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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
Dummies on dark matter 3: all these neutrinos…
wateva
Canto: So, look up neutrinos and dark matter together on any bona fide sciency website, such as Astronomy magazine, or Nature, and you’ll get apparently contradictory claims – ‘neutrinos cannot constitute dark matter’ and ‘neutrinos may solve the mystery of dark matter’, so what’s a dummy to think?
Jacinta: It’s ongoing, and exciting, we must suppose. Dark matter is often given another adjective – cold dark matter – and neutrinos are too ‘hot’, which is to say they travel close to light speed. The clumpy nature dark matter is believed to have – remember they’re believed to clump around the outskirts of galaxies, explaining the observed higher velocity of outer galaxy stars – that clumpy nature isn’t consistent with zippy neutrinos.
Canto: Yes – neutrinos are kind of slight and speedy whereas dark matter is fat and lumpy?
Jacinta: Well that’s one way of putting it, but if it was fat it’d be visible, but it appears to be ‘transparent’ as Hossenfelder describes it.
Canto: That’s funny, a lot of fat people would prefer to be invisible, maybe dark matter has worked out a way… But if this matter is transparent or invisible, how can they detect it, or know that it’s clumpy? It seems to be just a placeholder to explain the gravitational behaviour of galaxies – doesn’t it?
Jacinta: Obviously I can’t answer that. Mathematics, however, may find a way…
Canto: I was hoping you wouldn’t mention that word.
Jacinta: Well it’s a return to neutrinos – sterile neutrinos. They only interact via gravity, but they are heavy, as needs to be the case. It’s all about missing mass after all.
Canto: Sounds like a similar profile to WIMPs but I think WIMPs, which are just postulates, I think, only interact through the weak nuclear force, an interaction that brings about nuclear radioactive decay. But I don’t think gravitational interactions have been ruled out for them.
Jacinta: WIMPs have gone off the boil recently, I think. It’s all such groping in the dark stuff at the moment, and if you have virtually no mathematics, it’s deadly. I’ve just been reading a dialogue between a physicist and a mathematician on neutrinos and dark matter, which after various increasingly heated exchanges of equations and talk of Minkowski spacetime, Lagrangians, anti-commuting spinor-valued fields, Weyl spinors and the like, it got to the point of pistols at dawn and aim for the heart. But the equations did look impressive.
Canto: Time to get back to basics. Remember we know about three types of neutrinos, also called flavours – tau, muon and electron. And remember they’re called leptons because they’re elementary particles and not very interactive….
Jacinta: That doesn’t explain why they’re called leptons, though, does it? Actually, when I try googling that very question, all I get is what leptons are, or what physicists thank they are.
Canto: You didn’t frame the question well enough:
Lepton was first used by physicist Léon Rosenfeld in 1948: ‘Following a suggestion of Prof. C. Møller, I adopt—as a pendant to “nucleon”—the denomination “lepton” (from λεπτός, small, thin, delicate) to denote a particle of small mass’.
Jacinta: Okay, all Greek to me. And by the way there are six lepton types, let’s get this clear – the three neutrinos and the particles they’re connected with, the electrons, muons and tauons. But I don’t know how or why they’re connected.
Canto: It seems that the three neutrino types are electrically neutral versions of, or sisters of, the negatively charged electrons, the also negatively charged muons – which have a half-spin, apparently – and the tauon or tau particle, which is also negatively charged with a half-spin. How can they tell them apart you ask? Well, according to the US Department of Energy, ‘Muons are similar to electrons but weigh more than 207 times as much’. Which is a bit like saying I’m similar to my neighbour but she weighs more than 15,000 kgs.
Jacinta: Ah yes, I’ve met her. A gentle giant, but a bit negative.
Canto: Well, multiply my neighbour’s mass – I mean a muon – by 17 and you have the mass of a tau particle. You’d think they’d be unmissable, but the first lepton to be discovered was by far the smallest, the electron. That was in 1897, and the rest are 20th century discoveries. And there are anti-leptons, of course.
