a history of the universe

book review: The Origin of Language

(that’s the best photo I could find. )

the title of this book is a bit misleading, as it’s not about “the origin” or “the mother tongue” — in fact, there is little discussion of what that original language may have been like or the evolutionary development of the capacity for language and all those other speculative fields (though he does offer a handful of what he believes are global cognates, and he does briefly try to sketch out the spread and branching of the world’s language families from Africa).  of course, those are terribly difficult subjects, and it’s understandable why there is little coverage in this book, but then why the misleading titles?

oh well, what the book is about is the use of comparative linguistics — classification and taxonomy — to identify not only the major families of languages worldwide, but also the larger families to which even these language families belong.  with little regard for the general consensus among linguists throughout the world (esp. historical linguists) — and with the credentials and data to back it up — Ruhlen makes his case in an interesting way: he introduces the reader to the basics of language classification — the basic tools used initially to identify Indo-European, setting historical linguistics as a field of study in motion — supplementing those basics with a few key points here and there (e.g., common sound changes among the world’s languages), and then allows the reader to work through tables of vocabulary to identify families of languages.  this allows the reader to discover some of the key features involved in classifying known language families, as well as then finding commonalities with larger super-families of languages.

a fair concern here is that he could be picking and choosing words that conveniently support his thesis, and the reader would never be the wiser.  in fact, that is a criticism that has been aimed at anyone trying to do this type of large-scale comparative linguistic work.  however, he does provide general statistics about the chance occurrences of certain similarities — and his vocabulary are not entirely random words, but more common words that are known to be more stable over time.  further, he answers those criticisms (though there may be more, for all I know) directly and in a satisfying manner.  for instance, someone may object to a large-scale grouping of the Amerind languages based on, among other things, consistent pronominal patterns by saying that pronouns look like everywhere, or that those sounds mimic infant sucking sounds and so are widespread.  unfortunately for the critic, the first claim simply isn’t true, and the second claim is not satisfactory because it fails to account for why those same sounds are not attested elsewhere, if not worldwide (assuming, of course, that we were all once infants).

one of Ruhlen’s beefs with most historical linguists is that they have forgotten the first order of business: classification and taxonomy.  since Indo-European and other families were initially discovered, most linguists have taken these families for granted and have set about reconstructing the proto-languages of those families, or trying to chart the various sound and grammar changes over time.  as a result, they have come to believe that only in the presence of such extensive work reconstructing proto-forms and documenting sound changes (such as what exists for Indo-European, which alone has been studied more than the rest of the world’s language families combined) can you believe you have a genuine family group — ignoring the fact that they were already operating within the assumption that IE was a language group, one that was identified on not nearly so many (a few handfuls, in fact) cognates.

in any case, this book has informed me about a lot, though I feel I have more questions now than I had before, but that’s usually a good thing (unless, of course, a book simply fails to provide you with any answers whatsoever).  it should also be said that he makes use of the best available genetic information that has independently tried to track human migration over time (using various means), most of which corroborates what linguists have uncovered over the years.  and his argument is that the evidence also confirms those who wish to group the world’s language families into ever more closely related family groups.

what’s boggling my mind right now is the rate at which languages change, as well as the innumerable twigs and branches of human language families.  for instance, look at this figure from his book, which represents human genetic populations organized loosely along language boundaries.  it’s not even as complicated as his final genealogical figure, but I couldn’t find that one online.

now look at where you see “Indo-European” and then look at the language family chart for Indo-European (from Wikipedia):

(click on the image for a bigger view).  and the truth is, this complex reconstruction of IE is unique among the world’s languages, as it’s been studied far more and has a lot more material (esp. written) to analyze.  so just imagine what the true history of it all may be!  what a ridiculously complicated story and subject.

biology=morality

over at the Edge, Marc D. Hauser, a Harvard psychologist, has written a short article about the evolutionary origins of morality.  not much of this is new when compared to articles he’s published elsewhere, along with the few books he’s written on the subject, but this is a very nice summary and worth mulling over.  here are a few of his key points:

