Views from Crestmont Drive

EO Wilson, The Meaning of Human Existence, Part 4

Posted on Tuesday 2 December 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Fourth of several posts about Edward O. Wilson’s book THE MEANING OF HUMAN EXISTENCE, which as I described earlier both here on my blog and on Facebook, is a concise summary of this important scientist’s views on the big issues of science and philosophy, as elaborated in his many earlier books. (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) One more post to follow.

Chapter 11 is about “The Collapse of Biodiversity”

This is a topic that most people, even those who think themselves relatively well-informed about science topics, are not generally aware of: the fact that the human race’s propogation across the planet in the past few centuries has resulting in a huge dying off of other species, an extinction event to rival the four or five others across the vast history of the planet Earth.

Wilson has addressed these issues in previous books Biophilia and The Diversity of Life and The Creation (subtitled: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth).

In this chapter, he notes the paradox that the more species humanity extinguishes, the more new ones scientists discover. The current estimate of *known* species is about 2 million, but the estimate of actual species on Earth is more like 5 to 100 million. There are three levels of biodiversity: ecosystems, species, and genes. The way species are lost is summarized by HIPPO: habitat loss; invasive species; pollution; population growth; over-harvesting.

The next three chapters of the book are grouped by the heading “Idols of the Mind”, and concern Instinct, Religion, and Free Will.

Chapter 12, “Instinct”, quotes the Vercors novel You Shall Know Them: “All of man’s troubles have arisen from the fact that we do not know what we are and do not agree on what we want to be.” The human mind emerged as an instrument of survival that employs both reason and emotion. As late as the 1970s, the prevailing view was that human behavior is entirely cultural; there was no such thing as ‘human nature’. This view has changed… [dramatically, I have noticed over the past decades].

Wilson reviews summaries of human traits that are present among *all* societies around the world — a key point made way back on his 1978 book ON HUMAN NATURE. To quote a selection of those traits here:

athletic sports, bodily adornment, decorative art, etiquette, family feasting, folklore, funeral rites, hairstyles, incest taboos, inheritance rules, joking, and the propitiation to supernatural beings.

Human nature, he concludes, is

the ensemble of hereditary regularities in mental development that bias cultural evolution in one direction as opposed to others and thus connect genes to culture in the brain of every person.

And he gives one more memorable example (again from ON HUMAN NATURE), about the habitats in which people prefer to live. Adults prefer the kind of environment in which they grew up. But children, all around the world, not yet acculturated, when evaluating photos of alternative living situations, prefer choices with three factors: a vantage point on a rise looking down, a vista of parkland with grassland and trees, and a proximity to a body of water.

As Wilson notes, this archetype happens to reflect the actual savannas of Africa where our ancestors evolved over millions of years.

As humans converge into cities these preferences have not gone away.

As landscape architects and high-end real estate agents will tell you, the rich prefer habitations set on a rise that looks out over parkland next to a body of water. None of these qualities have practical value, but people with sufficient means will pay any price to have them.

[Actually, Wilson in that earlier book does explore what the ‘practical’ values of such a location might have been. Which is why those preferences evolved.]

And I have to say, while being aware of these biases ever since reading that 1978 book, I feel this motivation very strongly myself. That’s why I have for 11 years lived in a house with the view that it has — right up there at the top of my blog — and why Yeong and I are focused on finding a home in the Bay Area with a water view. Yeong’s ideal is to live by the ocean; my ideal is a view of the bay and the San Francisco skyline. Why is that so important to us? Even understanding this evolutionary tendency, this preference is not easily dismissed.

Posted in Book Notes, Culture, Evolution, Science | Comments Off

Interstellar

Posted on Monday 1 December 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

To begin with, I haven’t seen anyone note the coincidence that recent two films, Interstellar and The Theory of Everything (the Stephen Hawking biopic), both key off a major unsolved problem of physics, the unification of gravity and quantum theory. Who’d have thunk it? Physics in the filmhouse!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_%28film%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_Everything_%282014_film%29

Yet Interstellar oversimplifies it. In the film, Michael Caine’s character implies that the solution will be a single equation (which is likely a gross oversimplification), and that the solution will… enable anti-gravity? He doesn’t spell it out, but how else to implement the film’s Plan A, of saving everyone left alive on Earth. (And how much would that *cost*? To build all those anti-grav spaceships to save everyone left alive on Earth?)

I’d heard enough about this initial premise of the film to distrust it going in, and I didn’t see anything that ameliorated that distrust, on this specific point. The film never spells out exactly how many human beings are left alive after all these plagues that have killed off all these crops. In fact, the film displays a rather typical American/Western culture-centric bias: it focuses on the problems of farmers in some unidentified midwestern state [from the film’s credits, the scenes were apparently filmed in Alberta], without bothering to explore how these plagues have affected the *entire rest of the planet* and what people in those other countries might be doing to save themselves. In this film, American culture, and specifically NASA, is what will save the entire world. (Alas, a not atypical myopic viewpoint of US films, though less so of literary SF.)

And were there perhaps one or two too many scenes with John Lithgow sitting on the porch?

