Archive for the ‘education’ Category
what can we learn from religion?
Those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the Being of a God. Promises, Covenants and Oaths, which are the Bonds of Humane Society, can have no hold upon an Atheist.
John Locke, ‘A letter concerning toleration’, 1689
In my last post I referred to some aspects of religious belief that I think are worth focusing on if we want to get past the rational/irrational, or even the true/false debates. Alain de Botton created quite a stir recently when he claimed that arguments about the truth/falsity of religion were boring and without much value – or something like that. Typically, I both agree and disagree. There are essential empirical questions at stake, as I argued in my critique of Stephen Jay Gould here, but they’re hardly key to getting a handle on religion’s enormous popularity and endurance. That requires a deeper understanding of the psychological underpinnings of religious belief.
First, I’ve already written of the fact that, for all very young children, adults are supernatural beings. They’ve yet to learn about human mortality and limitations. They certainly learn quickly about their own pain and discomfort, but it comes as a shock when they first observe that all these competent, powerful, protective giants can be hurt, angry and frustrated just like them. These findings should hardly surprise us – children at this stage are entirely dependent on adults for their survival. These adults, they observe, can throw them up in the air and hopefully catch them, they can walk across a room in three seconds flat, they can transport them by car or plane to a completely different world, they’re not afraid of anything, and they miraculously provide all sustenance and succour.
While non-believers mostly understand such basic childhood beliefs, many are highly impatient of those who haven’t, at an appropriate age, abandoned this ‘theory of mind’ and replaced it with a more rational or sophisticated scientific worldview. The response of many psychologists in the field would be that, yes, we do change, but the idea of the supernatural, of transcending the usual limitations, has a long, lingering effect. The popularity of fairies, Harry Potter and Spiderman, which take us through early childhood into adolescence and beyond, attests to this. It’s worth noting that the nerdiest atheists are avid Trekkies and Whovians.
But none of this is really disturbing or unhealthy in the way that religious belief seems to be in the eyes of many non-believers – such as myself. The world’s most secular polities – in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Japan, and in many European countries, are also the most law-abiding, secure and contented, as countless surveys show. As a regular dipper into history, I can’t help but note that social life in god-obsessed pre-Enlightenment Europe was far more volatile, cruel and corrupt than it is today in the era of democracy, human rights and secularism. Locke’s remarks above, have been throughly refuted by modern experience – though I suspect this is due to having a more regularised legal framework and a functioning police force than to the greater moral virtue of non-believers.
So for many of us, the point is not to understand religion, but to change it. Or rather, to neutralise it by understanding it and then applying that understanding within a more secular framework. For example, one of the themes of the religious is that you can’t be good without god x, y or z. Atheists rarely concede that theists might have a point here. The stock response is a personal one ‘I don’t need a supernatural fantasy-figure to frighten me into being good, I’m good because I have respect for others and for my environment’, etc. Psychological study, however, tells us a different story.
The Lebanese-born social psychologist Ara Norenzayan, at the University of British Columbia, points out that many of the gods of small societies have little interest in morality. Instead, ‘being good’ in these small societies is enforced by their very size, and their inescapability. Kin altruism and reciprocity, being the subject of gossip, the fear of ostracism, these are what keep society members on the right track. As numbers increase, though, a sense of anonymity engenders a greater tendency towards cheating and self-serving behaviours. Studies show that even wearing dark glasses, like the Tontons Macoutes, makes it easier to engage in anti-social behaviour. People behave much better when watched, by an audience, by a camera, and even by a large drawing of an eye in the corner of a shop.
The idea that non-believers can be ‘tricked’ into behaving better by the picture of an eye watching them should make us think again, not about gods, but about being watched. And about how we still over-determine for agency in our thinking. Civil libertarians get their backs up about CC-TV cameras on every street corner, but there’s no doubt they’ve been a success in catching robbers and muggers and king-hitters in the act, or just before or after. Even those of us with no urge to steal or who, like me, have left that urge behind long ago, tend to notice when a shop does or doesn’t feature an electronic scanning device, and if they’re like me they’ll wonder about the shop’s vulnerability or otherwise, and the trustworthiness or desperation of the customers around them. As to the painted eye, I presume it doesn’t have the deterrent effect of cameras and scanners, but the fact that it works at all should make us think again about our basic beliefs. Or does it only work on the religious?
That was a joke.
So how do more secular societies utilise the idea that someone knowing if you’ve been bad or good makes for a more moral, or at least law-abiding society? Well, it appears from the statistics that either they’ve already done so, or they’ve found other ways of being good. I suspect it’s been a complex mix of substitute gods, comprehensive education and community expectations. Large scale society has naturally subdivided into smaller groups based on family, business, sport, academic or professional interest and so on, so the age-old stabilisers of kinship, reciprocity and reputation within the group are still there, and these are bolstered by a greater set of ‘watched’ networks. Trade and travel, international relations, the internet, all of these things are always in process of being regulated to reflect community concepts of fairness. We are our own Big Brother (another supernatural agent). Modern liberal education teaches kids from an early age about human rights and environmental responsibility, so much so that they’re often happy to lecture their parents about it. The Freudian concept of the superego is a kind of internalised supernatural parental figure, finger-wagging at us during our weaker moments. The declaration of human rights, accepted by most countries today, though criticised as artificial and without teeth, surely presents a better framework for moral behaviour in the modern world than the often obscure and contradictory stories and proverbs found in the Bible and other religious texts. In short, there are many ways we’ve worked out for behaving well and generally flourishing in a secular society.
So I’m basically saying there isn’t much we can learn from religion, with respect to moral policing, that we haven’t learned already. But what about community and social bonding? In the USA and in other highly religious societies, the populace seems to be very united in its religion – especially against the irreligious. Some non-believers are concerned to replicate religion’s success in this area, and I’ve heard that there’s an atheist church, or I think they call it an atheist assembly – meeting on Sunday – somewhere in my area. I’m not particularly inclined to attend. Non-believers don’t necessarily have much in common apart from a lack of interest in religion, and I’m wary of in-group thinking anyway. I’m wary of just the kind of bonding above-mentioned, a bonding that might depend upon mutual congratulations and mocking or belittling, or despising, believers.
Non-believers are of course no less community-minded than the religious. Business, sporting, scientific and small-town communities, these attract us as social animals regardless of our views on the supernatural, and I don’t think we need a top-down ‘alternative’ to religious congregations or community spirit as advocated by de Botton.
Many of the religious point out that they’re more involved in charitable works than selfish unbelievers. Where are the atheist alternatives to Centacare and Anglicare, the welfare and social services arms of the Catholic and Anglican denominations? But these organisations have built up their considerable infrastructure and expertise under extremely favourable tax circumstances which have been a part of Australia’s religious history for a couple of centuries, so they’re always more favourably placed to win government and other contracts for social and educational services. I’ve experienced personally the frustrations of humanist organisations trying to attain the same tax-exempt status for charitable purposes. They’re not given a look-in. Nevertheless there are many powerful and effective NGOs such as Oxfam and MSF, and important human rights bodies like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, whose impetus comes directly from the secular human rights movement.
I would also argue, as a former employee of Centacare (as an educator) and of Anglicare (as a foster-carer) that one result of their having cornered so much of the education and social services market is that they’ve become more secularised. They no longer require their workers to share their supernatural beliefs, and this has enabled them to reach a wider market which they’ve been able to expand largely by downplaying or eliminating the proselytising. I’ve never heard any god-talk from Centacare or Anglicare employers, and this would surely not have been the case fifty years ago. It’s the same in Catholic schools I suspect, with so many non-Catholics sending their kids there due to doubts about under-funded state schools.
This is all to the good, as too-exclusive Christian or religious communities – as well as non-religious communities – lead to us-them problems. We need to be secure in our position on the supernatural without being dismissive.
So, what in the end do we have to learn from religion? My answer, frankly, is nothing much. We have far more to learn from history and from clear-minded examination of the evidence we uncover about ourselves and our fellow organisms in this shared biosphere.
acupuncture promotion in australia
I tried to find a picture of the chi energy system online, but guess what, nothing to be found. Here’s a chi-reflexology map instead – from the Australian College of Chi-Reflexology, no less!