• when considering moral situations for which they do not have a pre-scripted, emotionally charged response (e.g., for abortion of euthanasia), people — regardless of sex, age, race, demographic, religion, or cultural background — show remarkable similarities in moral reasoning.
• there is a universal moral grammar — an impartial, unemotional code — that “provides us with an unconscious suite of principles for judging what is morally right and wrong”
• people tend to see action as worse (or more weighted, positively or negatively) than inaction (e.g., pushing someone in front of a train vs. letting someone fall in in order to save more lives)
• what transforms (or betrays) this impartial, universal code into moral atrocities that we all repudiate are our emotions, specifically or innate tendency (so also dealing with biology) to prefer members of our “group,” whether those who resemble us or whose language or ideologies we share (there is a particularly fascinating study about the preferences of babies regarding people of same “race” or language, and combinations thereof)
• what makes a psychopath is not an inability to understand moral issues or the consequences of actions, but rather an emotional numbness to those issues or consequences: “Here lies the answer to understanding the dangers of nurture, of education and partiality. When we fuel in-group biases by elevating and praising members of the group, we often unconsciously, and sometimes consciously, denigrate the “other” by feeding the most nefarious of all emotions, the dragon of disgust.”
• this psychology of preference (and Hauser considers this “good news”) is not fixed but flexible — something that has been known and widely disgusted in fields related to race and ethnicity for decades now; it is as abstract and “content free” as universal grammar.  when it comes to matters of culture and race, then, “Exposure to diversity is perhaps our best option for reducing, if not eradicating, strong out-group biases.”

Hauser then offers a (two-point) caveat regarding whether or not this innate moral reasoning is sufficient:

For one, some of our moral instincts evolved during a period of human history that looked nothing like the situation today. In our distant past, we lived in small groups consisting of highly familiar and often familial individuals, with no formal laws. Today we live in a large and diffuse society, where our decisions have little-to-no impact on most people in our community but with laws to enforce those who deviate from expected norms. Further, we are confronted with moral decisions that are unfamiliar, including stem cells, abortion, organ transplants and life support. When we confront these novel situations, our evolved system is ill-equipped.

The second reason is that living a moral life requires us to be restless with our present moral norms, always challenging us to discover what might and ought to be. And here is where nurture can re-enter the conversation. We need education because we need a world in which people listen to the universal voice of their species, while stopping to wonder whether there are alternatives. And if there are alternatives, we need rational and reasonable people who will be vigilant of partiality and champions of plurality.

I have written on numerous occasions about how I think our discussions about ethics, morality, social policy, etc., need to be rooted in a firmer understanding of the way our mind works, along with the manifold ways in which it doesn’t work so well (see Gary Marcus’s excellent book Kluge).  an essential step in that dialogue — if we ever get there on a broader scale — is ridding ourselves of the absurd notion that appealing to our natural, biologically founded moral “code” — along with our ability (also natural) to empathize and reason — is akin to throwing all guidelines and principles out of the window.

an understanding of evolution — particularly our evolution — does not mean we live and die by “survival of the fittest,” because that same process has provided us with the ability to love and show compassion and invest in the well-being of those around us.  the problem, of course, as Hauser points out, is that our “natural” reasoning falls short in many ways.  is this were religion steps in?  maybe — but it’s quite clear that religions can and most often have failed to provide the best corrective; in fact, religions (along with many overlapping cultural features) have helped entrench a number of beliefs that violate our ability to see others as fully human and thus to show them the appropriate compassion (think race, sex, and sexuality).  we need concerted efforts to break us of our eagerness to form and feed our in-group biases and out-gr0up prejudices.  it’s not us vs. them, it’s all of us together.

yet another reason to hate the Red Sox in New England. 

divine numbers

apparently there has been a new study on that most magical of numbers, 7.  researches have long known about 7 (plus or minus 2) being the number the maximum number of things we can recall with short-term, or working, memory.  in this new study, however, researchers tried to create a model of brain activity to explain how the firing and suppressing of neurons involved in this process explains why it gets exponentially more difficult (for normal minds) to continue adding to this working memory.  it seems, as has been demonstrated repeatedly with human subjects, 7 seems to be the breaking point.  as the article states,

As a sentence or a string of numbers gets longer, it becomes exponentially harder for the excited cluster to suppress the others from firing, resulting in pathways that are weak or barely there. Recalling seven items requires about 15 times the suppression needed to recall three. Ten items requires inhibitory powers that are 50 times stronger, and 20 or more items would require suppression hundreds of times stronger still. That, Rabinovich explained, is normally not biologically feasible.

