Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
On Hannah Arendt and revolution
I’m reading Hannah Arendt’s 1963 book On Revolution, with an occasional irritation – well, not so occasional – I’m trying to suppress. For example, in the very first paragraph of the first chapter, she writes:
Modern revolutions have little in common with the mutatio rerum of Roman history or the [term written in ancient Greek], the civil strife which disturbed the Greek polis. We cannot equate them with Plato’s [longer ancient Greek term], the quasi-natural transformation of one form of government into another, or with Polybius’s [very long ancient Greek term], the appointed recurring cycle into which human affairs are bound by reason of their always being driven to extremes.
So mutatio rerum (that’s Latin) means a change in events/systems, as in ‘my, how things have changed’, whereas the Greek terms are more or less explained by Arendt’s subsequent words. In any case what this small section of the first para tells me is that I might be in for a rough ride.
So Arendt goes on to try to define ‘revolutions’ as distinct from, say, uprisings or coups d’etat, all of which, it seems to me, becomes overly technical and abstruse, as well as overly burdened with references to men and male pronouns – scores to a page – so it’s very likely that I won’t have the stomach to read too much further, though I recognise of course that, as a woman, she’s a pioneer in this field.
Then again, is there today a ‘field’ that studies revolutions? Do we have revolutions, apart from revolutionary ‘diets’ or ‘technologies’ or ‘fashions’ these days? Arendt refers to the American revolution and the French revolution, and no doubt in later pages she’ll look at the Russian or Bolshevik revolution, but it seems to me highly unlikely that a bloody, physical, warfare-type revolution will happen in the future, within the WEIRD world, and it’s interesting to reflect on that fact, if fact it is.
There has of course been the occasional coup, or elimination of the leadership, almost entirely emanating from the US and its CIA. For example, Mohammed Mosaddegh, the Prime Minister of Iran, a democracy-leaning, reforming nationalist, was deposed in 1953 in a coup organised by US and British intelligence operatives. Mossadegh was intending to nationalise his country’s oil stocks, which the Brits had spent a great deal of money in extracting. Other CIA-backed coups have occurred in Chile and various Central American countries, but of course these had nothing to do with revolution. As far as I know (and I don’t know much), the only time ‘revolution’ has been used in a military sense in my lifetime was for the Cuban revolution of 1958-59, which ended the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. The ‘revolution’ in this case, and in general, doesn’t involve the ‘bottom’ becoming the new ‘top’, because the bottom are always too powerless. It’s those excluded from the top, but perhaps close to the top, close enough to observe the top’s corruption, or simply close enough to feel they can do a much better job, generally in terms of the class they belong to.
Okay, I’ve just recalled the tragedy, particularly for women, of the Iranian revolution of 1979, resulting in the fall of a despotic but modernising Shah and the installation of the ‘Ayatollas’, ultra-religious Islamists whose attitudes towards women, and treatment of them, makes me forget that I’m supposed to hold humanist values – and that freedom of the will is a myth.
So, returning to Arendt, and the meaning of revolution. To me, it just means an abrupt change in political systems, usually, but not necessarily always, brought about violently. Early on, she makes comparisons between the French and the American revolutions which make me wonder about the usefulness of the term. After all, the American thing is also called the American War of Independence, which is how I think of it. Notoriously, the French affair ‘ate its own people’, not to mention many who were unfortunate enough to be born into the ancien regime, or even to have worked for them or been supported by them. The eventually-to-be United States was an ocean away from its ancien regime. Just as importantly, the soon-to-be United Staters didn’t have any thoughts of starting from year zero, with a new calendar and… well, a whole new, yet-to-be-thought-out world, about which it might be death to disagree. They clearly had their own elites, slave-owners to a man, and they exploited the British Constitution, fragmentary as it was, to build something of their own – unfortunately a Constitutional Presidency, with insufficient checks and balances, to put it mildly. They also had the mercurial and brilliant Thomas Paine, whose career, and especially his early life, I’ll reserve for another post, as he’s fast becoming a hero of mine.
I’m writing this partly as an antidote to Arendt’s barely comprehensible second chapter, which I’m perhaps too lazy get my head around, but as she often refers to Rousseau, a writer I’m very familiar with (I once considered calling my blog The reveries of a solitary wanker in his honour), I feel the need to persist.
So while Arendt persists in comparing what I see as two vastly different events, in France and the future USA, she does make these remarks which I think are key, though not, I think, in the way she intends:
In Rousseau’s construction [of the general will] the nation need not wait for an enemy to threaten its borders in order to rise ‘like one man’ and to bring about the union sacrée; the oneness of the nation is guaranteed in so far as each citizen carries within himself the common enemy as well as the general interest which the common enemy brings into existence; for the common enemy is the particular interest or the particular will of each man.
Wow, looks like I’ll have to read The Social Contract again to see if I agree with Arendt’s interpretation here. Would this be a worthwhile exercise?
In any case I’m torn between continuing with Arendt’s book, knowing that she was a pioneering female political philosopher, and focussing on more comprehensible stuff, like Rovelli, Lucretius, the political horror shows of the day, or maybe, bonobos…
References
Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, 1963
old time Christianity in the new country
St Andrews Anglican Church, Walkerville, South Australia
When did Australia become a country? It wasn’t in 1788, when the first flag, a British flag, was unfurled over the land. And it wasn’t 60,000 or so years earlier, when the first humans stepped onto this land, for they of course had no concept of countries, or nations, in the modern sense – though I note that many forward-thinking Aboriginals have employed this modern notion to promote their diversity (‘we are 250 nations’), their languages and even their ‘finders keepers’ rights.
The official view, and that of AI (never lies), is that –
Australia became a nation on 1 January 1901. when 6 British colonies – New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania – united to form the Commonwealth of Australia. This process is known as Federation, where the colonies became states under a new federal constitution.
So we’re a 125-year young country, unlike Britain, the national age of which is doubtless a matter of controversy, but certainly it’s many many times older than Australia. Other countries too, but not too many of them, can, or like to, date their age to more than a millennium. Still, the concept is new, considering the 300,000-year history of Homo sapiens.
