Right Reason

National Geographic on Early Human Cannibalism

 

National Geographic has a fascinating, if not macabre, article about cannibalism in human evolution. The article starts with a discussion of a recent findings about the nutritional value of a human carcass and then questions why, given those findings, cannibalism would ever be as endemic as it seems to have been in the archaeological record: 

A new look at the nutritional value of human flesh shows that, compared with other Paleolithic prey animals, humans weren’t especially packed with calories for their size.

“When you compare us to other animals, we’re not very nutritional at all,” says study author James Cole of the University of Brighton, who published his work Thursday in Scientific Reports.

According to his estimates, boars and beavers pack about 1,800 calories into each pound of muscle compared with a measly 650 calories from a modern human. That’s about what would be expected based on our overall size and muscularity compared to other animals, he says.

So, Cole asks, if humans aren’t especially valuable in terms of prey, why eat them? After all, unless they are sick or dying, they wouldn’t be easy to hunt.

“You have to get together a hunting party and track these people, and then they aren’t just standing there waiting for you to stab them with a spear,” says Cole.

Instead, Cole argues that perhaps not all ancient cannibalism was for filling bellies; it may have also served various social functions for early humans and their ancestors.

Homo sapiens is an animal that was able to evolve by virtue of recognizing the evolutionary gains offered by taking up a diet of roasted animal flesh. Considering that most of those gains came from becoming a species capable of exploiting both a cooperative, that is moral, nature and culture, it isn't all that surprising that ritual cannibalism is a part of our evolutionary history.

Our ancestors may not have been all that disgusted by cannibalism, they may have seen individuals from other bands or chiefdoms as entirely other and therefore to be consumed much like a fallen beast. It is one of the great achievements of civilization to extend man's moral sphere across the entire species. 

The Ternate Essay

 

 

Today in 1858, Charles Darwin received a manuscript in the mail  from the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, who was at that time exploring the Malay Archipelago, outlining a theory of evolution. Titled "On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely From the Original Type," but widely known as the Ternate essay for the island Wallace wrote the piece on, the essay was certainly a startle to Darwin, who had been carefully accumulating evidence for a large work on evolution.

In the essay, Wallace describes evolution as the progress, always checked by external circumstances, from an original type:

We believe we have now shown that there is a tendency in nature to the continued progression of certain classes of varieties further and further from the original type--a progression to which there appears no reason to assign any definite limits--and that the same principle which produces this result in a state of nature will also explain why domestic varieties have a tendency to revert to the original type. This progression, by minute steps, in various directions, but always checked and balanced by the necessary conditions, subject to which alone existence can be preserved, may, it is believed, be followed out so as to agree with all the phenomena presented by organized beings, their extinction and succession in past ages, and all the extraordinary modifications of form, instinct, and habits which they exhibit.

Of note in the Ternate essay is Wallace's discussion of the struggle for existence:

The life of wild animals is a struggle for existence. The full exertion of all their faculties and all their energies is required to preserve their own existence and provide for that of their infant offspring. The possibility of procuring food during the least favourable seasons, and of escaping the attacks of their most dangerous enemies, are the primary conditions which determine the existence both of individuals and of entire species. These conditions will also determine the population of a species; and by a careful consideration of all the circumstances we may be enabled to comprehend, and in some degree to explain, what at first sight appears so inexplicable--the excessive abundance of some species, while others closely allied to them are very rare.

I don't know whether Charles Darwin adopted Wallace's language or whether he came to it independently, but Darwin puts great emphasis on the struggle for existence in The Origin of Species, dedicating an entire chapter to the topic. Like Darwin, Wallace correctly emphasizes that the struggle for existence is strongest between similar organisms in similar niches in an ecosystem.

Where the two drastically disagree is in the relationship of domestic animals to the theory of evolution. Whereas Wallace rejects the existence of an analogy between the varieties of domestic animals and the varieties of animals in a state of nature, Darwin cleverly exploits that analogy in the first couple of chapters in The Origin of Species. Indeed, Darwin opens the book with a elucidation of the principles of artificial selection. Only after establishing those principles does he move onto establishing that the struggle for existence can produce similar selective pressures on animals in a state of nature. 