Jacinta: Of course. So for completeness’ sake, and for our education, there are leptons, mesons and hadrons. Oh, and fermions. I’m just throwing those names out there. And gluons, and quarks, and bosons… and that might be it.
Canto: Well considering that we can account for only 4 or 5 percent of universal mass-energy – unless something’s very wrong with our accounting – we might be adding a few more possibly speculative particles in future. Is it really exciting or is it just a mess?
Jacinta: You want me to answer that?
Canto: Rhetorical, rhetorical. But it’s no wonder that respected physicists like Neil Turok is finding that we’ve complicated the field way too much. As he says, the LHC, the most touted experimental device in physics in the last 40 years, has discovered nothing but the Higgs boson, which of course was a really important discovery, but…
Jacinta: He says the dark matter is probably a right-handed neutrino, which, whatever it means, sounds simple enough. And that the universe is a kind of flat space, with nice and simple geometry…
Canto: Okay, a right-handed neutrino, let’s follow that up. The first thing I would think would be – it’d have to be heavy, and non-interactive, which means very difficult/impossible to detect. And then – if there are right-handed neutrinos there must surely be left-handed ones. These terms relate to spin, and the Standard Model, I think, gives neutrinos a left-handed spin, with a ‘helicity’ of -1, and these are paired with right-handed anti-neutrinos, with a helicity of +1.
Jacinta: So Turok is out on a limb here?
Canto: How would I know? It starts to get into mathematics and if-then speculations very quickly, and I get lost. But Turok feels that there must be more simple solutions to the big dark matter-dark energy conundrums without positing all these new particles. I know he seems to be positing one himself, but it’s just a variant of the neutrinos that’ve been proven to exist.
Jacinta: Helicity, by the way, is ‘the projection of the spin onto the direction of momentum’. Just another head-scratcher for dummies. Helicity, at any rate, is conserved. It doesn’t change over time. And here for, what it’s worth to the likes of me, is what one commentator says about Turok’s hypothesis:
For a heavy neutrino to serve as dark matter, it needs to be quite stable. Apparently this is tough if it interacts with the Higgs—how true is that, exactly? But a neutrino that’s its own antiparticle can have a mass without interacting with the Higgs: a so-called ‘Majorana mass’.
In Turok’s theory all the neutrinos have Majorana masses, described by a mass matrix. To make the heaviest right-handed neutrino stable, a bunch of matrix entries must vanish—and this makes the lightest left-handed neutrino massless!
Canto: Yeah, ain’t mathematics magical.
Jacinta: Hmmm, I’m wondering if we should leave all this dark stuff behind us for a while. Leave it to the Dark Lords to work out.
Canto: Haha, not very female supremacist of you…
References
https://www.nature.com/articles/d44151-022-00024-6
https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2022/12/neutrino_dark_matter.html
we are family? bonobo care, monogamy or not, the magniloquence of humanity, etc
a single mother, benefits assured
So in this post I want to look at how monogamy is doing in the WEIRD world, inter alia. As Henrich and others point out, marriage became thoroughly regularised (and economically exploited) by the Church in the millennium or more during which it held sway in Western Europe. Its marriage and family programme (MFP) ‘legitimised’ children (at least among the upper classes, where legitimacy mattered), reduced kinship ties (which helped to weaken dynastic forces that might challenge the Church’s power) and, perhaps inadvertently, encouraged marital ties based on elective affinities or that fuzzily pleasant concept or sensation known as love.
So in the modern WEIRD world we may marry whomever we like as soon as achieving legal adulthood, and then repent at leisure and divorce without fault, or we can reproduce without marrying and receive much the same supports for our offspring as married couples do. And during the past few decades in particular, couplings and combinations, short-term or long-term, and regardless of gender, have been experiencing less censure and opposition. There is no sense, pace some ultra-conservative circles, that our society is falling apart due to these changes. Capital enterprises continue to flourish, per capita GDP continues to rise (as does the temperature), and the WEIRD world continues to work and party hard, while occasionally fretting about its collective future.