I was thinking along these lines while wandering lonely as a cloud through the inner-city suburb of Adelaide that I’ve recently come to reside in. It certainly isn’t one of the poorer neighbourhoods, and there are some rather glamorous, not to say ostentatious piles within strolling distance. It occurred to me, though, that many of them seemed to copy semi-gothic styles while obviously being of relatively recent construction, while others, particularly churches and municipal buildings, were more authentically 19th century – probably among the first structures built in the area, and the only ones not demolished and replaced by the nouveau riche. I was interested enough in one of these buildings, a church, to have a closer look. It’s pictured above. A plaque attached to the building provides interesting detail:
St Andrew’s Anglican Church of Walkerville is among the most significant churches in South Australia. The building’s Victorian Academic Gothic appearance is of exceptional aesthetic value and is the result of three distinctive construction periods. Designed by architect E A Hamilton, the sanctuary and transepts were built in 1857. Architect J H Grainger designed the current nave, while architects Messrs Grainger & Naish designed the replacement tower. These works occurred between 1877-1879. The Tower was fitted with six imported bells, which were installed in 1886. The bells were cast by the well-known company Whitechapel Bell Foundry – the same foundry that created ‘Big Ben’, which is located in the Clock Tower of the Palace of Westminster in London. St Andrew’s Anglican Church was entered into the South Australian Heritage Register as a State Heritage Place in 2006.
So very British, or even Scottish, as St Andrew is the patron saint of that country, if it is a country. I’m not sure if this is a typical example of late 19th century British architecture, or if it has a more colonial feel due to the local materials used in its construction, but it certainly stands out from the other buildings in the neighbourhood. And it’s anachronistic in another important way.
Adelaide has been called ‘the city of churches’, surely for a century or more. The term isn’t used so often these days, as many of the churches have since been repurposed, sometimes as dance venues, or as community gathering places of various kinds. Others have been left to stand as monuments to history, or Heritage Places, as the above plaque puts it. I don’t know if St Andrew’s Anglican Church still functions as a religious meeting place – I’ll have to come by on a Sunday morning to check it out, but I looked around the site enough to feel that its busiest days are definitely over.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics conducts a census every 5 years. The next one will be later this year. The census question on religion has ‘remained fundamentally the same in structure for over 100 years, appearing in every national census since 1911’, according to AI (never lies).
the little life of just another reader
Reading and writing have been my mainstays, FWIW, and worth is the word, they seem to, or seek to, plug the many holes in my ego. Reading, of course takes me away to many places, and back to many times, that I can’t access physically. I’ve always been too poor to do much extensive travelling, and too timid to actually meet and converse with interesting people, so I converse, sort of, with books. Sometimes having terrible, exhausting arguments with them, other times brought to tears.
I limit myself to six books at a time, though usually one, or maybe two, grab my attention to the detriment of others, sort of. At the moment it’s the second volume of Janet Browne’s totalling gripping biography of Charles Darwin, The power of place. What a fascinating, admirable, complex character he is, how richly brought to life by Browne’s writings and researches. At the moment I’m reading of his new-found fascination with orchids and their pollination. It seems that he developed this interest partly to take his mind off the endless controversies surrounding his Origin of species, but, not surprisingly, he soon found that their pollination by particular insects supported what came to be known as co-evolution, a whole new field of evolutionary studies.
And yet, reading about this extraordinary and complex bloke (his Descent of Man is on my six-book list, somewhat neglected at the moment), who is still vilified today, and not just by creationists, I still get annoyed at all his upper-class advantages. Not his fault of course, but connections handed him his trip on the Beagle, his marriage to a member of the super-rich Wedgewood family, his university education at Edinburgh and Cambridge, and so forth. At least his life provides a good argument against libertarianism.
So the other four books on the six-book list are Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (I have a policy of making at least one book a work of fiction) and Lost connections by Johann Hari – these two books I’m completely ignoring at present, for no good reason – and the other two books, which I’ve brought with me to my exile in the Adelaide Hills, Kingdom of fear by Hunter S Thompson (apparently the ‘S’ is necessary when referring to him) and Shattered lands by Sam Dalrymple.
I bought Shattered Lands the other day at Shakespeare’s Books here in Blackwood, because I couldn’t resist the bookshop’s name, and once inside, I’d feel guilty if I didn’t buy. I also assumed, correctly, that Sam was the son or close relative of William Dalrymple, a writer often recommended to me by a friend, but whom I’ve never read. So I was influenced but didn’t want to be too influenced. Another influence on the purchase was Anna Reid’s Borderland, so informative about a land exotic to me, Ukraine. Shattered Lands promised to tell stories about a world equally exotic, in time rather than place – the British Raj.
In speaking of this to my once-wife, Sarah, she looked up William Dalrymple, and I was shocked but not surprised. Get this, from Wikipedia:
William Benedict Hamilton-Dalrymple was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on 20 March 1965 as the youngest son of Major Sir Hew Hamilton-Dalrymple, 10th Baronet (1926–2018), Lord Lieutenant of East Lothian from 1987 to 2001, and Lady Anne-Louise Keppel, a daughter of Walter Keppel, 9th Earl of Albemarle; through this line of descent he is a third cousin of Queen Camilla, both being great-great-grandchildren of William Keppel, 7th Earl of Albemarle. He is a great-nephew of the writer Virginia Woolf. His brother Jock was a first-class cricketer. Dalrymple, the youngest of four brothers, grew up in North Berwick on the shores of the Firth of Forth. He has described his childhood as being old-fashioned and “almost Edwardian”. Among his forebears is a Mughal princess who married a Dalrymple ancestor.
I, too, was born in Scotland. My father was an unskilled labourer, and sometime amateur boxer, the last of a number of male children to a Dundee shipwright – a reasonably classy occupation. That’s all I know of that side of the family, and I’ve never been much interested in tracing ancestry. My mother was a Stewart, and her father, a coal-miner, was Daniel Stewart, hence I’m named Stewart Daniel Henderson. The Stewarts came over the channel with William the Bastard in 1066. They were Stewards then, but changed ‘d’ to ‘t’ when given swathes of land in Scotland for helping William to slaughter the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy. Then, when one branch of the ever-branching Stewart family looked like becoming Kings of Scotland they changed their name to Stuart, further removing them from the Stench of Stewardship. And those Stuarts went on to…
To cut a long story short, with a bit of trimming and tweaking, I could’ve/should’ve/would’ve been the current monarch of the British Commonwealth of Nations, and life just isn’t fair.