How Big Is Big?

 

From National Geographic's "How Big Are the Biggest Squids, Whales, Sharks, Jellyfish?":

A Remark On the Biological Division of Labor

 

 When survival of the fittest is the survival of the weirdest. 

 

In On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin argued that competition is fiercest between animals of the same genus and especially of the same species:

As the species of the same genus usually have, though by no means invariably, much similarity in habits and constitutions, and always in structure, the struggle [for existence] will generally be more severe between them, if they come into competition with each other, than between the species of distinct genera... We can dimly see why the competition should be most severe between allied forms, which fill nearly the same place in the economy of nature; but probably in no one case could we precisely say why one species has been victorious over another in the great battle of life. (Darwin 1876: 59)

As a result of competition between allied species, there are selective pressures operating in nature by which a species can discover a niche otherwise uncolonized, so to speak, by its close relatives, and thereby thrive. The demands of that new niche can have curious consequences. 

For instance, the slender loris is able to cope with the toxins in its insectivorous diet by slowing down its metabolism, and by using much of its energy to process the toxins that it consumes along with the calories it needs to live. As a result, the loris is a slow animal, apt to spend much of its day asleep, which is much like another animal that has found its place in the economy of nature eating what others don't want: The koala. The Eucalyptus leaves that a koala munches on are toxic in large quantities, and they provide little nutrition, so the koala bear has adapted with a slow metabolism and a sedentary lifestyle. The relative smallness of a koala's brain compared to its overall weight may very well be an adaptation to a life spent eating the little nutritious food that other species turn away from. 

Both the koala and the slender loris are able to secure their place in the economy of nature by staking out a place for themselves where there is little competition. If competition between their progenitors had not been so severe, then there probably wouldn’t have been a sufficiently strong pressure for them to turn to their curious diets. Here, we can see the very same principles affecting human entrepreneurs’ specialization in the international division of labor — away from where competition has eroded profits away — affecting the specialization of species in their novel niches in what Darwin called “the economy of nature”, which I think is a most apt phrase considering the forces at work.

Fighting Across the Animal Kingdom

 

From Jack Slack's "Street Fighting Roos" over at Fightland: 

All joking aside, the martial arts have been influenced by the behavior of animals for thousands of years. From the numerous White Crane and Preying Mantis styles of chuan fa to Roy Jones Jr.'s study of fighting cocks, animal behavior has always had a hand in human strategy.

But more than that, many of the basic principles which govern all fighting are visible in the animal kingdom. Clashing bulls try to shuck their opponents past them in order to take a dominant angle and gore the opponent's flank. Mongooses attempt to draw venomous snakes into lashing out and falling short, in order for the mongoose to comes down on the back of the snake's head while it is recovering from the attempted strike. The relationship between fighting and animals is a fascinating one, and I hope to look at it in detail very soon.

Like human martial artists, a kangaroo has to deal with the same constants of F=ma, and many of the same biological constraints, such as two arms and a need to defend the head. The principles determining the winner of two rams fighting are all often the same principles that determine which of two human fighters will be victorious.

Fighting technique must therefore express some constants across species and across disciplines that can only be appreciated by recognizing how different fighters cope with those constants. The costs and benefits of a square stance can only be genuinely appreciated by understanding why some disciplines, such as Muay Thai, favor that stance, and others, such as boxing, advise against it. It's all constrained problem-solving.

The Emergence of AIDS: New Information

 

From The Economist's "How AIDS first spread: Journey into the night":

RAILWAYS are one of humanity’s most important inventions. But they can transport bad things as well as good, and one of those bad things is disease. In particular, suggests a paper just published in Science by a team led by Oliver Pybus of Oxford University and Philippe Lemey of the University of Leuven, in Belgium, they had a crucial role in the early dissemination of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

Dr Pybus and Dr Lemey have been investigating the origin of this infection. Most cases are caused by HIV-1, originally a chimpanzee virus. HIV-1, however, comes in several varieties, a lot of which are rare, and only one of which, group M, has become pandemic. The two researchers wanted to understand why.

