I can recall a classroom discussion decades ago about the function of literary criticism: was it a formal evaluation of the literary text on its own merits, treating the work as a self-contained aesthetic object? Or was context required: for example, the reader's attention to the author's biography, the culture and historical reference point(s) from which the work emerged, and perhaps the work's social function? I always leaned to the latter simply because most (if not all) authors are writing to be heard about something in context. Few, if any, authors are writing solely for the sake of form.
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, who has written non-fiction works about Spinoza, Gödel, and now a blended work of fiction and non-fiction about Plato confronts this split in Plato at the Googleplex. She can't avoid a contextual approach: this work is substantially about the history and role of philosophy, and she is trying to communicate a message about philosophers talking across the ages to each other, even when it is impossible to get them in the same room together. Philosophy is that way, after all. But is literature really any different? Both have their origins in human imagination, and for that matter so does scientific inquiry, a point I will return to in a moment. (See July 30, 2011 post).
Not a biography, Plato at the Googleplex is biographical. It is a very clever book, organized to convince you that Plato, born 2500 years ago, is still very much alive today. The story of Plato or Socratic ideas is really just a tool in a much larger construct that Goldstein is presenting and arguing. Goldstein is disturbed --- deeply I might say --- that philosophy is being characterized as something like a historical artifact in the mental toolbox of evolving human ideas, now allegedly dominated by scientific inquiry. Previous posts in this blog have noted this: for example, John Searle's statement, "Philosophers need to forget about Cartesian dualism "and just remind ourselves that mental phenomena are ordinary biological phenomena in the same sense as digestion and photosynthesis." (See January 21, 2011 and September 27, 2009 post). This story of Plato and Socratic ideas is the device to remind us that many of the things that we argue about today at work, on television talk shows, in criminal and civil justice institutions, in educational institutions, and in public fora are the same things we have been arguing about in western civilization since the 5th Century BCE.
It is not enough to understand Plato's dialogues or Socratic ideas based on the text and words alone. It is imperative that we understand the context in which the words were uttered or written. There was the Golden Age of Greece glorified by Homer, then came the monument builders, wars and more wars, and in the middle of those wars an intellectual era that marks the beginning of modern philosophy. Philosophers and political leaders and teachers preceded Socrates and Plato, and they (Socrates and Plato) were arguing with their predecessors.
Modern science is no different. The same is true of Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg and others engaged in the quantum discussion of the 20th century. (See July 30, 2011 post). There is little difference between philosophical theorizing and scientific theorizing. They are starting points in the discovery of what is real. But ultimately, the test of what is real is dominated by that next part of scientific inquiry that asks, "How can we test this proposition?" When the testing begins, the philosophical inquiry does not come to an end, but it wanes. We can see this in the scientific inquiry into "moral behavior" and "cooperative behavior." (See November 21, 2012, September 17, 2012, September 12, 2012 post). At some point, real facts about human beings start to explain what philosophical inquiry and speculation began poking around at thousands of years ago and we keep digging into those facts until there is a more solid foundation and a story to tell.
Goldstein gets this, but she is not sympathetic to the view that some day science will have everything figured out. She takes offense at Lawrence Krauss' remark that the "tension between philosophy and science occurs because people in philosophy feel threatened, and they have every right to feel threatened, because science progresses and philosophy doesn't." This book is a statement that not every philosopher feels threatened and philosophy does help solve problems. Certainly John Searle does not feel threatened (see January 21, 2011 post) and Plato at the Googleplex reveals that Goldstein does not feel threatened.
The contextual key to understanding Socrates and Plato, Goldstein argues, is the Greek sense of virtue, embodied in the word arête. Prior to Socrates, arête was an Athenian social construct that was dependent upon reputation (kleos). A reputation for excellence, a reputation for being extraordinary is what gave life "an added substance." "Live so that others will hear of you" is the choice that Achilles makes in The Iliad. Greek myth and song advanced this kleos-centric view. What brought Socrates into conflict with his Athenian community, Goldstein opines, is Socrates' assertion that arête was entirely independent of social regard, reputation. For Socrates, his moral anchor is not what others may think of him, but whether he can live with his own actions. Others cannot control my life; I must control my life. The quest for knowledge and truth and reality is personal, and it is not a social construct that is imposed upon me. And that non-kleos-centric view brought Socrates to his trial and conviction. Without this "context," we cannot understand why Socrates, the Socratic dialogues, and Plato are worth reading. This same "context" also helps us understand a Socrates of a later era, Baruch Spinoza (see March 12, 2012 and December 17, 2012 post). Goldstein wants us to understand this connection; philosophers, after all, speak to each other across the centuries.
But if Socrates is speaking to future philosophers, John Searle must be speaking back to this view of Socrates. Searle will not agree that reality is not a social construct; for Searle our reality is entirely dependent upon a social construct and, whether we like it or not, that social construct is imposed upon us. (See February 24, 2013 post). We are social animals.
I have not read Plato or about Plato in years. I would be interested in discovering how Plato addresses the social and moral emotions. We know that Plato and Socrates embrace the power of reason, not unlike Spinoza and other philosophers of the Enlightenment. But some Enlightenment philosophers understood the power of social emotions. (See November 21, 2012 post and February 27, 2011 post). The social emotions and language (and yes, intelligence (see November 16, 2013 post)) are, in my view, key to describing what makes us human, and these are the raw materials for the social construct that builds a reality in our minds. It is not merely our capacity to reason that defines our species.
Neoplatonism is a different subject, particularly as revealed in histories of the early Christian church. Goldstein only now makes me realize that the collection of memes that are represented by neoplatonism may not actually represent the philosophy or views of Plato, if we can ever really know the philosophy or views of Plato. A surprise to me, although surely not to Plato scholars, is the statement attributed to Plato in the Seventh Letter suggesting that he never put his philosophical views to writing: "This much at least, I can say about all writers, past or future, who say they know the things to which I devote myself, whether by hearing the teaching of me or of others, or by their own discoveries-that according to my view it is not possible for them to have any real skill in the matter. There neither is nor ever will be a treatise of mine on the subject." If this was true --- and remember Plato's dialogues on their face express the views of others who participate in his dialogues --- then how can we ever know Plato's views? Plato is open to interpretation and if we can discern his views and philosophy at all, it is only in context. "When you ask why did some particular question occur to a scientist or philosopher for the first time," writes Goldstein, "or why did this particular approach seem natural, then your questions concern the context of discovery. When you ask whether the argument the philosopher puts forth to answer that question is sound, or whether the evidence justifies the scientific theory proposed then you've entered the context of justification. Considerations of history, sociology, anthropology, and psychology are relevant to the context of discovery, but not to justification. . . . one doesn't diminish a philosopher's achievement, and doesn't undermine its soundness, by showing how the particular set of questions on which he focused, the orientation he brought to bear in his focus, has some causal connections to the circumstances of his life."
Plato, she believes, was more of a materialist than the dualist that neoplatonists would suggest. Her elucidation of Plato's Myth of the Cave (The Republic) suggests Plato was not, as I have long believed from the neoplatonist understanding of Plato, entirely an adherent to the eternity of abstract Forms as a matter of transcendent reality. Phaedo suggests that Plato supports a dualist's perspective, but Timaeus, she argues, suggests otherwise. For Plato, asserts Goldstein, there was only one "form" and that was mathematics. "The Pythagorean intuition that the form for rendering reality intelligible is supplied by mathematical ratios influenced [Plato] profoundly, ultimately yielding him his conception of the Sublime Braid [truth, beauty, and goodness are all bound up with one another, sublimely], and the means to make good on Socrates' search for the kind of knowledge that is also virtue." Goldstein writes that in Plato's Timaeus, "the mathematics inscribed in the heavens' motions, generate the structure of reality." Mathematics is not a component of reality, however; it is a mental tool belonging to our representational capacity that makes information accessible to all humans and enables, as Goldstein writes, "our human reason to penetrate the cosmic reason."
There is a "form" that is much a part of our brain's mental faculty, which this blog has described in a prior post. There, quoting sociologist Paul Bloom, it is noted, "Our minds have evolved to put things into categories and to ignore or downplay what makes these things distinct. Some categories are more obvious than others: all children understand the categories chairs and tigers; only scientists are comfortable with the categories such as ungulates and quarks. What all categories share is that they capture a potential infinity of individuals under a single perspective. They lump." Bloom says, "We lump the world into categories so that we can learn." He adds, "A perfect memory, one that treats each experience as a distinct thing-in-itself, is useless. The whole point of storing the past is to make sense of the present and to plan for the future. Without categories [or concepts], everything is perfectly different from everything else, and nothing can be generalized or learned." So if we think of "categories" created by our mind to assist our memory as Forms, these Forms or categories are very real to us. But these are not Plato's Forms as we understand them from neoplatonists (and perhaps even Plato himself).
I cannot intelligibly vouch for or comment on Goldstein's perspective on Plato. First she informs us that Plato's views on anything may never be known, but she is bold enough to suggest that we can marshal a perspective on his views that gives more weight to one of his dialogues over another dialogue. Plato's breadth of philosophical conversation is astonishing for its day, and that fact alone explains why the philosophic tradition celebrates Plato. He was among the earliest rationalists, reasoning his way to a framework that helps us understand reality. Another philosophic tradition explores whether our knowledge of what is real is subjective, personal, or objective, universal. And there are other philosophic categories --- ethics, aesthetics, for example --- explored by Plato that are also divided by the subjective/objective distinction. Science may or may not solve this division, and that uncertainty opens the door for Goldstein to question Krauss' judgment and argue the continuing vitality of philosophy as the bridge between our senses, intuition, and scientific knowledge.