On the ever-reliable US-based NeuroLogica blog, Steven Novella reports on an interesting case of acupuncture promotion here in Oz, via Rachel Dunlop. As Novella reports, acupuncture has been studied many times before, and Cosmos, our premier science mag, did a story on the procedure a while back, reporting no evidence of any benefits except in the notoriously vague areas of back pain and headaches.
Not surprisingly, lower back pain was one of the conditions that supposedly benefited from acupuncture, according to media hype about the latest study. The trouble is, this study was being reported on before being published and peer reviewed, which, to put it mildly, is highly irregular and raises obvious questions. The Sydney Morning Herald is the offending news outlet, and Dr Michael Ben-Meir the over-enthusiastic researcher. As the article points out, Ben-Meir is already a ‘convert’ to acupuncture, having used it for some time in acute cases at two Melbourne hospitals. That’s fine, if a bit unorthodox, but it doesn’t accord with other findings, and there are therefore bound to be questions about methodology.
One of the obvious difficulties is that acupuncture can hardly be applied to patients without them knowing it. It’s a much more hands-on and ‘invasive’ experience than swallowing a tablet, and this will undoubtedly have a psychological effect. It seems to me, just off the top of my head, that acupuncture, with its associated rituals, its aura of antiquity and its oriental cultural cachet, would carry greater weight as a placebo than, say, a homeopathic pill. But in fact I don’t have to speculate here, as there is much clinical evidence that injections have a greater placebo effect than pills, and big pills have a greater placebo effect than small ones. So it doesn’t greatly surprise me that people will report a lessening, and even a dramatic lessening, of acute pain, after an acupuncture treatment, however illegitimate. I presume there are illegitimate treatments, because the ‘key meridional points’ where the needles are applied are precisely know by legitimate acupuncturists, and they apply their treatments with rigorous accuracy.
Well, actually there’s a big question as to whether or not there are any legitimate acupuncturists, because acupuncture is based on an energy system known as ‘chi’, which supposedly has meridional points at which needles can be inserted quite deeply into the skin, but there’s no evidence whatever that such an energy system exists, let alone about how such a system might function – for example, its mode of energy transmission (whatever ‘energy’ might mean in this case). Considering that we know a great deal about the autoimmune system and the central and peripheral nervous systems, it seems astonishing that this other bodily system has gone undetected by scientists for so long, and especially in recent times, with our ultra-sophisticated monitoring devices. When you look up ‘chi, sometimes spelt ‘qi’ or with other variants, you’ll find nothing more specific than ‘energy’, ‘life force’ or something similar – nothing corpuscular or in any sense measurable by modern medicine. Even so, researchers into acupuncture have come up with an attempt to measure its efficacy by comparing it to ‘sham acupuncture’ in clinical trials. Sham acupuncture uses the ‘wrong’ meridians and the ‘wrong’ depths to which the needle goes.
But herein lies an obvious problem. Sham acupuncturists insert needles only millimetres deep, while real acupuncturists put their needles between one and three or four centimetres deep: ‘Depth of insertion will depend on nature of the condition being treated, the patients’ size, age, and constitution, and upon the acupuncturists’ style or school’, according to an acupuncture site I visited at random. These are rather wide parameters, but the point that interests me is this. If you don’t put your needle in deep enough, you won’t make contact with the chi that needs to be stimulated or other wise modified to heal the patient. So goes the rationale, surely. It’s like, if you don’t put the needle for a standard vaccination in the right place, you’ll miss the vein. But veins are clearly real. If you go dissecting, you’ll find veins and arteries and nerves and muscle and fat and so on. But you won’t find chi. Yet, apparently it does have real existence. It’s between one and four centimetres down, according to real acupuncturists, depending on the above-mentioned variables (and no doubt many others).
So we can’t actually see it, or find it on dissection, but it’s locatable in space, vaguely. Or is it that chi is everywhere in the body but the right kind of chi, the bit that’s causing the pain and needs to be treated with needles at certain precise meridional points, is at a certain distance from the surface of the skin?
It all begins to sound a bit like theology, doesn’t it?
Here’s the ‘take-home’ for me. If you read about treatments that ‘work’ but you get virtually nothing about the mechanism of action, as is the case, for example, with homeopathy and acupuncture, be very skeptical. In the end I’m not impressed with clinical trials that show a ‘real effect’, even a startling one, because I know about regression to the mean, and I particularly know about the placebo effect. I want ‘proof of concept’. In this case proof of the concept of chi and of meridians. I’ve heard homeopaths defend their pills on TV recently by claiming that, ‘whatever the mechanism, clinical trials consistently prove that this treatment works’, and I can’t be bothered chasing up those clinical trials and testing their legitimacy, I go straight to the concepts and processes behind the treatment – the law of similars, the law of infinitesimals, and don’t forget succussion. These concepts are so intrinsically absurd that we needn’t bother looking at the clinical data. If there are positive results, they haven’t been produced by homeopathy. The fact that homeopaths themselves are largely uninterested in the mechanisms is a dead giveaway. You’d think that the law of infinitesimals and the law of similars would surely have myriad applications far beyond their current ones. They would revolutionise science and technology, if only they were real (and they’d also render obsolete much that we currently know).
The same goes for acupuncture, and chi. If this bodily system were real, and chi could be captured in a test tube, and its constituents examined and isolated under a microscope, how revolutionary that would be. How transformative. Chi pills, chi soap, chi breakfast cereal…
Ah but I’m thinking like one of those limited westerners, so modern, so smug, so lacking in the insight of the ancients…
what is ideology?
![ideology[1]](https://i0.wp.com/bonobohumanity.blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/ideology1.jpg)
I recall Daniel Dennett, in an interview on Point of Inquiry, saying that one of the main barriers to critical thinking is emotional investment in a particular position. This reminds me also of Nietzsche’s remark – a great favourite of mine – that ‘there’s no greater liar than an indignant man’.
This is what ideology is all about. It needn’t be a scarey word, it’s really quite simple.
An ideologue is someone who’s stuck – as we all can be from time to time. Their emotionalism or indignation has them repeating the same mantra over and over. Hence the love of slogans.
Some time ago I wrote about the issue of GM food – in fact. it was the last of several posts, as mentioned there, but the title of the piece, ‘Monsanto and GMOs are not the same’, might’ve indicated that I was going to write about Monsanto. My intention, in the title, was to separate the scientific issues around GMOs from the political or business issues around Monsanto’s decisions and behaviour. I also felt a bit daunted about entering the messy arena of what seemed to be monopolistic or even standover tactics – at least according to anti-Monsanto activists. So I left the Monsanto issue alone. However, a recent analysis of Monsanto’s practices and the accusations against the company, presented on the Skeptics’ guide to the universe podcast, has emboldened me to look more closely at Monsanto in a forthcoming post.
I mention all this because my writing about GMOs in the first place was inspired by an encounter with one of those ‘stuck’ ideologues. I’d known this person for years, and we were just chatting about stuff when GMOs came up. I described myself as open about the issue, whereupon she launched upon a fierce attempt to disabuse me of my openness. By the end of it she’d worked herself up into a state of great emotion, there were tears in her eyes about the horrors of this practice, and I got the distinction impression that our civilisation was at stake. Needless to say, I felt sceptical, and with good reason as it turns out. But doesn’t it always turn out that way?
We tend to think of ideology as an unthinking, or insufficiently-thinking commitment to some broad set of ideas, usually political, but I don’t think it’s substantively different from most ‘I hate’ statements (or ‘I love’ statements for that matter). Over the years I’ve heard people say in my presence that they hate animals, poetry, Albanians, potatoes, Proust, ants and Asians – and I’m sure I could come up with more. All of these ‘hatreds’ were essentially ideological, that’s to say involving an unreflective emotional over-commitment.
Not that it requires a heavy emotional commitment – in fact the vehemence of the declaration often masks an underlying vacillation or insecurity. It reminds me of some adolescents. Relentless ideologues are often like the worst adolescents. Stuck, again.