So, where was I? Kingdom of fear is the first book by this author I’ve read, and likely the last. I suppose I chose it because the reading group I’m with have dealt with Ken Kesey’s One flew over the cuckoo’s nest and Kerouac’s on the road, and I though I’d continue a bit with the hobo libertarian stuff of the USA, which is sometimes entertaining, and often food for thought for a non-libertarian such as myself. At least it’s more appealing than right-wing libertarianism, which really is the pits.
Thompson’s political views chime fairly well with my own, though he’s a bit long-winded about it all, and it of course is all set in the gun-toting US of A, which I’ve just about had enough of. At the same time it’s much more familiar to me than the Burmese-Indian and Hindu-Moslem clashes of the 1930s and beyond, which have me constantly referring to maps to locate Gujarat, Rawalpindi, Kanniyakumari and the like. And the Hindu caste system is surely one of humankind’s greatest grotesqueries.
So that’s all. I’m nowhere near the end of any of these books, but I’m generally enjoying where they take me, especially the Darwin stuff. The Indian stuff too, as my history reading has generally had a western bias, understandably enough.
References
Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: The power of place, 2002
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Dalrymple
Sam Dalrymple, Shattered lands, 2025
Hunter S Thompson, Kingdom of fear, 2003
the USA is odd, and not in a good way
don’t worry, be happy
Gutsick Gibbon, also known as Erica – I don’t know her last name – is a very smart primatologist and palaeontologist (I don’t know if that’s the right descriptor) who, because I think she comes from a religious background, spends much of her time debunking such strange, largely US entities as Young Earth Creationists (YEC indeed), some of whom, like Robert Carter, seem otherwise highly intelligent and sort of reasonable. But of course they have to back up their claims with very dodgy science. In this case it’s about our genetic relationship with chimps (and bonobos, remember?). But zoom out from that issue and realise that the YECs believe the world (by which they must mean the universe) is a few thousand years old, and presumably that all astrophysics and cosmology is bunkum (and can apparently be ignored) because their very male god ‘did it’, and it’s sacrilegious to ask why, and you’ll realise just how powerful religious indoctrination can be, in the midst of a society – admittedly very large and multi-facetted – that can boast of some of the best astrophysical research on the planet.
What’s more astonishing to me is that this belief system is held by vast numbers of United Staters, as Wikipedia tells us:
A 2017 Gallup creationism survey found that 38 percent of adults in the United States held the view that “God created humans in their present form at some time within the last 10,000 years or so” when asked for their views on the origin and development of human beings, which Gallup noted was the lowest level in 35 years.
Of course a lot depends on how you frame the question, as well as how representative the survey is. A ‘similar’ Gallup question was asked in 2019, with 40% holding the ‘God – about 10,000 years ago’ view. I remain somewhat skeptical – in order to maintain a semblance of sanity. But then, the majority of US voters chose a loud and proud ignoramus to be their President, twice. Ok, actually it was a slight minority in 2016.
So I think there are two main reasons for US backwardness in its understanding of the real world – with millions of exceptions among the population of course. One is that it became a haven for religious (Christian) zealotry from back in the days of the Puritans, and large swathes of the population have maintained that fundamentalism. The other is that the massive gap between rich and poor in the country, greater than that of any other country in the WEIRD world, is also, unsurprisingly, an educational gap. So huge numbers of families will have ensured that their children received ‘proper’ religious education, uncontaminated by godless naturalism, while others would have received barely any education, certainly nothing on a tertiary level. And their current administration is doing everything to ensure the continuation, and widening, of the educational and financial gap.
The whole situation seems sad and sickening to me, and while I feel glad that I don’t live there, I feel vaguely guilty about that gladness, and hope that those in the country who want to improve the situation will win out, in my lifetime. So I watch the situation from afar, hoping that the ‘goodies’ will win, but also frustrated at the ‘how have the mighty fallen’ attitude of so many liberals in the country who never look elsewhere in the world for guidance.
So it seems I’ve moved away from the USA’s religious obsessions to the broader issue of its obsession with its place in the world, which has always had more than a touch of religious zealotry about it. Even the ‘no kings’ slogan harks back to the ‘monarchy’ that Americans claim to have revolted against back in the 1770s – as if ‘mad King George’ was ruling Britain at the time. Britain was simply trying to hold onto its colony, out of pure self-interest. Powerful countries have always dominated their neighbours and more or less imagined enemies. Think of the USA and The Philippines back in 1900, and its self-interested actions in Nicaragua, Chile, Iran, Vietnam and Iraq. What the USA is experiencing now is something hard to put a name to, when so many of its citizens vote against their self-interest in favour of a self-obsessed, inhumane driveler whose obnoxiousness is his most salient feature, to me at least. It’s hard to have much respect for a nation that does this to itself.
Sadly, the nations that are setting an example to the world in terms of the health and happiness of their people – Finland, Denmark, Iceland and Sweden – don’t make nearly so much noise about themselves as the USA (Israel is also up there, but I find it hard to believe that the Palestinians in their midst, in a region that was multi-ethnic for millennia before it was so named, had a say in the matter). The key, unsurprisingly, is community support, which many United Staters deride as ‘socialism’. Perhaps they think their happiness is a ruse?
Meanwhile, the USA is hogging the limelight, as it faces the consequences of a vast underclass of left-behind, conspiracy-prone, saviour-obsessed, manipulable worshippers of the rich-and-getting-richer, each of whom, like Trump, are lapping up the adulation and the increased power being bestowed upon them. I’m left wondering which is worse, the heavy-handed, generally patriarchal total control of Putinland and the Chinese Testosterone Party, or the USA’s current abandonment of decent healthcare, education and social security, supported by many of its own victims as well as the usual neoliberal crowd.
Fortunately for me, I live in multicultural Australia, which is managing ok, for now…
References
I Killed this Creationist Argument. (video, Gutsick Gibbon)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Earth_creationism
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/happiest-countries-in-the-world
why bonobos matter – or not?
Casting around for something new to write about – which is only occasionally a problem – I’ve found, more or less by accident, an online essay published back in 2015 in Evolutionary Psychology, which is a review of a book by Susan Block, The bonobo way: the evolution of peace through pleasure. I’ve never heard of the book, but it sounds promising. However, this reviewer, Ryan Ellsworth, is clearly not a fan. You get a sense of this early on:
In The Bonobo Way, Block advises that recognizing and tuning in to our “inner bonobo” can bring positive consequences such as improvement in one’s sex life, interpersonal relationships, and mental health. While not a scholarly book by any measure, it demands some treatment, for, like Sex at Dawn, it bears on the public’s understanding of bonobos, humans, and the science that informs this understanding.