With the rise of WEIRD feminism, there can be excesses, both in the positive and negative direction, and combined with the religious hangover (‘your body is a temple’), even sexual dialogue – the first level of sexual intercourse – has become fraught. Even so, the situation is an improvement on that of previous generations, when coercive intercourse, date rape and such were part of a history that women have only recently been able to talk about. So the WEIRD situation re sexual power, politics, language and intercourse (in the general sense) is very much in flux, and will be so for the foreseeable future.
How that flux will affect the monogamy we currently still accept as the norm is hard to predict. The most common argument in its favour has long been about the raising of children. The conservative view that a child needs both a father and a mother isn’t ridiculous, in spite of the fact that many modern children have thrived on less (and sometimes more), but it seems to me that the most successful upbringing for a child would involve what we call ‘support networks’, a rather bloodless, bureaucratic term for a combo of loving and caring elders and peers. You might guess from this the bonoboesque direction in which I’m heading.
Given what I’ve learned about bonobos over the years, I’m hardly surprised that childcare by bonobo non-parents is a normal part of bonobo life. An online article, linked below, describing research from the University of Oregon, bears this out. Here are some quotes:
“After studying bonobos for several years, I noticed that juveniles and adolescents were obsessed with the babies,” said Klaree Boose, an instructor in the UO Department of Anthropology. “They played with the babies and carried them around. It appeared to be more than just play behavior.”
“It is common in the wild to see infant bonobos be a focus of enormous interest to others, especially to adolescent bonobos,” White said. “It is often noticeable how bonobo mothers are willing to let others get close and interact with their infants, as compared to chimpanzees who are more restrictive.”
Initially, Boose observed that all juvenile bonobos, ages 3-7, were obsessed with handling the infants, all under age 3. As they entered adolescence, however, females continued to approach the mothers and help care for the infants, while males turned away in favour of other behaviours.
“Handling behaviour picked up among the female adolescents, and it was really intense,” Boose said. “They would approach the mothers, groom them briefly and then carry the babies away. They’d move across the enclosure, where they would engage in nurturing and other maternal behaviours with the infants, such as grooming and cradling them, putting them on their belly and carrying them on their back. These were very deliberate caretaking behaviors.”
Boose also found a hormonal link to her observations. Elevated levels of oxytocin — associated with complex social behaviors and social cognition, including maternal and caregiving activities — were common in urine samples collected after infant-handling activities. As young females interact with the infants, Boose said, increased oxytocin may reflect how the body reinforces caregiving activity or social bonding with mothers or infants.
Note that this is described as a very female thing. It isn’t clear from the article as to whether any adolescent carers of these infants were male, but I wishfully think they might have been. And I might draw from my own experience here. My mother gave birth to the last child of the family, extraordinarily enough, on my eighth birthday. This odd factoid had a seemingly profound maternal effect on me. I was fascinated by this baby, and more than happy to be his principal baby sitter, lullaby singer and rocker of the cradle. During the first year or so of his life, I doted on him, much to the relief and evident pleasure of my mother.
Whether or not bonobo males play much of a role in the raising of children, human males are doing a bit more of it in the WEIRD world, doubtless to the detriment of their testosterone levels. Here’s an interesting quote from ten years ago:
A record 8% of households with minor children in the United States are headed by a single father, up from just over 1% in 1960, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of Decennial Census and American Community Survey data.
Of course the number of single mother households would be much higher and also rising. But it takes a village to raise a child – or, in the WEIRD world, a community, compleat with childcare services, kindergartens, Play School, Sesame Street and the like (the impact of disembodied social media on our culture – which we’re only just beginning to come to terms with – has been profound, and clearly not entirely beneficial). The ‘village’ that WEIRD children are currently exposed to seems in many ways to be a blooming, buzzing confusion, and yet they’re navigating it, for better or worse. The worry, at present, is that real physical contact is in danger of being replaced by gaming, texting and other forms of interaction that lack the throb and breath of that animal nature we seem at pains to deny. The term ‘remote learning’ is indicative, and of course there is more – online trading, virtual care services, artificial intelligence, the cloud, all of these developments seem to have swamped our reality in just a decade or so. In that sense, a bonobo humanity seems to be receding beyond the horizon.
