but love it as a tool for re-enforcing the status quo. Biology is bad because it undermines Creation. But it might be good, if it can be used to prove racist stereotypes and support bell curve thinking. Physics is good when it gives you Nuclear Weapons, but its bad when it proves time to be "relativistic."

This sort of thinking is childish. Almost as childish as the bit about God and statistical impossibility in the quote. This sort of bargain basement ID creationism is an intellectual embarrassment, and just proves how soft in the head right wingers get anytime someone approvingly invokes God. Sullivan ought to know better, yet he rarely does.

Necessity and Nemesis

More from Roberto Calasso. In some versions of the myth, Zeus seduces Nemesis (a representative of Ananke and necessity, this time as a figure of retribution). From this seduction, comes Helen of Troy.

The life of Helen marked a moment of precarious, fleeting equilibrium, when, thanks to the deceitful cunning of Zeus, necessity and beauty were superimposed the one over the other. The rape of Nemesis was the most formidable theological gamble in Zeus's reign. To provoke a forced convergence of beauty and necessity was to challenge the law of heaven. Only Olympus could have sustained such a thing, certainly not the earth, where that challenge blazed uncontrollably throughout Helen's lifetime. It was marked from beginning to end by calamity. But it was also the time men could go on dreaming of, long after that fire had gone out (The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony pg 127).

In this telling, the birth of Helen is the catalyst for all of history: first the age of heroes, battles, turmoil and great deeds, and later the age of men, poetry, storytelling and art which follows. Helen is the synthesis of necessity and beauty (chance), and embodies all of the conflict and contradiction that this convergence suggests. The face that launched 1000 ships indeed, and the Iliad, The Odyssey, and all of western literature down to the present day.

With Zeus's challenge to the law, we have in this one figure the source of all human conflict:

• Fascism - the aesthetization of politics
• Marxism - cultural critique as science
• Christianism / Islamic imperialism - religion as politics (mythology as law)
  
• Communism - politics as religion
• Social Darwinism - aesthetization of science

Anytime idealism is forced upon reality, or the descriptive becomes prescriptive, we are witnessing the rebirth of Helen.

Conflict Schematic

The Limits of Richard Dawkins

This essay of Dawkins's, written against a sort of strawman postmodernism, is the sort of ignorant self-satisfied nonsense that he's supposed to be against. If this is how he sounds to religious folks, it's no wonder the atheist movement suffers.

But don't the postmodernists claim only to be 'playing games'? Isn't it the whole point of their philosophy that anything goes, there is no absolute truth, anything written has the same status as anything else, no point of view is privileged? Given their own standards of relative truth, isn't it rather unfair to take them to task for fooling around with word-games, and playing little jokes on readers? Perhaps, but one is then left wondering why their writings are so stupefyingly boring. Shouldn't games at least be entertaining, not po-faced, solemn and pretentious? More tellingly, if they are only joking around, why do they react with such shrieks of dismay when somebody plays a joke at their expense.

The first sentence is true, but the rest of the paragraph is nonsense. The best way to understand the way Postmodernists "play" at things is best distinguished from the way scientists "work" at things. It is the classical distinction between fate and destiny, between fortune and necessity - one force is random and playful, the other linear and ineluctuable. One is Zeus, the deceitful, cunning, shaping changing god of seduction. The other side is Ananke, Nemesis, necessity.

Postmodernism looks for the possible, however improbable in the same way that science uses probability to determine the likelihood of any possible outcome.

What's interesting is that both are motivated by skepticism toward transcendental meaning, the supernatural, the logocentric. Choose your word. The absolute truth that postmodernists deny is the same one Dawkins claims is a delusion. So it's a mystery to me why hardcore scientific atheists are so offended by it. More importantly the so-called Sokal hoax only appears to debunk postmodernism by virtue of the author's lack of sincerity. He's only aping postmodern language so therefore it can't be true. It's like a creationist using Intelligent Design to undermine evolutionary theory by introducing unprovable assertions into scientific discourse: it ultimately says more about the author of the hoax than it does about the theory.

Ultimately, science focuses on the accumulation of facts and postmodernism on the accumulation of meaning. The one side is a process for gathering information, and the other for interpreting and understanding. Both are designed to challenge our received notions about the world around us and force us to look at things from new and sometimes difficult perspectives.

Dawkins's ultimate greivance is that, unlike science, postmodernism is unnecessarily obscure. In comments to his article he writes:

I can imagine only one defence, which might go something like this. "The technical language of quantum theory, too, is extremely hard to understand. Here is a paragraph from a learned journal of quantum theory. Please furnish us with a translation into clear and meaningful English." I accept that this challenge might be impossible to meet. So, what is the difference? The difference is that quantum theory makes predictions about experimental measurements in the real world, which are verified to an accuracy equivalent (in Richard Feynman's vivid analogy) to specifying the width of North America to within one hairsbreadth. That's how quantum theory buys the right to be unintelligible to non-specialists.