Showing posts with label information. Show all posts
Showing posts with label information. Show all posts
Sunday, June 29, 2014
Wednesday, September 25, 2013
Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Genes, Peoples and Languages (2001)
Information is typically packaged. The smallest unit of information (something like a bit) (see August 23, 2009 and August 17, 2009 posts) has limited meaning (information value) on its own. Aggregating, absorbing, connecting, colliding, and communicating with other units of information expands the information value associated with the package of bits. These packages of information include small subatomic units, electrons, atoms, chemical compounds, photons, waves of sound and light, proteins, genotypes, cells, organs, phenotypes, letters, words, songs, books, and culture. (See November 27, 2010 post).
Information migrates. (See May 20, 2012 post) It is in nearly constant motion. And when it is in motion, information can be altered and its meaning changed. (See August 15, 2011 and August 23, 2009 posts). Sometimes information is degraded by change; sometimes information is enhanced. Information moves with its package; the package migrates, and information moves along. Genes, Peoples and Languages is about the movement of genetic information in the package of a phenotype and the scientific quest to track the movement and transformation of modern human genes over the course of roughly one hundred thousand years. And along the way, as a result of natural selection, and in some geographic areas, genetic drift, the information in this genetic package was edited and revised from the general population that preceded it: hair texture and color changed, skin color changed, small genetic changes enabled humans to digest milk, immunized them from diseases such as malaria in certain areas, morphologies changed, and so on.
This research supports the Out of Africa hypothesis: that modern human origins begin on the African continent approximately 100,000 years ago, likely in southern Africa; that intra-continental African migration ensued northward along East Africa in the thousands of years afterward; and the first migration of homo sapiens out of Africa occurred roughly 50-60,000 years ago to the Arabian peninsula and the Levant, likely along the coast, and ultimately to southern Asia (India), southeast Asia, and Oceania (Australia) about 45,000 years ago. And about the same time that modern humans were reaching Oceania, migrations out of the Levant northward in the direction of Europe, and later in the direction of central Asia and ultimately to North America roughly 15,000 years ago. What should not be forgotten in this focus on modern human migration is that a similar migratory path may have been taken over a million years earlier by homo erectus.
Cavalli-Sforza sees a parallel between genetic evolution and cultural evolution. The units and type of information as well as the means of information transmission in these two circumstances, however, are radically different. Speech acts (including rituals) and language are the means of transmitting cultural information, and Cavalli-Sforza treats linguistic evolution as a type of cultural evolution. But genes and culture do not co-evolve. As mentioned in an earlier post, "Language is a social institution, and social institutions and culture evolve, albeit at a different and faster pace than biological evolution." (August 31, 2009 post). Language changes can occur as a result of migration and conquest of another's territory. Cavalli-Sforza documents this in a number of cases. Religion is another attribute of culture that likewise can change as a result of migration and conquest. (See May 12, 2010 post). And ideas can change as a result of migration and conquest. (See May 20, 2012 post). "There is a fundamental difference between biological and cultural mutation," writes Cavalli-Sforza. "Cultural mutations may result from random events, and thus be very similar to genetic mutations, but cultural changes are more often intentional or directed to a very specific goal, while biological mutations are blind to their potential benefit. At the level of mutation, cultural evolution can be directed while genetic change cannot." Later he adds, "We must note a significant difference between biological and linguistic mutation. A genetic mutant is generally very similar to the original gene, since one gives rise to another with only a small change. Words vary in more complicated ways. The same root can change meaning. One word can have may unrelated senses. One could try to establish greater similarities between genes and words taking into account all of the peculiarities, but it is not clear that would be useful." The curious aspect of Cavalli-Sforza's discussion of biological and cultural evolution and transmission is the absence of any discussion of the evolutionary debate about whether evolution operates on genes, phenotypes, or groups that has laced this subject for several decades now. (See November 4, 2009, November 30, 2009, September 12, 2012, and September 17, 2012 posts). References to Richard Dawkins, memes, and Edward Wilson are not to be found. Cavalli-Sforza's discussion on this subject is disjointed, and one wonders how he would treat the subject of the unit of information on which evolution operates.
Information migrates. (See May 20, 2012 post) It is in nearly constant motion. And when it is in motion, information can be altered and its meaning changed. (See August 15, 2011 and August 23, 2009 posts). Sometimes information is degraded by change; sometimes information is enhanced. Information moves with its package; the package migrates, and information moves along. Genes, Peoples and Languages is about the movement of genetic information in the package of a phenotype and the scientific quest to track the movement and transformation of modern human genes over the course of roughly one hundred thousand years. And along the way, as a result of natural selection, and in some geographic areas, genetic drift, the information in this genetic package was edited and revised from the general population that preceded it: hair texture and color changed, skin color changed, small genetic changes enabled humans to digest milk, immunized them from diseases such as malaria in certain areas, morphologies changed, and so on.
This research supports the Out of Africa hypothesis: that modern human origins begin on the African continent approximately 100,000 years ago, likely in southern Africa; that intra-continental African migration ensued northward along East Africa in the thousands of years afterward; and the first migration of homo sapiens out of Africa occurred roughly 50-60,000 years ago to the Arabian peninsula and the Levant, likely along the coast, and ultimately to southern Asia (India), southeast Asia, and Oceania (Australia) about 45,000 years ago. And about the same time that modern humans were reaching Oceania, migrations out of the Levant northward in the direction of Europe, and later in the direction of central Asia and ultimately to North America roughly 15,000 years ago. What should not be forgotten in this focus on modern human migration is that a similar migratory path may have been taken over a million years earlier by homo erectus.
Cavalli-Sforza sees a parallel between genetic evolution and cultural evolution. The units and type of information as well as the means of information transmission in these two circumstances, however, are radically different. Speech acts (including rituals) and language are the means of transmitting cultural information, and Cavalli-Sforza treats linguistic evolution as a type of cultural evolution. But genes and culture do not co-evolve. As mentioned in an earlier post, "Language is a social institution, and social institutions and culture evolve, albeit at a different and faster pace than biological evolution." (August 31, 2009 post). Language changes can occur as a result of migration and conquest of another's territory. Cavalli-Sforza documents this in a number of cases. Religion is another attribute of culture that likewise can change as a result of migration and conquest. (See May 12, 2010 post). And ideas can change as a result of migration and conquest. (See May 20, 2012 post). "There is a fundamental difference between biological and cultural mutation," writes Cavalli-Sforza. "Cultural mutations may result from random events, and thus be very similar to genetic mutations, but cultural changes are more often intentional or directed to a very specific goal, while biological mutations are blind to their potential benefit. At the level of mutation, cultural evolution can be directed while genetic change cannot." Later he adds, "We must note a significant difference between biological and linguistic mutation. A genetic mutant is generally very similar to the original gene, since one gives rise to another with only a small change. Words vary in more complicated ways. The same root can change meaning. One word can have may unrelated senses. One could try to establish greater similarities between genes and words taking into account all of the peculiarities, but it is not clear that would be useful." The curious aspect of Cavalli-Sforza's discussion of biological and cultural evolution and transmission is the absence of any discussion of the evolutionary debate about whether evolution operates on genes, phenotypes, or groups that has laced this subject for several decades now. (See November 4, 2009, November 30, 2009, September 12, 2012, and September 17, 2012 posts). References to Richard Dawkins, memes, and Edward Wilson are not to be found. Cavalli-Sforza's discussion on this subject is disjointed, and one wonders how he would treat the subject of the unit of information on which evolution operates.
Sunday, April 28, 2013
Nessa Carey, The Epigenetics Revolution (2012)
A recurring theme running through the posts on this blog is the recognition of a unit of information as the fundamental units of physical nature. Collateral to this theme: the transmission of information and the avoidance of errors in translation during transmission, whether those communications are at the cellular level or communications among species or between individuals of a species. (See March 6, 2012, August 15, 2011, November 27, 2010, August 23, 2009, and August 17, 2009 posts). A slight change in a unit of information can potentially change the "meaning" of a larger assembly of units of information, things akin to what we might label words, a sentence, a paragraph, an entire story. Matthew Ridley uses this kind of analogy when he discusses the genome. (See November 27, 2010 post):
"Ridley calls the genome a book, the chromosome a chapter, the gene a story, an exon a paragraph, a codon a word consisting of three letters, and a base is a letter, either (in the case of DNA) an A, C, G, or T (or U in the case of RNA), for adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine, each consisting of one or two aromatic rings and arrangements of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and/or oxygen atoms. These chemical units are the basic units of information that comprise life forms, but alone they do not give rise to life. What gives rise to life is (1) the pairing of these letters along a double helix that makes up DNA, and (2) their subsequent transcription into RNA to form three letter codons, which, (3) are subsequently "translated" into a specific amino acid depending on which three of the four letters are transcribed and their sequence. (4) The particular chain of amino acids creates a protein. By this process, it is said that "genes" code for "proteins." While the RNA amino acid chains may have been the earliest form of life, "life" as we know it received a boost with the creation of cellular membranes to form the first cells that carried the proteins containing genetic information central for the cell's organization. This development is still not fully understood.
