The Great Approximator

I was on the bus yesterday morning trying to think up a new song. I had a particular thought in my head, about how all human culture, no matter how noble and unnatural it may seem, was completely determined by physics and evolution. We are not adding machines, nor are we computers; we are animals honed by the blind processes of natural and sexual selection to have what seems to be an amount of self-awareness and intellectual ability that exceeds that which we might need to live. Some (I'm looking at you, Vonnegut) might even say that we've become peacocks in a hedge-maze: our sexually selected cleverness is becoming a serious threat to our continued survival.
This all comes back to Jeff's recent post in which he called himself a 'cynical optimist'. Short term cynicism and long-term optimism is something that I've long held to, but riding the bus I came up with a sort of framework for this set of beliefs.

This is what cynical optimists believe, illustrated

Do you know how an alligator stalks its prey? It eyeballs it, submerges and heads towards the prey, surfaces and repeats the process, zig-zagging its way inexorably towards murder. That's how our magic stock market ends up zoning in on the near-perfect values for so many companies, by the blind actions of millions of investors buying and selling, zig-zagging towards proper valuation, the same way a drunk wends his way to the door.
It just occurred to me today that that's the way humans go about a lot of things. When we set out to learn something the path is soften bumpy and the journey marked by extended periods of inactivity. The process of growing up is a long series of small successes, hopefully leading ever upward. It's just a thought, albeit a powerful one.
Anyway, that's why the title of the song is The Great Approximator, and true to form I have been able to write the lyrics but it seems I will have to wait for the music to come to me.
(Update: I'm just going to use the ever-"save as draft"ing Blogger window to write the music in. Clever, eh?)

The Great Approximator

C
I've got my little plan written I'm an itinerarian
lo-F
I've got my little book, I'm a librarian
C
Got an idea where I'm going where I've been
G
I know a lot about something only sometimes worth knowing
C Am
Know a little bit about how the world works
F G
Carving a little piece, for whatever it's worth
C G
I'm looking at a landscape that I'm not equipped to savvy
Am A#
I'm a little artifact of a billion years of history
F G C Am
I may have missed the point in fact consider it a certainty
G
Sooner or later everything you know erodes
F C
I'm the great approximator and I'm never alone
C Am F G

C Am
I'm trying to overlay a bullseye on everything I see
F G
aware of the limitations constantly proscribing me
hi-C A#
I like to draw my lay lines make my little calculations
Am G
Choo choo, I'm the Great Approximation
C
duh duh dun dun dun

C
I like to make it seem like I'm making something happen
lo-F
Oh, something just happened, oh oh something just happened
C
I'm an active participant, somewhat inconsistent
G
I'm a little scientific I'm a lot shamanic mystic
C Am
Know a little bit about how the world works
F G
Carving a little piece, for whatever it's worth
C G
I'm looking at a landscape that I'm not equipped to savvy
Am A#
I'm a little artifact of a billion years of history
F G C Am
I may have missed the point in fact consider it a certainty
G
Wouldn't be surprised if everything I know was wrong
F C
I'm the Great Approximator fairly barreling along
C Am F G

G
As an educated guesser I just barely qualify
F C
I'm the Great Approximator and I will be till I die

Finnish Scientist: Grandma Good, Grandpa Bad

Do yourself a favor and read this extremely interesting article from Scientific American about a Finnish scientist's demographic evolution study of 200 year old birth and death records. Highlights:

• Grandma's increase the reproductive success of grandchildren because they take care of their grandchildren. Certainly seems to be true to me, as I can site innumerable real-world examples of this.
• Grandfathers, meanwhile, harm grandchildren's reproductive success, probably because old men get preferential treatment in most societies, thus distracting grandmas from their real job, coddling children. This is why there is no selection pressure for men to live as long as women.
  
• The reproductive success of female twins with male twins is less than females without male twins (including female-female twins). This is chalked up to testosterone. Incidentally, my mom has a male twin, but she also had three kids, so perhaps in this case my anecdotal evidence is not so statistically significant. Not that such things ever are.
• Raising boys takes a greater toll than raising girls. This is again chalked up to testosterone contamination, which harms the immune system, although it could equally likely be due to all those hours chasing sons around with rolling pins if you ask me.
  

Forget dinosaurs, mammals are the chosen ones.

I spent the idle hours of the past weekend watching the faux-nature documentaries Walking with Monsters, Walking with Prehistoric Beasts and Alien Planet. Monsters does its best to bring the vertebrates and mammal-like reptiles that ruled the Earth before the dinosaurs out of obscurity, Prehistoric Beasts attempts the same with the mammals that lived after the dinosaurs but before our time, and Alien Planet dramatizes the voyages of two artificially intelligent probes sent to the planet Darwin IV to search for microbial life and instead finding what seems to be somewhat intelligent life.
The first two series have a definite bias towards humans, in that the very first and earliest episode shows a few early crustaceans before focusing in on the most seemingly insignificant little worm, which is of course the first vertebrate. Narrator Kenneth Brannagh constantly reminds that this or that humble creature is destined to spawn class mammalia. It's prehistory written by the winners. There are in addition several themes which crop up throughout the two series, the most recognizable of which are