So we get some sense that Ellsworth is going to give the author of ‘this muddled book’, as he calls it, ‘The Treatment’, courtesy of Science. He goes on to say that he’s going to teach Block, and us, some lessons. First, he challenges two basic assumptions she makes:
that 1) bonobos and humans are sufficiently similar for one species to hold useful lessons for the other; and/or 2) that bonobos surpass humans in the aforementioned qualities…
The aforementioned qualities are these:
Block urges that the time is ripe to “learn as much as we can from [bonobos] about our noblest and kinkiest characteristics, our capacity for peace (even world peace) through pleasure, more satisfying relationships, better communication, hotter sex and deeper love”.
True, this does sound like hippy fun stuff, and I would want to qualify it in various ways. but the first assumption is a reasonable one to me. There are no species on the planet more similar to us than chimps and bonobos – if we can’t learn from these species we can hardly learn from any others, and I’m no great fan of human exceptionalism. My focus on bonobos, though, has been less about sex per se, and more about matriarchy – which of course is the key to different attitudes to sex and sexuality. Our patriarchal societies, battened down by all the major religions that have dominated much of humanity for millennia, and which the WEIRD world is only just beginning to squirm its way out of, are I feel, slowly eking out their final days, and monogamy too – not practised by either of our two closest relatives, is not quite as strong, particularly in the WEIRD world, as it once was. We have to take the long view, but it will surely be helped by noting the success story of bonobo society, currently being assisted by human protections in that tragic mess of a human state, the former ‘Belgian’ Congo (actually the then personal fiefdom and killing field of Leo Victor, by provenance Leopold II of Belgium).
Ellsworth, I think, misses the point completely while engaging in what I would describe as scientific gobbledegook:
Recognition of our relationship to other apes doesn’t necessitate that we are like them in any particular respect. Phylogenetic distance alone does not provide sufficient grounds for arguing that species are similar for any trait; nor that they should be dissimilar on some trait in question. The utility of comparative genomics and phylogenetics in biology depends upon our comprehension of evolutionary processes, and they do not lend themselves easily to facile postulations of expected phenotypic similarities based solely on genetic similitude.
Don’t try to understand this – it’s completely irrelevant. What we’re concerned about here isn’t biology but cultural praxis. It is the culture of bonobos – and they certainly have a culture – that should inspire us, and make us wonder – how did our culture go so off the rails as to be as patriarchally violent and exploitative of females as it came to be?
I’ve just pointed out in my previous post re capital punishment that the nations most enamoured of state killing are the most patriarchal – Confucionist China with its massively male-dominated government, and the Islamist governments of the Middle East with their veiled and silenced women. Of course we can’t compare this with chimp and bonobo social practices directly, but we know through long observation that male-dominated chimp society practices and condones infanticide, when alpha males want to breed with particular females. Perhaps ‘condone’ is the wrong word here – the males simply get away with it, to the distress of female mothers. Chimps are also known to engage in warfare, troupe against troupe, even until one troupe is completely wiped out. Bonobos, on the other hand, ease the possibility of conflict with other troupes by food-sharing, and other delightfully friendly and relationship-opening practices. Compare trading in human societies, as opposed to warfare.
Ellsworth points out that Block and others have blamed the rise of agriculture for a ‘masking’ of our naturally promiscuous nature:
Block relates that “prehistoric humans participated in various forms of bonoboesque ‘free love,’ group sex and multi-partner arrangements … for tens of thousands of years before the advent of farming and our current ownership-oriented, property based, paternity-obsessed society” (p. 63). As do Ryan and Jethá [authors of Sex at dawn], Block points the finger at agriculture as the source of stultification of our bonobo-like sexuality, especially for women, but maintains that modern society masks, but has not changed, our promiscuous nature.
It’s certainly true that human society has, for as long as history has been recorded, been hierarchical, ownership-oriented and largely patriarchal. Whether we were more ‘promiscuous’, a rather dodgy term, before that, is unknown. I’d really love to find out though.
One major difference between human apes and our cousins is the relationship between sex and fertility. Our last common ancestor with chimps/bonobos lived sometime between 6 and 8 million years ago (there’s much debate about the timing), while the bonobo/chimp divide occurred much later, around 1.5 million years ago, with the formation of the Congo River barrier. There are many things I’d love to know about these histories. How and when did our species become fertile pretty well all year round? As I’ve reported in a previous post, the Guinness Book of Records has it that the most children born of one woman is 69. I suspect this is bullshit, but there’s no doubt that the record for human births is way way higher than that for chimps and bonobos. So what’s the explanation? Higher androgen levels may be one factor – these hormones are important for fertility in both males and females, but also for chimps and bonobos so I’m not sure…
I’ve heard tell that many animals are ‘in season’ or ‘in heat’ – when they can become pregnant – only at certain times in a month, somehow related to women’s menstrual cycle. Whether or not this is true for some mammals, it doesn’t apply to our closest relatives any more than it does to us. However, female sexual swellings appear to be a come-on for males, as this abstract from a 2004 paper, ‘Female sexual swelling size, timing of ovulation, and male behaviour in wild West African chimpanzees’, linked below, more than suggests:
We are able to show that (i) even within the traditionally defined maximum swelling period, further slight increases in swelling size indicate approaching ovulation, and (ii) that male mating interest changes according to the changes in swelling size.
But it gets more complicated:
Finally, when having the choice between several “maximally” tumescent females, the alpha male prefers the female that is in the fertile phase of her cycle rather than that with the biggest swelling at that time.
Which seems to suggest that something’s going on ‘under the hood’ in terms of hormones and pheromones. How much of this ‘unconscious’ stuff relates to humans? I’ve often experienced ‘lust at first sight’ in my youth, and even beyond, but I doubt if it had to do with a woman’s sexual swellings – surely the last thing on my mind. It had to do with a woman’s face, her smile, the grace of her movements, a clever comment, a way of dressing, much of the stuff that is typically human and sets those chemicals swirling.
