Fuzzy

Surprisingly often, scientific researchers make what (eventually, perhaps after decades) turn out to be bad assumptions. They simplify a vexing problem in order to investigate it with the available tools, and then assume that what they’ve learned describes what happens in the real world, forgetting that they began by making a simplifying assumption.

Right now I’m reading Microcosm, a wonderful layman’s science book about the bacterium E. coli. You may not know much about E. coli, but they know quite a lot about you, at least in a vague, utilitarian way, because billions of them are living in your intestines right now.

E. coli has been quite extensively studied in the laboratory. It’s right up there with mice and fruit flies as one of the favorite organisms used in research. But research can’t be done in your intestines. On p. 51, the author (Carl Zimmer) says this:

“Out of the 4,288 genes scientists have identified in E. coli … only 303 appear to be essential for its growth in a laboratory. That does not mean the other 3,985 genes are all useless. Many help E. coli survive in the crowded ecosystem of the human gut, where a thousand species of microbes compete for food.”

But I’m not here today to meditate on intestinal parasites (though that’s a topic worth meditating on). I’m a lot more interested in what happens inside of E. coli. The little critter is a jam-packed protein circus! Large molecules are whizzing around carrying out amazingly intricate

Win or Lose

Back in the early ’80s, I used to play pool with a guy named Dave Williamson. We would drive down to a nearby pool hall and play 8-ball while eating lunch. Dave was Keyboard’s advertising director, and a very competitive guy. In order to understand this story, you have to know a little about the rules of 8-ball.

There are two ways to win a game of 8-ball: You can sink all of your balls, followed by the 8, or your opponent can foul. If you foul, you lose immediately. Sinking the 8 ball too early is a foul … but here’s the nasty bit: Once you’ve sunk all of your balls and you’re shooting for the 8, if the cue ball strikes one of your opponent’s remaining balls before it hits the 8, you’ve fouled, and you lose.

If your opponent gets too far ahead — if he’s shooting for the 8 while you still have four or five of your balls on the table — you have a tactical opportunity. You can

Lingua Franca

So you’re describing the human species to a xenosociologist named Erbq, who comes from a planet somewhere near Aldebaran. You tell him (actually, Erbq is a him/2, but let’s not get into that) that we humans use tools and communicate using spoken words, which signify objects, actions, and relations. Also, we have a glandular system that releases chemicals into the bloodstream to stimulate quick action — emotions, in other words.

From this data, Erbq might reasonably conclude that humans will express their emotions by making sculpture and paintings. (I suppose we’d better tell him we have color-sensitive eyes too. That’s important information.) He might also be able to predict that in order to depict our social relations, we will tell stories, write poetry, and enact dramas, either onstage or in a film/video medium of some sort. All of this seems pretty natural, given the raw material of the human organism.

But would Erbq be able to predict the existence of music?

Music is a very odd art form. It’s almost entirely abstract, and yet it communicates. Music is a language whose words and sentences are, technically, meaningless. But somehow, the listener

Morality Unraveled

If you ever wonder why we are the way we are, I recommend reading Robert Wright’s fascinating book The Moral Animal. Wright lucidly explains the insights of the emerging science of evolutionary psychology.

It’s more than a little disheartening to see one’s grand pretensions laid bare, but it’s also freeing. The foundations of human morality seem very clearly to lie in the adaptive trait of reciprocal altruism — you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. Like our cousins the chimpanzees, we form alliances by doing one another small favors.

There’s more to the book than that. Wright discusses both status hierarchies and cheating in considerable detail, along with the values related to mate selection.

After re-reading The Moral Animal, I’m afraid I may need to rethink my fondness for the ideals of socialism. As I define it, socialism springs from the insight that we’re all in this together. It’s a small planet, and if we can’t figure out how to live with one another, we’re doomed. But while this insight is inarguable, it also

Social Cohesion

Evolution has equipped the human species with a fairly strong herd instinct. We all want to be part of a close-knit group. The craving may be stronger in some people and weaker in others, stronger at certain points in life and weaker at others, but it’s seldom entirely absent.

It’s not hard to see why. In the environment in which our ancestors lived, being part of a group meant both more physical safety and more access to potential mates. Those who went their own way faced greater dangers, and had less chance of passing their genes to the next generation. So genes that promote social behavior would inevitably have flourished.

From what I’ve seen, fitting in with a group is far more important for most people in the modern world than thinking for themselves. For a great many people, this is a sensible strategy: They’re

The Illusion of Free Will

We like to think that we have something called “free will.” But do we? I don’t think the term can even be defined in a way that makes sense.