now, I’m not troubling myself with the details of the study here because it’s not what is interesting me right now.  instead, I’m thinking back to all the sermons heard and lessons learned in Sunday school about how 7 was the number of God.  7 days in creation, 7 days in the week, 7 days of Passover (ignoring that these are all pretty much the same thing…), 7 spirits of God, 7 churches in Asia,

the 10 commandments are found in the 70th chapter of the Bible (ignoring, of course, the later, sometimes arbitrary origin of those divisions), 7 loaves of bread,

7 deadly sins,

and so on.

of course, 7′s magicalness extends beyond the Bible: in addition to it simply being a lucky number, we have the 7 chakras in Hinduism, 7 heavens in Islam (as well as 7 fires of hell), Judaism’s 7-branched candelabrum (of the temple, not Hanukkah),

7 lucky Japanese gods of fortune

and, of course, the 7-layer whopper released in Japan last month.

so assuming that this new study is true — heck, let’s up the ante and say that the number 7 is not just the statistical average of things that can be held in short-term memory but in fact “written” into the brain’s hardwiring — I can’t help but think about how this story could and should be interpreted in light of the importance of the number in various cultures and their myths and religions.  one the one hand, there’s the could.  some people will surely see this as evidence that God — whose number is 7, remember? — created us in such a way that his number could be found implanted within our brains.  oh, the trickster!  glory!

on the other hand, there’s the should.  that the number 7 may be found across various cultures because of the structure of our brains.  now again, this is taking this study beyond face value and assuming way more than necessary, but it’s illustrative of a larger problem of how we interpret evidence.  for instance, you often hear about how the conditions on this planet, nay, universe, are perfect for life.  if the earth moved an inch in its orbit, we would all burn of freeze (nobody really knows the physics, they just know this).  everything we need for life and health is bountifully provided on the planet by the plants (and animals, if you’re one of those ).  and when we’re not inconsiderately interfering, the planet is fairly good at balancing itself out and maintaining homeostasis.  in short, clear evidence of design and of the hand of a beneficent creator.

the problem, of course, is that this type of thinking is backward.  it involves looking at the end product, irrespective of how it developed, concluding that things couldn’t have been any other way — that this was the intended product, or even the only imaginable one — and consequently marveling at the fact that conditions or means just happened to exactly what was necessary.  it entails looking first at the nutrients we need to develop and survive and then at what’s available in the world, which, lo and behold, match up quite nicely.  what are the odds?!  this is essentially how I learned to look at the world — excuse me, creation — growing up in church.  it is, like many other un or pseudoscientific views preferred by the church over time, alarmingly egotistic.

the correct view, of course, even crudely understood, is just the opposite.  the essential nutrients and conditions of life are not there to meet our needs as we are, but rather we are the way we are — and life is the way it is — because “we” evolved as we were able to break down those nutrients for energy and as “we” were capable of surviving — better, thriving — in those environments.  God didn’t create bluish/grayish eyes — much less give them specifically to me — so that people whom he wanted to live in cold environments with less sunlight could thrive; rather, the genetic mutation spread — and in recent evolutionary memory, at that — because of benefits for those who were already living in those environments.  I mean, that’s a pithy, pathetic explanation, but it’s immediately more reasonable that the former position, as humbling as that might be.

this doesn’t provide any really satisfying answer as to why the number 7 can be found in so many cultures, playing such an important role, but I’m not interested enough right now to sift through any explanations there might be.  plus, let’s not pretend that 7 is really that prevalent around the globe, or that it’s even all that important in the Bible.  rather, this is an instance of the human tendency to look for patterns and to bias all the instances of what we’re looking for — ignoring all the other numbers that are just as important/mundane.

book review: Kluge

an excellent, well-written, persuasive case for considering the mind an evolutionary “kluge” — an inelegant solution to a problem.  Marcus details, with an illuminating and entertaining spread of clinical neuro/psychological research, along with some economics and mathematics thrown in, the ways in which our brains are less than perfect, framing the discussion within an accessible account of the evolutionary development of our minds.

although our brains are unrivaled in the natural world and were obviously a great advantage in human evolution, they were built from the ground up, so to speak, and the end result is a mind that is prone to any number of errors or faults — not to mention the tendency to occasionally break down entirely.  any architect working from scratch, he argues, would make a number of changes, especially integrating our “ancestral” and “deliberative” systems, as he calls them.  evolution, however, advances in small steps, and nature can only select from what is available and build on what has come before — it may reach a “peak” of sorts, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a higher, more impressive peak nearby (that is, a superior system with a different, or at least more integrated, foundation).

so the result is a kluge — an impressive one, to be sure, but a haphazard and undirected (read undesigned) kluge nonetheless.

in addition to enjoying this book in general, I appreciate his candid look at some of the less-than-ideal aspects of how our minds work — or don’t work.  and the case is really persuasive, not only in evolutionary terms (discussing which parts of our brain do what, what we share with other mammals, and what makes us unique), but also in terms of the (often funny) clinical studies done over the past decades that help us understand how we reason and make decisions.