So I see ideology differently from some. Many definitions of ideology talk about comprehensiveness and a systematic set of views, firmly held, but I prefer to focus on the emotionality inherent in all ideology. Racism, for example, is an ideology, which you might describe as all-encompassing rather than comprehensive. After all, there’s not much comprehending going on. Nor is there really all that much system. There’s just a lot of feeling, or at least a lot of display of feeling. It’s the feeling that’s all encompassing, and you find it in the anti-GMO crowd, the climate change denial crowd, the conspiracy theory crowd, the anti-vaccination crowd, and so on – an intense emotional stuckness. And it is the toughest nut for skeptics to crack, and it’s all-pervasive. If we could persuade people that their feelings are the worst culprits in leading them astray,we’d be well on the way to successfully transforming our world into a more reflective one (and I’m not convinced by the claim, made by some, that we’re all ideologues). We have to start with ourselves, of course.
what does curiosity actually mean?
Robert Hooke, star of the early Royal Society
You might say that Philip Ball has performed a curious task with his book, Curiosity. He’s taken this term, which we moderns might take for granted, and examined what intellectuals and the public have made of it down through the ages – with a particular focus on that wobbly symbol of the seventeenth century British scientific enlightenment, the Royal Society. I’ve been spending a bit of time in the seventeenth century lately, what with Dava Sobel’s book on the struggle to measure longitude, Matthew Cobb’s book on the untangling of the problem of eggs and sperm and conception, not to mention Bill Bryson’s lively treatment of Hooke, Leeuwenhoek and cells and protozoa in A Short History of Nearly Everything.
That century, with some of its most interesting actors, including Francis Bacon, René Descartes, William Harvey, Jan Swammerdam, Nicolas Steno, Johann Komensky (aka Comenius), Samuel Butler, Thomas Hobbes, Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, Thomas Shadwell, Margaret Cavendish and Isaac Newton, represented a great testing period for science and its reception by the public. Curiosity has always had its enemies, and still does, as evidenced by some Papal pronouncements of recent years, but in earlier, more universally religious times, knowledge and its pursuit were treated with great wariness and suspicion, a suspicion sanctioned by the Biblical tale of the fall. The Catholic Church had risen to a position of great power in the west, though the revolting Lutherans, Anglicans, Calvinists and their ilk had spoiled the party somewhat, and England in particular, having grown in pride and prosperity during the Elizabethan period, was flexing its muscles and exercising its grey matter in exciting new ways. The sense of renovation was captured by the versatile Bacon, with works like the Novum Organum (New Method), The New Atlantis and The Advancement of Learning.
In the past I’ve described curiosity and scepticism as the twin pillars of the scientific mindset, but they’re really more like a pair of essential forces that interact and modify each other. Scepticism without curiosity is just pure negativity and nihilism, curiosity without scepticism is directionless and naive.
But perhaps that’s overly glib. What, if any, are the limits of curiosity, and when is it a bad thing? It killed the cat, after all.
The word derives from the Latin ‘cura’, meaning care. Think of the word ‘curator’. However, if you think of one of the most curious works of the ancients, Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, you’d have to say, from a modern perspective, that little care was taken to separate truth from fiction in his massive and sometimes bizarre collection of curios. This sort of unfiltered inclusivity in collecting ‘facts’ and stories goes back at least to Herodotus, the ‘father of lies’ as well as of history, and it goes forward to medieval bestiaries and herbaria. These collections of the weird and wonderful were, of course, not intended to be scientific in the modern sense. The term ‘science’ wasn’t in currency and no clear scientific methodologies had been elaborated. As to curiosity, it certainly wasn’t a fixed term, and after the political establishment of Christianity, it was more often than not seen in a negative light. ‘We want no curious disputation after possessing [i.e. accepting the truth of] Jesus Christ’, wrote Tertullian in the early Christian days. Another early Christian, Lactantius [c240-c320], explained that the reason Adam and Eve were created last was so that they’d remain forever ignorant of how their god created everything else. That was how it was intended to be. Modern creationists follow this tradition – God did it, we don’t know how and we don’t really care.
Fast forward to Francis Bacon, who still, in the early 17th century, had to contend with the view of curiosity as a sinful extravagance, a view that had dominated Europe for almost a millennium and a half. Bacon had quite a pragmatic, almost business-like view of curiosity as a tool to benefit humanity. The ‘cabinet of curiosities’ was becoming well established in his time, and Bacon advised all monarchs, indeed all rich and powerful men, to maintain one, well sorted and labelled, as if to do so would be magically empowering. The problem with these cabinets, though, was that there was little understanding about the relations between entities and articles. That’s to say, there was little that was modernly scientific about them. Their objects were largely unrelated rarities and oddities, having only one thing in common, that they were ‘curious’. Bacon recognised that this wouldn’t quite do, and tried to point a way forward. He didn’t entirely succeed, but – small steps.
Ball’s book is at pains to correct, or at least provide nuance to, the standard view of Bacon as initiator of and father-figure to the British scientific enlightenment. In fact, Bacon may have been a Rosicrucian, and his utopian New Atlantis describes a more or less priestly caste of technical experts, living and working in Solomon’s House, and keeping their arts and knowledge largely under wraps, like the alchemists and mages of earlier generations. Bacon, with his government connections and his obvious ambition to be benefited by as well as benefiting the state, was concerned to harness knowledge to productivity and profit, and those who see science largely as a coercion of nature have cursed him for it ever since. Mining and metallurgy, engineering and manufacturing were his first subjects, but he also imagined great changes in agriculture – the breeding of plants, fruits and flowers, as well as animals, to create ‘super-organisms’, in and out of season, for our benefit and delight. The art and science of the kitchens of Solomon’s House produces superior dishes, as well as wines and other beverages, and printing and textiles have advanced greatly, with new fabrics, papers, dyes and machinery. Even the weather is subject to manipulation, with rain, snow and sunshine under the control of the savants. The details of all these advancements are kept vague of course, (and here’s where Bacon’s insistence on ‘secret knowledge’ plays to his advantage, a point not sufficiently noted by Ball in his need to connect Bacon with the the alchemist-magicians of the past) but what is represented here is promise, a faith in human ingenuity to improve on the products of the natural world.
In focusing on all these benefits, Bacon manages largely to sidestep the religious aversion to curiosity as a form of intellectual avarice. However, Bacon and his more curious compatriots were never too far from the magical dark arts. Few intellectuals of this period, for example, would have dismissed alchemy out of hand, in spite of Chaucer’s delicious mockery of it over 200 years before, or Ben Jonson’s more contemporaneous take in The Alchemist. What differentiated Bacon was an interest in system, however vaguely adumbrated, and a harnessing of this system to the interests of the state.
Bacon tried to interest James I in a state sponsored proto-scientific institution, but this got nowhere, largely because he couldn’t devise anything like a practical program for such an entity, but a generation or two after his death, after a civil war, a brief republic and a restoration, the Royal Society was formed under the more or less indifferent patronage of Charles II. Bacon was seen as its guiding spirit, and there was an expectation, or hope, that its members would be virtuosi, a term then in currency. As Ball explains:
The virtuoso was ‘a rational artist in all things’… meaning the arts as well as the sciences, pursued methodically with a scientist’s understanding of perspective, anatomy and so forth. (It is after all in the arts that the epithet ‘virtuoso’ survives today.) The virtuoso was permitted, indeed expected, to indulge pure curiosity: to pry into any aspect of nature or art, no matter how trivial, for the sake of knowing. There was no sense that this impulse need be harnessed and disciplined by anything resembling a systematic program, or by an attempt to generalise from particulars to overarching theories.
Charles II, in spite of having some scientific pretensions, paid scant attention to his own Society, and neglected to fund it. What was perhaps worse for the Society was his amused approval of a hit play of the time, Thomas Shadwell’s The Virtuoso, which satirized the Society through its central character, Sir Nicholas Gimcrack. The play, as well as many criticisms of the Society’s practices by the likes of the philosopher Thomas Hobbes and the aristocratic Margaret Cavendish (Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne), presented another kind of negativity vis-a-vis unbridled curiosity, more modern, if not more pointed than the old religious objections.
The play-goer first encounters Sir Nicholas Gimcrack lying on a table making swimming motions. He tells his visitors that he’s learning to swim, but they are dubious about his method. His response:
I content myself with the speculative part of swimming; I care not for the practick. I seldom bring anything to use; tis not my way. Knowledge is my ultimate end.