HIV-1 evolves fast. That has two useful consequences for science. One is that family trees can be drawn up which show not only what derives from what but also (because the rate of genetic change is reasonably constant) when the various branches diverged. The other is that the virus genotype varies from place to place, depending on when it first arrived somewhere. This means it is possible to track its spread in some detail—which Dr Pybus and Dr Lemey have now done.

They confirmed two suspicions. One is that the common ancestor of group M dates back to the 1920s. The other is that it originated in Kinshasa (then called Léopoldville) in what was the Belgian Congo and is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. The analysis ruled out other mooted points of origin, such as Brazzaville and Pointe-Noire.

What happened before and after the origin of group M, though, is intriguing. The group’s ancestor seems to have come from Cameroon, whose chimpanzees have the simian virus most similar to it. Some time before the first world war someone there (probably a hunter) was infected, probably through close contact with chimp blood. (Transmission of pathogens from animals to people in this way is also thought responsible for the current Ebola epidemic.) It then, most likely, travelled south down the Sangha river, which was used to trade rubber and ivory between Congo and Cameroon.

 

Of Cormorants and Emergence

 

 

The image of thousands of Scotora Cormorants nesting in the Bahrain desert off of the Persian Gulf is an image I can almost never not think of when talking about the phenomenon of emergence. With each nest being built beyond the pecking reach of a nearby nest, the nests are organized in a marvelous pattern, but that marvelous pattern can only be appreciated from a, forgive the metaphor, bird’s eye view. From the ground, one merely sees thousands of panting birds in their nests, but from the air, one can see that the nests are all organizes into a clear pattern:

 

  

 

However simple the pattern created by the Cormorants’ nests may be, it’s still there, and it’s an order that comes into view only once a spectator finds a perspective that can behold a sufficiently whole, so to speak, part of the order. Look at just a single nest, or just a handful, then the pattern simply won’t be there. The pattern only comes into view once we behold a sufficiently whole part of the pattern; hence the pattern emerges before our eyes. Daniel Klein argues along similar lines when he defines ‘emergence, emergent convention’ in Knowledge and Coordination: “Emergence implies that the emergent things come into view by their own force, as when baby sea turtles emerge from the sand” (Oxford University Press, 2012: 319). 

 

The Scotora Cormorants can help us to remember that emergence can never be appreciated from within; instead, a spectator must have some independence from it to appreciate the pattern that is emerging. Emergence is where reductionism fails to grab hold of reality. However much we may study the individual nest of an individual nesting Cormorant, we certainly learn something about their nesting behavior when we look at all of the nests taken together. In some way, therefore, the whole must be something more than the sum of parts. 

 

Are Imagined Communities Real?

 

In the aftermath of Scotland's decision to remain in the United Kingdom, Daniel Hannan defends British nationalism as a source of harmony in the debates over Scottish independence in in "The positive case for nationalism". He argues that that nationalism led to the best in human nature revealing itself in people's acquiescence to the outcome of the election.

At the end of the post he takes aim at the view that nations are simply made up lines on a map:

Most ordinary people – that is, people who are not literati or politicians – take feelings of national belonging for granted, and see patriotism as an unalloyed virtue, like honesty or courage. Yet the prevailing intellectual fashion is that patriotism is artificial. The Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawn popularised the idea that nations depend on “invented traditions”.  A.C. Grayling held that they were synthetic creations, “their boundaries drawn in the blood of past wars”.

What was once Marxist critique is now academic orthodoxy. Virtually every political science postgraduate who passes through my office has been taught the same bilge about nations being “imagined communities”. And so, technically, they are, in the sense that they exist largely in people’s minds. But this is true of lots of perfectly real things. Why is a £20 note worth £20? Because we agree that it should be. Why is David Cameron prime minister? Because we agree to treat him as such.