I also enjoyed his few subtle pokes at intelligent design in the book — only addressed directly in the last part of the book, and still briefly — adding a more frank look at something often held somewhat sacrosanct (that is, the mind) to the list of other aspects of our physical bodies that also evolved from imperfect beginnings — my favorite ones being the spine, the vas deferens (also discussed in Your Inner Fish; see review below), and the “byzantine” structure of our DNA, as he puts it.  natural selection selects from what’s available, spreading and promoting what works, and it could take a much longer time than we’ve been around (if ever at all) to fine tune some of our more recent developments (such as the prefrontal cortex, which is a main focus of his).  so we’re stuck with imperfect memory, false memory, motivated reasoning, framing, “anchoring,” confirmation bias, and the whole litany of ways in which we refuse to think and behave rationally.  it’s no wonder people are so darn crazy.  (and stupid.)

book review: Your Inner Fish

while I enjoyed and would recommend this book, I did feel that a bit too much time was spent on general descriptions (of, say, anatomical features) and analogy and not enough on the applications and significance of our evolutionary past.  just when you got to the “payoff,” he quickly moved on to another topic or another chapter.  it also felt that the last chapter, discussing some of our ills and how these relate to that past, was too rushed, whereas it should have been the bulk of the book (it’s what I was reading the book for…).

it ended up being more of an intro to evolution than I thought it would be, but unfortunately it wasn’t a great one — strayed a little too closely to the kind of “we needed to evolve so we did” picture of evolution and didn’t make the mechanisms clear enough (esp. if he is addressing the uninitiated).

still a good book, but maybe it needed a clearer focus.

anyway, I feel very sorry for anyone whose “ideological” background, let’s call it, prevents them from being able to truly assess and value the astounding evidence for the history of life — and the mechanism by which it has originated — on this planet.  I remember the first time I actually read a book about human evolution (Paul Ehrlich’s Human Natures), I was overwhelmed not only by how much evidence there is in support of evolution, but also by how much sense it made.  I felt ashamed for having only ever learned about evolution in its distorted, creationist polemical caricature.  of course evolution seems ridiculous and logically flawed when presented in such an hostile light, but that’s only because most of those people trying to disprove it never bothered to understand it in the first place.  they clearly don’t.  or worse, they are deliberately misleading people.

there’s a famous video among opponents of evolution in which Richard Dawkins is supposedly stumped by a creation “scientist” in an interview when asked a simple question.  the problem is, first, the man in the video wasn’t the one who asked him that question — he spliced himself into another video.  and second, Dawkins does have an answer, which was recorded by the original interviewer, and that answer goes to show how the question itself was flawed and demonstrated a misunderstanding of evolution.  so congregations to which this clip was shown were 1) lied to and 2) deprived of the clarifying answer that would help shed light on the misrepresentation.  all in the name of what?

anyway, books like this can do a lot of good when it comes to presenting a more accurate view of things — not to mention how exciting and fascinating it all is! — for general readers.  and you can watch a video of Shubin going one on one with Stephen Colbert here.

to have a clue: redux

as an afterthought (or ongoingthought) to a previous post, I thought I’d add a wonderful quote taken from Jerry Coyne’s acclaimed Why Evolution Is True (which I now own but haven’t yet read).  the quote comes from Richard Dawkins, who is, despite what you may have heard, a rather soft spoken and charming man.  and his contagious enthusiasm for understanding the world — and subsequently helping educate others — should be his greatest legacy.