The subject came up in conversation today, so I figured I’d better lay out my thoughts in an orderly way. Not that I expect to change many minds. This is a subject that arouses deep feelings.

That’s an interesting fact in itself. I suspect that many people confuse free will with personal responsibility. The idea being, if you aren’t free to choose whether to do or not do certain things (perhaps praiseworthy things, perhaps despicable things), then there’s no point in holding you accountable. There is no way to exercise any moral judgment. Everyone gets to engage in any sort of naughty behavior that their impulses may suggest, because, “Hey, I couldn’t help it.”

Well, okay, you couldn’t help it. But we’re still going to lock you up for a while. First, so that maybe next time you’ll think twice before you

Digging It

Archaeology is how we come to understand who we are. The traces that remain of the distant past are being obliterated across the globe — submerged behind new dams, bulldozed to make way for freeways and high-rises — and that’s a horrifying tragedy. When it’s gone, it’s gone.

Other sites that would have yielded up priceless knowledge were looted in the 19th century, before the rise of modern archaeology. The human race is heedless. Who was it who said, “What we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history”?

And of course the soft bits rot. With a pitifully few exceptions, we have not a shred of evidence about what people wore 10,000 years ago. We know what kinds of meat they ate, because they left the bones scattered around. But we don’t know what they may have carved from wood — toys for their children, perhaps? — because the wood is gone. We don’t have their dances, their songs, their stories. All we have, for the most part, are

Automatic Pilot

I’ve been re-reading a couple of books by neurologist Oliver Sacks — The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and An Anthropologist on Mars. What I get out of Sacks is an appreciation of the stunning complexity (and fragility) of the human brain.

Our brains are constantly doing tons of extremely sophisticated data processing, all without our having the slightest awareness of it. Things that seem perfectly transparent to us — looking at a coin and seeing that it’s round, for instance — are not to be taken for granted.

Ancient History

Bacteria have been around, as nearly as we can tell, for a couple of billion years. These single-celled animals reproduce asexually, by fission. That is, when a bacterium gets fat enough, it splits in two.

We can, if we like, say that the two bacteria are “new.” We might call them daughter cells. From the point of view of an individual daughter cell, however (if a bacterium can be said to have a point of view), it’s the same as it was before the split. The other daughter cell has split off from it. The other daughter cell would be thinking the same thing, of course — if bacteria could think. Each would feel that it was still the same creature it had been before the split.

One fascinating consequence of this is that the first original bacterium that assembled itself (somehow) from the primordial ooze two billion years ago is still alive.

Home Schooling

I have no kids of my own, which makes me an automatic expert on how other people should raise theirs. (Not.) This morning the topic of home-schooling came up in a private email, and I realized I have some opinions. As the day wore on, I realized my opinions were different than what I thought at first.

My first thought was, If people home-school to provide their kids a better education, then fine. I’m aware that public schools in many parts of the country are in desperate disarray.

My first thought was, If the public schools are filled with gangs and violence, again, home-schooling would be a very reasonable choice. The idea that kids have to walk through metal detectors is appalling. I wouldn’t want my kid to go there.

But I soon realized I was kidding myself. The real reason home-schooling is wrong is this: It allows the parents who are most concerned about their kids’ education, if they’re rich enough and well organized enough, to opt out of the public school system.

The kids who are left in the public schools, then, are those whose parents (a) are working desperately at menial jobs to make ends meet, and don’t have the leisure to indulge in home-schooling, or (b) don’t care enough about their kids’ education to actually do anything about it.

If home-schooling weren’t allowed, those rich, articulate, well-organized parents would damn well have an incentive to pitch in and improve the quality of the public schools, and that would benefit all kids, not just their own kids.

There’s another facet to the question: If parents’ real agenda is to keep their kids from being exposed to ideas (such as evolution) of which they disapprove, then they’re actually home-schooling in order to keep their kids ignorant. And that’s morally wrong. Parents who inflict bizarre, irrational beliefs on their children are practicing child abuse.

And yes, failing to understand that evolution is a fact is bizarre and irrational. You can choose your own opinions, but you don’t get to choose your own facts.

I hate to see kids being victimized. When rich parents opt out of the public schools, for whatever reason, it’s the poor kids who suffer the consequences.

The core concept is this: Good public education helps everybody. Lousy public education hurts everybody, not just those who end up badly educated. Home-schooling is anti-democratic. It perpetuates a class system and class oppression.

But then, so does Harvard. And I’ll bet you’d love it if your kid got into Harvard. Striving for personal advantage is human. Not even human — it’s biological. No doing away with it. So go ahead, home-school. Nature red in tooth and claw, right?