This was the updated criticism. Pointless observations and experiments, leading nowhere and of no practical use. Gimcrack appears to have been based on Robert Hooke, one of the Royal Society’s most brilliant members, who was suitably enraged on viewing the play. Shadwell mocked Hooke’s prized invention, the air pump, intended to create a vacuum for the purpose of observing objects inserted into it, and he presented a jaundiced view of Gimcrack, through the dialogue of his niece, as ‘a sot that has spent two thousand pounds in microscopes to find out the nature of eels in vinegar, mites in a cheese, and the blue of plums.’ These were all examined in Hooke’s ground-breaking and breath-taking work Micrographia.
Most of Shadwell’s mockery hasn’t stood the test of time, but he was far from the only one who targeted the practices and the approach of the Society and of ‘virtuosi’, sometimes with humour, sometimes with indignation. Their criticisms are worth examining, both for what they reveal of the era, and for their occasional relevance today. Many of them seem totally misplaced – mocking the ‘weighing of air’, which they naturally saw as the weighing of nothing, or the examining, through the newish tool the microscope, of a gnat’s leg. It should be recalled that Hooke, through his microscopic investigations, was the first to highlight and to name the individual cell. Yet it was a common criticism of the era, due largely to the ignorance of the interconnectedness of all things that the scientifically literate now take for granted, that these explorations were simply time-wasting dilettantism. The philosophical curmudgeon Thomas Hobbes, for example, firmly believed that experiments couldn’t produce significant truths about the world. It seems that the general public, who didn’t have access to such things, saw microscopes and telescopes as magical devices which didn’t so much reveal new worlds as to create them. If they couldn’t be verified with one’s own eyes, how could these visions be trusted? And there was the old religious argument that we weren’t meant to see them, that we should keep to our god-given limitations.
Generally speaking, as Ball describes it, though the criticisms and misgivings weren’t so clearly religious as they had been, they centred on a suspicion about unrestrained curiosity and questioning, which might lead to an undermining of the social order (a big issue after the recent upheavals in England), and to atheism (they were on the money with that one). They had a big impact on the Royal Society, which struggled to survive in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It’s worth noting too, that the later eighteenth century Enlightenment on the continent was much more political and social than scientific.
But rather than try to analyse these criticisms, I’ll provide a rich sample of them, without comment. None of them are ‘representative’, but together they give a flavour of the times, or of the more conservative feeling of the time.
[Is there] anything more Absurd and Impertinent than a Man who has so great a concern upon his Hands as the Preparing for Eternity, all busy and taken up with Quadrants, and Telescopes, Furnaces, Syphons and Air-pumps?
John Norris, Reflections on the conduct of human life, 1690
Through worlds unnumber’d though the God be known,
‘Tis ours to trace him only in our own….
The bliss of man (could pride that blessing find)
Is not to act or think beyond mankind;
No powers of body or of soul to share,
But what his nature and his state can bear.
Why has not a man a microscopic eye?
For this plain reason, man is not a fly.
Say what the use, were finer optics giv’n,
T’inspect a mite, not comprehend the heav’n? …
Then say not man’s imperfect, Heav’n in fault;
Say rather, man’s as perfect as he ought:
His knowledge measur’d to his state and place,
His time a moment, and a point his space.
Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man
There are some men whose heads are so oddly turned this way, that though they are utter strangers to the common occurrences of life, they are able to discover the sex of a cockle, or describe the generation of a mite, in all its circumstances. They are so little versed in the world, that they scarce know a horse from an ox; but at the same time will tell you, with a great deal of gravity, that a flea is a rhinoceros, and a snail an hermaphrodite.
… the mind of man… is capable of much higher contemplations [and] should not be altogether fixed upon such mean and disproportionate objects.
Joseph Addison, The Tatler, 1710
But could Experimental Philosophers find out more beneficial Arts then our Fore-fathers have done, either for the better increase of Vegetables and brute Animals to nourish our bodies, or better and commodious contrivances in the Art of Architecture to build us houses… it would not onely be worth their labour, but of as much praise as could be given to them: But as Boys that play with watry Bubbles, or fling Dust into each others Eyes, or make a Hobby-horse of Snow, are worthy of reproof rather then praise, for wasting their time with useless sports; so those that addict themselves to unprofitable Arts, spend more time then they reap benefit thereby… they will never be able to spin Silk, Thred, or Wool, &c. from loose Atomes; neither will Weavers weave a Web of Light from the Sun’s Rays, nor an Architect build an House of the bubbles of Water and Air… and if a Painter should draw a Lowse as big as a Crab, and of that shape as the Microscope presents, can any body imagine that a Beggar would believe it to be true? but if he did, what advantage would it be to the Beggar? for it doth neither instruct him how to avoid breeding them, or how to catch them, or to hinder them from biting.
[Inventors of telescopes etc] have done the world more injury than benefit; for this art has intoxicated so many men’s brains, and wholly employed their thoughts and bodily actions about phenomena, or the exterior figures of objects, as all better arts and studies are laid aside.
Margaret Cavendish, Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, 1666
[A virtuoso is one who] has abandoned the society of men for that of Insects, Worms, Grubbs, Maggots, Flies, Moths, Locusts, Beetles, Spiders, Grasshoppers, Snails, Lizards and Tortoises….
To what purpose is it, that these Gentlemen ransack all Parts both of Earth and Sea to procure these Triffles?… I know that the desire of knowledge, and the discovery of things yet unknown is the pretence; but what Knowledge is it? What Discoveries do we owe to their Labours? It is only the discovery of some few unheeded Varieties of Plants, Shells, or Insects, unheeded only because useless; and the knowledge, they boast so much of, is no more than a Register of their Names and Marks of Distinction only.
Mary Astell, The character of a virtuoso, 1696
There are many other such comments, very various, some attempting to be witty, others indignant or contemptuous, and some quite astute – the Royal Society did have more than its share of dabblers and dilettantes, and was far from being simply ‘open to talents’ – but for the most parts the criticisms haven’t dated well. You won’t see The Virtuoso in your local playhouse in the near future. Wide-ranging curiosity, mixed with a big dose of scepticism and critical analysis of what the contemporary knowledge provides, has proved itself many times over in the development of scientific theory and an ever-expanding world view, taking us very far from the supposedly ‘better arts and studies’ the seventeenth century pundits thought we should be occupied by, but also making us realize that the science that has flowed from curiosity has mightily informed those ‘better arts and studies’, which can be perhaps best summarized by the four Kantian questions, Who are we? What do we know? What should we do? and What can we hope for?
Anatol Rapoport’s rules: a tough ask
‘Anatol Rapoport…..once promulgated a list of rules for how to write a successful critical commentary on an opponent’s work. First, he said, you must attempt to re-express your opponent’s position so clearly, vividly and fairly that your opponent says “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.” Then, you should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement), and third, you should mention anything you have learned from your opponent. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.’
These rules are useful for everyday spoken arguments too, of the more or less intellectual sort. They can be adapted for the spoken, to keep your interlocutor onside, (along with smiles, nods, effective impressions of interest, appropriate turn-taking and the suppression of irritated grimaces). I think I’m reasonably good at following Rapoport’s rules in writing – or trying to keep to them. In conversation it’s much harder, especially after a few drinks!
I once watched former High Court Justice Michael Kirby, whom I already greatly admired, in a television exchange with a Pauline Hanson supporter. He listened politely to the man’s bluster, then spent some time painstakingly and seemingly sympathetically presenting the Hanson view on immigration, and then he described in details its flaws while defending its validity as a position, at least on an emotional level. It was an extraordinary performance, full of discipline, grace and poise. I use the memory to punish myself when I perform disappointingly in an argument – sometimes ‘winning’ the argument, or at least seeming to, but losing the respect or interest of the opponent.
Monsanto and GMOs are not the same
scary protesters
The other day on the tram to the city I noticed people congregating on the steps of Adelaide’s parliament house, many of them holding green balloons. Always fascinated by demos, and usually well up on the news, I struggled for reasons as to what it was all about. The only ‘special day’ I knew of was for indigenous Australians – National Sorry Day on Sunday May 26 – but this was a Saturday, and the green balloons suggested something more environmental. I continued on into the city for a spot of lunch and window shopping, but then found presumably the same demonstrators wending their way through Rundle Mall, behind a megaphone-wielding leader and parroting after him three clear slogans – ‘No Monsanto’, ‘No GMOs’ and ‘No human experiments’.