I’ve taken myself a bit far from Ryan Ellsworth’s critique, but these issues are of grand importance to me, so, to be continued…
Charles Darwin, coral reefs, bleaching and all that
a stony coral polyp
I’ve read a lot of stuff about, and by, Charles Darwin over the years – not only in various passing depictions and interpretations by the likes of Richard Dawkins and Steven Jay Gould, but whole books, such as James Moore and Adrian Desmond’s big biography, Darwin (1992), David Quammen’s The Kiwi’s egg (2007) and Rebecca Stott’s Darwin and the barnacle (2003) – a real favourite. And I finished his Voyage of the Beagle only a few days ago, trying to get my head around the last sections, in fact the penultimate chapter of the book, in which he deals with ‘coral formations’. I seem to remember from one or more of those biographical books that he expanded his brief but dense – I mean complex – account in his Voyage, into what we might nowadays call a separate scientific paper [‘On the structure and distribution of coral reefs‘], and that his understanding of these formations was mostly correct, and ground-breaking. So for my sins I’m going to try to fathom these mostly undersea marvels, with the help of Darwin and others.
But before that, just one more thing about Darwin biographies. I’ve recently returned from a very pleasant holiday on Kangaroo Island, where we stayed at an ‘air b & b’ on the coast just outside of Kingscote, very comfy-cosy, and with a very varied lounge-room library. One book caught my eye – another Darwin biography, Charles Darwin: voyaging (1996) by Janet Browne. I read the first few pages and was – well, smitten might be the word. The comparison between Darwin’s social world and that of Jane Austen, one of my favourite authors, was brilliant and completely engrossing. Of course I didn’t have time to read much more, what with my own reading and all our excursions round the island, but I’m looking out to get myself a copy asap.
So Darwin starts out with the kind of basic but fresh wonderment that even I got in observing the rounded, rust-coloured boulders heaped up on the shore at Cape Willoughby, the eastern tip of Kangaroo Island. What were the processes….?
But Darwin, of course, went much further. Of reefs, he starts… ‘such formations surely rank high amongst the wonderful objects of this world’, and goes on:
We feel surprise when travellers tell us of the vast dimensions of the Pyramids and other great ruins, but how utterly insignificant are the greatest of these, when compared to these mountains of stone accumulated by the agency of various minute and tender animals! This is a wonder which does not at first strike the eye of the body, but, after reflection, the eye of reason.
So Darwin reflected on the ‘three great classes’ of coral reefs – atolls, barrier and fringing reefs.
Atolls, as he teaches me, are ‘ring’ islands, or sets of islands, encircling a central lagoon, and I have to quote, as Darwin does, a French adventurer’s exclamation from 1605:
C’est une merveille de voir chacun de ces atollons, environné d’un grand banc de pierre tout autour, n’y ayant point d’artifice humain.
I suppose they could also be called ‘reef islands’, and the ‘land’ or reef rings can extend to a diameter of many kilometres. I won’t be using Darwin’s descriptions for the following, as his antiquated language is headache-inducing, but atolls are apparently the ‘third and final stage of Darwin’s subsidence theory’, so I should put them in order.
With the first stage, the fringing reef, volcanic activity forms an island, rising up from the ocean, and corals, which I’ll attempt to describe later, begin to form, and they build up as the land formed by the volcano begins to subside. This is because the coral needs sunlight as a source of energy. The corals form a more or less circular fringe around the subsiding land.
In the second stage, with more subsidence, a kind of barrier – think of it perhaps as a kind of natural ‘moat’ – forms between the reef and the now almost submerged land in the centre.
In the case of an atoll, the land is wholly submerged. And yet, the coral seems to form islands around this central lagoon? Anyway, here’s how one presumably reliable source puts it:
The Deep Sea Drilling Project sought evidence of volcanic cores beneath coral reefs and found it. First, in 1952 at the Einwetok Atoll in the Marshall islands, and again, in 1960 at the Midway Atoll, teams found volcanic rock strongly supporting Darwin’s theory that coral reefs form around submerging islands. Today, Darwin’s theory is universally accepted as a means of explaining these reef formations.
However, as this source, linked below, puts it, not all reefs fit this pattern (and I’m thinking that Australia’s Great Barrier Reef surely doesn’t). Other reefs known as patch reefs and bank reefs are found in the Caribbean region.
But I want to get down to the real basics. Coral reefs are built by coral, or corals, or what? Micro-organisms? What is coral? I’ll start, and probably finish, with Wikipedia, the most comprehensive and reliable encyclopedia ever devised, but there are many other reliable sites, linked below.
Corals are tiny invertebrate animals, in the phylum Cnidaria (of which there are more than 11,000 species, including jellyfish and sea anemones). Generally they form colonies of individual polyps, long thin little creatures with tentacles. They can reproduce asexually to form colonies, and sexually by spawning – releasing a mix of eggs and sperm into the water, as most marine creatures do. For most of their lives they’re sessile (immobile), and these colonies of genetically identical individuals can number in the millions. Stony coral polyps produce a skeleton of calcium carbonate, essentially composed of calcium, carbon and oxygen (CaCO3). The stony coral we’re familiar with, Scleractinia to the cognoscenti, have been around for about 250 million years, from the Middle Triassic, but we can trace coral ancestry back much further, to the Cambrian, 535 million years ago. They were quite rare, though, until the Ordovician, 100 years later, and they were of a very different type from ‘modern’ corals. It seems that different coral types came and went, with a particularly massive disappearance due to the Permian-Triassic extinction event 250 million years ago, which killed off 75% of all marine species.
So, a little more about their anatomy, before I go on to to coral bleaching, and current threats. I’ve mentioned the calcium carbonate skeleton, deposited by the polyps and also by the coenosarc, a layer of tissue that connects these polyps by secreting coenosteum, a stony material made of calcium carbonate in the form of aragonite (a more spongy and porous form). There’s also an extracellular matrix called mesogloea – it’s complicated!
Aragonite is also the material from which corallites are made. These are cup-shaped depressions into which the polyp can retract. The individual polyps and their housings can grow to form enormous colonies of very variable shapes and sizes:
Colonies of stony coral are markedly variable in appearance; a single species may adopt an encrusting, plate-like, bushy, columnar or massive solid structure, the various forms often being linked to different types of habitat, with variations in light level and water movement being significant.
It would be frankly ridiculous of me to go into much more detail, there’s way too much ground, or stone, or ocean, to cover. Better to focus on coral’s apparently self-imposed bleaching behaviour. When corals are stressed, usually due to the over-heating of reef waters, they expel a particular form of algae, known as zooxanthellae, from their tissues. Why they do this seems unclear, as the zooxanthellae provide food and photosynthetic energy essential for their growth and reproduction. It has to do with oxidative stress, apparently, and I’m sure they know what they’re doing. And perhaps ‘bleaching’ should be dumped as a term, because it surely gives the wrong impression. The pale skeletons that remain are not in any sense bleached, but….