But this is necessity talking. Postmodernity uses specialized language to express the way meaning can be turned against itself. This is not mathematics. These are tropes. It's the difference between physics and poetry. One gives us the outcome we expect through experiment and repetition, the other undermines our preconceptions in order to lead us in unexpected directions. The specialized language of postmodernism is meant to take us outside ourselves, alienate us from meaning, break and bend understanding, in order to give us insight into possibilities not governed by prediction and the measurement of gross objects to within one hairsbreadth.

The point is to measure the meaning of North America: history, propaganda, industry, idealism, violence, beauty, ambition, and dream. All the things that Dawkins can't no matter how objective or accurate his predictions.

Ultimately this may be a revision of the separation of religion and science into distinct and discreet worlds. But unlike religion, the humanities (which is all postmodern theory really is) do not offer any ultimate truths, just new ways to ask questions and think about the world.

Creation Museum at Salon

Ah, yes!

Salon does an article on the new Creation Museum and the letters section goes crazy. Good times.

The article includes lots of fun facts gathered from the exhibits:

In the Garden of Eden in Genesis, says Ham, when everything was still perfect, animals weren't predators or prey, so the museum's designer, Patrick Marsh, is able to crowd grizzly bears, wildcats, zebras, kangaroos, an iguanodon and several other dinosaurs into the same little chunk of primeval Eden. After the fall, such a scene would result in a bloody mess.

Pretty cool. It should make vegetarians glad to know that meat eating is a sin. I guess that makes Atkins the devil.

But what you really get out of it is the profound sense of panic Ham and his followers are trying to cope with through their museum:

Ham blames the notion that the Earth is quite a bit older than the Bible suggests for just about all the world's problems. Evolution, which requires large amounts of time for small changes to accumulate into larger ones, makes it far too easy for people not to believe the Bible, he says. And that loss of belief "is at the root of modern evil."

It's pretty much an admission that if science is true than the bible can't be. Which undoes all of the live and let live arguments on both sides. What Ham is saying is that to live in the real world you have to be an atheist. So he's decided to opt out and live in this fantasy land where he can choose which ever version of reality he wants. His museum is not about religion - it's about a world without religion. He's an atheist in crisis.

But really, why take the museum seriously? Is it really any different from "museums" dedicated to UFOs or Bigfoot or the Lochness Monster? Is it really that different from Ripley's Believe it or Not, or Madame Tussaud's, or the London Dungeon?

I mean no one really believes any of this stuff do they? OK sure, some people believe that stuff, but just crazy fringe people. I mean you'd never see anyone running for president who didn't understand the difference between myth and science, fantasy and reality, right?

Right?

Salon Keeps It Real

Another entry in their Atoms & Eden series. This time it's up to Lewis Wolpert to remind everyone that we are a product of our biology, and if we have certain beliefs there's probably a biological explanation for them. Like for instance, our ability to understand Cause and Effect and extrapolate big theories about causation from little instances we see in everyday life (like tool-making). I apparently also need to read up on Scottish philosopher David Hume.

The letters section is highly entertaining as well. Count how many times the religious folks pretend to be a) bored by the argument and b) accuse scientists of being closed minded. Heh.

What's Wrong with Not Knowing What You're Talking About?

Peter Beinart and Jonah Goldberg ham-handedly attempt to discuss "Darwinism".

My response posted in their comments section:

These guys should stick to what they know and try not to discuss difficult topics based on things they vaguely remember from their school days.

First they can't seem to distinguish between evolutionary theory, the works of Charles Darwin, and the discredited fallacies of so-called Social Darwinism. Most people who know the Creationism/Intelligent Design debate recognize "Darwinism" as a right-wing code word.

Secondly, the mostly forgotten po-mo critique of science that was alluded to was not about afro-centrism or whatever they said. It was about scientific meta-narratives and was an attempt to examine the limits of scientific knowledge. The po-mo position was skeptical about science's claims of objectivity and absolute truth. It was also troubled by how science was used to legitimize political power and justify the status quo. Right or wrong, I think this is sort of close to Goldberg's view.

Now feel free to debate the politics.

ScienceHeads

John Horgan and George Johnson do a good job of hashing out the latest science news for a non-scientific audience (namely, me). Most useful is the healthy scepticism they bring to a lot of the gee-whizism in the press. This is not news but a sobering factoid to file away:

The nearest star to our sun, Alpha Centauri, is 4 light years away. Using present technology, it would take a space craft 60,000 years to reach it. Something for global warming naysayers to keep in mind.