A lot of thoughts went through my head at hearing these chants – I’m a very excitable fellow – but among them was this. Ages ago I began a five part series of posts on the subject of genetically modified foods, which I based on a piece of writing in a cookbook, The urban cook, by ‘celebrity chef’ Mark Jensen, who plies his trade at Sydney’s Red Lantern restaurant. The first four parts were written and posted here, here, here and here, but I never got round to finishing the fifth part, based on the last paragraph of Jensen’s little anti-GMO critique. So I’ll finish it now with reference to the demonstration the other day, which I’ve discovered was targeted specifically at Monsanto.
So now to look at the final of Mark Jensen’s five not very provocative paragraphs on GM plants, and to summarise my own take on the controversy.
In the United States, some farmers who use GM crops have had to resort to physically ripping horse weed [an example of a herbicide-resistant ‘super weed’] out of the ground by hand. Farmers who grow GM crops use herbicides that are designed to kill the weeds but leave the crop healthy. In this case, the GM food crop has remained resistant to the herbicide, but unfortunately the weeds have adapted to resist it as well. If the farmer uses another brand of herbicide to kill the weeds he runs the risk of killing the food crop. This situation is frightening and the only way to stop the cycle of stronger and stronger chemical use is to do just that: STOP IT. This is a classic example of man trying to circumvent nature and only succeeding in making matters worse.
The thesis in this paragraph is simple enough – the use of GM crops creates herbicide-resistant super-weeds, which will lead to the use of stronger chemicals and higher volumes of chemicals in order to control them. So is this true, and how much of a key factor are GMOs in the production or over-production of chemical herbicides and/or pesticides?
First, the horseweed problem. This weed’s growing resistance to glyphosate, the herbicide patented and marketed as Round-up by Monsanto [though its patent ran out in 2000], has been a problem for US agriculturalists for over a decade now. Glyphosate is the most commonly-used herbicide in the USA. It should be pointed out that it was first marketed in the seventies, well before any GMOs came on the market. Round-up Ready soybeans, engineered to be resistant to glyphosate, were not released into the market until 1996. According to this scientific report:
Common to all known cases of glyphosate-resistant horseweed is the frequent use of glyphosate for control of all weeds, little or no use of alternative herbicides that control horseweed, and long-term no-tillage crop production practices
That’s to say, monocultural farming practices and the one silver bullet approach to weed control seem to be the culprits in this resistance problem. The report argues that effective control of horseweed simply involves the adjustment of management strategies. Increased tillage, where possible, is recommended, and for well-established weeds, a three-way mixture of herbicides, including glyphosate, appears to fix the problem. The researchers name the herbicides to use, and the relative quantities. I would be very surprised if they hadn’t taken into account the possibility that such a mixture might harm the crop. The impression I get from this particular report is that we need not get too alarmed.
The use of herbicides will continue to be a feature of agriculture as long as monocultural farming is required to feed the world’s vast population. This type of farming has its problems – as does every other type of farming – but there’s no doubt that it has led to enormous efficiencies in terms of land use and crop yields. Monoculture was a key component of the ‘green revolution’ that began in the sixties and led to an unprecedented rise in crop yields, rescuing millions of people from the prospect of starvation. And the revolution isn’t over yet.
This is the point. The issues of weed resistance, difficult though they sometimes are, are minor by comparison to the benefits of high-yielding, intensively grown crops in effectively feeding our populations – regardless of whether those crops have been genetically modified in the old way through experimental hybridisation, or in the new way by means of gene splicing. Meanwhile we will continue to work on the weed resistance problem, which will no doubt involve a modification of current monocultural practise (among other strategies), rather than its abandonment. The situation is not frightening, it’s an ongoing problem, as it has long been, but it is by no means out of control. We need to be alert but not alarmed, and there continues to be a lot of research devoted to this problem. From what I’ve read, it’s not a losing battle.
GM foods are here to stay, and it seems to me that Australians should be given the choice of consuming them. Currently very little GM food production occurs in Australia, and only a limited amount is imported – mainly soya from the US. All GM food must be labelled as such here, but it’s highly likely that much is slipping through unlabelled, in imported cereals, chocolate and other foodstuffs. Next year marks the twentieth anniversary of the introduction of GM food in the US, the first country of use. Other major producers are Brazil, Argentina, Canada, China and India. As yet no health problems have been definitively associated with GMO consumption.
As to the demonstration the other day, its slogans and frankenfood banners do nothing to provide enlightenment on this issue. It gives the distinct impression that being opposed to the monopolistic practices of Monsanto means being opposed to all GMOs and all GMO research, as well as, bizarrely, to all human experiments! Presumably by chanting against human experiments they’re trying to make a link between Monsanto’s products and the risks to humans who use them, but to me, it’s unlikely that passersby would be able to make that connection – quite apart from the fact that Monsanto no longer has a monopoly on glyphosate. It goes without saying that human trials – of all new pharmaceuticals or medical procedures, etc, are not only vitally important, they’re mandatory, as they should be. Without ‘human experiments’ no new developments would ever get the chance to display a human benefit.
As always, what’s needed here is education and informed debate, not silly slogans.
For an informative account of the current situation with genetically modified food, especially in relation to Australia, check out this fact sheet from Australia’s Chief Scientist. Don’t get angry, get educated.
books and e-books
don’t bother, at least not with the ebook version
Change is the only certainty, and the world of books (made of paper), booksellers and publishers is having this little apothegm rubbed painfully in its face at present, it seems to me, and, as a person who loves books but has always been poor as a church-mouse, I feel rather caught in the middle of all this transition, and pulled more or less equally in the directions of tradition and transformation.
After all, the choice between e-books and the traditional version is a little more fraught than that between CDs (please note – no fucking apostrophe) and MP3 downloads. Books don’t just go back to the days of Gutenberg and Caxton, or the movable type that was used in Korea from at least the thirteenth century. The library of Alexandria, founded well over 2000 years ago by the Ptolemaic dynasty (Ptolemy Soter, the ‘illegitimate’ son of Philip of Macedon, half-brother and general of Alexander the Great, and subsequent ruler of Egypt, was probably its originator) is said to have contained some 500,000 papyrus scrolls, all now lost to history. That’s one advantage of e-books; they render book-burnings obsolete.
So writing on paper, or its antecedents, has a long and proud history, and is now being threatened for the first time in millennia by new technology. So I’ve been feeling this weight of history when ducking into the odd bookshop lately. I’ve been a bookshop-haunter for forty years, and it’s pretty obvious that they’re going through tough times now. As with CDs, makeshift shops full of cheap editions are cropping up here and there, then just as suddenly disappearing when the number of buyers drops off. I was in one the other day, and held in my hand a prettily-packaged volume of Ovid, called The Art of Love, selling for a mere $7. It was apparently an amalgamation of two collections, Amores and Ars Amatoria, and a ridiculous bargain, but even that tiny amount gave me pause. I’d always wanted to explore Ovid’s works on love, because of their influence on Shakespeare, but I’ve been so caught up with reading sciencey stuff lately, almost to the point of addiction, and then it occurred to me that, with my new Kindle, I could probably download all of Ovid’s works for free…
I ended up buying three cheap books, one of them sciencey. The lab rat chronicles: a neuroscientist reveals life lessons from the planet’s most successful mammals comes with a recommendation from Patricia Churchland, no less, and I suspect that such books aren’t available through Kindle, at least not at anything less than $10, the price I paid. Ok I’ve just checked, and it is available, at exactly the same price. The 2 other books I bought were God is not one: the eight rival religions that run the world and why their differences matter, by Stephen Prothero ($10), and How to win a cosmic war: confronting radical religion, by Reza Aslan ($8). Interestingly, the Prothero book isn’t available on Amazon, but the Aslan one is, for $10. So there are still bargains to be had offline. However Amazon is always reducing its prices, as books move from ‘must read-nows’ to ‘has-beens’. That’s happening in the bookstores too, of course, but not at the same rate. Then again, though you’re unlikely to get hold of the complete works of Plato (Benjamin Jowett translation, presumably with his excellent introductions) in a second-hand bookshop for a dollar – the going Amazon price – there are book exchanges (there’s one in the caf around the corner from me) where you can pick up one of an admittedly limited selection of books for free, with the idea that you exchange it for something of your own, honour bound.