"This ability of the genes to copy themselves, read and transmit their story, under the right conditions, is the ability to create another life form. . . . [T]hese units of information [have the ability] to communicate among themselves --- an electrochemical means --- to say "Let's stick together," or "Let's avoid each other," and then to store itself as if in memory. This is what we find in the genome, whatever the species."
"Life began with RNA --- which by itself can replicate itself, and translate and transmit its meaning, as well as catalyze with --- break up or join with --- other chemicals, creating amino acids and proteins. The storage device for these words and paragraphs is DNA. An RNA gene found on chromosome 1 translates the information found in DNA to proteins, which become the primary agent for carrying out the direction specified by the information contained in the genes within a cell."
A prior post discusses how alterations in the structure of DNA and the chromosome, what we typically refer to as mutations, can lead to changes in species. (See December 14, 2010 post):
"And there are a variety of mutations of the genetic code. The most common is the equivalent of a typographical error in the process of copying the genetic code --- a substitution of one of the four letters for another. But there are also mutations involving deletions of code and insertions of repeating code or duplications. Sometimes these mutations actually mean something --- changing something about the phenotype in which the genetic code resides, but many, many times these changes mean nothing --- they don't change a thing about how the gene works. Some genes simply lose their meaning over time because they are no longer used, and these are called fossil genes. And some mutations that do have meaning simply do not survive to live another generation because selection is neither accommodating nor forgiving. When mutations occur repeatedly and have meaning --- in the sense that it changes something about the phenotype in which it resides --- and selection favors the survival of that mutation, then given enough time (many generations, thousands of years) we can find new species evolving. Carroll has reduced his mantra of chance, selection and time to this expression: "i) given sufficient time, ii) identical or equivalent mutations will arise repeatedly by chance, and iii) their fate (preservation or elimination) will be determined by the conditions of selection upon the traits they affect."
Epigenetics concerns a molecular examination of genetics, and how substitutions of molecules on a piece of DNA can have consequences for the phenotype of which the DNA is a part. This does not involve a change in the arrangement of the genetic letters, or the words, or the paragraph or the chapter, in Ridley's terms. These molecular alterations change the way in which genes are expressed. Broadly speaking, the "environment" is believed to play a role in these alterations, importantly during embryonic development, but at any stage of life. And recent research is beginning to show that epigenetic changes can be inherited for a generation or more. The change in gene expression can alter the very nature of cells themselves.
Currently, there are two fairly well known types of epigenetic modification. The first is called DNA methylation, which involves the addition of a methyl group (carbon atom bonded to 3 hydrogen atoms) to one of Ridley's genetic "letters" --- cytosine. The underlying DNA sequence is not altered by the modification. Cytosine, says Nessa Carey in The Epigenetic Revolution, has been "decorated," not changed. DNA methylation is associated with genes that are turned "off." This can lead to a number of disorders that the individual suffers from for the rest of their life. In addition to turning a gene off, it is also known to prevent messenger RNA molecules from being produced, thus stopping the DNA transcription machinery from working. The second epigenetic modification is called histone acetylation. Histone acetylation is associated with turning genes on, although that is not always the case. Again the underlying gene sequence is not altered.
Understanding epigenetic modifications allows us to better understand why "identical" twins are not identical. It leads to a better understanding of certain disorders (cancer, obesity, and other disorders). Nessa Carey describes a wide number of research projects in which science is studying whether epigenetic modifications triggers a particular disorder. I will only discuss one: early childhood abuse triggers an event that has consequences into adulthood; childhood trauma causes an alteration in gene expression in the brain that is generated or maintained by epigenetic mechanisms. The focus of this research is on a hormone known as cortisol, which is produced in response to stress. Research shows that the average level of cortisone production in adults seems to be higher for persons with traumatic childhoods. The hippocampus in the brain responds to stress, and it releases two hormones: corticotrophine-releasing hormone and arginine vasopressin. They stimulate the pituitary, which in turn releases a hormone called adrenocorticotrophin into the bloodstream. When cells of the adrenal gland take up adrenocorticotrophin, the cells release cortisol. Some of this cortisol makes its way through the bloodstream back to the brain. Receptors in the hippocampus, hypothalamus and pituitary all "recognize" cortisol and the cortisol binds to these receptors creating a signal to the brain to calm down. This reduces the production of cortisol and the result is that we are prevented from being overstressed. Adults who suffered traumatic childhoods are actually overstressed and produce too much cortisol. Something about the feedback loop that would normally reduce stress is broken. Research on mice suggests that DNA methylation of the arginine vasopressin hormone leads to increased expression of this hormone and the stimulation of a stress response. This is all very contentious at this time, and more research is underway on the impact of stress, and other brain-related topics such as memory.
Carey reports on research involving honeybees. The research is far from conclusive, but there is interest in histone modifications in the control of honeybee development and activity and DNA methylation in the changes of honeybee memory. Carey describes research showing that expression of different epigenetic enzymes varies between different social groups in colonies of ants, and the data suggests that epigenetic control of colony members may be the mechanism that has evolved in the social insects.
In The Social Conquest of Earth, biologist E.O. Wilson referred to epigenetics in an entirely different way. (September 12, 2012 post) To determine what evolved that made us humans, he begins by asking "What is human nature?" He suggests that the place to look for the answer to this question is "in the rules of development prescribed by genes, through which the universals of culture are created." Human nature, he says, is the "inherited regularities of mental development common to our species. They are epigenetic rules, which evolved by the interaction of genetic and cultural evolution that occurred over a long period in deep prehistory. These rules are the genetic biases in the way our senses perceive the world, the symbolic coding by which we represent the world, the options we automatically open to ourselves, and the responses we find easiest and most rewarding to make. . . They determine the individuals we as a rule find sexually most attractive. They lead us differentially to acquire fears and phobias concerning dangers in the environment, as from snakes and heights, to communicate with certain facial expressions and forms of body language, to bond with infants; to bond conjugally; and so on across the wide range of other categories of behavior and thought." (See September 17, 2012 post). Wilson's use of the term epigenetics is more related to the term epigenesis, and this is slightly (although not entirely) different than the study of epigenetics that forms the basis of Nessa Carey's The Epigenetics Revolution. Nor is Wilson approaching this subject from a singularly genetic angle. He is concerned with the interaction of genes and culture (broadly considered) in the evolution of a social unit. I suspect at the bottom of Wilson's use of the term are the neurochemical actions behind learning and memory that triggers epigenetic change affecting the neurological system resulting in patterns of behavior. Of interest to Wilson would be social behavior; for example, why do primates groom each other?
Epigenetics as described by Nessa Carey or in the sense intended by Edward Wilson both involve the transmission of information, alterations in the information units transferred, and the effect of these information transfers (positive, negative or neutral). This area of inquiry is a work in progress, and promises to enhance our understanding of disease and health.
"Ridley calls the genome a book, the chromosome a chapter, the gene a story, an exon a paragraph, a codon a word consisting of three letters, and a base is a letter, either (in the case of DNA) an A, C, G, or T (or U in the case of RNA), for adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine, each consisting of one or two aromatic rings and arrangements of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and/or oxygen atoms. These chemical units are the basic units of information that comprise life forms, but alone they do not give rise to life. What gives rise to life is (1) the pairing of these letters along a double helix that makes up DNA, and (2) their subsequent transcription into RNA to form three letter codons, which, (3) are subsequently "translated" into a specific amino acid depending on which three of the four letters are transcribed and their sequence. (4) The particular chain of amino acids creates a protein. By this process, it is said that "genes" code for "proteins." While the RNA amino acid chains may have been the earliest form of life, "life" as we know it received a boost with the creation of cellular membranes to form the first cells that carried the proteins containing genetic information central for the cell's organization. This development is still not fully understood.
"This ability of the genes to copy themselves, read and transmit their story, under the right conditions, is the ability to create another life form. . . . [T]hese units of information [have the ability] to communicate among themselves --- an electrochemical means --- to say "Let's stick together," or "Let's avoid each other," and then to store itself as if in memory. This is what we find in the genome, whatever the species."
"Life began with RNA --- which by itself can replicate itself, and translate and transmit its meaning, as well as catalyze with --- break up or join with --- other chemicals, creating amino acids and proteins. The storage device for these words and paragraphs is DNA. An RNA gene found on chromosome 1 translates the information found in DNA to proteins, which become the primary agent for carrying out the direction specified by the information contained in the genes within a cell."
A prior post discusses how alterations in the structure of DNA and the chromosome, what we typically refer to as mutations, can lead to changes in species. (See December 14, 2010 post):
"And there are a variety of mutations of the genetic code. The most common is the equivalent of a typographical error in the process of copying the genetic code --- a substitution of one of the four letters for another. But there are also mutations involving deletions of code and insertions of repeating code or duplications. Sometimes these mutations actually mean something --- changing something about the phenotype in which the genetic code resides, but many, many times these changes mean nothing --- they don't change a thing about how the gene works. Some genes simply lose their meaning over time because they are no longer used, and these are called fossil genes. And some mutations that do have meaning simply do not survive to live another generation because selection is neither accommodating nor forgiving. When mutations occur repeatedly and have meaning --- in the sense that it changes something about the phenotype in which it resides --- and selection favors the survival of that mutation, then given enough time (many generations, thousands of years) we can find new species evolving. Carroll has reduced his mantra of chance, selection and time to this expression: "i) given sufficient time, ii) identical or equivalent mutations will arise repeatedly by chance, and iii) their fate (preservation or elimination) will be determined by the conditions of selection upon the traits they affect."