After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life.  Within decades we must close our eyes again.  Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it?  This is how I answer when I am asked — as I am surprisingly often — why I bother to get up in the mornings.

book review: Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought

another book I’m sure to revisit frequently.  Boyer makes a case for the various intuitive/cognitive systems that make belief (of any sort) and religious/supernatural concepts (of every sort) that is both basic and convincing, yet fascinating and thought provoking in that there is no 1,2,3 process whereby we acquire religious beliefs.  they piggyback on a number of inference systems, all of which work together in ways that still escape us–BUT we know enough about them at present to see them at work.  so Boyer’s arguments seem sound, but there is still much more room for new discoveries and attempts to put it all together.

what I found particularly fascinating was the beginning of the book, which addresses a common misconception (one I formerly held) that religious beliefs could be virtually anything as long as people continue to espouse them and are socialized, so to speak, to those beliefs.  this account is close to a more conspiracy theory view of religious belief, whereby someone somewhere at some point and time came up with a belief of some sort and everyone’s just been passing it along ever since.  what Boyer argues is that only certain kinds of beliefs–ones that simultaneously rely on and violate some aspect of our natural inference systems–are more likely to be passed on because of their attention-grabbing effect.  only those ideas that survive this marketplace, or that are culturally ‘selected’ in this way are those that do very well and accord well with how our minds work in general.

As he puts it,

“Human minds did not become vulnerable to just any odd kind of supernatural beliefs.  On the contrary, because they had many sophisticated inference systems, they became vulnerable to a very restricted set of supernatural concepts: ones that jointly activate inference systems for agency, predation, death, morality, social exchange, etc.  Only a small range of concepts are such that they reach this aggregate relevance, which is why religion has common features the world over” (324-25).

I also enjoyed his final chapter addressing questions like ‘religion vs. science’ and the ‘naturalness’ of religion.  a lot of pundits want to use this sort of thinking to justify very specific religious claims, which is overall unwarranted, so I appreciate Boyer’s passing comment:

“I can safely predict that there will always be a market for such [religious] explanations, but I also think we have evidence that they cannot be true” (298-99).

excellent organization and bibliography, as well.

book review: Darwinism and the Divine in America

Jon Robert’s book is an excellent discussion of the reaction to (and overall intellectual/theological context of) transmutation hypotheses, in general, and Darwin’s natural selection, in particular.  particularly interesting–and confusing, given the current state of things in this country–is the earnestness with which a number of protestant intellectuals engaged in rethinking theological positions in coming to terms with an emerging picture of the natural world and of humanity’s place within it.

one thing I would have loved to read about (though I am not faulting roberts here, since it was not his intention) was the christian reaction to “Darwinism” on a broader scale.  attention was certainly paid to initial and ongoing protestant objections to evolution, but i wonder what the larger context was and, by extension, how we arrived at the current state of affairs.  another time, another book.  but one thing I would have wanted to read and think could have been included would have been a better overview of the protestant intellectual community.  I have an idea of the sources he used and thus where these discussions were taking place.  but what about a profile of these intellectuals, their schools, their backgrounds?  and what about a few examples of the loud protestant voices left out of the study, those not considered among the “intellectual” group publishing in academic journals but influential nonetheless in shaping public and protestant reactions to “Darwinism.”

in any case, I appreciate the book, and Roberts’ handling of the intellectual and theological contexts of the developments and debates.  he handles it well, dispassionately yet candidly.

book review: Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America’s Soul

a wonderful book overall.  a stare into the abyss, if you will, and coming out on the side of reason.  a great explanation of why it is that evolution by natural selection is the great unifier of the natural sciences, and why there is more at stake in the ID movement than just challenging evolution–it is a challenge to the very core of science and scientific method, which will set us back centuries if it gets more popular or political support behind it.
I disliked his chapter in which he claimed “science” and “religion” aren’t at odds in any sense because they don’t make conflicting claims (the old “separate magisteria” claim), especially since he ruled out so much of the various “god” arguments with respect to evolution and the physics of the universe (brief discussion).  I wonder what his personal beliefs about god really are–and what, if any, relevance they hold for the real world.  of course he fell securely back on the western, christian canon (partly for personal reasons, i’m sure, but also given the opposition to scientific learning in this country), but can he really think that’s anything but relative?  what about miracles?  what about the historical specifics of scripture?  what about when religious traditions claim to have something to say about the world that conflicts with other, more testable ideas?  though I don’t always agree with the more aggressive, humanistic or science writers with respect to religion, I do think that the jump from some seemingly irrelevant view of “god” to the historical specifics and limitations of one tradition, and that we can say and believe things about god while putting him/her outside the realm of our understanding, is, as it has been put, “the mother of all cop-outs.”