Anyway, Queensland’s Great Barrier Reef has suffered several mass bleaching events in the last few years, the most recent being earlier this year (2024), following the hottest year, globally, on record. Corals do recover from such events, gradually, but the strain on them is accumulating.
References
http://coraldigest.org/index.php/DarwinsTheory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coral
https://www.barrierreef.org/the-reef/threats/coral-bleaching
Bayesian stuff, encore, encore, probably
So I was listening to one of my science podcasts in my usual distracted way, when a segment came on about Bayesian inference, or reasoning, or logic, woteva, and I know I’ve written about this before, but I also know that if someone asked me to explain it, I’d be lost, caught out, shamed and disgraced. Me, an inner-lechal? Come now.
So, once more into the breach – and I’m not even going to look at anything I’ve written on the topic before, nor am I going to avoid the issue by going on about the Reverend Thomas Bayes’ relatively obscure 18th century life in Tunbridge Wells, where he… oh, sorry.
Bayes’ Theorem, or Rule, says that the probability of A, given B, is the probability of B given A, times the probability of A, all divided by the probability of B. Mathematically it looks like this:
P(A|B) = P(B|A).P|(A)/P(B), – which simplifies to
P(A|B) = P(A + B)/P(B)
It’s about statistical inference apparently, and also, to some degree, about common sense and everyday experience. One tutorial puts it this way. Someone tells you, very briefly, that a friend of hers has just been diagnosed with breast cancer. You’ve just recently learned that males too can develop breast cancer. You wonder if that friend is male. What are the chances?
So the probability of maleness, given breast cancer, is equal to the probability of having breast cancer, given maleness, multiplied by the probability of being male, all divided by the probability of having breast cancer. Now, the probability of breast cancer given maleness is about one in a thousand, according to the tutorial (i.e 0.001) And the probability of being male is about one in two, or 50% (0.5), while the overall probability of getting breast cancer is 0.063 (63 in a thousand). So, putting those stats together and doing the maths results in a tiny .79% likelihood of the friend being male, assuming the stats are reliable, and there aren’t any other confounding factors. That’s well under 1%, I have to remind myself. Then again, a more efficient way to find out, as the tutorial points out, is to just ask!
So what’s a more effective scenario for using Bayesian probability? Well…
The ratio of probability of a piece of ‘information’ being true under one hypothesis, compared to it being false, is called a Bayes factor, apparently – representing ‘the amount of information we’ve learned, re our hypothesis, from the available data’. This learning is used, or can be used, to update our prior belief or understanding, to a posterior one. The whole process is one of hypothesis testing, and the belief-changing that should be attendant upon that testing. As if…
So therein lies the problem, that we don’t subject our beliefs to hypothesis-testing, at least not often, and not very much at all when we live in a community that shares those beliefs. If the Reverend Bayes lived in 21st century Adelaide, he might not be so reverential about the putative father-and-son beings he was so reverential about, presumably, in 18th century Tunbridge Wells. But how can you subject your belief in a single, omniscient, ominipotent creator god to hypothesis-testing? That’s when the concept of evidence comes in, and not just evidence about beliefs. So it seems to me that Bayesian probability has rather limited applications.
And yet, it’s pretty obvious that Bayesian woteva – reasoning, inference, probability, priors, theorems etc – has been flavour of the month for months and months and months now (and isn’t ‘month’ a funny word, come to think of it? but I digress…), though there is push-back, and even something of a turf war, between Bayesian and frequentist-type reasoning, and there are articles and videos galore about all this stuff – and I’ve been around for sixty-odd years without giving any of it the slightest thought. Here’s a quick summary from somewhere:
the frequentist approach assigns probabilities to data, not to hypotheses, whereas the Bayesian approach assigns probabilities to hypotheses. Furthermore, Bayesian models incorporate prior knowledge into the analysis, updating hypotheses probabilities as more data become available.
As one nice video puts it, using a coin flip, for those who see the coin land, the datum shows that the coin shows heads, say, and this isn’t probable, it’s a fact. For those who don’t, there’s a 50% probability that the coin will show heads. The Bayesian bases her conjecture on her prior knowledge that coins have two sides, but if she learns that the coin-flipper is a trickster with a double-headed coin (thus updating her prior knowledge) she updates the hypothesis based on this datum. So it just seems to be a difference between data and knowledge of data. I’m not quite sure I understand what all the fuss is about. And yet… As Steven Pinker points out, in his book Rationality:
In recent decades Bayesian thinking has skyrocketed in prominence in every scientific field. Though few laypeople can name or explain it, they have felt its influence in the trendy term ‘priors’, which refers to one of the variables in the theorem.
I haven’t myself noted the trendiness of priors but I’ve never really been in academia. In any case the term seems pretty basic, and I’m just not sure about the need to ‘mathematise’ it all. Pinker himself first describes Bayes’ Rule in verbal/arithmetical terms – posterior probability = prior probability x likelihood of the data/commonness of the data – which he then translates into English, and after that into common sense, i.e ‘now that you’ve seen the evidence, how much should you believe the idea?’ So, if you’re an evidence-conscious type, you should generally be fine, methinks. I have heard it said, though, that many people even at high levels of academia trip themselves up because they ‘forget’ to apply Bayes’ Rule. I suspect, though, that it’s not so much forgetting as motivated reasoning or ‘my side bias’, generally a tougher nut to crack…
References
You know I’m all about that Bayes: crash course stats (video)
Are you Bayesian or Frequentist? video, Cassie Kozyrkov
Steven Pinker, Rationality, 2021
https://johnhorgan.org/cross-check/bayes-theorem-and-bullshit
how do we get to Mars? via a ‘transfer orbit’.
precisely to scale, of course…
I may have written about this before, and I know I’ve talked to people about it, but the topic is fascinating and counter-intuitive to most people, including myself, so I’ll try to ‘rise above myself and grasp the world’ yet again, and hopefully I won’t mess it up as I did with LaGrange points recently. Must have another go at that, by the way.
A recent video by SpaceMog (Dr Maggie Lieu), linked below, has inspired me to make this effort, and I’ll just be repeating closely her account, at least for the first part of this post. She’s an astrophysicist after all, and I’m just as autodidactic dilettante. Ma vie est un désert, malheureusement.