But let’s switch the film’s stronger points. There is a huge amount of relatively intelligent physics here, moreso than any SF film ever, I would think. Kip Thorne, a CalTech physicist, was brought in early on as a consultant, and apparently advised the director, Christopher Nolan, and his brother Jonathan, who co-wrote the script, to consider and develop plot points they had not previously thought about.

Thus we have in this film a wormhole, a planet orbiting a black hole, the effects of relativity (how time is relative to travel near the speed of light, including close orbit around a black hole), and what could happen by diving into the singularity of a black hole. And the speculation of what would happen should gravity and quantum theory be merged — the film suggests this would result in the manipulation of gravity across time.

And this leads to my tentative take on this film: it tries to do *too much*. A human catastrophe *plus* traveling through a wormhole *plus* the effects of relativity around a black hole *plus* the manipulation of time via an understanding of gravity *plus* how humanity can propogate itself *plus* the human stories of all involved.

Even without Gary Westfahl’s review of this film, that I posted a while back on Locus Online, any experienced film-goer can’t help but notice the huge number of allusions and parallels between Interstellar and 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s 1968 film, that is widely regarded as not just the greatest SF film of all time, but one of the greatest films of all time. Both 2001 and Interstellar depict an initial primary state; a central state depicting a space exploration flight; and a final state depicting some kind of transcendence into a higher state, or dimension, or reality. As Gary Westfahl suggested, it is as if Christopher Nolan wanted to remake 2001 with an emotional content — the content 2001 specifically lacked, though not without intention. And here’s where several key scenes play…

I won’t try to detail them all, but here is one that comes to mind. In Interstellear, there is a scene in which Matthew McConaughey’s character, after he has survived a trip that has relativistically aged him a couple decades compared to his kids back home, watches backlogged video transmissions from his kids. His boy is now a man, with a kid of his own. And MM’s character can’t help but weep, seeing scenes of his children who are decades past his own experience, and whom he realizes he might never see again.

It’s a powerful scene, and one that I couldn’t help but respond powerfully to myself.

In 2001, there is a scene in which Frank Poole watches a transmission from his parents, wishing him a happy birthday. Poole watches without any visible emotional reaction whatsoever, more concerned about asking HAL to adjust the angle of his headrest. He’s watching his parents, not his kids, but still.

This was of course not a flaw in Kubrick’s film; it was an intention; and it was a very different intention than Nolan’s.

How many other allusions to 2001?

Well, just to enumerate a few I can think of off-hand:

The rotating space station, to produce artificial gravity;
The presence of an AI robot, named here TARS (cf 2001’s HAL) (One criticism I do have of this film is that TARS’s voice is not sufficiently distinct from the other human voices. There were scenes where I wasn’t quite sure who was speaking, TARS or one of the human astronauts. 2001‘s HAL voice, by Douglas Rain, was distinct, and brilliant.)
A huge credit to this film, Interstellar, is that it does not pretend that there are *sounds* in space; there are numerous scenes of spaceships moving about and interacting, with no sound, which is of course realistic, since sound does not travel in a vacuum, in outer space. I’m not sure there has been any SF film that has done this correctly since 2001. OTOH, there is a scene involving an explosion that depicts visible flames erupting, albeit briefly; but visible flames depend on oxygen…

I like Hans Zimmer’s score just fine, and am listening to it again right now as I prepare this post. Yes, there were two or three spots in the film where the score might have been turned up rather too loudly — though as I said earlier on Facebook, that is not the composer’s fault, rather the sound editor’s or the director’s. At the same time, those spots where the score came to be overwhelming, were sections of the film where intercuts between the spaceship scenes, and the scenes back on Earth, were especially effective in building a dramatic climax.

What else?

Well, the film indulges in some relatively sophisticated acknowledgement of the conflicting motivations of individual humans beings that derive from the forces of evolutionary natural selection. Matt Damon’s character expounds these ideas, if rather crudely; he asks McConaughey’s character why should anyone care about saving the whole human race, as a species, as opposed to saving their own children?

This is the difference between the film’s Plan A and Plan B. Plan B involves a societal, group effort, across all of civilization, to save humanity, via fertilized embryos, frozen, on the spaceships, so that if no one from Earth survives, at least the *species* will survive, via a few spaceship survivors who subsequently grow these fertilized embryos into life and into subsequent generations. Plan A is all about saving one’s own families, one’s relatives, one’s communities. One of the emotional tensions in the film is about the conflict between these two plans. There’s an obvious relationship between these two plans and the divisions as identified by current social science about individual vs group selection, conservatism vs liberalism, capitalism vs socialism…

This leads to my thought every time I see a Hollywood big budget SF film– why do these Hollywood film producers think they can write an intelligent science fiction film? When there are so many actual SF authors who could step in and advise them on plot points and correct their characters’ dialogue to not sound quite so dumb? (E.g. why does Interstellar‘s wormhole have to lead to another *galaxy*? Why not a couple hundred light years across our own galaxy? Because, I’d guess, the filmmakers don’t actually understand what galaxies are, in the vast scheme of things, compared to solar systems and stars and the vast regions of the Milky Way. Or perhaps it’s just so much simpler to say, another ‘galaxy’, for dramatic effect, without worrying about what that actually means.) The obvious answer is that Hollywood films are made for an audience who has no knowledge of, and doesn’t care about, the thought that has gone into generations of literary SF and its development of ideas. Yet the effort to improve a Hollywood film’s script with some intelligent input from an actual SF author would take an infinitesimal portion of that film’s budget.