So I weigh the pros and cons and ponder the senses of guilt and obligation. The kindle is light and convenient, and easy to read in bed. My eyesight is poor, so I appreciate a backlit screen as opposed to the foxed and mouldering pages of a second-hand text, though I wonder if the light is damaging my eyes even more. On the other hand its caveat emptor with some of these e-books. One of the first ones I bought (okay it was free so I’m not really allowed to complain) was A very brief history of the first crusade, by one Mark Black. Brief it was, more of a pamphlet than a book. I have a copy of Christopher Tyerman’s monumental history of the crusades on my shelves, but I gave up on it a few years back after about 200 pages = too many Count Theobalds and Sir Roberts, too many family connections and names and names and names, I felt as confused as any medieval plebeian might have felt when caught up in the thick of it, but without the concentration of the mind an imminent death would’ve usefully brought on. So I thought this brief history might offer a clearer view, but I was more than disappointed. I suspect everything in it was lifted from Tyerman’s book, so it told me nothing new. What was worse, though, was that the grammar was often hilariously bad. I have a feeling it wasn’t actually edited by a human being. Possibly the text was used as an experimental test case for robotic proofreading. A black mark for Mark Black, whose name, I note, crops up for many of these ‘brief histories’, mostly unrelated to each other. Anyway, an odd experience.
So I’m not entirely convinced of the new reading technology, though the possibilities are obvious, and it’s clearly a mode still in its infancy. Hopefully the two ways of packaging good reading material will live side by side for a while to come, and I look forward to accessing both, long into the future.
fountains 4: what’s a glial cell?
Here’s the transcript for the next podcast, which I won’t be putting online for another week or so, when I can afford to buy space to host podcasts directly from this site. Then I’ll be able to stick all the fountains podcasts in one place, with the new logo created by a friend of mine, Stuart Rose:
What’s a glial cell?
Today, I’m going to make my first, but hopefully not last, foray into neurobiology. And since neurobiology is about the most complicated subject imaginable, I’ve decided to enter it sideways, so to speak, by looking at glial cells, or neuroglia, as they’re sometimes called. Not that this will make it any easier.
Glial cells – ‘glia’ means glue in Greek – perform a whole range of tasks apart from holding neurons together. They also come in many different varieties, and there’s still a lot we don’t know about them. They make up about half the mass of the brain, and they outnumber neurons many times over, making up between 85% and 90% of brain cells.
Considering the great varieties of roles glial cells play in the central nervous system (CNS), the peripheral nervous system (PNS) and in neurogenesis or the development of the brain, it’s hard to start with a summary or overview. They’re generally a lot smaller than neurons, and the glia/neuron ratio varies greatly between species, with the human brain near the top end. Elephants, though, are much higher with 97% glial cells.
Glial cells emerge from the multipotent precursor cells of the neural crest and neural tube. Radial glial cells act as progenitors and also as scaffolding for the growth and migration of neurons in the brain. They play a role in the development and maintenance of synaptic plasticity in the cerebellum. This function of supporting neurons is typical of all glial cells, with some of them having their own quasi-neuronal tasks. In the vertebrate retina, for example, Muller cells or Muller glia have been found, quite recently, to play a role in the formation of synapses. They’ve also been shown, when the retina is damaged, to re differentiate into progenitor cells which can then become photoreceptor cells.
But I’m galloping forward a bit here. The three main types of glial cells in the CNS are the astrocytes, the oligodendrocytes and the microglia, and some of their functions have long been known, though the detail, as well as a growing number of other roles and functions, are only now being focused on, in what some are describing as a revolution in neurobiology. Dr. Douglas Fields, chief of the Nervous System Development & Plasticity Section of the National Institutes of Health in the USA, argues that our understanding of the brain has been overly influenced by what he calls ‘the neuron doctrine’, that’s to say, a relentless focus on the electrical activity of the brain in the form of action potentials between neurons. The fact that glial cells don’t communicate electrically has meant that their role in brain activity has been largely overlooked for the best part of a century, according to Dr Fields. My layman’s perspective suggests to me that, not being electrical, glial cells just aren’t as flashy or sexy as neurons. ‘I sing the body electric’, Walt Whitman memorably wrote, and maybe he wasn’t thinking about neurons, but he definitely wasn’t thinking about glial cells.
So let’s have a look at some of those glial cell types. Astrocytes – so-called because of their star-like shape and projections – perform lots of functions within the CNS, including providing physical support to neurons through the formation of a matrix, cleaning up chemical debris within the brain, and replenishing chemicals within neurons and so keeping them healthy and well-nourished. This clearly requires communication between neurons and glia. Astrocytes also monitor the fluid surrounding neurons and keep it chemically well maintained. They get rid of the flotsam and jetsam through a process called phagocytosis, which involves engulfing the unwanted particles and essentially digesting them, a process performed by dedicated cells throughout the body.
looks like an astrocyte
Astrocytes nourish the neurons by first obtaining glucose from capillaries, then breaking it down into lactate, the first product of glucose metabolism. The lactate is then released into the fluid surrounding the neurons. The neurons take up this lactate and transport it, as an energy source, to their mitochondria. Astrocytes also maintain a store of glycogen from this process, which may be used in times of high neuronal metabolism.
One of the essential functions of oligodendrocytes is myelination. Now I’m sorry for the polysyllabification there, but I’m talking about the production of myelin sheath, the insulating material that protects the axons of the CNS as well as substantially improving their electrical activity. Myelin is white in colour, and accounts for the white colour of the brain. It’s made up of 80% lipid and 20% protein and it increases, many times over, the strength and efficiency of electrical conduction down the axon. The axon is generally the only part of the neuron sheathed in myelin. The oligodendrocytes are able to sheath as many as 40 axons at once in myelin.
Microglia, the smallest of the glial cells, also engage in phagocytosis to clean up debris, but their most important role is immunological. The brain’s main protection against pathogens is the blood-brain barrier, a layer of endothelial cells similar to the types of cells that line blood vessels and internal organs. When somehow pathogens cross the blood-brain barrier or are introduced into the brain directly, microglia, which are ultra-sensitive to chemical imbalances in the brain, and particularly to extra-cellular potassium levels, move swiftly into action. Microglia perform a similar role in the CNS to that of macrophages in the blood system, but are not as easily replaceable as macrophages, due to the blood-brain barrier. However microglia are extremely plastic which allows them to perform a variety of immunological functions at short notice while also maintaining homeostasis in the brain.
Another type of glia, the Schwann cells, provide support to the nerve cells of the peripheral nervous system (PNS). They wrap themselves around axons, as with oligodendrocytes in the CNS, and in so doing produce myelin, though the process of myelin production is substantially different in the PNS, with one cell producing only one segment of myelin. Schwann cells also clean up debris and play a major role in the regrowth of PNS axons. They arrange themselves into cylinders which guide the tendrils of regenerating axons. When a functioning tendril comes into contact with one of these cylinders it will grow inside it a rate of up to 4mm a day.
There are other types of glia, and the glial cells already mentioned have their subsets and their developmental phases, which all play their part in the development and maintenance of the brain and the nervous systems, yet for a long time neurophysiologists considered the ‘white matter’ of the brain – the glia, predominantly – as passive, with the grey neuronal matter being the active component.
With the renewed interest in glia however, experiments are being conducted that show that when you remove or ablate relevant glial cells, it has a profound effect on an animal’s ability to sense its surroundings. This has been shown in worms and other creatures, and it raises many questions as to how glial cells communicate with neurons in facilitating an effective sense of our environment, without which, we wouldn’t last long.
We now know that the activation of calcium ions provides the principal means of chemical communication between neuroglia and neurons. An increase in calcium ions signals the release of what are now being called gliotransmitters, molecules that travel between cells in a manner similar to neurotransmitters. All this communication has a variety of purposes but it’s the immunological role of neuroglia that has researchers really excited. The neuroglia are able to pick up signals between neurons and respond by controlling neuronal activity, inhibiting or stimulating or refining the action potentials between nerve cells. All of this was completely unsuspected until recently. Their role in such diseases as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, Lou Gehrig’s disease, cancer and AIDS, and even such disorders as OCD (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder) are now being uncovered through a lot of experimental work. Communication between astrocytes and microglia and neurons are substantially altered in specific ways in each of these diseases. So important have glia become in contemporary neuro-research that there’s talk of ‘the other brain’ or ‘the glial brain’ as opposed to the neural brain. They of course work in tandem, but the point is that we have a lot of catching up to do in researching glia.