It takes between 6 and 9 months to get to Mars, and we have to time it carefully, for there are certain ‘windows of opportunity’ – best, or perhaps only, times for setting out. Every two years, apparently.
We can’t just go directly to Mars, the fourth planet from the Sun (at their closest, Earth and Mars are some 56 million kilometres away). More on that later perhaps. Instead we go by a precisely calculated fuel-efficient route for transferring between two orbits, known as the Hohmann transfer orbit. Fuel efficiency is absolutely key, as fuel for space travel is astronomically expensive, some thousands of dollars per kilo according to Dr Maggie. She worked on the Exomars 2016 mission, particularly the Trace Gas Orbiter, which had a total launch mass of 4300 kilos, of which only 700 kgs were science instruments.
So, some calculations. Picture our solar orbit as circular. The radius to the Sun is 1 AU (astronomical unit), while that of Mars is 1.5 AU. The elliptical Hohmann transfer orbit connects Earth’s orbit to that of Mars. So if we picture Earth at 0° on the circle, the trick is to get our spacecraft to Mars at 180° on its orbit – that’s to say, on the other side of the Sun. This kind of orbit, between any one planet and another, has been calculated as the most fuel-efficient route. So the spacecraft is first launched into a low-Earth orbit, building up enough speed to put it into this transfer orbit, at a precisely calculated trajectory, which enables it to get to Mars, where it will slow down, via its engines, for the Mars orbit.
So far so good, but we’ve only just begun. Dr Maggie takes us through the calculations for the journey. First we calculate the semi-major axis (a) for the transfer orbit. To be clear (for me) the semi-major axis for a precisely circular orbit would be the radius. In a non-circular case it is the average distance from a point on the ellipse to the centre. In this context it’s half the average distance between Earth and Mars (on the other side of the Sun), that’s
a = 1/2(REarth + RMars), which is 1/2(1AU + 1.5AU), or 1/2(2.5AU), which is 1.25AU.
Now to Kepler’s Third Law, which describes the relationship between the orbital periods of planets and their average distance from the Sun. That is, that the square of a planet’s orbital period is directly proportional to the cube of its semi-major axis. The formula is T² = ka³, T being the orbital period of the planet, in years, a being the semi-major axis of the orbit, and k is a constant of proportionality, which is the same for all the planets of the solar system.
So, calculating k from Earth’s orbit, the period of which is of course one year, and its distance from the Sun is 1AU. To isolate k, in T² = ka³, we divide both sides by a³, giving
k = T²/a³
So T, the orbital period, is 1, and a, the semi-major axis, is 1. So k is equal to 1. Pretty simple, no worries about the squaring and cubing. Now, the semi-major axis for the transfer orbit has already been calculated as 1.25AU. So we get T (being the transfer orbit) is equal to
√1 x 1.25³
which comes out as approximately 1.4 years or around 511 days. That’s the whole orbit, but getting to Mars requires only half an orbit. That’s around 8.5 months (256 days).
So I think I get this, thanks entirely to Dr Maggie. The next issue she takes us through is the launch timing. The orbital period of Mars (TMars) is 687 days. Dividing 360° by 687 days gives us a movement of 0.52° per day. After half the orbit, 256 days, Mars will have moved
256 x .52° = 133°
So, this key. In order for Mars to be 180° from Earth when the spacecraft enters the Mars orbit, the craft must be launched at 180°minus the 133° of Mars’ orbital movement. That leaves 47°. In other words, Mars must be 47° ahead of Earth’s orbit at launch-time to ensure that it will be in the ‘right place’ when the craft arrives.
Now, apparently, that’s the mathematically easy part of this exercise (and to be honest it’s been pretty straightforward so far). So what happens if we miss the ‘launch window’ as described above? Earth is moving, in terms of its orbit, at 360° every 365.2 days or so, which makes about .99° per day. The location of Earth at any given time follows this equation
E = t.vEarth – (360°.z)
where E is the position of Earth (in degrees), t is the time (in days), vEarth is the Earth’s orbital speed, measured in degrees per day, and z is an ‘arbitrary integer’, ‘because we know that, at 360°, you’re already going back to the start, so it’s the same as zero degrees, so by subtracting 360 you can get numbers only between 360 and zero and nothing above that…’ I quote directly from SpaceMog because I’m not sure I understand it, though I know it all goes round in ellipses. Anyway, it’s all about distance being velocity multiplied by time.
So we do the same calculation for Mars
M = t.vMars – (360°.y) + M0
where things are as above for Mars and time, with y as the arbitrary integer, and M0 as the initial position of Mars, which isn’t zero, but 47° ahead of Earth. So subtracting the two equations from each other, we get this:
(M – E) = t(vMars – vEarth) + 360°(z – y) + M0
which is plugged in as
(47) = t(0.52 – 0.99) + 360° (x) + 47
and rearranging the time factor
t = -360°x/(0.52 – 0.99)
t = 766x …… t being thus about every two years. Orbits, as mentioned, are in fact slightly elliptical, so the calculations would need to be adjusted for that.
So I understand some of this, but I still don’t understand some of the most basic stuff, e.g. about gravity. Like, how does the Sun’s gravity keep the planets in orbit (if in fact it does)? Why doesn’t the sun, with its hefty gravitational force (yes, I know it’s not a force but a curvature of space-time – which is easy enough to write…), draw the planets closer and closer in, so that they burn up? Same with black holes and galactic stars. Which leads to the question, how did the planets get to form in the first place? Something explosive happened, that defied gravity?? And then the planets formed by a kind of gravitational accretion? I know that the Moon is spiralling away from Earth, very very slowly. It’s being measured precisely, due to a kind of reflective mirror planted on the Moon during the Apollo days. But wouldn’t it make more sense if it was spiralling towards Earth, due to gravity? Learning equations is one thing – here’s one:
F = G.m1m2/r²
– not clearly put, but I’m told that G here is the gravitational constant, which is a constant of proportionality, and which is directly proportional to the product of mass1 and mass2 and inversely proportional to distance between their centres of mass. But I could be getting it wrong. The point is, I might be able to read equations, eventually, but will I ever get to really understand? It’s not the equations that are the problem, it’s the why of it all…
I’ll keep trying though, so more on gravity in the future.
