Category: Evolution

We hate memes, pass it on…

Vaughn at Mind Hacks has a short post, Memes exist: tell your friends (clever, Vaughn, very clever), which links to a couple of meme-related talks at TED. Daniel linked to a lot of the TED talks back in April (TED: Ideas Worth Spreading), but Vaughn focuses on videos of Daniel Dennett and Susan Blackmore, both of whom are ardent meme advocates.

I’ve watched both talks, more than a half hour of my finite lifespan that I will never get back (okay, I’ve wasted part of my finite life doing worse… I think), so I need to unburden myself. I think ‘memetics’ is one of the bigger crocks hatched in recent decades, hiding in the shadow of respectable evolutionary theory, suggesting that anyone who doesn’t immediately concede to the ‘awesome-ness’ of meme-ness is somehow afraid of evolutionary theory. Let me just make this perfectly clear: I teach about evolutionary theory. I like Charles Darwin. I have casts of hominid skulls in my office. I still think ‘memetics’ is nonsense on stilts on skates on thin ice on borrowed time (apologies to Bentham), as deserving of the designation ‘science’ as astrology, phrenology, or economic forecasting.

What’s hard for me to understand is that I LIKE some of Daniel Dennett’s work, and I can’t cite Dennett’s other work confidently when he has picked up a ‘meme franchise,’ and is plugging away with the ‘meme’ meme, making it appear that I’m down with this later material. Blackmore, on the other hand, is a reformed para-psychologist, so she’s, at worst, made a lateral move in terms of respectability. I get particularly irritated during her talk because I think she does an enormous disservice to Darwin’s Origin of Species, but I will try not to late my irritation show too much (even though our regular readers know I won’t be able to manage). I wasn’t going to really heap scorn on Blackmore until I read her own account of TED on the Guardian’s website; gloves are now off.

But I digress, back to the content of the concept and Vaughn’s comments…

Continue reading “We hate memes, pass it on…”

Synesthesia & metaphor — I’m not feeling it

Wired online carried a story recently on a talk by ‘neuroscientist extraordinaire’ V.S. Ramachandran, one of the folks responsible for a lot of creative thinking in the brain sciences. Brandom Keim writes on a recent talk Ramachandran gave at the World Science Festival in a story, Poetry Comes from Our Tree-Climbing Ancestors, Neuroscientist Says. While I typically find his stuff both fascinating and resonant, this particular piece left me unpersuaded.

Normally, I might take issue with the sloppy logic of the title (‘poetry’ coming from ‘tree-climbing ancestors’ being a dangerous conflation between non-proximate contributing factors and eventual effects — you could just as logically say that ‘poetry comes from spinning disk of post-stellar material in proto-solar system’…), but I’ve got bigger fish to fry: synesthesia.

Rmachandran’s work on synesthesia is excellent; for example, his piece with in Neuron on synesthesia is essential reading, and the piece he co-authored on the condition in Scholarpedia is my source for a fair bit of what I will write. The problem is that I don’t think that synesthesia is a good metaphor for, well, metaphor.

Although there may be some ways that metaphor is like synesthesia, when we add up the pros and cons, synesthesia as a metaphor for metaphor may not help us too much to understand the latter, and I seriously doubt that the two are linked in a more profound causal fashion (like a ‘gene’ for both synesthesia and metaphor). Similarly, attention-based failure to perceive something may be like blindness, but using one to try to explain the other is futile. In other words, not all metaphors are equally useful, and I’m concerned that the synesthesia metaphor for metaphor might do more harm than good.

Continue reading “Synesthesia & metaphor — I’m not feeling it”

Wednesday Round Up #13

Neuroanthropology

David Freedberg, Empathy, Motion & Emotion and Composition & Emotion
Two pdfs on art and the neurosciences by the Columbia art history professor

Sam Harris et al., Functional Neuroimaging of Belief, Disbelief and Uncertainty
Pdf of 2008 article from Annals of Neurology: “truth may be beauty, and beauty truth, in more than a metaphorical sense”

John Horgan, Brain Chips and Other Dreams of the Cyber-Evangelists
Yearning for brain chips, and the problems therein

Literary Trends

Kenneth Goldsmith, In Barry Bonds I See The Future of Poetry
Welcome to our post-human future

Anne Harrington, The Inner Lives of Disordered Brains
The Harvard historian of science’s excellent take on the recent rise in neuro-lit

Jonathan Gottschall, Measure for Measure
Literary criticism needs to embrace science

Henry Bowles, It’s in the Genes: Criticism Devolved
How about criticism of the literary embrace of dubious science?!