And yet, it’s complicated. Bonobos are noted for sharing, and for closeness (to put it euphemistically). Humans are, I think, getting better at the sharing part, but not so much the closeness. The internet, for example, is a massive shared resource, with the potential to educate, entertain and enrich us beyond the wildest dreams of previous generations, without our ever having to rub our skin against another human for the best (or worst) part of a lifetime.
And speaking of skin, it’s something we’ve evolved to keep covered – for protection, for decoration, for privacy. Sometimes just for conformity. We’re the clothed ape, and few of us want to be thought of as less than that. All of this has more or less impelled us to develop a noli me tangere sensibility that has fuelled and been fuelled by religion – our bodies as temples must never be desecrated, and we alone can determine whether worship or desecration has occurred. And so, unlike bonobos with their close comforts, we’ve become more or less severe guardians of these decorated temples, proudly isolated, opened only to the most select of select of select few.
Perhaps this is all to the good? One of the first intellectuals I was exposed to as a youth was Sigmund Freud, with his concepts of polymorphous perversity and sublimation, and as a randy adolescent I took this to mean that we’re more filled with sexual thoughts and easily sexually stimulated in our youth, but as we mature our sexual impulses are harnessed and channelled into creative arty-sciencey endeavours. And was left to wonder whether I really wanted to grow up. Anyway, maybe we needed all this sublimation to uncover the secrets of the universe, to create marvels of engineering, wondrous art forms and financial empires (not to mention WMDs, mass slavery and the Cambodian and Congolese killing fields). What does love, or a bout of the touchy-feelies, have to do with it?
It’s a conundrum, and yet, I just can’t get those bonobo exemplars out of my mind…
References
https://around.uoregon.edu/content/study-bonobos-finds-day-care-pays-babysitters
we’re running out of gas on this topic
Jacinta: So we need to look at why high domestic energy costs come as a shock to Chinese arrivals here in Australia. It seems the essay we analysed last time took the view that we should be capitalising on high gas prices, getting top dollar for our gas exports, and exporting even more of the stuff, including increasing production as much as possible, and not capping the domestic price but somehow offsetting the cost to local consumers through the tax system. But it seems that Chinese consumers are getting it cheap.
Canto: Yes, it’s hard to make sense of it – how is it that gas producers/retailers are making windfall profits by selling LNG to China when the consumers there are paying much less for it than we are? Is it just the sheer quantity they’re sending offshore?
Jacinta: Well, we’re not economists, far from it, so it’s a battle for us to understand it all. But I’m reading an Aussie article from a little over a year ago that puts it bluntly:
Australia [has] gas. Loads and loads of it. Far more than we could ever possibly need. It comes out of the ground at $1GJ all across QLD and SA. But then what happens to it is beyond all hope and reason. Three-quarters of it is shipped to China as LNG at $31GJ, $4GJ cheaper than it is sold locally.
That doesn’t seem to me to be that much cheaper, but the author, David Llewellyn-Smith, seems to be claiming that the cost of bringing the gas out of the ground is $1 per gigajoule, but it’s sold, presumably after much processing, as LNG at $31 per gigajoule in China. And sold here at $35 per gigajoule. Or was. And that may not mean the cost to the household consumer. I’ve been trying to find out current domestic prices, but the economic gobbledegook is beyond me.
Canto: I’ve located our last gas bill – $344.64 for 91 days usage (i.e quarterly). The usage is measured in megajoules, and a gigajoule is 1000 megajoules. Our average daily usage for the period May through July was 52.24 MJ. That’s about 4754 MJ or, say 4.75GJ used in the period. That means we’re paying around $72.50 per gigajoule. Something very wrong here, I give up. The average quarterly gas bill in South Australia is currently $218, so we’re way over. I presume that’s per domestic household. Average daily usage over winter in SA was 21.64MJ, and we’re way over that. We have only gas hot water, and we rarely ever use the gas stove. I cook on a small electric oven we bought – not induction, sadly.