Epigenetics concerns a molecular examination of genetics, and how substitutions of molecules on a piece of DNA can have consequences for the phenotype of which the DNA is a part. This does not involve a change in the arrangement of the genetic letters, or the words, or the paragraph or the chapter, in Ridley's terms. These molecular alterations change the way in which genes are expressed. Broadly speaking, the "environment" is believed to play a role in these alterations, importantly during embryonic development, but at any stage of life. And recent research is beginning to show that epigenetic changes can be inherited for a generation or more. The change in gene expression can alter the very nature of cells themselves.
Currently, there are two fairly well known types of epigenetic modification. The first is called DNA methylation, which involves the addition of a methyl group (carbon atom bonded to 3 hydrogen atoms) to one of Ridley's genetic "letters" --- cytosine. The underlying DNA sequence is not altered by the modification. Cytosine, says Nessa Carey in The Epigenetic Revolution, has been "decorated," not changed. DNA methylation is associated with genes that are turned "off." This can lead to a number of disorders that the individual suffers from for the rest of their life. In addition to turning a gene off, it is also known to prevent messenger RNA molecules from being produced, thus stopping the DNA transcription machinery from working. The second epigenetic modification is called histone acetylation. Histone acetylation is associated with turning genes on, although that is not always the case. Again the underlying gene sequence is not altered.
Understanding epigenetic modifications allows us to better understand why "identical" twins are not identical. It leads to a better understanding of certain disorders (cancer, obesity, and other disorders). Nessa Carey describes a wide number of research projects in which science is studying whether epigenetic modifications triggers a particular disorder. I will only discuss one: early childhood abuse triggers an event that has consequences into adulthood; childhood trauma causes an alteration in gene expression in the brain that is generated or maintained by epigenetic mechanisms. The focus of this research is on a hormone known as cortisol, which is produced in response to stress. Research shows that the average level of cortisone production in adults seems to be higher for persons with traumatic childhoods. The hippocampus in the brain responds to stress, and it releases two hormones: corticotrophine-releasing hormone and arginine vasopressin. They stimulate the pituitary, which in turn releases a hormone called adrenocorticotrophin into the bloodstream. When cells of the adrenal gland take up adrenocorticotrophin, the cells release cortisol. Some of this cortisol makes its way through the bloodstream back to the brain. Receptors in the hippocampus, hypothalamus and pituitary all "recognize" cortisol and the cortisol binds to these receptors creating a signal to the brain to calm down. This reduces the production of cortisol and the result is that we are prevented from being overstressed. Adults who suffered traumatic childhoods are actually overstressed and produce too much cortisol. Something about the feedback loop that would normally reduce stress is broken. Research on mice suggests that DNA methylation of the arginine vasopressin hormone leads to increased expression of this hormone and the stimulation of a stress response. This is all very contentious at this time, and more research is underway on the impact of stress, and other brain-related topics such as memory.
Carey reports on research involving honeybees. The research is far from conclusive, but there is interest in histone modifications in the control of honeybee development and activity and DNA methylation in the changes of honeybee memory. Carey describes research showing that expression of different epigenetic enzymes varies between different social groups in colonies of ants, and the data suggests that epigenetic control of colony members may be the mechanism that has evolved in the social insects.
In The Social Conquest of Earth, biologist E.O. Wilson referred to epigenetics in an entirely different way. (September 12, 2012 post) To determine what evolved that made us humans, he begins by asking "What is human nature?" He suggests that the place to look for the answer to this question is "in the rules of development prescribed by genes, through which the universals of culture are created." Human nature, he says, is the "inherited regularities of mental development common to our species. They are epigenetic rules, which evolved by the interaction of genetic and cultural evolution that occurred over a long period in deep prehistory. These rules are the genetic biases in the way our senses perceive the world, the symbolic coding by which we represent the world, the options we automatically open to ourselves, and the responses we find easiest and most rewarding to make. . . They determine the individuals we as a rule find sexually most attractive. They lead us differentially to acquire fears and phobias concerning dangers in the environment, as from snakes and heights, to communicate with certain facial expressions and forms of body language, to bond with infants; to bond conjugally; and so on across the wide range of other categories of behavior and thought." (See September 17, 2012 post). Wilson's use of the term epigenetics is more related to the term epigenesis, and this is slightly (although not entirely) different than the study of epigenetics that forms the basis of Nessa Carey's The Epigenetics Revolution. Nor is Wilson approaching this subject from a singularly genetic angle. He is concerned with the interaction of genes and culture (broadly considered) in the evolution of a social unit. I suspect at the bottom of Wilson's use of the term are the neurochemical actions behind learning and memory that triggers epigenetic change affecting the neurological system resulting in patterns of behavior. Of interest to Wilson would be social behavior; for example, why do primates groom each other?
Epigenetics as described by Nessa Carey or in the sense intended by Edward Wilson both involve the transmission of information, alterations in the information units transferred, and the effect of these information transfers (positive, negative or neutral). This area of inquiry is a work in progress, and promises to enhance our understanding of disease and health.
Sunday, May 20, 2012
Arthur Herman, How The Scots Invented the Modern World (2001)
Migration, when one first contemplates the subject, brings to mind human migration: out-of-Africa, across the Arctic land bridge, the Silk Road, across oceans in boats, and perhaps some day to other planetary objects. Reverting, however, to a theme that begins with the opening post in this blog, migration refers, at its most fundamental level, to the migration of information: the migration of genetic information via biological mechanisms, such as sexual intercourse, and molecular mechanisms such transcription; the migration of culture and ideas and language through the movement of peoples; and to a lesser, but nevertheless equally significant extent, through the movement of other species and even atomic particles. (See August 15, 2011 post).
Arthur Herman's history of the Scottish Enlightenment, How The Scots Invented the Modern World, is a book about the migration of people, culture, and ideas. Herman's story begins in 1696, more than two decades after the death of Baruch Spinoza (see March 20, 2012 and March 12, 2012 post) in The Hague, when a 19-year old Scottish theology student, Thomas Aikenhead, utters to some friends, while walking outside on a cold August evening in Edinburgh, "I wish right now I were in the place Ezra called hell to warm myself there." The remark may have been intended as a joke, and his friends may have laughed, but it was repeated to local church authorities who did not find the remark to be humorous. Others came forward and reported that young Aikenhead had told others that the Bible was not the literal word of god, but the invention of the prophet Ezra. Aikenhead purportedly claimed that Jesus performed no miracles, and that reports of miracles were "cheap magic tricks." Aikenhead reportedly said that the purported resurrection of Jesus was a myth, and that Moses had been a better magician and politician than Jesus. Genesis was a myth as well. He claimed that god, nature, and the world were one, and that had been the case for eternity. Aikenhead must have heard about or read Spinoza. These are Spinoza's ideas. The migration of Spinozism across the North Sea is not a subject that Herman addresses in this book, but it is a subject that is central to Jonathan Israel's Radical Enlightenment, which covers the continental migration of Spinozism during the late 17th and 18th centuries. The outcome was different, perhaps reflecting differences between Dutch tolerance and Scottish intolerance. Spinoza was excommunicated by his community; Aikenhead was condemned to death.
By the end of Herman's history of the Scottish Enlightenment, it is Scotland's culture of tolerance that has infected other parts of the globe, setting off liberation movements. Indeed, only fifty years later David Hume expresses many of the same thoughts (see May 24, 2010 post), and he lives to a ripe old age. The seeds of Scottish tolerance, Herman writes, were planted a full century before the death of Thomas Aikenhead and a century in advance of John Locke, when George Buchanan, a Scotsman and tutor to the boy who became James VI, son of Mary Queen of Scots, wrote the The Art and Science of Government Among the Scots. All political authority, Buchanan said, ultimately belonged to the people, who "have the right to confer the royal authority upon whomever they wish." James VI (he who was later James I of England for whom the King James Bible is dedicated) obviously disagreed and ignored his tutor. But the Kirk --- the Church of Scotland --- did not disagree and the popular election of church elders and ministers was institutionalized in Scotland.
Just a few decades after the execution of Thomas Aikenhead, the Scottish assault on some of the basic tenets of Christianity resumed. Deism was flowering in England at this time. Scotland's Francis Hutcheson was not only casting doubt on the trinity and the status of Jesus as the "son of god," but he also asserted that belief in Jesus was not necessary for salvation. Hutcheson advocated "natural religion." Man carries within him the spark of divine reason. Man enjoyed natural rights in life and property. Obedience to law was not established by submission to divine or kingly authority, but through common consent, including moral law. Moral reasoning is a natural human faculty: man carried with him the means to learn to be helpful to others, and in helping others, man finds pleasure. Happiness --- the pursuit of happiness --- is found in making others happy. Hutcheson's views were not entirely original, as the seeds had been planted by his teachers including John Simson at the University of Glasgow and Gershom Carmichael. He was also influenced by the Earl of Shaftesbury. It is Hutcheson who in 1729 refers to "unalienable rights" in An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue. An unalienable right is our sense of private of judgement: our right to think our own minds. An unalienable right "acts as an essential limitation on all governments," Hutcheson avers. We begin to see here the beginnings of ideas that would migrate to the North American continent and prove influential in inspiring a new form of government based on liberty the consent of the governed.