• Complex behaviors like nest guarding, parental care, social cohesion and cooperative hunting developed slowly and independent of each other. The series thus tends to focus on first instances of these things (the first australopithecus clan defending a weaker member as a group springs to mind), but that's not always the case, as in the most memorable iteration of this theme, in which a dimetredon that has violently defended her nest nearly to the point of death immediately ceases to defend her offspring upon hatching and in fact attempts to eat some of them. The point, which is well taken, is that it is not the case that one day niceness just evolved up out of nowhere, and that the suite of adaptations that we humans consider to be either honorable or uniquely human all exist for some logical reason.
• The hunter becomes the hunted, on a ridiculously regular basis. The series positively revels in apocalyptic death beasts evolving into prey. Case in point, did you know that the ungulates (hooved mammals including cows and pigs and sheep and goats) were originally carnivorous, and that the only descendants of that group to still be carnivorous are the cetaceans (whales and dolphins)?
  
• The story of evolution is not a straight line, and the development of certain killer adaptations can re-write the course of it. The series cites the sense of touch in early invertebrates, the abovementioned complex behaviors, walking on hind legs and speed and agility in early dinosaurs and walking on hind legs in humans. The series also goes out of its way to suggest that mammal-like reptiles were the kings of the earth before the dinosaurs appeared, and that essentially the dinosaurs sort of stole the throne for one hundred and change million years but in the end they died out and we took our rightful place. It's sort of fatalistic in that way.
• If there had been cameras and nature photographers in ancient prehistory, animals of all periods would have shown a great interest in them. The camera in both series is constantly being hit, nudged or broken by herds, fights, etc. It's verite in that same way that the debris from the exploding Cloud Nine on Galactica hit the camera.
  
• Climate rules everything. Climate (and oxygen levels) can turn insects huge, kill off dinosaurs, give rise to grass and thus create whole new categories of grazing animals, change whales from hunters to filter feeders and basically just trump whatever is going on evolutionarily. Certainly no fault to be found with this view.
• We are destined to kill every animal that cannot live in a human-scaled world. No matter how hard we try to save the whales and the pandas and the elephants, they are doomed, because we have already killed 90% of the large animals that existed when we evolved, not by hunting them (the series claims we didn't hunt mammoths at some point because they were too huge and dangerous) but by simply making their lifestyle unsustainable.
  

Okay, the last one is all mine, but tell you that some TV series made by scientists said it and it picks up a little authoritay, does it not?
The two series are great because they highlight incredibly interesting periods in the Earth's history that often go overlooked in favor of dinosaurs. They undoubtedly oversimplify and tend to favor flashy minority opinions, like that some 200 million year old hunter used venom to kill its prey.

The last mammal

Discovery Channel did a show a few years ago called The Future is Wild, and the premise is that humans "leave" the earth, and then millions of years later some kind of probe comes to the earth and makes a nature show about all the new animals that have evolved. Anyway, besides the fact that humans "left", what got to me was the animal they called the poggle, which was, according to the show, the last mammal. The thing about the poggle that is so depressing is that the poggle, the last in a long line of mammals including majestic creatures like whales, bats and horses, is a little hamster-like creature that is raised for food by giant spiders. So that's how it ends, Discovery Channel? All those warm-blooded hijinks for that, to feed spiders in the deep future? Quite sad.

Or not. I mean, maybe mammals weren't meant to live in the warped, twisted future that the staff of futurologists and futuronomists at DC have created. Maybe 100million years in the future is better off without mammals.

Anyway, I was thinking about evolution today, in particular social evolution. The thing that spurned it all was the fact that Bill Clinton has convinced junk food companies to stop selling so much junk food in schools, and there's apparently some kind of trans-fat restriction bill on the docket somewhere. And that would be totally anti freedom of choice, right? How can it be America when you can't even choose your lunch? So that got me thinking about good old fashioned freedom. The kind of good old fashioned frrreedom where you hit the R really hard like a rreal Amerrrican. Anyway, it all started with the founding fathers, those bootlegging tax-evaders, who wanted Americans to be as free as they could possibly be, like old Patrick Henry said, "Give me liberty or give me death." Right? So, given 230 years of evolution, where did that freedom wind up?
I posit that it ended up going something like this: as an American, you are exposed to every possible opportunity to fuck up your life without the government getting in your way. You are totally free to do anything that is likely to ruin your future. And even the people in a position to tell you not to, who know better, may not intervene because they're Amerrricans too. And then after the damage has been done and you know better and you see it coming for the next generation, you bite your tongue in the name of frrreedom.
When I moved to Korea I initially noticed the same thing that most foreign men do: The women are so beautiful. You hear it all the time among Americans abroad, I'm sure they say it in most any foreign country that they go to. Why? Is it because immigration to America has somehow detrimentally mutated the DNA of our nation's ancestors? Of course the answer is that such a huge proportion of our men women and children are fat that half of our beautiful women are trapped inside fat bodies. In my high school there was a girl from China who came to the U.S. not speaking a word of English and, a few years later got an astronomical SAT verbal score. What does that mean? Americans are dumb? Yes, but not because they do poorly on standardized tests. Because they don't push the importance of education in anyway near the way they do in some other cultures. So what you find in the U.S. is a nation of underachievers with lots of rich life experience. I'm serious, not being fascetious about the rich life lessons bit, it's true. The question is, is it good or bad to live way below your potential, making mistakes left and right with little guidance in order to get this life experience?