Spore is a new game coming out this fall and recently a creature creator was released to show off a bit of the game. Given that this is a game more or less about evolution, with male and female creatures, it did not take long until “Sporn” hit the Internet.
I’ve pasted the “nature video” in all its glory below, so please take that into account before playing it. I found it very funny–ah, the things people put their minds to–but I wouldn’t show it to my kids. The tagline for the game goes, “Starting with single-cell organisms, players work on designing life with ever more complexity.” Or designing it right into the gutters… The hattip goes to Greg Laden.
Our own Greg adds: Warning: Video contains graphic scenes of pink-skinned animated aliens mating, including growling, circling hearts, and funky dance moves. Please don’t click if you are without a sense of humor.
Improv Everywhere pulled off a great social experiment, a couple hundred people freezing all at once for five minutes in the main terminal of New York’s Grand Central Terminal. Here’s the video:
People’s reactions show public culture in action, backed up by the commentary on the making and enactment of the video at Improv Everywhere. I thought this was striking, of how the volunteers both took the mission on and brought their own creativity to it:
It was fun to see all the different choices people made for their frozen moment. I didn’t give any instructions in advance. I just told everyone to be doing something realistic and not jokey. One guy dropped an entire briefcase full of papers the second before he froze, leaving his papers scattered before him for five minutes. Many froze midway through eating or drinking. A few froze while taking off a jacket. One couple froze kissing.
At the Improv post, you can see lots more video on particular scenes, so plenty of great real-live data on a real-life experiment. And there are other “missions” like making a little league game the “best game ever” and The Moebius, where seven agents got stuck in a time loop at a Starbucks.
A lot of controversy and blogging about the gay brain of late. Here’s the Savic and Lindstrom paper that got the fray started, with Mind Hacks’ accompanying coverage on the Return of the Gay Brain.
Shortly afterwards, Vaughan proposed “hard wired” as one of the worst psychobabble terms. For me, the fixation on biological determinism is the larger, and worse, cultural concept behind that. So I propose leaving behind biological claims for identity. It just gives us claptrap like the opening lines from the New Scientist news report, “Brain scans have provided the most compelling evidence yet that being gay or straight is a biologically fixed trait.”
Compelling evidence? While there is interesting work on biology and sexuality (the LA Times covers some of it), there is plenty to doubt about the present work, as the Neurocritic points out quite well here and here. This sort of work represents bad brain science: reported claims overreaching the evidence, an often notable lack of comparative work and appropriate controls, little longitudinal analysis, and on and on.
The worst thing about it? The science, whatever it turns out to be, cannot take us from is to ought.
To add my two anthropological cents, human sexuality is varied. Trying to shoehorn sexuality into one socially and politically charged box just does not work well from an anthropological point of view. As one example, men in some cultures go through different life stages, and in some of those stages homosexuality is the normal way of being, whereas at other times heterosexual relations are the norm. To speak personally, I’ve known people who have had an array of partners in their lives, individually recreating what cultures like the Etoro have shown us ethnographically.
On the neuroplasticity and experience/behavior side, this type of approach generally leaves out something every consenting adult knows. Sex matters! The experience of a sexual encounter helps shape our desires, our pleasures, our associations.
But there is something that matters more to me, and most of the people I know, than sex. LOVE. All this debate about cerebral asymmetries and biological determinism misses the human point. Love matters.
Who cares whether sex between whatever combination of men and women is or is not natural? Love makes a much bigger difference in people’s lives. Love between two committed partners, love of a parent for a child, love of family and friend and groups finding common bond.
Love holds us together, whereas the debates over how gay our brains may or may not be aims to divide us, to heighten identity politics at the expense of those experiences and behaviors whose impact lasts longer. We sacrifice the strength of intimacy to proclaim the supposed facts of science.
There are those who will say that knowing the nature of the problem (how easy to slide from one sense of the problem to another) will help us make better determinations about what to do, that more information will lead to better decisions. Or that being able to claim the mantle of biologically innate will help in the fight against the other side.
I would counter that these sorts of assertions cut entirely against the grain of the society we have built, whether that is a liberal vision of equality before the law or a conservative vision that government should not dictate people’s private choices. But that vision gets sacrificed at the altar of proclamations of moral superiority and the exercise of vindictive power.
Science, with its claims of facts and evidence, steps so easily into that arena, declaring this and that truth. In doing that, the scientists are forgetting what matters, both about science and about human experience.
The Morning News, “Black and White and Read All Over,” has an on-going art gallery series, demonstrating the work of a particular artist along one theme, complete with an accompanying interview. Most of the series consists of photography, but there are paintings and drawings as well. Really striking work.
The latest is Topologies by the photographer Edgar Martins, interview by Rosencrans Baldwin.
But the one that really struck me was on Phone Sex Operators by Phillip Toledano. Toledano captures these individuals so well, revealing the lives behind the fantasy. There is also an accompanying quote from the person which adds that much more depth. Here is the one from that series. I’m 60 years old, have a B.A. in Cultural Anthropology from Columbia University, and married for 25 years. I have a son in his last years of college who lives at home. He’s a 4.0 with a double major in English Literature and Religion. Men call me for an infinity of reasons. Of course, they call to masturbate. I call it “Executive Stress Relief.” It’s not sex; it’s a cocktail of testosterone, fueled by addiction to pornography, loneliness, and the need to hear a woman’s voice. I make twice the money I made in the corporate world. I work from home, the money transfers into my bank account daily. I’m Scheherezade: If I don’t tell stories that fascinate the Pasha, he will kill me in the morning.