It’s worth noting that, though neurons in invertebrate animals are not substantially different from those in vertebrates, glial cells are far less numerous, in proportion to neurons, in invertebrates, where they don’t have the same myelin-producing role. Investigating the increasingly vital and diverse roles played by glia and how they came to evolve in more complex animals will no doubt be a focus of future research.
fountains 2: dolphins and their brains
Here’s the transcript of my second ‘fountains of good stuff’ podcast, ‘dolphins and their brains’, (linked to above) minus some bits at the beginning and end.
Dolphins have long been considered our cute, smart underwater friends. In fact you might be surprised at how far back such observations go, and at how interested the ancients were in dolphinkind. Aristotle recognised that dolphins weren’t fish, that they couldn’t breathe underwater, that they had lungs and had to return to the surface to breathe just like us. The ancient poet Oppius of Corycus had this to say about them:
Diviner than the dolphin is nothing yet created; for indeed they were aforetime men and lived in cities along with mortals, but by the devising of Dionysus they exchanged the land for the sea and put on the form of fishes.
In these remarks we find the mixing of genuine observation and fascination with mythologising which still persists today. Some modern claims are that dolphins are idyllically happy and playful creatures, that they have a special bond with humans, that they’re at least equivalent in intelligence to us, bearing in mind the vastly different medium they inhabit, and that they have a highly developed language and a social and cultural complexity that we’ve barely begun to tap into.
So how much truth is there to these claims? Well I think we should first look at the grandest of the claims, about dolphin language and culture.
Many of the more hyperbolic claims for a rich dolphin language and culture, as yet beyond the ken of mere humans, were made by John Lilly, a pioneering researcher of the fifties and sixties. Lilly worked with bottle-nosed dolphins, and that is the species I’m referring to, though of course, all thirty or so species of dolphins and porpoises, as well as the forty or more species of whales, tend to be lumped in together as highly communicative and cultured.
Lilly’s attempts to back up his claims about dolphin language didn’t work out so well, however, and his writings on dolphins became increasingly drug-influenced and fantastical. Another researcher in the mid-sixties, Duane Batteau, tried to translate Hawaiian phonemes into the whistle-sounds frequently used by dolphins, using them to convey simple instructions. However, Batteau could only use the sounds as holophrases, that’s to say, instructions with complex elements, such as ‘jump through the hoop I’m holding’. The dolphins couldn’t be taught to recognise individual semantic elements within the complex instruction, such as ‘hoop’, ‘leap’ or ‘five feet high’, which are essential to building up a whole language, at least one that humans would recognise, and using it in a flexible and creative way. The dolphins took some years to learn about a dozen holophrastic sounds, which indicated none of the complexity or nuance of human language.
Since these early researches, little headway has been gained in trying to teach dolphins, or any other species, to understand human language, which is hardly surprising, as they’ve evolved to communicate very differently. Dolphins are very vocal animals, forever sounding off with whistles and clicks that are incomprehensible to most of us, and many of which we’re not even equipped to hear. But is this dolphin language?
Well, early research on dolphin whistles didn’t come up with anything too promising. Individual dolphins produce their own unique whistles, described as ‘signature whistles’, doubtless for the purpose of identifying themselves to others. Interestingly, female dolphins develop signature whistles that are quite different from their mothers’, while male dolphins don’t. This is explained by the fact that male dolphins, after weaning, hang around together in ‘adolescent gangs’ just as male humans do [and quite a few other species too, such as elephants]. Females tend to stick to their mothers, becoming young mothers themselves. They need to be able to differentiate between mothers and children, which is unnecessary for the males.
Dolphins do sometimes mimic the whistles of other dolphins too, particularly those of their closest relatives, but signature whistles as a form of recognition and differentiation, are a long way from anything like language. After all, many species can recognise their own mates or kin from the distinctive sounds they make, or from their specific odour, or from visual cues. However, a clever experiment carried out more recently, which synthesised these whistles through a computer, so that the whistle pattern was divorced from its distinctive sound, found that the dolphins responded to these patterns even when produced via a different sound. It seemed that they were recognising names. It’s undoubtedly intriguing, but clearly a lot more research is required.
Most attempts to elicit information about dolphin language, and dolphin intelligence generally, suffer from a difficulty in imagining a language system completely alien to our own, so that we always try to translate communication into something that might make sense to us. It’s a kind of anthropomorphism problem, which we can probably only overcome by a greater insight into the social life of these creatures and what they might use language for. It will no doubt be a long and painstaking process.
One of the reasons given for the supreme intelligence of the dolphin is its very large brain, and on first thought, it seems a very sound reason. The human brain is considerably larger, both in absolute terms and in terms of brain body ratio, than that of other primates.
In fact the human brain has become so large that we have trouble pushing our babies’ heads through the birth canal, and their skulls at birth are still soft and collapsible in places to facilitate the birth process. In the few months after birth, the baby’s head has to be supported until it becomes used to carrying that great bony weight on its shoulders all by itself. The average dolphin brain is slightly larger than ours, but so is its body, so its brain body ratio averages out at about the same, or a little less than ours.
The real key to human intelligence, however, is the growth of a specific part of the brain, the neocortex. In most mammals, the neocortex takes up between 10 and 30% of the total brain mass. In primates in general, it takes up 50%. For humans, though it has climbed to a very impressive 80%. So big is our neocortex that is has to be folded in on itself to fit inside our heads.
So what about the dolphin neocortex? Well, it was John Lilly, the sixties researcher, who first discovered that it was even bigger than our own, a fact that led him to to the quite understandable conviction that dolphins were, at the very least, our equals, intelligence-wise.
However, size isn’t everything, especially when we compare land mammals with their underwater cousins. Mammals on land all have about the same nerve cell density, that is, the same number of neurons per square centimetre. Aquatic mammals have far less densely packed neurons in their brains. In fact, their brains are only a quarter as densely packed with neurons as land mammals, and that’s a big difference. It seems that, because dolphins have evolved in water and don’t have to contend with gravity the way we do, their brains have been able to spread out over a larger area, without necessarily increasing complexity. Which isn’t to say that the dolphin brain isn’t extremely complex. We’re only at the beginning of understanding a small fraction of it.
Some of this research has highlighted that the neocortex in dolphins, which naturally reflects more recent evolutionary development, is used for very different purposes, such as breathing, which is regulated by more primitive brain processes in land mammals. Hearing in dolphins requires a far larger proportion of grey matter than in humans, and it’s likely that their complex sonar system is regulated by the neocortex.
In recent years it’s been discovered that spindle neurons, previously only found in higher primates, exist in large numbers in many whale and dolphin species. These neurons are associated with the processing of emotions and social interaction. They’re relatively large and allow for high-speed communication and response across the large brains of hominids, so the fact that many cetaceans [the order that whales, dolphins and porpoises belong to] have some three times the number that humans do, is certainly food for thought.
“The discovery of spindle neurons in cetaceans is a stunning example of neuro-anatomical convergence between cetaceans and primates,”
says Lori Marino of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.
“The common ancestor of cetaceans and primates lived over 95 million years ago, and such a highly specific morphological similarity as the finding of spindle cells is clearly due to evolutionary convergence, not shared ancestry,”
she says. The term ‘convergence’ refers to a similarity in adaptive structures and behaviours in unrelated or only distantly related species.
Exactly how these spindle cells function in cetaceans is still unclear, but it’s believed that they’ve been present in these mammals for some thirty million years, compared to 15 to 20 million years in our primate ancestors.
The term ‘intelligence’ is really quite fuzzy, even when we’re applying it only to humans, let alone comparing humans to such vastly different creatures as dolphins, but years of studying the social interactions of cetaceans in general are gradually revealing a world much worth exploring. However, it isn’t necessarily the playful world we associate with the bounding, squealing, apparently perpetually laughing and eagerly performing creatures formerly associated with marinelands the world over.
Some years ago, beginning in 1997, a growing mystery developed when dead porpoises and juvenile dolphins were found washed up on beaches in Scotland and on the other side of the world in Virginia. The animals had suffered massive internal damage, as it turned out, from dolphin attacks. They had literally been beaten to death. A well-known documentary, ‘the Dolphin Murders’, relates the story. Researchers are still unclear as to the motive for these murderous attacks, but they remind us that evolutionary pressures and brutality are just as much a part of life in the oceans as on land, and that even dolphins, who’ve often been reported as saving human lives at sea, can turn themselves into killers.