Jacinta: They may be adding other costs on to the basic usage costs, but our high usage is extremely surprising, and it won’t necessarily be less in the warmer months, because we’re only using the gas for showering and washing dishes, not for heating. That means we’re likely spending nearly $1400 annually for gas. Can we change the subject now?
Canto: Well, no, we need to change our usage, not the subject. That’s assuming this usage number is reliable, and I have to be sceptical of that. Anyway, I think we can dispense with gas usage totally, at least I can. For example, washing dishes via electricity (boiling the electric kettle), and body-washing also via electricity (same system) and doing without showering. That would reduce my gas usage to zero.
Jacinta: Okay, good luck with that. We still haven’t really worked out why the Chinese are paying less for gas, or maybe for energy in general, than we are.
Canto: Well, economics bores me witless, but here we go. In 2021 China became the world’s largest gas importer, surpassing Japan. What this means for the cost to the domestic consumer I’m not sure. There has been a decline in commodity prices, including gas, in recent months apparently, but I suspect that low prices to the consumer have little to do with that. I suspect it has to do with the deviancies of the Chinese Testosterone Party – which I blame for everything in that country.
Jacinta: Haha, but is blame the word? How have they managed to shield their people from the costs we suffer under?
Canto: Anyway, our way out is to get our electric dishwasher fixed, stop using the gas hot water system, and switch off the gas tap.
Jacinta: Yes, and then we can get back to talking about bonobos and such…. Please!
References
What is the average (MJ) cost of gas in Australia?
How are the Maldives faring under global warming?
Lily Beach Spa and Resort, Maldives. Book Now!
Jacinta: So we’re reading Adventures in the Anthropocene, by science writer and intrepid traveller Gaia Vince, which we picked up at Adelaide Writers’ Week earlier this year. She was a speaker, probably from a remote location, but I didn’t hear her talk….
Canto: Yes, but we’re certainly interested in the topic – global warming, problems, possible solutions, and the female and male heroes trying to effect those solutions. We bought two of Vince’s books – Adventures in the Anthropocene, published in 2014, and Transcendence, in 2019. And at last we’ve gotten round to reading them, in order of publication. We’re about halfway through the first book, which is divided into sections of concern and interest. The first section, “Atmosphere”, deals with the cause of the problem, human changes to our atmosphere, increasing CO2, methane, chlorofluorocarbons and such. The next sections, “Mountains”, “Rivers”, “Farmlands” and “Oceans” treat of glacial melting, dammed, over-fished and polluted rivers, drought-affected and nutrient-depleted soils, and rising sea levels, among other things…
Jacinta: Which brings us to the Maldives, a group of numerous tiny-teeny low-lying tropical islands in the north Indian Ocean, between the Arabian Peninsula and India, regarded as ‘canaries in the coalmine’ for global warming. The smallest and most geographically dispersed nation in Asia, it’s apparently been a getaway place for the super-rich, but most of the local population are dirt poor, and heroin addiction is rife, or at least was ten years ago. Vince met with the island nation’s then President, Mohammed Nasheed, a climate activist who’d taken over from some more or less corrupt characters, and was soon to be ousted by same. My further reading tells me that he’s still active in Maldivian politics, in spite of its brutal nature – corruption in the country has drawn criticism from human rights organisations, and caused its withdrawal from the Commonwealth of Nations in 2016. It has since been reinstated…
Canto: Yes, the Maldives is surely the oddest nation on earth. It has about half a million inhabitants (tiny for an Asian country – if that’s what it is), spread over a territory of 90,000 square kilometres, of which only 300 square kilometres is land! It features a vast mountain range, entirely under water, and overall it’s the world’s most low-lying nation. Apparently the tiny islands are separated by large distances, but navigation between them is near-impossible due to all the coral reefs surrounding them. The marine ecosystems there are among the richest and most diverse on the planet.