References
Sean Carroll on free will – a sort of compatibilist
this comment, from a site called ‘physics of free will’, seems to miss the point completely
There are a few positions on the free will issue, and probably three principal ones. They are, compatibilism (the most common position, particularly among philosophers), incompatibilism and libertarianism. I’m not interested in discussing libertarianism, which is just too weird. Compatibilism, argued for by Daniel Dennett in Elbow Room, amongst many others I’ve read, including Steven Pinker, and most of the contributors to Free will & determinism, a mid-twentieth century collection edited by Bernard Berofsky, claims basically that though our macro world is deterministic, otherwise science would never have gotten off the ground, we as complex, thinking and deciding individuals, make life choices all the time, in large matters and small, choices which we claim as our own, with all the praise and opprobrium that comes with our decisions.
Those that argue for incompatibilism, or hard determinism as it’s sometimes called, question, among other things, this notion of the self-determining self. Robert Sapolsky, professor of neurology at Stanford University, has written a comprehensive defence of the incompatibilist position in Determined, which together with his earlier book Behave, and Sam Harris’ book Free Will, and reflections on the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study (a 50-year-old longitudinal study of, inter alia, personality types and how they change, or not, over time), has shifted my own stance on the issue from a wobbly compatibilism to a much more firm incompatibilism.
So to Sean Carroll, eminent physicist and science communicator and author of a 2016 book which I bought the other day, The Big Picture: on the origins of life, meaning and the universe itself – obviously inspired by my own writings. He devotes six pages of his 441-page book to the free will question, so it’s probably not a big issue for him. And indeed, it’s pretty inevitable that successful and highly respected individuals, who have contributed positively to science and human understanding, as Carroll undoubtedly has, would wish to be given credit for their achievements, and to believe that their own decisions and their own hard work have brought them to the position of respected public intellectual that the likes of Carroll enjoys today.
However.
I’m not going to research Carroll’s background, any more than I’ll research the backgrounds of other compatibilists such as Dennett and Pinker, but I think I can safely assume that none of these individuals were born into dire poverty, or a toxic family situation, or a war zone, or a strongly kinship-oriented, non-English-speaking culture. When I think of free will, or the lack thereof, it’s these Big Factors that come to mind, not whether I chose to have muesli or shredded wheat for breakfast. It’s typical, for example, that Carroll uses this example in demonstrating our ability to choose:
Imagine you’re a high school student who wants to go to college, and you’ve been accepted into several universities. You look at their web pages, visit campuses, talk to students and faculty at each place. Then you say yes to one of them, no to the others. What is the best way to describe what just happened, the most useful vocabulary for talking about our human-scale world? It will inevitably involve some statements along the lines of ‘you made a choice’.
Clearly Carroll knows his readership – educated citizens of the ‘Western’ or WEIRD world – so I can hardly blame him for his choice of example. However, he doesn’t really question the essential word ‘you’ here, and seems to think it’s all about a confused use of language and categories:
… the mistake made by free-will skeptics is to carelessly switch between incompatible vocabularies.
Describing the choices we make about what to wear in the morning, he writes:
That’s a decision that you [my emphasis] have to make; you can’t just say, ‘I’ll do whatever the atoms in my body were going to deterministically do anyway’. The atoms are going to do whatever they were going to do, but you don’t know what that is, and it’s irrelevant to the question of which decision you should make. Once you frame the question in terms of you and your clear choice, you can’t also start talking about your atoms and the laws of physics. Either vocabulary is perfectly legitimate, but mixing them leads to nonsense.
Sean Carroll, The Big Picture, p 379
This is, unfortunately, a classic straw woman argument. No careful-thinking incompatibilist is going to bring up atoms or even neurons to explain this particular everyday choice. Amongst the determining factors will be: what clothes are available to the subject; the weather; what job, activities or tasks she expects to engage in; her mood; her age and gender; her culture; her taste, developed over a lifetime and influenced by family, peer group, class etc. The ‘you’, the self, is constructed of many of these elements and more, including daily effects (the weather) and lifelong ones (culture, genetics) operating very much down to the neuronal and hormonal level – but there would rarely be a need to reach down that far to explain the person’s choices.
While I recognise that Carroll has barely skated over the topic in six pages, I find it bizarre that he doesn’t touch on the Big Issues here – culture, upbringing, genetics and our arbitrary ‘thrown-ness’ into the world – and their massive determining effects. He does end on a note of compromise and uncertainty however, while still, I think, largely missing the point:
Most people do maintain a certain degree of volition and autonomy, not to mention a complexity of cognitive functioning that makes predicting their future actions infeasible in practice. There are grey areas – drug addiction is an obvious case where volition can be undermined, even before we go all the way to considering tumours and explicit brain damage. This is a subject in which the basics are far from settled, and much of the important science has yet to be established. What seems clear is that we should base our ideas about personal responsibility on the best possible understanding of how the brain works that we can possibly achieve, and be willing to update those ideas whenever the data call for it.
Ibid, p 384
To me, this feeling of volition and autonomy is simply a product of complexity, and a sense of that complexity being inside us. We feel it, especially when faced with tough choices, or regretting the road not travelled. But what is the difference here between me and my pet dog? Does she feel anger, shame, regret? The general human response would be – maybe, but not like us. And what about bonobos? Cetaceans? We recognise, with all these mammals, that they are ‘individuals’. All dogs I’ve owned, or known, had their own personalities, I recognised that they ‘thought’, and so reacted, differently from each other. There may be similarities in breeds, just as we recognise cultural similarities in humans, but there are individual differences due to being ‘the runt of the litter’, being over- or under-fed by their owner, being brought up with other dogs or not, being pampered or neglected, and so on. But do we grant them free will? Surely not. And only humans, it seems, have the power to grant beings such power! Which is why we grant it so readily to ourselves. It’s just another example of human exceptionalism, as defined by humans. Remember how we were the only tool-makers, the only language-users, the only mourners of the dead….?
In my next piece on this topic I’ll look at what Steven Pinker had to say about free will in his 2002 book The blank slate. I wonder if he’s changed his mind since….
References
Sean Carroll, The Big Picture: on the origin of life, meaning and the universe itself, 2016
Robert Sapolsky, Determined: life without free will, 2023
Robert Sapolsky, Behave, 2017
Daniel Dennett, Elbow room: the varieties of free will worth wanting, 1984
Steven Pinker, The blank slate, 2002
Bernard Berofsky ed, Free will and determinism, 1963