Bob Meagher, Socrates on the Campaign Trail
Hope or fear this fall? Socrates will help guide you

Elinore Longobardi, Think Globally, Read Locally
Journalism needs to embrace anthropology

Three-Toed Sloth, Books To Read While Algae Grow In Your Fur
Books recommendations; eclectic from liberalism and math brains to comic books…

Lorenz at Antropologi, Anthropology Blogs More Interesting Than Journals?
For some of us at least… a summary from a quick-and-dirty ethnography of blogging

Language

Liz Danzico, Telling Stories Using Data: An Interview with Jonathan Harris
“Stories should have feeling, to the extent that they want to be human.”

Michael Price, Outside Language Looking In
Children who learn signing at home: language helps organize the mind’s underlying architecture

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The Battle between the Sciences and the Humanities

Natalie Angier writes today on a “Curriculum Designed to Unite Art and Science.” She starts where most people in this area start, with CP Snow’s famous lecture The Two Cultures and the “mutual dislike” between “natural scientists” and “literary intellectuals.” Snow’s gap has widened in recent decades, Angier implies, through the increased Balkanization of knowledge and vicious academic turf wars.

Today, however, Angier declares, “a few scholars of thick dermis and pep-rally vigor believe that the cultural chasm can be bridged and the sciences and the humanities united into a powerful new discipline that would apply the strengths of both mindsets, the quantitative and qualitative, to a wide array of problems.”

One new proponent of this synthesis is the evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson, author of the recent Evolution for Everyone. As Angier relates, “In Dr. Wilson’s view, evolutionary biology is a discipline that, to be done right, demands a crossover approach, the capacity to think in narrative and abstract terms simultaneously, so why not use it as a template for emulsifying the two cultures generally?”

Wilson will work with Leslie Heywood, a professor of English, in the New Humanities Initiative at Binghamton University. Heywood is a poet; examines women and sports, for example, her co-authored book Built to Win; and is a proponent of Third Wave Feminism. Not the most obvious pair to an evolutionary biologist. It gives me some hope.

As for the New Humanities Initiative, it is a program under development. Angier writes:

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Intelligent Design & Creationism

Dr. X recently posted this YouTube video on how creation “science” lead directly into intelligent design, a key component in the Dover legal case that went against the teaching of intelligent design. The video summarizes the work done by the National Center for Science Education to show that the textbook Of Pandas and People was “creationism in disguise.”

I also found this related video about the work of Barbara Forrest, a philosophy professor at Southeastern Louisiana University, a key witness who analyzed the early drafts of Of Pandas and People to show how drafts of the book went from talking about creationism to framing everything in terms of intelligent design.

Back from absence with links on human evolution

I’ve been noticeably silent on Neuroanthropology of late — I didn’t think I could get any busier after January was bad, but it’s been awful around here. I’ve been involved in local politics, if you can believe that, and set up another website (www.berrybypass.com) to try to expose a bit of local corruption and misinformation that was trying to reroute a highway bypass. So I’ve been blogging, just not on Neuroanthropology, putting my knowledge of WordPress to alternative uses.

With the absence, I’ve got a backlog of interesting stuff that I will not be able to write substantial comments on, so I thought I could at least put some links to a couple of pieces:

ABC News has an intriguing short piece on vestigial organs, Five Things Humans No Longer Need, by Laura Spinney. Some of the usual subjects are there (like wisdom teeth and the coccyx), but there’s also some less well-known examples. If I were writing a long piece on this, though, I’m still not persuaded by the notion of ‘vestigial’ organs because it seems to imply that other organs ARE doing what they were selected for, and I doubt that’s the case; too many organs have likely been co-opted into other things over evolutionary time. I worry that the notion of ‘vestigial’ organs singles these out, when in fact the issue is broader, BUT I also love using vesigial organs when I teach.

The other piece I’m not going to get to is Tracing Humanity’s Path, by Michael Balter on ScienceNOW Daily News. The piece is a news story on a longer article available on PLoS Genetics, Inferring Human Colonization History Using a Copying Model, by Garrett Hellenthal, Adam Auton, and Daniel Falush, that uses genome-wide statistical modeling to reconstruct human dispersal patterns that, although not earth-shattering, does produce some interesting wrinkles in the usual account of how humans got all over the globe. And it has cool animated maps linked to it that show the patterns.