Those who disparage or detest nationhood are guilty of an old Marxist conceit: the notion that people can be reconstructed, purged of the “wrong” ideas, cured of “false consciousness”.

As usual when talking about the nature of nations, Mr. Hannan is right, and very much so - even if the cosmopolitan sentiments within us may wish otherwise.

The idea that nations are simply imagined communities, and therefore may be discarded by an Enlightened era isn't a sound argument. The conclusion simply doesn't follow from the premises. Nations may be imagined communities, but that doesn't imply that they are unreal. Here a metaphysical point needs emphasis: Mental objects exist just as extended ones do. (All of you who think that metaphysics isn't necessary take heed. We actually need to know a thing or two about what kinds of substances exist to talk coherently about the world.) Nor are those mental objects necessarily arbitrary.

It's the peccadillo of an adolescent to think that simply because something, such as tradition, exists only in the minds of its adherents that it is therefore made up and arbitrary. As David Sloan Wilson has shown in Darwin's Cathedral, the human mind can develop such objects because such objects have helped our far-off ancestors in their struggle for existence. Imagined communities and other mental objects have biologically evolved because they are useful adaptations.

Adaptations, in turn, have some form that reflects the problems they help solve. One can go as far as to speak of them as embodied knowledge. That embodied knowledge must in some sense be complex and in being complex. Culture's reality as a set of mental object is betrayed by the complexity of those adaptive structures no less than the tactile properties of some sand in one's hands would prove the reality of that sand. If imagined communities and other traditions were simply made up, they would be random in their form. Instead, though, they are adaptive. Britannia, Rule the Waves! tells us something about the problems which have faced British society in the past just as a polar bear's lush fur would tell someone about the environment it inhabited. 

There is also an underlying biological explanation of of patriotism that Mr. Hannan doesn't touch on when he writes:  "Patriotism, as this blog never ceases to argue, is what makes us behave unselfishly." That explanation is that, as a cooperative species, Homo sapiens has evolved an innate desire to belong to a band. Nature has left Homo sapiens a distinctly cooperative species, and that propensity to cooperate is reflected in a desire to belong to a community because without such a sense of belonging cooperation to a human degree would be impossible. In The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin argued that traits such as "sympathy, fidelity, and courage" evolved to such a degree in human beings because "selfish and contentious people will not cohere" (Darwin 1989[1877]: 134-135[129-130]).

Even though human society has greatly changed since the conditions of our band-ancestors, human instincts have remained comparatively constant, and so the same instincts that would lead someone to desire the solidarity of a band compel them to find a first-person plural in the nation. In a sense, patriotism is atavistic because it reflects our desire to belong to bands even though patriotism's object is a much wider civilization. There shall always be a human desire to belong impelling people's patriotism, what matters is how culture directs that emotional impetus. 

 

The National Geographic Interviews Jane Goodall

 

 

The National Geographic's David Quammen interviews Jane Goodman, famous for her four decade research on chimpanzees in Tanzania's Gombe Stream National Park. The part about academia's reaction to Goodall's methods is especially of note: 

JANE GOODALL In those days, you know, ethology was really trying to prove that it was a hard science. Which of course it can’t really be. Not unless you’re very invasive. And so, although individual differences were sort of admitted, they were not discussed.

DAVID QUAMMEN Academic ethology didn’t like to talk about individual differences. It liked patterns.

JG It was very reductionist.

DQ Reducing individuals and their behavior to data and the patterns that can be drawn from data.

JG Right. And anecdotes were absolutely the worst sin.

DQ And you came along and wanted to talk about individuals, and about personalities and about character.

JG I wanted to talk about emotions. I wanted to talk about the mind, and thoughts.

DQ How did that play out at Cambridge?

The answer was, not well. Her professors disapproved of her approach.