Harry Homes, a Scottish lawyer, later known as Lord Kames, advanced a view of the history of man in four stages: the hunter/fisherman stage; the pastoral/nomadic stage where men sought cooperation from other men, but without the need for a government except at the family level; the agrarian stage where cooperation was combined with a need for sanctions and the beginnings of a state; and the commercial stage, which featured greater networks of social and economic cooperation of increasing complexity, including contractual cooperation that required a means for enforcement, including new laws and agencies of the state. This was the Scottish Historical School, which recognized the commercial stage as that beneficial confluence and linkage of industry, knowledge and humanity that made men free. Kames felt that the most important human instinct is the sense of property and desire to own things, which is tied to our sense of self. Property therefore became linked with self-worth. Kames' student, David Hume, advanced the idea that the role of government was to check other people's avidity for our own personal property: to protect the property rights of individuals. Again, we see in this emphasis on individual property rights the beginning of ideas that would migrate to North America and become foundations of a new republican democracy.
The migration of Scottish people to North America was quite substantial. Two hundred thousand Ulster Scots from Northern Ireland with their own brand of Scottish Calvinism migrated broadly to the American colonies and particularly across the southern colonies; Highlanders migrated to Canada and the American colonies. They all brought with them their sense of independence and industry as well their cultural institutions that embraced self-governance.
Herman cites the influence of Benjamin Rush, an Englishman with a Scottish education, and Scotsman John Witherspoon, as influential in helping to establish the values of the Scottish Enlightenment as part of the new American democracy. Witherspoon became the President of Princeton University, who promoted a spirit of freedom of inquiry within the college. He was later a signatory of the Declaration of Independence. James Madison, a future President of the United States and one author of the American Constitution, was a student at Princeton at the time of Witherspoon's leadership. Herman writes that Madison found himself drawn to another Scotsman, David Hume, an intellectual nemesis of Witherspoon because of Hume's views on "natural religion," which were antithetical to Witherspoon's Evangelical Christianity. In a little-known essay penned by Hume entitled "The Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth," Herman says, Madison found his view that an extended republic might be most stable form of government of all. "Although the people as a body are unfit for government," Hume wrote, "yet when dispersed in small bodies [such as individual states] they are more susceptible both to reason and order; the force of popular currents and ties is, in great measure, broken." In Hume's view, Herman says, the elite coordinate the movement of the various parts of the whole, rather than plotting its overthrow, and the parts "are so distant and remote, that it is very difficult, either by intrigue, prejudice, or passion, to hurry them into any measures against the public interest." From this perspective evolved Madison's view of co-equal branches of government and and a government that pits smaller state interests against one another that results in either gridlock or compromise. And within a polity that features gridlock or compromise, liberty is guaranteed.
Herman tells a good story, and if one has not fully appreciated the role of the Scottish people and persons of Scottish heritage in the spread of liberal ideas and the advancement of science and technology across the globe in the 18th and 19th century, they will now. The more interesting phenomenon in my view is the broad concept of migration I outlined at the beginning of this post. This story is just one example of migration. And it is myopic to think of migration in terms of this one example. A broader, comparative approach would compare the migration of peoples, ideas, and cultures from other parts of the globe at the same time: from Africa, from England, from the European continent and to understand how they collectively influenced North America; of Jews, of evangelical Christians, of deists, of Catholics, and even those whose persuasion some called atheism and others called "natural religion;" of those with property and those without property; of those who were indentured and those who came to govern. One could walk away from Herman's story with the view that the Scots "invented" America, and we know that was not the case. But they surely made a substantial contribution.
Arthur Herman's history of the Scottish Enlightenment, How The Scots Invented the Modern World, is a book about the migration of people, culture, and ideas. Herman's story begins in 1696, more than two decades after the death of Baruch Spinoza (see March 20, 2012 and March 12, 2012 post) in The Hague, when a 19-year old Scottish theology student, Thomas Aikenhead, utters to some friends, while walking outside on a cold August evening in Edinburgh, "I wish right now I were in the place Ezra called hell to warm myself there." The remark may have been intended as a joke, and his friends may have laughed, but it was repeated to local church authorities who did not find the remark to be humorous. Others came forward and reported that young Aikenhead had told others that the Bible was not the literal word of god, but the invention of the prophet Ezra. Aikenhead purportedly claimed that Jesus performed no miracles, and that reports of miracles were "cheap magic tricks." Aikenhead reportedly said that the purported resurrection of Jesus was a myth, and that Moses had been a better magician and politician than Jesus. Genesis was a myth as well. He claimed that god, nature, and the world were one, and that had been the case for eternity. Aikenhead must have heard about or read Spinoza. These are Spinoza's ideas. The migration of Spinozism across the North Sea is not a subject that Herman addresses in this book, but it is a subject that is central to Jonathan Israel's Radical Enlightenment, which covers the continental migration of Spinozism during the late 17th and 18th centuries. The outcome was different, perhaps reflecting differences between Dutch tolerance and Scottish intolerance. Spinoza was excommunicated by his community; Aikenhead was condemned to death.
By the end of Herman's history of the Scottish Enlightenment, it is Scotland's culture of tolerance that has infected other parts of the globe, setting off liberation movements. Indeed, only fifty years later David Hume expresses many of the same thoughts (see May 24, 2010 post), and he lives to a ripe old age. The seeds of Scottish tolerance, Herman writes, were planted a full century before the death of Thomas Aikenhead and a century in advance of John Locke, when George Buchanan, a Scotsman and tutor to the boy who became James VI, son of Mary Queen of Scots, wrote the The Art and Science of Government Among the Scots. All political authority, Buchanan said, ultimately belonged to the people, who "have the right to confer the royal authority upon whomever they wish." James VI (he who was later James I of England for whom the King James Bible is dedicated) obviously disagreed and ignored his tutor. But the Kirk --- the Church of Scotland --- did not disagree and the popular election of church elders and ministers was institutionalized in Scotland.
Just a few decades after the execution of Thomas Aikenhead, the Scottish assault on some of the basic tenets of Christianity resumed. Deism was flowering in England at this time. Scotland's Francis Hutcheson was not only casting doubt on the trinity and the status of Jesus as the "son of god," but he also asserted that belief in Jesus was not necessary for salvation. Hutcheson advocated "natural religion." Man carries within him the spark of divine reason. Man enjoyed natural rights in life and property. Obedience to law was not established by submission to divine or kingly authority, but through common consent, including moral law. Moral reasoning is a natural human faculty: man carried with him the means to learn to be helpful to others, and in helping others, man finds pleasure. Happiness --- the pursuit of happiness --- is found in making others happy. Hutcheson's views were not entirely original, as the seeds had been planted by his teachers including John Simson at the University of Glasgow and Gershom Carmichael. He was also influenced by the Earl of Shaftesbury. It is Hutcheson who in 1729 refers to "unalienable rights" in An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue. An unalienable right is our sense of private of judgement: our right to think our own minds. An unalienable right "acts as an essential limitation on all governments," Hutcheson avers. We begin to see here the beginnings of ideas that would migrate to the North American continent and prove influential in inspiring a new form of government based on liberty the consent of the governed.
Harry Homes, a Scottish lawyer, later known as Lord Kames, advanced a view of the history of man in four stages: the hunter/fisherman stage; the pastoral/nomadic stage where men sought cooperation from other men, but without the need for a government except at the family level; the agrarian stage where cooperation was combined with a need for sanctions and the beginnings of a state; and the commercial stage, which featured greater networks of social and economic cooperation of increasing complexity, including contractual cooperation that required a means for enforcement, including new laws and agencies of the state. This was the Scottish Historical School, which recognized the commercial stage as that beneficial confluence and linkage of industry, knowledge and humanity that made men free. Kames felt that the most important human instinct is the sense of property and desire to own things, which is tied to our sense of self. Property therefore became linked with self-worth. Kames' student, David Hume, advanced the idea that the role of government was to check other people's avidity for our own personal property: to protect the property rights of individuals. Again, we see in this emphasis on individual property rights the beginning of ideas that would migrate to North America and become foundations of a new republican democracy.
The migration of Scottish people to North America was quite substantial. Two hundred thousand Ulster Scots from Northern Ireland with their own brand of Scottish Calvinism migrated broadly to the American colonies and particularly across the southern colonies; Highlanders migrated to Canada and the American colonies. They all brought with them their sense of independence and industry as well their cultural institutions that embraced self-governance.
Herman cites the influence of Benjamin Rush, an Englishman with a Scottish education, and Scotsman John Witherspoon, as influential in helping to establish the values of the Scottish Enlightenment as part of the new American democracy. Witherspoon became the President of Princeton University, who promoted a spirit of freedom of inquiry within the college. He was later a signatory of the Declaration of Independence. James Madison, a future President of the United States and one author of the American Constitution, was a student at Princeton at the time of Witherspoon's leadership. Herman writes that Madison found himself drawn to another Scotsman, David Hume, an intellectual nemesis of Witherspoon because of Hume's views on "natural religion," which were antithetical to Witherspoon's Evangelical Christianity. In a little-known essay penned by Hume entitled "The Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth," Herman says, Madison found his view that an extended republic might be most stable form of government of all. "Although the people as a body are unfit for government," Hume wrote, "yet when dispersed in small bodies [such as individual states] they are more susceptible both to reason and order; the force of popular currents and ties is, in great measure, broken." In Hume's view, Herman says, the elite coordinate the movement of the various parts of the whole, rather than plotting its overthrow, and the parts "are so distant and remote, that it is very difficult, either by intrigue, prejudice, or passion, to hurry them into any measures against the public interest." From this perspective evolved Madison's view of co-equal branches of government and and a government that pits smaller state interests against one another that results in either gridlock or compromise. And within a polity that features gridlock or compromise, liberty is guaranteed.
