CapitalistImperialistPig

Six million years ago a couple in Africa had two sons and their names were Cain and .... Let me try that again. Six million or so years ago there was a population of apes living in Africa who shared a lot of DNA (like 99%) with their surviving descendants, chimpanzees, bonobos and humans.  They probably looked a lot like those descendants, had brains about like chimps, were hairy like chimps and gorillas, and walked like them, but we really don't know because there is no trace of them in the fossil record.  Some of their offspring became chimps and bonobos, but we don't know much about their evolution since they didn't leave any trace in the fossil record for another 5 plus million years.  Other branches did start leaving traces a couple of millions of years later and they tend to be chimp sized, with chimp sized brains, but may have walked slightly more like humans. By about three million years ago some definitely upright walkers appeared.  They were still about...

... you are too deficient too know, or (it would appear) even to care, what "conservatives" think....... William Connolley, addressing your (no doubt insufficiently) humble correspondent. Well, yes, Mr. , er, Dr., Connolley has managed to irk me.  Fair enough, I suppose, since I suppose I have done the same by abusing some of his sacred bovines.  A couple of his changes of subject later, he further accuses me of ignorance of the conservative position.  Of course that was never the subject of my post - I was talking about mutual opinions of conservatives and liberals, and, more importantly, their neural substrates.  However, WC is rarely guilty of either that foolish consistency that Emerson called the hobgoblin of little minds or any other kind of logical consistency. Of course it's true that I don't know what conservatives think, though I think the functional MRI brain studies provide some strong hints.  So, I imagine, are the actual words of those selfsa...

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me................  F. Scott Fitzgerald, in The Rich Boy . Hemingway heard and borrowed critic Mary Colum's rejoinder to the effect that the only difference was that they had more money.  Robert Sapolsky takes a look at the data and the neurobiology.  It seems that the answer is both no and yes.  ...when it comes to empathy and compassion, rich people tend to suck. This has been explored at length in a series of studies by Dacher Keltner of UC Berkeley. Across the socioeconomic spectrum, on the average, the wealthier people are, the less empathy they report for people in distress and the less compassionately they act. Moreover, wealthier people are less adept at recognizing other people’s emotions and in experimental settings are greedier and more likely to cheat or steal. Two of the findings were picked up by the media as irresistible: (a) wealthier people (as assessed by the cost of the car ...

...make a liberal tired, hungry, rushed, distracted, or disgusted, and they become more conservative. Make a conservative more detached about something viscerally disturbing, and they become more liberal.   Sapolsky, Robert M.. Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (p. 569). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. A lot of research and pontification has been expended on what makes a person conservative or liberal.  One broad conclusion that is not particularly controversial is that liberal and conservative tendencies tend to apply broadly - those liberal on some subjects tends to be liberal on most.  Similarly for conservatives.  Both conservatives and liberals are convinced that their opposites are morally deficient.  Liberals find conservatives deficient in compassion and tolerance and conservatives find liberals deficient in some other stuff. Some studies seem to confirm the liberal suspicion that conservatives, at least those o...

There is a substantial body of observations that show that societies that are more unequal are more violent, have more crime, and dramatically less healthy.  Sometimes this exhibits itself in small but vivid ways.  Sapolsky has an example: The frequency of “air rage”— a passenger majorly, disruptively, dangerously losing it over something on a flight— has been increasing. Turns out there’s a substantial predictor of it: if the plane has a first-class section, there’s almost a fourfold increase in the odds of a coach passenger having air rage. Force coach passengers to walk through first class when boarding, and you more than double the chances further. Nothing like starting a flight by being reminded of where you fit into the class hierarchy. And completing the parallel with violent crime, when air rage is boosted in coach by reminders of inequality, the result is not a crazed coach passenger sprinting into first class to shout Marxist slogans. It’s the guy being awful to t...

Humans have achieved 85% of adult brain volume by age two, but the brain is not fully "wired" until the mid-twenties, long after sexual and other physical maturity.  This has important consequences. Think about this— adolescence and early adulthood are the times when someone is most likely to kill, be killed, leave home forever, invent an art form, help overthrow a dictator, ethnically cleanse a village, devote themselves to the needy, become addicted, marry outside their group, transform physics, have hideous fashion taste, break their neck recreationally, commit their life to God, mug an old lady, or be convinced that all of history has converged to make this moment the most consequential, the most fraught with peril and promise, the most demanding that they get involved and make a difference. In other words, it’s the time of life of maximal risk taking, novelty seeking, and affiliation with peers. All because of that immature frontal cortex. Sapolsky, Robert M.. Behav...

It's a tragically familiar scenario: a policeman stops a black person, they reach for wallet and driver's licence, or for their cell phone, and get shot to death.  Why does that happen, and what can we do about it? The policeman's best defense might be "my amygdala made me do it." The brain has at least two circuits for processing threats.  In the first, the information goes to the amygdala, a threat is registered, and sent to the prefrontal cortex for further processing.  There the threat is evaluated and instructions are sent to the motor neurons for a response.  In the second, the alarms that go off in the amygdala are so strong that prefrontal processing is skipped, and the motor neurons are activated immediately, saving roughly 700 milliseconds.  The penalty for speedy evaluation is loss of accuracy: that cell phone or wallet might be evaluated as a gun.  This kind of fatal error probably happens more to blacks because policemen - even black policeme...