JG It was a bit shocking to be told I’d done everything wrong. Everything. I shouldn’t have given them names. I couldn’t talk about their personalities, their minds, or their feelings. Those are unique to us. Fortunately, I thought back to my first teacher, when I was a child, who taught me that that wasn’t true. And that was my dog, Rusty. You cannot share your life in a meaningful way with any kind of animal with a reasonably well developed brain and not realize that animals have personalities.

The Commercial Society Contradicts Our Instincts

 

In "The trouble is that free trade is just feels wrong", Daniel Hannan discusses how human beings are biased against free trade. However sound the free-trade argument may be, the cause of protectionism is still alive and well over a hundred years after The Wealth of Nations. Mr. Hannan correctly identifies our social instincts as one of the main culprits behind that tragedy of policy which continues to impoverish the world:

(Free trade is) a missed opportunity from the United Kingdom’s point of view. Outside the EU, we’d have negotiated a properly open bilateral deal with the United States years ago. As members, we’re obliged to uphold a relatively protectionist EU commercial policy for the sake of French film-makers, Italian textile manufacturers, Bavarian smallholders and so on.

Still, we are where we are. A key task for Conservative MEPs over the next six months will be to try to convince others that free trade benefits all participants. For once, the word “convince” may be apt. Politicians rarely change their minds (as opposed to changing their policies, which they do frequently). Trade, unusually, is an example of an issue where intelligent people, shown the evidence, often do shift their view.

The reason is that free trade is literally counterintuitive. It seems to violate so many ideas that feel right. How can it be better to fly stuff half way around the world than to produce it locally? How can it be right to rely on one sector instead of encouraging the growth of a balanced economy? Doesn’t it make sense to shield infant industries from competition until they’re strong enough to go it alone? Shouldn’t we aim to be self-sufficient in basics, such as food?

All these ideas appeal to minds evolved on the savannahs of Pleistocene Africa. Our brains are designed to make short-cuts, to go with hunches. But the hunches that served well enough for hunter-gatherers programmed to hoard against famine are often irrational. (I try to address the food security issue, for example, in this blog).

Just as we can understand that an optical illusion isn’t what it seems, so we see through false intuitions (of which, indeed, optical illusions are a sub-category). A good example is the question of comparative advantage, perhaps the single most counter-intuitive notion in the whole of economics. If Country A is more efficient than Country B in every respect, we can see why Country A stands to gain from free commerce between the two. But surely, we assume, Country A’s gain will be Country B’s loss? Country B’s industries will be overwhelmed by cheaper competition, its workers thrown onto the streets. Won’t they?

 

The unavoidable conclusion is that human nature has a bias against the liberal civilization. Friedrich Hayek addressed this idea, which I think deserves a lot more attention than it has hitherto recieved, in The Fatal Conceit: 

(M)an's insticts, which were fully developed long before Aristotle's time, were not made for the kinds of surroundings, and for the numbers, in which he now lives. They were adapted to life in the small roving bands or troops in which the human race and its immediate ancestors evolved during the few milion years while the biological constitution of homo sapiens was still being formed. These genetically inherited instincts served to steer the cooperation of the members of the troop, a cooperation that was, necessarily, a narrowly circumscribed interaction of fellows known to and trusted by one another. These primitive people were guided by concrete, commonly perceived aims, and by a similar perception of the dangers and opporunities - chiefly sources of food and shelter - of their environment (Hayek 1988, 11-12).

Part of our present difficult is that we must constantly adjust our lives, our thoughts and our emotions, in order to live simultaneously within different kinds of orders according to different rules. If we were to apply the unmodified, uncurbed, rules of the micro-cosmos (i.e., of the small band or troop, or of, say, our families) to the macro-cosmos (our wider civilization), as our sentiments and sentimental yearnings often make us wish to do, we would destroy it. Yet if we were always to apply the rules of the extended order to our more intimate groupings, we would crush them. So we must learn to live in two sorts of world at once (Ibid, 18).