Only Kubrick, who hired Arthur C. Clarke, got this right, with 2001.

Any other problems?

Well, yes, I think Anne Hathaway’s character’s going on about love being a primal force of the universe is a bit of woo, i.e., an invocation of an unjustified, non-scientific supernatural force. Yes, love may in fact be a primal force among human relationships, but to equate it with the fundamental physical forces of the universe is a huge category error. (io9’s Annalee Newitz captured this in her November 5th post, Interstellar Is the Best and Worst Space Opera You’ll Ever See, which I just read today.)

Back to the plus side: I had no problem with the film’s conclusion, given Matthew McConaughey’s narration, that describes how future human beings, having solved the relationship between gravity and time, have generated this infinite matrix of possible states of his daughter’s bedroom… specifically to allow him to send a message into the past, to allow her to produce that solution. Once you realize what you are seeing, that huge matrix of all states of her bedroom across time, it’s rather awesome, very cool. OTOH, that McConaughey uses the power of *love* to guide him to the one spot where he can send a message rather unfortunately depends on that woo component.

I’ve ordered Kip Thorne’s book about the science of this film, and I wonder if he will address this in any way.

To sum up: Interstellar is an amazing film with many pluses and a few issues. I will read Kip Thorne’s book about it, I will order it on DVD or Blu-Ray when it comes out, and I will watch it again, likely more than once.

Posted in Astronomy, Cosmology, Culture, Films | Comments Off

EO Wilson, The Meaning of Human Existence, part 3

Posted on Monday 1 December 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Third of several posts about Edward O. Wilson’s book THE MEANING OF HUMAN EXISTENCE, which as I described earlier both here on my blog and on Facebook, is a concise summary of this important scientist’s views on the big issues of science and philosophy, as elaborated in his many earlier books. (Part 1, Part 2) There will be one or two more.

I mentioned before that since this book is largely a summary and consolidation of Wilson’s early books, over the past 30+ years, it’s hard to consider this a substantial book on its own, or an award-worthy book — it was a nominee (it did not win) for this year’s National Book Awards. But I would update that comment to say, for anyone who has not read all of Wilson’s earlier books (including me!), and who would appreciate an elegant, precise summary of the current scientific stance on the big issues of evolution, instinct, religion, free will, and as the title says the “meaning of human existence”, this is an excellent primer, and highly recommended.

Chapter 7 is about how humans experience only a tiny part of the world through our senses, compared to 99% of the species across the earth who depend on chemicals (pheromones), for interaction among others of their species. Humans, like few other species, are primarily audiovisual. It’s because we evolved into a species whose heads are farther from the ground, and from the other species who live there, than most others.

Chapter 8 discusses ‘super-organisms’, like ants, termites, etc., in which each individual plays a role in a larger ‘organism’, without being aware of that role. The way ants live has nothing to suggest about how humans should live, Wilson advises. (Wilson is an expert on ants, and won a Pulitzer Prize for an enormous book about them — The Ants, Belknap Press, 1990.) The current collapse of honeybees around the world may be due to the vulnerability of such complex, fragile, organisms.

Chapter 9 concerns the potential of life on other planets, and the likelihood of microbes everywhere, even in extreme environments on Earth, and what the discovery of life on other planets would entail — primarily, solving the puzzle of whether their genetic code is the same as that of life on Earth, or different.

Chapter 10 is “A Portrait of E.T.” in which Wilson speculates — based on his understanding of the range of animal species across the Earth — the characteristics of a hypothetical intelligent species of extra-terrestrials. He concludes that such a species would be: land-dwellers, not aquatic; relatively large animals; biologically audiovisual; with a big, distinct head, located up front; with light to moderate jaws and teeth; with very high social intelligence; with a small number of appendages, with segments, and with one pair that has sensitive tips for touch and grasping; and who are moral (in the way he explains). p117

A final section of this chapter explains why aliens could never successfully invade Earth (or for that matter why humans could never successfully settle an alien planet), an insight that undermines thousands of science fiction stories (and films). (p120)

All E.T.s have a fatal weakness. Their bodies would almost certainly carry microbiomes, entire ecosystems of symbiotic microorganisms comparable to the ones that our own bodies require for day-to-day existence. … The reason is that the two living worlds, ours and theirs, are radically different in origin, molecular machinery, and the endless pathways of evolution that produced the life-forms then brought together by colonization. The ecosystems and species of the alien world would be wholly incompatible with our own.

The result would be a biological train wreck. The first to perish would be the alien colonists…

Posted in Book Notes, Culture, Evolution, Religion, Science | Comments Off

Inherit the Wind

Posted on Sunday 23 November 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Saw the movie INHERIT THE WIND today for the first time in many years. This is the 1960 film version of the 1955 play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, as directed by Stanley Kramer, about the famous 1925 ‘monkey trial’ in a small town, Dayton, Tennessee, in which a high school teacher was accused of teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution in spite of a state law prohibiting such instruction.