The Stoat has a nearly impenetrably referential post on the subject as above. As usual, reading the post left me pretty much entirely clueless about what he was talking about, but because I had more important work that I wanted to avoid, I read a couple of the links. I discovered that a few years ago he seemed to be able to express himself more clearly, though even then he wasn't willing to give his stuff a descriptive title. His point, then and now, as I understand it was: So I’ll be more explicit, here, and argue for solving GHG emissions as a matter of economics, to be handled by taxation, rather than as a matter of morality, to be handled… somehow. Context: Eli wants to handle it as ethics. And a fair amount of the comments on Can global emissions really be reduced? are about this. Oddly enough, I agree with this, but I think that posing potential solutions as economics versus ethics is profoundly misleading, mostly because they are inextricably intertwined. Ethics i...

Michiko Kakutani reviews the first volume of Ullrich's new Hitler biography in the New York Times. That first volume focuses on his rise to power. How did Adolf Hitler — described by one eminent magazine editor in 1930 as a “half-insane rascal,” a “pathetic dunderhead,” a “nowhere fool,” a “big mouth” — rise to power in the land of Goethe and Beethoven? What persuaded millions of ordinary Germans to embrace him and his doctrine of hatred? How did this “most unlikely pretender to high state office” achieve absolute power in a once democratic country and set it on a course of monstrous horror? Ullrich is apparently more concerned with the man than some previous biographers who focused on sociopolitical matters, and that focus humanizes him. This strikes me as a good idea. Consigning great historical villains to the "monster" category is a good way of deflecting our attention from the monstrous tendencies lurking somewhere in all. Certain themes with contemporary res...

...Or, the Integro-Differential theory of consciousness. Perhaps you would suspect from this that this theory has something to do with the calculus of Leibniz and Newton. So far as I can tell, that's not it at all. Instead, Koch and collaborators have constructed - claim to have constructed - a theory of consciousness that depends on the degree of differentiation and integration of a complex system. A sample: Integrated information theory introduces a precise measure capturing the extent of consciousness called Φ, or phi (and pronounced “fi”). Expressed in bits, Φ quantifies the reduction of uncertainty that occurs in a system, above and beyond the information generated independently by its parts, when that system enters a particular state. (Remember, information is the reduction of uncertainty.) The parts— the modules— of the system account for as much nonintegrated, independent information as possible. Thus, if all of the individual chunks of the brain taken in isolation alr...

I'm reading Christof Koch ( Consciousness: confessions of a romantic reductionist ) and James Joyce ( Ulysses ) right now and once again pondering the nature of consciousness. Joyce tries to reveal his characters more fully by means of his "stream of consciousness" method. I'm skeptical. If you have ever tried to turn the power of introspection onto your consciousness by asking "What am I thinking about right now?" I suspect that the answer you got was "What am I thinking about right now?" At least that's what I always get. Trying to remember what you were thinking about recently might be more fruitful, but, at least in my case, not by much. For me, at least, only a little of what comes to my attention seems to be words. The other stuff, sensory experiences, memories, and connections, needs to be translated into words to be described. Joyce is trying to transcend the limitations of the narrative description by translating these other f...

Human nature exhibits some unusual behavioral traits - unusual but not unprecedented in the animal kingdom. In particular, we are capable of a very high degree of altruism and have a strong tendency to group ourselves into tribes. Like ants, bees, termites, certain shrimps and naked mole rats and a handful of others, we are a eusocial species. All such species, asserts Edward O. Wilson, writing in The Social Conquest of Earth , start with the adoption of a defensible nest. One solid principle drawn from this analysis of the hymenopterans, and other insects as well, is that all of the species that have attained eusociality, as I have stressed, live in fortified nest sites. A second principle, less well established but probably nonetheless universal, is that the protection is against enemies, namely predators, parasites, and competitors. A final principle is that, all other things being equal, even a little society does better than a solitary individual belonging to closely related s...

Pinker starts his chapter on children with the so-called three laws of behavioral genetics: The First Law: All human behavioral traits are heritable. The Second Law: The effect of being raised in the same family is smaller than the effect of the genes. The Third Law: A substantial portion of the variation in complex human behavioral traits is not accounted for by the effects of genes or families. The laws are about what make us what Pinker, Steven. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (p. 373). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. The pillar of the Second Law is the evidence showing that siblings reared in the same family are at most only slightly more similar than siblings raised apart. He concludes from this that parenting choices have very small effects on children's development. It seems to me that he is leaving out a very crucial aspect of the unique environment of a child reared with a sibling. There is only so much social/emotional ecospace in a ...