At first the 48th edition looked like a round up of the Usual Suspects, a cop gone bad (the philosopher), a hit man (the critic), his hard-talking partner (the challenger), a hijacker (the pedant), and a con man (the hacker). But that line-up turned out to be fiction. More suspects got brought in; plot lines got complicated.
We anthropologists make lousy cops anyway. “To a cop the explanation’s always simple. There’s no mystery to the street, no arch criminal behind it all. If you find a body and you think his brother did it, you’re gonna find out you’re right.”
We’re going for the mystery.
Evolution
“We find the concept brilliant, but New York is difficult for new restaurants. How can we be certain that our money will be returned in the long run?” Keaton looks at Edie and smiles confidently. “It’s simple gentlemen, design versatility.”
Out of flesh and blood, evolution cobbles things together like our conjoined nervous and sensory systems. Courtesy of our imperfect eyes, the new blog Illusion Sciences gives us the peripheral escalator illusion. Felt like I was going to fall out of a tree, which is not a good thing for a primate. Language is a better thing, and Babel’s Dawn covers how to build that sort of new brain from old parts.
“A truck load of guns gets snagged, Customs comes down on N.Y.P.D. for some answers – they come up with us.”
Bloggers do cover the answers. Want to know how to get into problems? First, cut out the tryptophan, it will put you in a bad mood, a punishing mood; low serotonin and decision making just don’t mix!
Still, vision can be fallible, apt to get caught up in illusion, context making us see movement when things are really black and white. For, as Deric Bownds shows us, we want to see into the future to be able to grasp the present, sometimes seeing things that aren’t really there.
The Critique
“Alright, you all know the drill. When your number is called, step forward and repeat the phrase you’ve been given. Understand?”
As much as we like the revolution in neuroscience, brain scientists sometimes act like cops—they’re laying down the law. More than a little crooked criticism is needed.
What better than one of the real highlights of this line-up: Neurocritic’s Mirror Neurons Control Hard-Ons? The Mr. Bean photo comes directly from him, and captures everything that goes wrong with mirror-neurons-explain-the-world enthusiasm.
Mixing Memory wants in too, so he adds Sex = Mirror Neurons. Now I know why sleazy hotels have mirrors on the ceiling—it looks like mirror neurons need extra help getting aroused.
Not so with expressions of fear and disgust and the latest evolutionary psychology declaration of magnificent adaptive benefits. You mean, just mimicking facial expressions with no actual indication of a fitness benefit doesn’t convince you, Dr. X?
Paraskevidekatriaphilia. Say that five times fast before you ask what it is. No, you won’t figure it out that way, but it will make you laugh. And you need to laugh about the fear of Friday the 13th. Or in Romania, Tuesday the 13th. PodBlack continues with her good work placing research on superstition in the proper cultural, educational, and peer-reviewed context.
At the World Science Festival it’s guilt by assocation from being too Geek Friendly. The Science of Morality links to perps with long records of their own: Daniel Dennett, Patricia Churchland, Antonio Damasio and Marc Hauser.
“We know you can get to us, and now you know we can get to you.”
In Culture Shock, Mind Hacks describes how culture affects trauma (helped by one of our posts) and then takes us through the history and recent evidence on post-traumatic stress disorder. Conveniently, our own Erin Finley has just provided part two on her work on trauma among Iraq veterans, Cultural Aspects of PTSD, Part II: Narrative and Healing.
Sharp Brains enlightens us with an interview with Ori Brafman, author of Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior. The hidden forces shaping our actions are as much cultural as they are individual. As Brafman says, “We take on the roles others ascribe to us.”
And sometimes we just remember things wrong, as described in The Anatomy of a False Memory. Patients with frontal lobe damage help identify some of the functional pathways involved in how we reconstruct memories. This type of research then brings us a thorny legal question: If we make memory up, can we ever swear to tell the truth?
Culture In Action: Technology
“I’ve got immunity now. What can you possibly offer me?”
At the very least, emerging technologies offer new ways to diagnose and deal with brain-related disorders. Brain Stimulant covers how ultrasound, coupled with a magnetic field, can now be used to shape neuronal firing, which will surely interest neurosurgeons looking for non-invasive techniques.
Isn’t that what activities like capoeira and ballroom dancing already do? Put differently, our technologies often take our brain’s capabilities along for the ride, as each step in the computer revolution shows us. Restless Minds argues that Google and Web 2.0 is about the “flow,” about a service that “enables an effortless flow of your data—and experience—[to] hold your attention.”
But technology has gone one step further in experience, attention, and identity—on-line virtual reality. Savage Minds provides a review of Tom Boellstorff’s recent ethnography of Second Life. We handle gaps in our roles and identities in everyday life with apparent ease; online “we lack many of the cues and strategies we rely upon in the real world.” Based on experience, people are developing new techniques and interpretations, from brb (be right back) to more leeway in letting people play their online identity.
So our brains live in a Material World, surrounded by technology everyday, everywhere. In Brazil mobile phones are used to build new relations and identities, to demonstrate one’s modernity, and thus raise questions about the importance of our bodies, the role of emotions, even addiction. As Sandra Rubia Silva writes, “Owning a mobile phone has become a way of being in the world.”
So, there you have it. Encephalon #48. Anthropology coming up with its usual suspects. Evolution, biology, critique, everyday synthesis, and culture.
Neuroanthropology 