(I’d put the film on my Netflix quere literally years ago, and somehow last week, without my having noticed my queue in a while, the DVD appeared in my mailbox…)

The subsequent trial attracted national media attention and two big-name lawyers. (That the teacher violated the letter of the law was barely the issue; of course he did. The big-name attention was about whether the law was justified.) The play and movie fictionalizes the characters, but their identities are easily mapped to their real-life counterparts. The prosecuting attorney in the play/movie is Matthew Harrison Brady, counterpart of the actual William Jennings Bryan, the three-time (losing, obviously) presidential candidate, who speaks for the literal word of the Bible; the defense attorney in the play/movie is Henry Drummond, counterpart of the actual Clarence Darrow, a firebrand attorney known for defending unpopular clients. And attending the proceedings is a sarcastic newspaper reporter, E.K. Hornbeck, counterpart of the real life H.L. Mencken. (In the film, Brady is played by Fredric March, Drummond by Spencer Tracy [an Oscar nominee for this], and Hornbeck by none other than Gene Kelly. And Dick York, later known for his husbandly role on the TV series Bewitched, played the school-teacher, Bertram Cates. Also notable is Claude Akins as the overly-zealous Reverend Jeremiah Brown — father of the young woman in love with Bertram Cates.)

The story pits small-town Bible-thumpers — “simple folk”, “plain folk”, they are repeatedly described as, who need the comfort of their Bible stories, against outsiders from the ‘northern cities’ and foreigners — resisting ideas of ‘evil’-ution, which to them means humans descended from apes and ultimately slime [a gross misunderstanding and mischaracterization, needless to say]. The town crowd repeatedly marches through the streets, singing “Give Me That Ol’ Time Religion”, and carrying signs (e.g. “Brady and Bible, Drummond and Devil”), that are too well-spelled (considering the actual recent record of reactionary protest marches) to be realistic. The town crowd is much like the hysterical mobs of “The Crucible” — at one point they parade through the streets singing about hanging and burning the teacher, Bertram Cates, as he waits in his jail cell.

Which is to say, the movie overplays it, exaggerating the ignorant zealousness of the townspeople, and for that matter the zealousness of Matthew Harrison Brady, who in his passion and small-mindedness comes across as a buffoon, and dies himself to a heart-attack in the midst of a passionate oration just after the trial ends.

I say this even after, obviously, not being on the town’s or Brady’s side in this debate. But maybe this exaggeration was dramatically necessary when this film was made, at a time when these issues were not so visible as they are today.

Of course, as with pretty much all plays and movies based on real events, this story takes liberties with historical facts. (Bryan died five days after the trial ended, not on the last day of the trial, for example.)

Dramatically, however, the story is incendiary. It’s mostly about the trial, and it takes off when, after Brady and the judge have ruled out testimony from various university experts in zoology, geology, and whatnot, Drummond calls *Brady* to the stand, to interrogate him about the Bible and “Mrs. Cain” and about whether the first day was literally a 24-hour day, a dialogue that leads to Brady’s claim that God speaks to him. It’s a long, impassioned scene that culminates in Brady’s breakdown, the crowd’s subtle turn against him, and how the ultimate verdict against Cates seems like a joke. (After so many days or weeks of media attention, the town’s leaders realized that the country, and even the world, was treating Dayton as a laughing-stock. And so the judge minimized the sentence as best he could.) [Not mentioned in the play or film: the verdict was later overturned on a technicality.]

I read this play in my teens, long before I saw the movie. It was published in a paperback Bantam Pathfinder edition, for 60 cents, that I bought off a junior-high school book cart, and which I’ve scanned here (without color correcting). In those days the junior high school “home room” class hosted a book cart, like a large library cart, that was wheeled into home room once a week, from which one could purchase books. I was especially attracted to Bantam Pathfinder editions, and bought this one (along with William Gibson’s play The Miracle Worker, Leonard Wibberley’s The Mouse That Roared, C. S. Forester’s Sink the Bismark!, and others, including my first few Ray Bradbury books).

As I watched the movie today, I couldn’t help but pick up the book, and track the film to the play. And I was surprised to discover that the film is actually *longer* and more developed than the play; there is some rearrangement of scenes from the play, but there are also entire scenes in the film that were not in the play, especially a couple involving the preacher and his daughter, and some rearrangement of the final scenes with Hornbeck and Drummond. At the same time, considerable portions of the film are taken word for word from the play. So I’m surprised to see that, according to Wikipedia, the film’s scriptwriters were not the playwrights; most scriptwriters take much more liberty with their source material than these two obviously did.

Reading the play at age 15 was just one ingredient among many that formed my worldview in those impressionable years. Later, I saw a performance of the play at UCLA, while I was a student there, and eventually the movie.

Here’s a key passage — among many — from the play.

Brady:
We must not abandon faith! Faith is the most important thing!

Drummond:
Then why did God plague us with the power to think? Mr. Brady, why do you deny the one faculty which lifts man above all the creatures on the earth: the power of his brain to reason. What other merit have we?