One gender feminist idea that has gained a lot of credence even among those who ought to know better is the claim that "rape is not about sex." Instead, claimed Susan Brownmiller, the apparent originator of this theory: From prehistoric times to the present, I believe, rape has played a critical function . . . it is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear. Pinker, Steven. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (p. 361). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. This notion may be transparently silly, but the corollary that "rape is not about sex" has achieved rather wide currency, despite the fact that it is perfectly analogous to the equally ridiculous "bank robbery is not about the money." Instead, I guess, it's part of a hundred thousand year plot to keep bankers in their place. Here is Brownmiller in its defense: BROWNMILLER ASKED A revealing rhetorical q...

Pinker: As a young teenager in proudly peaceable Canada during the romantic 1960s, I was a true believer in Bakunin’s anarchism. I laughed off my parents’ argument that if the government ever laid down its arms all hell would break loose. Our competing predictions were put to the test at 8: 00 A.M. on October 17, 1969, when the Montreal police went on strike. By 11: 20 A.M. the first bank was robbed. By noon most downtown stores had closed because of looting. Within a few more hours, taxi drivers burned down the garage of a limousine service that had competed with them for airport customers, a rooftop sniper killed a provincial police officer, rioters broke into several hotels and restaurants, and a doctor slew a burglar in his suburban home. By the end of the day, six banks had been robbed, a hundred shops had been looted, twelve fires had been set, forty carloads of storefront glass had been broken, and three million dollars in property damage had been inflicted, before city authori...

Our moral sense licenses aggression against others as a way to prevent or punish immoral acts. That is fine when the act deemed immoral truly is immoral by any standard, such as rape and murder, and when the aggression is meted out fairly and serves as a deterrent. The point of this chapter is that the human moral sense is not guaranteed to pick out those acts as the targets of its righteous indignation. The moral sense is a gadget, like stereo vision or intuitions about number. It is an assembly of neural circuits cobbled together from older parts of the primate brain and shaped by natural selection to do a job. Pinker, Steven. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (p. 270). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. And so that moral sense is a sword with a double edge. On the one hand, it helps maintain a society. On the other, it also licenses the suicide bomber and the assassin of politician you disagree with.

Pinker: But each child should to want the parent to dole out twice as much of the investment to himself or herself as to a sibling, because children share half their genes with each full sibling but share all their genes with themselves. Given a family with two children and one pie, each child should want to split it in a ratio of two-thirds to one-third, while parents should want it to be split fifty-fifty. Pinker, Steven. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (p. 248). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. If the reasoning here sounds a bit dubious to you, you aren't alone. Maybe Pinker needs a bit more stat work. Supposing the child in question really really wants to maximize the chance of the largest numbers of his genes surviving, then the computation is bound to be a bit more complicated. The real question is the dependence of each fitness function on the share of pie, and perhaps more importantly, the mutual dependence of the fitness functions of the ...

In 529 CE, not quite sixteen hundred years ago, Muhammad and ten thousand or so followers seized the city of Mecca and destroyed the hundreds of shrines of other religions in the city. By his death, Islam had expanded to much of the Arabian peninsula. Two hundred years later it had conquered North Africa, the Middle East, the Persian Empire, most of Spain, and parts of Central Asia. Muslim warriors and raiders penetrated far into France, but were handed a big defeat at Tours in 732 CE. After that, something like stalemate settled over the Muslim Christian divide for much of the next 700 years. Nearly all of that Muslim advance was at the point of a sword. The political systems established under Muslim rule waxed and waned but cultural conquests remained remarkably durable. By the dawn of the Sixteenth Century, the struggle between Muslim and Christian had again intensified. Spain had defeated the last Muslim power on the Iberian peninsula in 1492. Empires of the Sea: The Siege of...

Sabine recently had a post claiming free will doesn't exist . Lumo responded with a couple of his own. I feel only slightly guilty that I didn't bother to read much of either. I'm pretty sure I've heard it all before, and frankly, the whole subject gives me the willies. I've read a lot of this stuff in the past and it's all about determinism, quantum randomness, etc. All very Laplacian and, in my opinion, beside the point. My point is that each of us comes equipped with sensors and a decision making machine that takes in data about the world and makes choices about what to do next. As I mentioned before, whether you believe that old decision maker is almost purely deterministic or somewhat affected by quantum randomness is beside the point, because in either case, one datum that affects those choices is belief in whether we can really make such choices. There is every reason to believe that fatalism, or its absence, plays an important role in the choic...

Approximately half of the people on Earth speak an Indo-European language. Some of the expansion of this language has taken place in historic times through European conquests, but most of it occurred before the dawn of history. Most of Europe and much of Asia were speaking IE languages before historic times. J.P. Mallory, in his book In Search of the Indo-Europeans , begins his chapter on the search for the Indo-European homeland by quoting three separate declarations by a single authority, spaced over 47 years, confidently assigning that homeland to Asia, Europe, and Asia Minor respectively. Nonetheless, Mallory remains confident that the IE homeland has already been identified, mainly because essentially every semi-plausible (and many an utterly absurd) potential location has already been claimed by somebody. In the absurd crowd, I would count the North Pole and Iceland. One complicating factor is nationalism and racism. Mallory also devotes a chapter to the Aryan Myth, which ...