Dolphin-hugging, metaphorically speaking, has been all the rage in recent decades, but for all its positivity, it risks obscuring what dolphins really are. They’re not always playful and cute, but they’re certainly among the most fascinating creatures on our planet, and the best compliment we can pay them is to try to get to know them a whole lot better.
blogging, truth and getting back to the fountain
Hello, let me take this opportunity to remind people, or to educate people who seem to have little knowledge of these things, about what a blog actually is, and what it can be.
Clearly a blog such as this one reflects the personal views of its author. There are thousands of such blogs of course, of very varying standards, and written for very varying purposes. My own blog has its own variety of purposes, including self-education, the promotion of particular values such as skepticism and critical thinking, and, in an elaborate way, the pleasures of self-development and worldly exploration, a la Montaigne, ‘inventor’ of the essay, who once claimed that he wrote not to discover his thoughts but to invent them – or some such thing.
Sometimes in this blog I may focus on others – their views, their activities or whatever. Those others may not like what I write about them, but that of course would not give them the right to shut me down, any more than, say, a politician would have the right to shut down a blogger who violently disagrees with her policies. Of course, if the politician feels that the blogger has ‘overstepped the mark’, and feels personally abused or offended by the blogger’s remarks, there are various options open to her.
She could, for example, take advantage of the interactive nature of blogging, and leave a critical comment on the blog, thus possibly initiating a conversation with the blogger or, in more popular blogs than mine, with the blogger’s other readers and commentators. This is often a very fruitful exercise, as it helps to clarify opposing positions and to deepen and enrich the debate.
However the politician may feel it beneath her to dignify the blogger with a response – this is often the case with public figures. Of course it may be that the blogger’s writings are so malicious as to be unworthy of attention. Such writings are often self-defeating, and the mainstream blogosphere deals with them by ignoring them, thus relegating them to their own little busy corner of looniness.
However, let’s imagine that the blogger in my example is articulate and knowledgeable, and presents cogent arguments, or tells a plausible story. This, of course, presents a danger to the politician. She can’t easily take legal action against the blogger, even though he is accusing her of corruption, say. In US law, malicious intent would also have to be proven, and it’s likely much the same in Australia. Of course the law, as it relates to blogs and online content generally, is varied, weak and behind-hand throughout the western world. In such a situation the blogger is more protected than otherwise. Virtually any case brought against a blogger would be precedent-setting, and courts tend to be very conservative about that sort of thing. As it happens, the blogosphere is also a pretty powerful force for preserving its own interests and freedoms, and there is currently a website, the electronic frontier foundation, dedicated to developing legal protection for bloggers and online users, and advocating for them. This includes important successes in having bloggers treated as journalists, with all the rights and protections that accrue.
Even if the politician or public figure were to take legal action, the blogger – the actual writer of the offending article(s) – could be the only target of that action. Imagine the case that the blogger is a member of an organisation which he is defending on his blog against forces – individual or organisational – that he believes are maligning or damaging it. Clearly his views are his own, and he’s not representing the organisation in any official capacity (imagine he makes a clear and unequivocal statement about this on his blog). He has taken upon himself sole responsibility for his writings, and any consequences that might derive from them.
Of course, with blogs there are confidentiality and security issues, and this is a messy area, but certainly not an impossible one to negotiate. Some have suggested, for example, that it might be wrong to place on your blog a photo of a public figure you wish to criticise or draw attention to. From a legal perspective, this is untrue. Data-sharing of this kind occurs a million times a day on blogs, web-sites, online news sites and so forth. Occasionally the photo might be under copywrite, in which case you will need to get permission, but otherwise it’s pretty well open slather, especially if the photos are already out in the public sphere. Of course, if you use the photo to vilify someone, or if you distort the image in a malicious way, that may be another matter, but of course this also occurs on a regular basis and the law is generally powerless to do much about it, except perhaps in extreme cases.
It’s a similar situation with the actual naming of a person on a blog. Of course this happens all the time, but people may have legitimate reasons for not wishing to be named. However, unless the person is the subject of in-train legal investigation, with court suppression orders out against his or her name, this is not a legal matter, and the naming of people will be up to the discretion of the blogger. For example, the named person may approach the blogger, perhaps via blog comment or email, and ask for his or her name to be removed, presumably providing reasons for the blogger’s consideration (remember, we’re imagining here a ‘good’ blogger, who is motivated by truth-telling as he sees it, not by malice or spite). The blogger will then have to weigh the ethics of naming v suppression in this case.
It’s inevitable that, if the blogger is telling a story about the organisation he’s defending, and about the characters in that organisation, those characters will be recognised by some readers – even if their names are suppressed – due to their role within the organisation, their activities, their history and so forth. Again this isn’t a legal issue, except in exceptional circumstances. The best way forward here would again be negotiation. Imagine a character in the organisation doesn’t want her or his activities to be written about, not because of having something to hide, but because she or he doesn’t believe the blogger will present a sufficiently accurate or nuanced picture. The blogger may choose to go on in spite of protestations, while welcoming any corrections, by way of comment, to the portrait he offers, either by the person portrayed, or by third parties. Or the blogger may choose to omit all references to the person and his or her activities, thereby presenting only a partial or distorted version of the organisation, the degree of distortion depending on the centrality or otherwise of the omitted person’s role in the organisation.
I’ve focused here on some of the difficulties and the possible negotiations involved when an individual writes about an organisation which many individuals feel an allegiance to or part-ownership of, but there is a much more positive side to this, which is inherent in the interactive nature of the blog – or its potentially interactive nature.
We find this interactivity operating at a high level on the best of blogs. A blogger might, for example, post something on the latest research in integrated information theory [the most prevalent theory of consciousness]. This might attract an opponent of the theory, who leaves a comment on some supposedly dubious aspects of the research. Then one of the people actually involved in the research leaps into the fray, defending it and adding valuable detail. Along comes a veteran of thirty years’ experience in consciousness research, making informed comments to put the research into a broader perspective. And so on and so forth – with along the way commentators sniping about the failings of materialism and the hubris of science, all helping to give a complex account of expert and lay opinion on the subject.
But to return to our imagined, impugned organisation. A blog, properly handled, could be just about the best way to get its story, its honest story, out to the broader public. New media is becoming more powerful as a way of shedding full light on a situation or organisation precisely because of its multi-facetedness and interactivity. The old media usually has its one fixed perspective, and its one basic story to tell, with a beginning middle and end – maybe with a follow-up six months later, if it’s worth the candle. The new media can tell an open-ended, multifarious story, with nuance upon nuance, making it far less cut and dried and far more human. It can also provide a more coherent truth, vouched for many times over, by different tellers with their different angles, yet all converging to create something real, not perfect but human, and thoroughly authentic.
To me, there’s nothing worse, when you’re defending your organisation, than going in the opposite direction and presenting it with a mind-numbing gloss that’s as relevant to the reality as a sales brochure. It will convince nobody, and it insults the intelligence of the reader, who above all, is looking for a measure of truth. Sure, by admitting no errors or imperfections you’ll deny your enemies the chance to attack you further, but you’ll also remove from your potential friends and allies the motivation to support and defend you as real, believable people, doing their level best against a series of bizarre situations and a small set of impossible people, and a system that seems stacked against them.
I’ve written elsewhere against adversarial systems. I prefer co-operation to combativeness. I don’t want to win, I want to arrive at the truth – which in my view is a slippery, changeable thing, but always worth chasing – and to encourage others to arrive at it too, and to value it and respect it. That’s why I write, and why I read and watch and listen.
Having said all that, I feel a bit tired of people and their squabbles right now. My current mood chimes with that of Marcus Aurelius, philosopher and Roman Emperor, when he wrote this – and forgive me for being prétentieux:
In the life of a man, his time is but a moment, his being an incessant flux, his senses a dim rushlight, his body a prey of worms, his soul an unquiet eddy, his fortune dark, and his fame doubtful. In short, all that is of the body is as coursing waters, all that is of the soul as dreams and vapours; life a warfare, a brief sojourning in an alien land; and after repute, oblivion. Where, then, can man find the power to guide and guard his steps? In one thing and one thing alone: the love of knowledge.
So, it’s back to fountains of good stuff!