Fun facts and asides:

I understand there is a museum in Dayton, Tennessee, about the Scopes Trial, that emphasizes the historical inaccuracies between the play/movie and what actually happened. As if.
According to Wikipedia, the Cowardly Lion in L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was a satirization of Bryan.
Bryan was a Democrat, who “champion[ed] the ideas of the farmers and workers” [Wikipedia] while also being a religious zealot who “actively lobbied for state laws banning public schools from teaching evolution” [ditto]. How times have changed.
Surprised to note that according to Wikipedia there have been three subsequent TV films of the play, in 1965, 1988, and 1999
And interesting to note that Wikipedia characterizes the play as a parable about the McCarthy ‘witch-hunt’ trials concerning communists, since of course the content of the story’s subject can be taken at face value — there are in fact battles ongoing in school boards to this day (especially in Texas and other southern states) about whether science should be prohibited in school classrooms in favor of religious myths.
Here’s a very weird coincidence, which I will note but not explain in this venue; according to my book of the play, which lists the cast of the 1955 NYC production, the first character on stage, in the character of Melinda, was played by Mary Kevin Kelly.
FWIW, in that original production, Tony Randall played E.K. Hornbeck, Ed Begley played Matthew Harrison Brady, and Paul Muni played Henry Drummond.

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Edited 24nov14: added a couple sentences above about how the teacher did actually violate the letter of the law, and how the town was made a laughing-stock through all the media attention.

Posted in Culture, Evolution, Films, Personal history, Reviews | Comments Off

Resuming SFADB Development

Posted on Wednesday 19 November 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

I’ve had concepts for what I want to implement on my science fiction awards site, what was first the Locus Index to Science Fiction Awards (http://www.locusmag.com/SFAwards/) and which has been superseded by the Science Fiction Awards Database (http://www.sfadb.com/), since at least 2000, when I first posted the former site and when I started to play with the idea of tallying up entries in Bill Contento’s Locus Index to Science Fiction, the entries for how many anthologies and collections any particular short story was reprinted in. I specifically remember jogging around the running track at the North Hollywood Bally’s (acquired three years ago by LA Fitness) thinking about it. Contento at that time had a crude tally of the number of such reprints, with stories by Ellison and Clarke and Keyes topping the list, but my vision was to scale those data by the kind of reprint book, and combining those data with the awards data already compiled, in order to come up with a balanced set of data about the most essential SF/fantasy novels and short fiction of all time.

(My motivation is not a technogeek issue about statistics. It’s about trying to identify a set of novels and stories that are at the core of the SF/fantasy genres, a set of titles that can be objectively identified as those that anyone interested in these genres should aspire to be familiar with. This notion of a common core of SF/F literature is perhaps an old-fashioned idea, but one which I still think is worth pursuing.)

This project is huge and I wish I were more efficient about implementing it. (And I’m boggled by all the work that’s gone into the vastly larger project of the Science Fiction Encyclopedia.) Currently, with no day job but while dealing with the sale of our house here in LA and the search for a new home in the San Francisco Bay Area, I have lots of free time, though it’s difficult to focus on a big project like this with these other matters in the foreground.

Despite which, I have resumed work on sfadb today, on one of the three major open threads on the site. (One: citations. Two: anthologies. Three: Tallies and rankings of novels and stories by year. And four, only barely begun: selected bibliographies in my preferred format.) I haven’t posted another round of ‘Citations’ (http://www.sfadb.com/Citations_Directory) since April, though I’ve off and on been working the next round of a couple three dozen additional sources. The issue for adding new citation references is verifying bibliographical information on the titles cited by each source. That is, if some citation source links to some title, I need to have the year and country and publisher of that title’s first edition in my database, before I can include those data in the dataset for sfadb, and update all the citation and title pages. (And I’m also revising the way in which I indicate first publication for books that were first published in non-English languages in some year, and published in English in some later year.)

As of today, I have 256 Books Records to verify in that way. In the past couple years I’ve taken the Science Fiction Encyclopedia as being the primary source for such bibliographical information (superseding my traditional sources, such as L.W. Currey’s Science Fiction and Fantasy Authors: A Bibliography of First Printings of Their Fiction, and other sources by St. James and Robert Reginald and Donald H. Tuck). The only problem with SFE is that it does not include some specifically fantasy authors, and for those, I resort to Bill Contento’s Locus Index, or Wikipedia, or Abebooks.com, or as a last resort a general Google search, to identify first publication data. So far, there are only a handful I’ve not been able to verify even through those methods. It should take only two or three full days to work through those 256, so another general update of Citations references on sfadb should be forthcoming in the next week or two.

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Scientific fidelity vs narrative; anti-gay bigotry and socialism; the ecology of faith; Valerie Tarico on religion; Hans Zimmer and conceptual breakthrough

Posted on Tuesday 18 November 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Here’s one of several articles in the past week or so about why we should not nitpick the science in Interstellar:

Slate: Back Off, Scientists: Don’t be so nitpicky about the technical details of sci-fi movies like Interstellar

I have yet to see the movie so this is not about that. It’s about a larger theme: why human beings value *story* over fidelity to the real world. Again and again, Hollywood science fiction films that are dumb to some degree about how the universe actually is, are forgiven by apologists who say that it’s really all about the story, that’s what’s most important.