Jacinta: Politically it’s been very up and down. It’s a Moslem nation, and to be honest, there haven’t been too many Moslem nations with great democratic, open-society credentials. Wikipedia relates plenty of cloak-and-dagger stuff, with timely, or untimely, depending on perspective, intervention from India.
Canto: It was part of the British Empire/Commonwealth for a period, after colonising efforts from the Dutch and the Portuguese. Their National Day relates to the extirpation of the Portuguese, who’d tried to impose Christianity on the islands. The Brits agreed to a protectorate system which allowed for Home Rule, apparently.
Jacinta: In 1953 one Mohamed Amin Didi became the Maldivian President. He was a progressive, who promoted the education of women, and tried to deal with addiction issues on the islands. He was more or less beaten to death for his efforts.
Canto: Yes, the history of the region is a sorry saga, but let’s focus more on the present. There are various predictions as to when the islands will disappear completely under rising seawater, and this will of course depend on the rate of warming, as well as mitigation processes on the islands themselves.
Jacinta: Yes, it seems that Maldivians are at the mercy of the rest of the world’s emitters. But here’s an interesting quote from Wikipedia:
In 2020, a three-year study at the University of Plymouth which looked at the Maldives and the Marshall Islands, found that tides move sediment to create a higher elevation, a morphological response that the researchers suggested could help low lying islands adjust to sea level rise and keep the islands habitable. The research also reported that sea walls were compromising islands’ ability to adjust to rising sea levels and that island drowning is an inevitable outcome for islands with coastal structures like sea walls.
Canto: Hmm, I can visualise that idea of tides moving sediments to build up the land – more than receding tides might remove sediments – but I can’t imagine it making a big difference. But what would I know?
Jacinta: Yes, and as to sea walls, they’re of course an artificial solution – which isn’t necessarily all bad, but they’re generally seen as short-term solutions, designed or financed by the rich to keep their coastal properties intact. I believe the most recent IPCC report, every word of which seems to be scrutinised and questioned by various governments, refers to some proposed solutions as ‘maladaptations’ without being too specific. In any case, natural solutions such as mangroves don’t work everywhere…
Canto: And rising sea levels cause other problems, such as contamination of underground aquifers in low-lying islands and coastal areas.
Jacinta: Representatives from these regions – the Maldives and the Marshall Islands for example – are arguing that, for the foreseeable, there’s no alternatives to sea walls, and they should be paid for largely by the world’s principal emitters, which sounds reasonable to me.
Canto: There’s another issue – the concrete generally used to build these walls also contributes to global warming. So here’s an apparent solution, or at least a partial one. Cement, the essential binding ingredient of concrete, is made from clinker, ‘a residue produced by firing limestone and clay in a furnace heated to 1,450°C’, a temperature achieved by burning fossil fuels. Cement-making causes about 7% of annual CO2 emissions. According to the PreventionWeb site, there’s a solution:
One of the biggest challenges facing the construction sector is reducing concrete’s carbon footprint while keeping the benefits of a cheap and durable building material. One way to achieve this is by replacing cement with recycled industrial waste, such as granulated slag from steelworks and pulverised ash from coal power plants (essentially, the residue that can be scraped out of the bottom of furnaces).
Our newly designed low-carbon concrete mixes use both of these recycled materials. In fact, it was possible to use up to 60% steel furnace waste in the mixes without the concrete losing its compressive strength, which is crucial for ensuring the structure holds up. The resulting mixes had a 40% smaller carbon footprint than traditional concrete.
Jacinta: Not bad. And I suppose engineering solutions, if that’s what this is, are important for mitigation while we tackle the actual emissions problem.
Canto: Well this is tackling the emissions problem too, kind of. Anyway lots of piecemeal solutions do add up.