Herman tells a good story, and if one has not fully appreciated the role of the Scottish people and persons of Scottish heritage in the spread of liberal ideas and the advancement of science and technology across the globe in the 18th and 19th century, they will now. The more interesting phenomenon in my view is the broad concept of migration I outlined at the beginning of this post. This story is just one example of migration. And it is myopic to think of migration in terms of this one example. A broader, comparative approach would compare the migration of peoples, ideas, and cultures from other parts of the globe at the same time: from Africa, from England, from the European continent and to understand how they collectively influenced North America; of Jews, of evangelical Christians, of deists, of Catholics, and even those whose persuasion some called atheism and others called "natural religion;" of those with property and those without property; of those who were indentured and those who came to govern. One could walk away from Herman's story with the view that the Scots "invented" America, and we know that was not the case. But they surely made a substantial contribution.
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
David Liss, A Conspiracy of Paper (2000)
The year is 1719. The scene is London, England. King George I, recently arrived from Germany, sits on the throne of England. Unlike the French, the English have not yet created a local or national police force to protect its citizens. The entrepreneurial class filled the official void, and established themselves as "thief-takers," bounty hunters hired to capture criminals. The most notorious of the thief-takers, Jonathan Wild, exploited his status to form an organized crime gang of thieves who stole property only to be hired by the victim, who would pay for its return, to "find" the same stolen property.
England is suffering financially at this time under the weight of a growing national debt because of the War of Spanish Succession. The South Sea Company, a business organized in the early 18th century as a stock company, buys half of the national debt in exchange for its stock, pursuant to a plan to convert that debt to lower interest debt that would ease the government's financial burden, but also provide the South Sea Company with steady revenue. The South Sea Company then pursued a program to drive up the price of its stock and a speculative frenzy ensued. By 1720, the infamous South Sea Bubble, the first stock market crash, occurred, leading to bankruptcies and other financial problems across Europe.
There is a nascent, unregulated stock market operating out of coffeehouses on and around Exchange Alley, where "stock jobbers" trade in company stocks. Stock jobbers are not held in high reputation, apparently for all the reasons that, over 200 years later, the United States of America established a Security and Exchange Commission to regulate this trade.
All of this is true, and against this background, David Liss' fictional story of a competing thief-taker, Benjamin Weaver, begins in earnest. Weaver, a Jew among the predominantly Protestant community of England, has assimilated reasonably well. He has recently become a "thief-taker," retired from his earlier professional roles as highwayman and competitive boxer. He now competes with Jonathan Wild for clients, but unlike Wild he forswears the unethical practice of stealing only to later "find" the stolen booty for a fee. Weaver is the grandson of Miguel Lienzo, the protagonist of Liss' third novel, The Coffee Trader, a prequel of sorts to A Conspiracy of Paper. Liss' oeuvre, if we want to call it that is not generic historical fiction, but economic historical fiction. The marketplace is as much a part of his work as the cast of characters and the plot.
A murder has allegedly occurred, and A Conspiracy of Paper is essentially a whodonit. The precise "who" is known early on, but the "official" conclusion is that the death was merely an accident. Others, however, suspect foul play --- a "conspiracy." Suspects abound as to who is really behind the conspiracy.
This is the period of the English Enlightenment. John Locke is fifteen years in the grave. David Hume (see February 27, 2011, post) is only 8 years old. But Isaac Newton is in the golden era of his illustrious life. Bernard Mandeville was editing his Fable of the Bees (see January 30, 2010 post), and George Berkeley was active trying to undo Locke's view of a materialist world.
To solve the murder mystery, however, none of these Enlightenment philosophers contributes to a method of investigation. A French mathematician and Catholic philosopher, Blaise Pascal, provides a source of inspiration. Probability theory is invoked. And so is right brain/left brain wisdom. I refer to the mind's right brain capacity to make intuitive hunches, and the left brain capacity to meditate, analyze, and sort through information. Weaver's friend, Elias, advises him, "[Pascal's] thinking is precisely what will allow you to resolve this matter, for you must work with probability rather than facts. If you can only go by what is probable, you will sooner or later learn the truth." Weaver responds, "Are you suggesting I conduct this matter by randomly choosing paths of inquiry?" Elias responds, "Not randomly. If you know nothing with certainty, but you guess reasonably, acting upon those guesses offers the maximum chance of learning who did this with the minimal amount of failure. Not acting offers no chance of discovery. The great mathematical minds of the last century, Boyle, Wilkins, Glanvil, Gassendi --- have set forth the rules by which you are to think if you are to find your murderer. You will not act on what your eyes and ears show you, but on what your mind thinks probable."
The murder victim is Weaver's father --- the son of Miguel Lienzo, who migrated from Amsterdam to London with his brother. Weaver's father is a stock-jobber, and Weaver suspects, as information starts to become available, that his father uncovered a conspiracy to manipulate the value of South Sea Company stock.
Only later in the novel, as Weaver laments how difficult it has become to bring the investigation of his father's murder to a conclusion, and he says, "Your philosophy [referring to Elias] has brought me this far, but I cannot see how it takes me much farther," Elias responds, "If philosophy no longer yields results, perhaps it is not because you have reached your limit to understanding philosophy. I think it is far more probable that philosophy had done what philosophy can do, and you would be wise to trust your instincts as fighter and a thief-taker. . . Trust your instincts." What would Sherlock Holmes say?
In the end the crime is solved, not because of instinct, but because a crucial piece of information suddenly falls into Weaver's lap -- the revelation of a lie that reveals the identity of the murderer. The revelation is not accidental. Jonathan Wild pushed the information in front of Weaver to help him out. The conspiracy behind the murder of his father turns out to be a vastly different conspiracy than Weaver initially postulated and conceived. Probabilities and beliefs did not solve this murder. Factual information did, much in the way that scientific experimentation during the Enlightenment era was undermining long-held beliefs that were products of mental reasoning, faith, and bias.
Decisions are made based on probabilities because we have incomplete information, uncertainty. Hume essentially made the point (see February 27, 2011 post), and he could not have been the first. Some people have access to more information than others and can act on superior information to their advantage. Wild is such a person, and in Wild's version of thief-taking where the taker is also the thief, it is just an early version of what we now call insider-trading. A Conspiracy of Paper was written and published as the 20th century came to a close and the technology stock bubble burst. And stock market manipulation and insider trading have not disappeared either. Liss is an excellent storyteller, and he is very clever at detecting in the annals of economic history, just as he did too in The Coffee Trader, the parallel times of the human past that reverberate in the modern mind.
England is suffering financially at this time under the weight of a growing national debt because of the War of Spanish Succession. The South Sea Company, a business organized in the early 18th century as a stock company, buys half of the national debt in exchange for its stock, pursuant to a plan to convert that debt to lower interest debt that would ease the government's financial burden, but also provide the South Sea Company with steady revenue. The South Sea Company then pursued a program to drive up the price of its stock and a speculative frenzy ensued. By 1720, the infamous South Sea Bubble, the first stock market crash, occurred, leading to bankruptcies and other financial problems across Europe.
There is a nascent, unregulated stock market operating out of coffeehouses on and around Exchange Alley, where "stock jobbers" trade in company stocks. Stock jobbers are not held in high reputation, apparently for all the reasons that, over 200 years later, the United States of America established a Security and Exchange Commission to regulate this trade.
All of this is true, and against this background, David Liss' fictional story of a competing thief-taker, Benjamin Weaver, begins in earnest. Weaver, a Jew among the predominantly Protestant community of England, has assimilated reasonably well. He has recently become a "thief-taker," retired from his earlier professional roles as highwayman and competitive boxer. He now competes with Jonathan Wild for clients, but unlike Wild he forswears the unethical practice of stealing only to later "find" the stolen booty for a fee. Weaver is the grandson of Miguel Lienzo, the protagonist of Liss' third novel, The Coffee Trader, a prequel of sorts to A Conspiracy of Paper. Liss' oeuvre, if we want to call it that is not generic historical fiction, but economic historical fiction. The marketplace is as much a part of his work as the cast of characters and the plot.
A murder has allegedly occurred, and A Conspiracy of Paper is essentially a whodonit. The precise "who" is known early on, but the "official" conclusion is that the death was merely an accident. Others, however, suspect foul play --- a "conspiracy." Suspects abound as to who is really behind the conspiracy.
This is the period of the English Enlightenment. John Locke is fifteen years in the grave. David Hume (see February 27, 2011, post) is only 8 years old. But Isaac Newton is in the golden era of his illustrious life. Bernard Mandeville was editing his Fable of the Bees (see January 30, 2010 post), and George Berkeley was active trying to undo Locke's view of a materialist world.