In my thinking the larger theme is why we so value story over reality, and this keys to the psychological biases discussed by David McRaney (and Jesse Bering and EO Wilson and many others), about how we interpret the world in terms of narrative. (Aside from the fact that it’s just so much simpler to defer one’s intellect to whatever holy book is at hand, rather than engage in a life-long thought-process about the ever-expanding and at times changing evidence for what is true about the real world.) This is also, of course, a primary underlying explanation for why the vast majority of the human race prefers religion — stories — over understanding of the real world. (The secondary explanation is that this narrative mindset truly does enhance reproductive fitness. Humans don’t need to ‘understand’ the real world as it actually is, in order to survive and reproduce; they only need to interpret it in the context of stories that play to their sense of worthiness and superiority compared to other family groups or social groups, providing them an incentive to perpetuate their line.)

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Towleroad has this interesting profile from a few days ago: Meet Cathi Herrod, Arizona’s Leading Anti-gay, Pro-Discrimination Bigot: VIDEO. Quoting her:

The social science data shows that marriage between a man and a woman is still the best family unit for men, women and children. This is never aimed at any individual, but it’s aimed at what’s the best public policy.

There are two problems with this. First, the social science data does *not* show that. She is lying, or is misinformed. (See my blog post Regnerus, Same-Sex Marriage, and False Witness and its reference on Slate, The Shamelessness of Professor Mark Regnerus.)

Second, she is taking a socialist stance — a huge irony, given that most right-wing/conservative/evangelicals bristle at anything they can condemn as socialist, like healthcare. She is saying we need to deny certain rights to gays *for the good of public policy*.

Needless to say, she does not perceive the irony. She implicitly presumes that Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness applies only to people she approves of.

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The ecology of faith: what makes societies religious?

Jerry Coyne chimes in about the recent study that examines religious beliefs as a function of social dysfunction. The more uncertain and worse off a society is, the more religious it is. (One might also observe the US states that are relatively poorest in terms of social standards – those in the South – are also the most religious.) Much more detail at the link.

[Not mentioned by Coyne, but this is consistent with the evidence that many countries in Europe, including the relatively, er, socialist Scandinavian countries, score highest on various standards of living and health, while having the lowest rates of religious belief, across the entire world.]

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Meanwhile, here are two articles by Valerie Tarico, on Alternet and Salon, who valiantly explores the interfaces of religion and society.

6 Ways Religion Does More Bad Than Good

With a provocative subtitle: “What if harming society is part of religion’s survival strategy?”

(Of course the strategy suggested here makes sense in terms of EO Wilson’s dialogue between individual and group selection; religion is about enforcing conformity within groups…but only small groups that can withstand variation among larger groups, and their interaction with the real world.)

Her points:

Religion promotes tribalism
Religion anchors believers to the Iron Age
Religion makes a virtue out of faith
Religion diverts generous impulses and good intentions
Religion teaches helplessness
Religions seek power

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Another Valerie Tarico article: 10 signs that religious fundamentalism is going down

One can only hope.

Again, to bulletize her points (though of course the complete article is worth reading):

Coming out atheist is up and coming
The cutting edge of freethought is less cutting and edgy
Biblical sexuality is getting binned. Finally
Recovering believers are reclaiming their lives
Communities are coming together
Secular giving is growing
The Religious Right is licking wounds
Texas is evolving!
Millenials are taking up the torch
Rebuilding the wall of separation isn’t the only place Millennials are leading the way

—

Finally, here is the best track from Hans Zimmer’s score for The Da Vinci Code.

In science fiction there is the idea of the conceptual breakthrough — the moment in which one’s world opens up and expands to something previously unsuspected, into a grand and glorious greater reality. This is music for that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yY1OJyaWBJ4

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EO Wilson, The Meaning of Human Existence, part 2

Posted on Monday 17 November 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Second of several posts about Edward O. Wilson’s book THE MEANING OF HUMAN EXISTENCE, which as I described earlier both here on my blog and on Facebook, is a concise summary of this important scientist’s views on the big issues of science and philosophy, as elaborated in his many earlier books. (Part 1)

Chapter 4, The Unity of Knowledge

[This was the theme of one of Wilson’s most essential books, CONSILIENCE (1998).]

Modern culture assumes (and endlessly probes) a presumed divide between the ‘sciences’ and the ‘humanities’, but the idea that the humanities and science share a basic foundation — that of cause and effect — was the basis for what Western culture called the Enlightenment, in the 17th and 18th centuries. The idea faltered in the early 1800s; science expanded rapidly but came nowhere near accounting for everything; thus the Romantics gave up and focused on private experiences of meaning, especially in poetry. Thus the split into the ‘two cultures’. Scientific specialties multiplied. But now, the author says, the quest for unification should be resumed. Many of the big problems of modern life depend on it.

The successful scientist thinks like a poet and works like a bookkeeper… the opposite is true in poetry and other creative arts.
d
In a fundamental sense the creative arts and humanities scholarship are just the same old story – reflecting a boundless anthropocentricity, a fascination with ourselves. It’s a result of social intelligence.

We are devoted to stories because that is how the mind works—a never-ending wandering through past scenarios and through alternative scenarios of the future.

(p43)

Whereas science

is totally committed to fact without reference to religion or ideology. It cuts paths through the fever swamp of human existence.

Science offers another property unlike the humanities: the idea of the continuum. Processes in one or more dimensions that occur continuously – temperature, pressure, spin, wave length. Of the variety of exoplanets. Of the continua of biodiversity. Of the evolutionary relationship of species.