Jacinta: Hmmm. And apparently they’ve been building new islands in the Maldives and elsewhere. Not floating islands, that would rise with the tides, which some enterprising individuals have created, but massive things upon which to build new tourist resorts and high-rise buildings. Lots and lots of sand apparently. It’s already happening. Oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
References
Gaia Vince, Adventures in the Anthropocene, 2014
Gaia Vince, Transcendence, 2019
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maldives
Scientists warn seawalls can make rising waters worse in the long run
Maldives’ man-made islands offer answer to sea-level rise
a bit about writing and reading origins
We’ll perhaps never know – but I should never say never. We’re still a long way from knowing when we first developed language. After all, what exactly is language? How do we define it? Chimps and bonobos, and other apes and monkeys, not to mention cetaceans and perhaps other species, perhaps in the class of cephalopods, have more or less sophisticated ways of communicating which at least partially resemble language…
But that’s not what I wanted to focus on in this essay. I want to focus on the origin of writing, and its corollary, reading. I’m reading Maryanne Wolf’s 2010 book Proust and the squid for the second time, this time perhaps a little more carefully, while thinking on what constitutes a writing system and how writing and reading changed the human world. Terms such as logogram, syllabary, cuneiform, abecedary and hieroglyph, as well as peoples – the Sumerians, the Egyptians, the Akkadians and the Ugaritic people of the northern Levant – these are all floating around in my head like so much flotsam and jetsam at present, and I’m hoping that some writing of my own might make sense of it all.
There are questions, of course, about the first writing system. For example, when we find impressions on clay, or daubs on walls which appear to have some structure that we can’t decode, how can we know if it is writing? There appears to be some agreement – though it’s contested by some Egyptologists – that the first writing was Sumerian, from the lower Mesopotamian, which evolved into something called cuneiform about 5400 years ago. But it’s also generally agreed that writing was invented independently as many as four times. And there may yet be more early forms to discover. And there should be no reason to believe that these independently-created writing systems would resemble each other.
So let’s have a look at some of them. First, cuneiform, shown above:
The word ‘cuneiform derives from the Latin word cuneus, ‘nail’, which refers to the script’s wedge-like appearance. Using a pointed reed stylus on soft clay, our ancestors created a script that looks, to the untutored eye, a lot like bird tracks.
Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the squid, p32
Around 5000 of these clay tablets have been found, in temples and palaces but also in ancient warehouses, used mostly for accounting. What’s most important to note with these figures is that a sufficient number of people would need to know how to interpret – ‘read’ – them to make the process worthwhile. And that this writing-reading system would require new neurological connections, or the adaptation of existing ones. This would require time, a gradualism from a more painstaking pictorial representation to more abstract, easily constructed and comprehended forms. It’s been argued that many written languages retain the vestiges of pictorial forms, though clearly some more than others. Wolf makes this observation:
Soon after it originated, Sumerian cuneiform, mysteriously and rather astonishingly, became sophisticated. Symbols rapidly became less pictographic and more logographic and abstract. A logographic writing system directly conveys the concepts in the oral language, rather than the sounds in the words. Over time many of the Sumerian characters also began to represent some of the syllables in oral Sumerian. This double function in a writing system is classified by linguists as a logosyllabary, and it makes a great many more demands on the brain.
Ibid, pp33-34
It’s a difficult passage, for me at least. How do we know today the ‘syllables in oral Sumerian’, a language nobody has spoken for millennia? I understand that a logographic writing system, like Chinese, is conceptual, but a concept can also be pictorial in some sense. A website called WikiDiff puts it this way:
Strictly speaking, a “pictogram” represents by illustration, an ”ideogram” represents an idea, and a ”logogram” represents a word: Chinese characters are all logograms, but few are pictograms or ideograms. Casually, ”pictogram” is used to represent all of these: it is a picture representing some concept.
So, to put it, mildly, it’s complex. I’m not sure if there’s anything ‘strict’ about it – a piece of writing, in the alphabet I’m now using, is read as sounds, images and/or ideas, or none of these (if we don’t know the word). Do we think of ‘the’ and ‘and’ as sounds when we read them (as opposed to hearing them)? Perhaps, but so fleetingly… The word ‘and’ surely conveys an idea of continuation or plurality depending on context, and ‘the’ conveys the concept of definiteness as opposed to ‘a’ or ‘any’. But all of these are composed of sounds, or ‘sound representations’, of course, barely noticed due to their familiarity.