To solve the murder mystery, however, none of these Enlightenment philosophers contributes to a method of investigation. A French mathematician and Catholic philosopher, Blaise Pascal, provides a source of inspiration. Probability theory is invoked. And so is right brain/left brain wisdom. I refer to the mind's right brain capacity to make intuitive hunches, and the left brain capacity to meditate, analyze, and sort through information. Weaver's friend, Elias, advises him, "[Pascal's] thinking is precisely what will allow you to resolve this matter, for you must work with probability rather than facts. If you can only go by what is probable, you will sooner or later learn the truth." Weaver responds, "Are you suggesting I conduct this matter by randomly choosing paths of inquiry?" Elias responds, "Not randomly. If you know nothing with certainty, but you guess reasonably, acting upon those guesses offers the maximum chance of learning who did this with the minimal amount of failure. Not acting offers no chance of discovery. The great mathematical minds of the last century, Boyle, Wilkins, Glanvil, Gassendi --- have set forth the rules by which you are to think if you are to find your murderer. You will not act on what your eyes and ears show you, but on what your mind thinks probable."
The murder victim is Weaver's father --- the son of Miguel Lienzo, who migrated from Amsterdam to London with his brother. Weaver's father is a stock-jobber, and Weaver suspects, as information starts to become available, that his father uncovered a conspiracy to manipulate the value of South Sea Company stock.
Only later in the novel, as Weaver laments how difficult it has become to bring the investigation of his father's murder to a conclusion, and he says, "Your philosophy [referring to Elias] has brought me this far, but I cannot see how it takes me much farther," Elias responds, "If philosophy no longer yields results, perhaps it is not because you have reached your limit to understanding philosophy. I think it is far more probable that philosophy had done what philosophy can do, and you would be wise to trust your instincts as fighter and a thief-taker. . . Trust your instincts." What would Sherlock Holmes say?
In the end the crime is solved, not because of instinct, but because a crucial piece of information suddenly falls into Weaver's lap -- the revelation of a lie that reveals the identity of the murderer. The revelation is not accidental. Jonathan Wild pushed the information in front of Weaver to help him out. The conspiracy behind the murder of his father turns out to be a vastly different conspiracy than Weaver initially postulated and conceived. Probabilities and beliefs did not solve this murder. Factual information did, much in the way that scientific experimentation during the Enlightenment era was undermining long-held beliefs that were products of mental reasoning, faith, and bias.
Decisions are made based on probabilities because we have incomplete information, uncertainty. Hume essentially made the point (see February 27, 2011 post), and he could not have been the first. Some people have access to more information than others and can act on superior information to their advantage. Wild is such a person, and in Wild's version of thief-taking where the taker is also the thief, it is just an early version of what we now call insider-trading. A Conspiracy of Paper was written and published as the 20th century came to a close and the technology stock bubble burst. And stock market manipulation and insider trading have not disappeared either. Liss is an excellent storyteller, and he is very clever at detecting in the annals of economic history, just as he did too in The Coffee Trader, the parallel times of the human past that reverberate in the modern mind.
Friday, July 16, 2010
Dacher Keltner, Born To Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life (2009)
When I first saw Born to Be Good at the store in a display of books, the title nearly turned me off. It sounded like a self-improvement book, a genre I generally avoid. But the subtitle caught my attention. It suggested that this was a scientific presentation, so I flipped the pages and saw references to Paul Ekman's work on facial expressions --- research that I had heard of, but never read --- along with references to Darwin, Frans DeWaal, and even the musician Steve Reich. And the author Dacher Keltner, a name that I was unfamiliar with, is a professor of psychology at my alma mater, the University of California, so I took a chance. I was not disappointed, notwithstanding the kitschy references to jen and the jen ratio, a Confucian measure of one's happiness.
Born to Be Good is in the genre of scientific literature about what it means to be human, so it fits with Michael Gazzaniga's Human (September 27, 2009 post), Marco Iacoboni's Mirroring People (September 18, 2009 post), and Marc Hauser's Moral Minds, all which document the social, cooperative, and even altruistic nature of the human species and the evolutionary origins of cooperation and altruism within our very social species. If there was a study in contrasts to read after Richard Wrangham's Demonic Males (July 1, 2010 post) about the dark, violent side of human nature, Born to Be Good is it. Keltner even stole a chapter title from Frans DeWaal's The Ape and The Sushi Master (June 17, 2010 post) and titled one of his chapters "Survival of the Kindest." Moreover, Born to Be Good fits in the lineage of research represented by Antonio Damassio's The Feeling of What Happens, which documents the fundamental role of emotion in human decision-making.
"Emotions are involuntary commitment devices that bind us to one another in long-term, mutually beneficial relationships," Keltner says. Emotions are communicated through several sensory means: visually through facial expressions, which Keltner documents based on his own research and that of his teacher and mentor, Paul Ekman, explaining how muscles in the face are linked to and controlled by neural pathways in the brain that make them reliable indicators of emotion. In facial expression, we recognize embarrassment, which signals our moral sense of wrongdoing and respect for the judgment of others. In facial expression, the smile signals friendly intent and affection among peers and movement toward cooperation and intimacy. In facial expression, laughter triggers mirror neurons in the brains of others that builds cooperative bonds between one who laughs and the other who hears the laugh. Keltner tells us that teasing is not the same as bullying, and is a type of playful communication designed to ferret out another's commitments that bolsters social life. Emotions are communicated through touch, and the skin, our largest sensory organ, evolved to be an important part of social communication among humans and their predecessors.
Keltner is at his best when he discussed the evolutionary origins of love (trust) and compassion and evolutionary development of the vagus nerve, which releases a hormone, oxytocin, that is linked to feelings of sympathy, concern over the vulnerability of others, and caregiving, and which can be stimulated by touch, and is linked to monogamy in certain species. "We have neuropeptides that enable trust and devotion, and a branch of nerves that connects the brain, the voice, and the heart that enables caretaking," says Keltner. "We are wired for good." The other books cited above bear this out, based on other research as well. But still, the dark side of human social behavior documented by Wrangham should not be forgotten as we experience awe for others and even nature writ large. Wrangham makes his case that violence might be important to survival in some primates, although he considers that it could be fatal to the survival of humans.
But Keltner makes the other case --- that love, compassion, are caregiving cooperation.
The big idea here is how information is communicated and the capabilities of the human mind. And again, as in the books discussed in several prior posts, it is information at a chemical level that is a key form of communication. "The profound vulnerability of our big-brained offspring wired us into an instinct to care. It created in us a biologically based capacity for sympathy. It produced a vagus nerve, loaded up with oxytocin receptors, the provenance of feelings of devotion, sacrifice, and trust. It yielded a rich set of signals --- empathetic sighs, oblique eyebrows, and soothing touch, which trigger vagus nerve response and oxytocin and opioid release in the recipient, giving rise to oceanic feelings of connection."
Born to Be Good is in the genre of scientific literature about what it means to be human, so it fits with Michael Gazzaniga's Human (September 27, 2009 post), Marco Iacoboni's Mirroring People (September 18, 2009 post), and Marc Hauser's Moral Minds, all which document the social, cooperative, and even altruistic nature of the human species and the evolutionary origins of cooperation and altruism within our very social species. If there was a study in contrasts to read after Richard Wrangham's Demonic Males (July 1, 2010 post) about the dark, violent side of human nature, Born to Be Good is it. Keltner even stole a chapter title from Frans DeWaal's The Ape and The Sushi Master (June 17, 2010 post) and titled one of his chapters "Survival of the Kindest." Moreover, Born to Be Good fits in the lineage of research represented by Antonio Damassio's The Feeling of What Happens, which documents the fundamental role of emotion in human decision-making.
"Emotions are involuntary commitment devices that bind us to one another in long-term, mutually beneficial relationships," Keltner says. Emotions are communicated through several sensory means: visually through facial expressions, which Keltner documents based on his own research and that of his teacher and mentor, Paul Ekman, explaining how muscles in the face are linked to and controlled by neural pathways in the brain that make them reliable indicators of emotion. In facial expression, we recognize embarrassment, which signals our moral sense of wrongdoing and respect for the judgment of others. In facial expression, the smile signals friendly intent and affection among peers and movement toward cooperation and intimacy. In facial expression, laughter triggers mirror neurons in the brains of others that builds cooperative bonds between one who laughs and the other who hears the laugh. Keltner tells us that teasing is not the same as bullying, and is a type of playful communication designed to ferret out another's commitments that bolsters social life. Emotions are communicated through touch, and the skin, our largest sensory organ, evolved to be an important part of social communication among humans and their predecessors.
Keltner is at his best when he discussed the evolutionary origins of love (trust) and compassion and evolutionary development of the vagus nerve, which releases a hormone, oxytocin, that is linked to feelings of sympathy, concern over the vulnerability of others, and caregiving, and which can be stimulated by touch, and is linked to monogamy in certain species. "We have neuropeptides that enable trust and devotion, and a branch of nerves that connects the brain, the voice, and the heart that enables caretaking," says Keltner. "We are wired for good." The other books cited above bear this out, based on other research as well. But still, the dark side of human social behavior documented by Wrangham should not be forgotten as we experience awe for others and even nature writ large. Wrangham makes his case that violence might be important to survival in some primates, although he considers that it could be fatal to the survival of humans.
But Keltner makes the other case --- that love, compassion, are caregiving cooperation.
The big idea here is how information is communicated and the capabilities of the human mind. And again, as in the books discussed in several prior posts, it is information at a chemical level that is a key form of communication. "The profound vulnerability of our big-brained offspring wired us into an instinct to care. It created in us a biologically based capacity for sympathy. It produced a vagus nerve, loaded up with oxytocin receptors, the provenance of feelings of devotion, sacrifice, and trust. It yielded a rich set of signals --- empathetic sighs, oblique eyebrows, and soothing touch, which trigger vagus nerve response and oxytocin and opioid release in the recipient, giving rise to oceanic feelings of connection."