The humanities do not appreciate how tiny our perceptions of these continua are—especially those of our senses. The range of light we can see, sounds we can hear; humans have one of the poorest senses of smell among all organisms on Earth. (The vast majority of animal species, Wilson notes, live their lives with their faces and noses much closer to the ground than do humans.) Science can explore all these continua in a way the humanities cannot perceive:

We are a very special species, perhaps the chosen species if you prefer, but the humanities by themselves cannot explain why this is the case. They don’t even pose the question in a manner that can be answered. Confined to a small box of awareness, they celebrate the tiny segments of the continua they know, in minute details and over and over again in endless permutations. These segments alone do not address the origins of the traits we fundamentally possess…

(p51)

[[ Comment: the way the human mind filters and channels experience and perception into narratives, i.e. stories, echoes themes of David McRaney’s books (e.g. as summarized here). Re: Wilson: of all the humanities it is the literary genre of *science fiction* that attempts to step outside the comfortable boundaries of what is known, and imagine things outside the ordinary experience of human beings. (Here is the core of my interest and what I’m exploring in this blog.) ]]

Chapter 5, The All-Importance of the Humanities

Wilson makes the provocative point that, were ‘real’ aliens to show up in a first contact scenario, it is not our science they would be interested in — because they would already know the science, since it’s the same everywhere, the physics, the principles of evolutionary biology, and so on. What aliens would value from human society is… our humanities.

Human history has given birth to thousands of cultures, languages, religious beliefs, social practices. [[ This variation, I would say, is like art; endlessly variable perceptions of how to live within the unchanging fundamental reality of the world. ]]

Science, Wilson suggests, will eventually reach a mature size and complexity, and advances will slow. Science will be the same across all cultures, everywhere in the world. In the next few decades we can expect advances in BNR—biotechnology, nanotechnology, and robotics. We will be able to correct mutant alleles that cause hereditary diseases. The worldwide population will homogenize; how will we handle the decrease in genetic diversity? And as robots advance, what will be left for humans to do? These are issues for humanities to solve — which is why humanities, in the long run, will remain important.

Chapter 6, The Driving Force of Social Evolution

This chapter explores in more detail the idea of ‘eusociality’ brought up earlier, in Chapter 2 (see earlier post), and the conflict or balance between individual-level selection and group selection. Wilson gives the example of a thief, who may by his actions further the interests of his offspring, but at the same time weakens the rest of his group. Whereas a warrior who is killed in battle helps preserve his own group, even at the expense of his own offspring. Inclusive fitness has been shown to apply to only extreme situations, and its method of regressive analysis has been invalidated (p64). Wilson reviews the history of these ideas: Haldane, Hamilton; kin selection; Dawkins and the idea of the ‘selfish gene’.

The author says that within the past decade, the theory of inclusive fitness has been shown to be fundamentally wrong. Doubts became frequent by 2005. Author wrote 2010 paper with two others at Harvard advancing the alternate theory about group selection, which got a fair amount of criticism, including from Dawkins.

And so, author concludes, the driving force was the creation of groups.

Posted in Book Notes, Culture, Evolution, Religion, Science | Comments Off

EO Wilson, The Meaning of Human Existence, part 1

Posted on Thursday 13 November 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Here’s the first of several posts about Edward O. Wilson’s book THE MEANING OF HUMAN EXISTENCE, which as I described earlier both here on my blog and on Facebook, is a concise summary of this important scientist’s views on the big issues of science and philosophy, as elaborated in his many earlier books.

(Though this book is a finalist for this year’s National Book Awards, it’s hard to think of this as a great book unto itself, since it derives so much of its content from the author’s earlier works. Maybe that’s a plus?)

These are issues that have informed my own worldview for over 30 years, ever since reading his seminal book ON HUMAN NATURE (1979), which won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. That Wilson has revised some of the ideas expressed in his earlier books — or rather, expanded and matured them on the basis of further evidence and analysis — is an example of the process of science and intellectual inquiry (as opposed to ideology and religion).

Chapter 1 is about “The Meaning of Meaning”. Wilson acknowledges that the ordinary use of ‘meaning’ is about intent and design. The broader definition of ‘meaning’, which he applies here, is that the accidents of history are the source of meaning; each event in the evolutionary past of the human race is random, yet each alters the probability of later events. Humanity’s existence is the consequence of adaptations amidst other potential possibilities that have driven us to our current existence, and those probabilities and consequences, as opposed to all the theoretical others, is a kind of ‘meaning’.

Wilson advises that we as a species approach a great moral dilemma: to what extent do we retrofit the human genotype, and direct our own evolution. The essays in this book invoke both proximate and ultimate causation, both as conditions for the ‘meaning’ of human existence. Humanity arose on its own:

We are not predestined to reach any goal, nor are we answerable to any power but our own. Only wisdom based on self-understanding, not piety, will save us. There will be no redemption or second chance vouchsafed to us from above. We have only this one planet to inhabit and this one meaning to unfold…

Chapter 2: Solving the Riddle of the Human Species

Here Wilson explores his latest, perhaps substantial, contribution to evolutionary theory, the idea of group or social selection. It’s an idea that’s been around for years and remains controversial, but one which according to Wilson has been validated by recent mathematical theorems and proofs. (Much more detail in his book THE SOCIAL CONQUEST OF EARTH.)