My own brain, and the brains of virtually all my acquaintance, is wired for the alphabet, derived from Ancient Greek. A Chinese reading brain is apparently quite different. Quoting Wolf again:
Unlike other writing systems (such as alphabets), Sumerian and Chinese show considerable involvement of the right hemisphere areas, known to contribute to the many spatial analysis requirements in logographic symbols and also to more global types of processing. The numerous, visually demanding logographic characters require much of both visual areas, as well as an important occipital-temporal region called area 37, which is involved in object recognition and which [the French cognitive neuroscientist Stanislaus Dehaene] hypothesises is the major seat of ‘neuronal recycling’ in literacy.
Ibid, pp35-36
I have no memory whatever of leaning to read. It’s as if I could always do so, and grammar and spelling came very easily to me. I was never read to as far as I can recall, though our home, in one of Australia’s most working-class neighbourhoods, was always full of books. The Sumerians, of course, didn’t have books in our sense, and their writing systems, and those of today’s Chinese, took years to learn. The Sumerians – those of the upper class – learned their symbols off clay tablets, which they would copy on the reverse side. It took years of self-discipline, and harsh discipline from above, to learn long lists of words and how to convey them, phonetically and conceptually, in symbols.
I’m trying to understand this, to get it under my skin. What the Sumerians were doing wasn’t just learning a handed-down alphabetical, phonemic system, they were creating such a system – not alphabetic in our sense, but based on phonemic and morphological symbols that needed to be agreed upon and bedded down. Morphemes being those essential additives that indicate plurality or tense. And this, according to Wolf and many others, was a decisive breakthrough in our intellectual history:
For the first Sumerian teachers this resulted in a long-lasting set of linguistic principles that facilitated teaching and learning and also accelerated the development of cognitive and linguistic skills in literate Sumerians. Thus, with the Sumerians’ contribution to teaching our species to read and write, the story began of how the reading brain changed the way we all think. All of us…
Ibid, p39
But Sumerian died out, as languages do. By 1600 BCE no-one was left to speak it. By that time the Akkadian language was in the ascendant in Mesopotamia. The Sumerian writing system and teaching methods, though, had been incorporated in various forms by the early Persian and Hittite civilisations, among others, and the Akkadians continued the tradition, helping to preserve something of that system over the next millennium.
Akkadian script, however, became increasingly syllabic, retaining only a few significant logographic (pictorial) elements. We have managed to uncover a lot of Akkadian texts, including the first great adventure story in literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh, which seems to have refined and greatly elaborated upon earlier Sumerian and Old Babylonian tales. It’s likely that it had a stylistic influence on the later Homeric tales – looking forward to reading it.
As to how different reading and writing systems affect the brain, and associated thought processes, I recall when I obtained my first computer in the 1990s. I’d been writing regularly, in diaries, since the late 70s, crabbed non-cursive writing in foolscap books, about 14 in all. Changing to a computer slowed things down as I’d never learned to type and I still can’t touch-type. It’s hard to say how this change affected the content and style of my writing, but I know it did. Editing, of course, became much easier, though I sometimes felt guilty, or a cheat, for so easily erasing my first thoughts for more ‘improved’ ones.
But that’s another story. How did the alphabet we use today come about? One of the first alphabetic or proto-alphabetic systems was the north Semitic alphabet from the region of what is now northern Syria. The term ‘Semitic’, often these days associated with Jewishness, actually refers more accurately to a language group widespread throughout Western Asia and Northern Africa. The north Semitic alphabet is the first known alphabetic writing system, ancestral to the Phoenician and later Greek alphabets. The term ‘north Semitic’ now seems questionable, as the oldest inscriptions in the language were recently found at Wadi el-Hol, a site near the Nile in Egypt. The topic of early or earliest alphabetical scripts anyhow seems very tangled and contested, and no doubt mixed up with national and regional pride as well as scholarly reputation. Still, I might have a go at at in a future post…
References
Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the squid, 2010
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Sumerian-language
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akkadian_language
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic_languages