Monday, May 24, 2010
David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779)
Robert Wright's discussion of intelligent design and a "designing process" in The Evolution of God (May 13, 2010 post) recalled a book on the bookshelf that I have been intending to read for a couple of years --- David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Hume, I read once, had actually criticized William Paley's intelligent design "watchmaker" argument decades before Paley wrote about it, and the Dialogues, a carefully crafted discussion among three friends, representing three different 18th century views on the nature of a deity, includes a debate between an anthropocentric advocate of god as an intelligent designer (Cleanthes) and a skeptic (Philo) who, while willing to acknowledge that nature appears to be a purposeful creation, is unwilling to assume a parallel between the human mind (which does create works of art) and a divine mind.
A modern eye will recognize that this pamphlet, initially written in the 1750s, anticipates Darwin's theory of natural selection, which was not published until a century later, as well as Gregor Mendel and Crick and Watson. When the third friend, Demea, asks the skeptic, Philo, "How is it conceivable that the world could arise from anything similar to vegetation or generation?" Philo replies: "Very easily. In like manner as the tree sheds its seed into the neighboring fields, and produces other trees; sothe great vegetable, the world, or this planetary system, produces within itself certain seeds, which being scattered into the surrounding chaos, vegetate into new worlds. A comet, for instance, is the seed of a world; and after it has been fully ripened, by passing from sun to sun, and star to star, it is at last tossed into the unformed elements, which everywhere surround the universe, and immediately sprouts up into a new system. Or, if, for the sake of variety, we should suppose this world to be an animal; a comet is the egg of this animal; and in like manner as an ostrich may lay its egg in the sand, which, without any further care, hatches the egg and produces a new animal." Demea says he understands, but asks, "What data do you have for such extraordinary conclusions? And is the slight, imaginary resemblance of the world to an animal or a vegetable sufficient to satisfy the same inference with regard to both?" Right, says Philo, "we have no data to establish such a system of cosmogony. . . but if we must fix on some hypothesis . . . Is there any other rule other than the great similarity of the objects compared? . . . When I see an animal, I infer, that it sprang from generation; and that with as great as certainty as you conclude a house to have been reared from design."
I reprint this extensive quote, because, while it lends some support to Richard Dawkins' conclusion in The Blind Watchmaker that Hume did not have either Darwin's biological "data" or his theory of evolution in hand and failed to fully appreciate "biological design," the quote also reveals that Hume enjoyed a much greater insight into nature than Dawkins is willing to concede. Darwin too was unaware of Gregor Mendel's work on genetics and was a century ahead of the discovery of DNA, but nevertheless deduced that plants and animals sexually transmitted their traits generationally. And Hume does fully appreciate this (which Darwin, himself, appreciated a century later): we have more to learn about nature from vegetation and animals than we could possibly learn from how machines are built. And Hume appreciates what has been a central topic of this blog since the first post discussing Seth Lloyd's Programming The Universe (see August 17, 2009 post): life, as we know it (and do not know it) and its creation is reducible to units of information, the transmission of information, and adaptation to new or changed information.
There is, in the Dialogues, much the same debate that plays out now between theists advancing the proposition that all life reflects the work of an intelligent designer and atheists, such as Dawkins, who advance Darwin's theory of natural selection as a sufficient explanation for the creation of life. It is impressive, to say the least, that this discourse was published over two hundred years ago. Was Hume an atheist in the sense we think of atheists today? Skepticism is a term that is most often associated with Hume, as well as Hobbes and Spinoza, and the theologians and theological philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries tended to label any skeptic an atheist. Hume, Hobbes, and Spinoza all shared a strong objection to an anthropomorphic deity as nothing more than man projecting its image onto an imaginary creator. Spinoza, however, did not fully abandon the term "god." Spinoza was a pantheist who marveled at all of nature and called the totality of the universe "god." Hume does not reveal his views on the existence of god in the Dialogues: all three characters in the Dialogues accept the existence of a god, and they merely disagree about its nature, but it is by no means clear that Hume shares this view and commentators are uniform on this perspective. Hume is definitely not a theist, and he is hostile to organized religion, religious doctrine and ritual. But he never denies the existence of a nonanthropomorphic deity of some sort.
This is the sort of discussion that would have benefitted Robert Wright's historical survey on god and religion. Instead, as I mention in the May 13, 2010 post, Wright ends his survey in the 8th century. In The Evolution of God, Robert Wright does not seem to be able to part with the idea that because a belief in a deity has survived in our many human cultures for many thousands of years, there must be some "purpose" to its survival and "evolution" must have something to explain for its survival and purpose. In my view, Wright has a soft spot for intelligent design that he cannot shake. Wright's "designing process" is nothing more than an "apparent design" argument that appears to embrace Darwinian evolution. That is the same argument that some biologists (who reject intelligent design), including Kenneth Miller in Finding Darwin's God, embrace today, purporting to capture evolutionary biological processes as part of god's initial design. Of course, evolutionary theory cannot deny or negate the existence of a creator, but neither can evolutionary theory negate the non-existence of a creator.
A modern eye will recognize that this pamphlet, initially written in the 1750s, anticipates Darwin's theory of natural selection, which was not published until a century later, as well as Gregor Mendel and Crick and Watson. When the third friend, Demea, asks the skeptic, Philo, "How is it conceivable that the world could arise from anything similar to vegetation or generation?" Philo replies: "Very easily. In like manner as the tree sheds its seed into the neighboring fields, and produces other trees; sothe great vegetable, the world, or this planetary system, produces within itself certain seeds, which being scattered into the surrounding chaos, vegetate into new worlds. A comet, for instance, is the seed of a world; and after it has been fully ripened, by passing from sun to sun, and star to star, it is at last tossed into the unformed elements, which everywhere surround the universe, and immediately sprouts up into a new system. Or, if, for the sake of variety, we should suppose this world to be an animal; a comet is the egg of this animal; and in like manner as an ostrich may lay its egg in the sand, which, without any further care, hatches the egg and produces a new animal." Demea says he understands, but asks, "What data do you have for such extraordinary conclusions? And is the slight, imaginary resemblance of the world to an animal or a vegetable sufficient to satisfy the same inference with regard to both?" Right, says Philo, "we have no data to establish such a system of cosmogony. . . but if we must fix on some hypothesis . . . Is there any other rule other than the great similarity of the objects compared? . . . When I see an animal, I infer, that it sprang from generation; and that with as great as certainty as you conclude a house to have been reared from design."
I reprint this extensive quote, because, while it lends some support to Richard Dawkins' conclusion in The Blind Watchmaker that Hume did not have either Darwin's biological "data" or his theory of evolution in hand and failed to fully appreciate "biological design," the quote also reveals that Hume enjoyed a much greater insight into nature than Dawkins is willing to concede. Darwin too was unaware of Gregor Mendel's work on genetics and was a century ahead of the discovery of DNA, but nevertheless deduced that plants and animals sexually transmitted their traits generationally. And Hume does fully appreciate this (which Darwin, himself, appreciated a century later): we have more to learn about nature from vegetation and animals than we could possibly learn from how machines are built. And Hume appreciates what has been a central topic of this blog since the first post discussing Seth Lloyd's Programming The Universe (see August 17, 2009 post): life, as we know it (and do not know it) and its creation is reducible to units of information, the transmission of information, and adaptation to new or changed information.
There is, in the Dialogues, much the same debate that plays out now between theists advancing the proposition that all life reflects the work of an intelligent designer and atheists, such as Dawkins, who advance Darwin's theory of natural selection as a sufficient explanation for the creation of life. It is impressive, to say the least, that this discourse was published over two hundred years ago. Was Hume an atheist in the sense we think of atheists today? Skepticism is a term that is most often associated with Hume, as well as Hobbes and Spinoza, and the theologians and theological philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries tended to label any skeptic an atheist. Hume, Hobbes, and Spinoza all shared a strong objection to an anthropomorphic deity as nothing more than man projecting its image onto an imaginary creator. Spinoza, however, did not fully abandon the term "god." Spinoza was a pantheist who marveled at all of nature and called the totality of the universe "god." Hume does not reveal his views on the existence of god in the Dialogues: all three characters in the Dialogues accept the existence of a god, and they merely disagree about its nature, but it is by no means clear that Hume shares this view and commentators are uniform on this perspective. Hume is definitely not a theist, and he is hostile to organized religion, religious doctrine and ritual. But he never denies the existence of a nonanthropomorphic deity of some sort.
This is the sort of discussion that would have benefitted Robert Wright's historical survey on god and religion. Instead, as I mention in the May 13, 2010 post, Wright ends his survey in the 8th century. In The Evolution of God, Robert Wright does not seem to be able to part with the idea that because a belief in a deity has survived in our many human cultures for many thousands of years, there must be some "purpose" to its survival and "evolution" must have something to explain for its survival and purpose. In my view, Wright has a soft spot for intelligent design that he cannot shake. Wright's "designing process" is nothing more than an "apparent design" argument that appears to embrace Darwinian evolution. That is the same argument that some biologists (who reject intelligent design), including Kenneth Miller in Finding Darwin's God, embrace today, purporting to capture evolutionary biological processes as part of god's initial design. Of course, evolutionary theory cannot deny or negate the existence of a creator, but neither can evolutionary theory negate the non-existence of a creator.
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