His idea is that ‘eusociality’ is a principle that explains the advanced social behavior of human beings — as well as a small number of other species, only 19 others in the history of life on Earth in fact, mostly insects (termites and ants), a few rodents, and a few marine species.

“Eusociality” is the condition in which members of a group cooperatively rear their young across multiple generations. They also divide labor in a way that reduces the “reproductive fitness” of some members but that increases that of other members. [It’s the opposite of the far more common pattern in which a male and female mate and the mother subsequently raises the young on her own, sometimes with the assistance of the father, but never within a group of other parents and offspring. Think of dogs or cats in the wild, birds in the nests — almost but not quite the entire animal kingdom.]

This is a result of a competition, or balance, between individual selection and group selection, and it is this understanding that is key to the ‘meaning’ of human existence: that we have “adapted to live in a biological world”:

Human existence may be simpler than we thought. There is no predestination, no unfathomed mystery of life. Demons and gods to not vie for our allegiance. Instead, we are self-made, independent, alone, and fragile, a biological species adapted to live in a biological world. What counts for long-term survival is intelligent self-understanding, based upon a greater independence of thought that that tolerated today even in our most advanced democratic societies.

(page 26)

Chapter 3: Evolution and Our Inner Conflict

The understanding of those conflicting forces of evolution leads to this great insight.

Are human beings intrinsically good but corruptible by the forces of evil, or the reverse, innately sinful yet redeemable by the forces of good?

Wilson’s answer: We are both simultaneously, as a result of the multilevel selection that pits kin selection against group selection. The results of this multilevel selection are aspects of human nature that seem like elemental forces of nature, but are in fact idiosyncratic traits of our species.
One is our obsessive interest in other people, what they are thinking and what their intentions are.
A second is the instinctual urge to belong to groups.

Individual-level selection works among individuals of the same group. Group-level selection is about competition among groups, promoting altruism and cooperation of all members of a group, not just kin, leading to ideas of morality and conscience and honor:

Within groups selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals, but groups of altriuists beat groups of selfish individuals. Or, risking oversimplification, individual selection promoted sin, while group selection promoted virtue.

(p33)

And so humans are forever conflicted by rival urges.

To give in completely to the instinctual urgings born from individual selection would be to dissolve society. At the opposite extreme, to surrender to the urgings from group selection would turn us into angelic robots –- the outside equivalents of ants.

And to conclude:

The eternal conflict is not God’s test of humanity. It is not a machination of Satan. It is just the way things worked out. The conflict might be the only way in the entire Universe that human-level intelligence and social organization can evolve. We will find a way eventually to live with our inborn turmoil, and perhaps find pleasure in viewing it as the primary source of our creativity.

(p34)

[[ Personal comment, not to be taken as any gloss on Wilson’s words, just my own ancillary thoughts as I was reading this book, and in the context of my themes of this blog. So: It is tempting to align the priorities of individual and group selection, as Wilson describes them, with the dualistic nature of human social and political tendencies, with ‘conservatives’ prioritizing fidelity to the family and small local groups, and ‘liberals’ prioritizing interactions and the health of larger groups. “It takes a family” to raise a child, one side says; “it takes a village”, the other side says.

In which direction does human society as a whole advance?

Without the more ‘advanced’ group priorities, there would be no society at all. ]]

More to follow.

http://www.amazon.com/Meaning-Human-Existence-Edward-Wilson/dp/0871401002/

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Hans Zimmer and Interstellar, again

Posted on Thursday 13 November 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Very happy to see this post on Slate by J. Bryan Lowder: Music of the Spheres: In Interstellar, Hans Zimmer scores the universe.

This is to follow up my earlier post, Interstellar…Music, which concerned complaints that the music overwhelmed to the film to a distracting degree.

I’ve also seen newsgroup posts about how the entire soundtrack obscures the dialogue, and makes the film hard to understand. I think this is all a matter of sound editing, or perhaps the director’s prerogative about the sound of the film. It makes me inclined to wait to see the film until it’s on DVD, when I can turn on subtitles.

Despite these kinds of issues, Hans Zimmer is one of my favorite film composers, as I mentioned in that earlier post. And I’m fascinated by the comment in the linked article that Zimmer deliberately delayed the release of the soundtrack for Interstellar, so that people would hear the score in the context of the film, before hearing it on its own.

Conflicted about whether I want to see the film now, despite all the complaints, aesthetic and otherwise.

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And the moon rose over an open field

Posted on Tuesday 11 November 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Here’s one of Paul Simon’s best songs, “America”, from Simon & Garfunkel’s 1968 album Bookends; a song that is recently getting play on a certain TV commercial… Has Simon sold out? Well, the TV commercial is about patronizing local, small-town businesses. So I suspect Simon must have licensed the song for that message, which is consistent with the song’s theme of searching for the true America.

“Kathy, I’m lost,” I said, though I knew she was sleeping.
“I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why”
Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike
They’ve all come to look for America

While we’re at it, here’s the YouTube of what I think of as the Ur-Simon & Garfunkel song — Scarborough Fair, with its gorgeous overlapping counterpoint melodies. (And its fundamental Italian sauce ingredients: parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme.)