Thursday, April 30, 2009

Migration problems

Yesterday, I was talking to another friend, and we got on the subject of migration. (The way we got there is a story in itself: we started talking about bands - we share an interest in music-, and how the show must go on, and how the band on the Titanic kept playing while the ship was sinking, and how his great-grandfather was on the ship that rescued some of the survivors, who were then brought to America, and how his great-grandfather, a Swabic Hungarian, returned to his home country, which had seen massive migration some centuries ago, when the Turks left). 
This prompted me to think about mass migrations, and about the many problems they cause. Human history is full of stories of local inhabitants being displaced (or worse) by newcomers, on all kinds of scales, and all over the world. On the level of continents, we have North America, South America and Australia; at the country level, we have Northern Ireland and Israel, to name just a few examples of where the situation has gone spectacularly wrong, but you can find similar examples at regional level, and even at the level of neighbourhoods. When I was young, the phrase "there goes the neighbourhood" was quite common: people were very concerned about who lived in their immediate vicinity. 

Which is only natural. Not because I have any objection per se to any particular culture (they are all equally valid within their own context, and there are usually good reasons for the differences), but simply because mixing them can cause problems that didn't exist before. Slight differences in values within a culture (between individual and social groups) already cause problems, and there is good chance that they will get worse when differences increase.

Of course, cultural differences are not the same as racial differences, which is something I have always dismissed as so irrelevant as not even to warrant much thought. In that sense, I am a bit like the white daughter of very well-to-do liberal parents in the film "Guess who's coming to dinner" who has fallen in love with a (highly educated) black man, wants her parents to approve the marriage, and can't really see what the problem is. The film focusses most on the father's struggle with something that he would definitely have defended in principle, but had never even considered might actually become an issue for him personally.




On the whole, the film was well done, but I was a bit disappointed that virtually no attention was paid to why exactly interracial marriage was a problem. Of course I understand that people are more likely to "defend their kin", and I can also see how this can be extended to larger groups that are somehow genetically related, but that is a very theoretical bond. Sometimes, it really is better to have a good neighbour (of whatever color) that a distant friend. 

In fact, from the point of view of the species, mixing genes is good, or at very least, not bad, because it increases our chances of surviving. Which makes me wonder whether mixing cultures - however unpleasant the consequences might be for certain individuals or groups - might perhaps not also a good thing in the long run, for the species as a whole. Certainly contact between different groups of humans can be linked to all kinds of important developments, including language itself. And were it not for language, I would not be writing this. 

Hmm. 

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Adults drinking milk

The other day, a friend announced (with a little more emphasis than necessary, but we are used to that from him) that adults drinking milk was "an aberration". We didn't really get into the details of why he believed this - the conversation went off on another tangent - but I imagine it is because milk was "designed" as food for infants, not adults. So in a sense, he was arguing that people should act their age. 

I responded by mentioning a theory that certain adults (and most notably the ones in northern Europe and North America, with less sunshine) drink milk because they need it as a vitamin D supplement. And that this was another case of natural selection, namely in the sense that migration to sun-impoverished areas is only a choice for people who are able to digest milk as an adult. (And, I would add now, that this in turn is a result of population pressure). 

But I do agree that it doesn't feel natural, if only because I know of no other species where the adults drink milk. (I have heard that certain snakes will drink goat's milk, but that does not count: that would be more like humans eating fruit, which is basically food for the infant plant/seed).  In fact, you could argue that we should have never left the subtropics, not only because of the lack of sun as a source of vitamin D, but also because of the temperature, which has forced us into wear clothes. 

Of course, I realize we do not really have a choice (there is no going back), and I also know that moving out of our climatic comfort zone has given rise to a lot of interesting developments, but - and now comes the twist - accepting the premise that we do not belong here immediately and completely validates a fallacy that I get more emphatic about than strictly necessary, namely the idea that we should only eat what grows in the area. Most diets nowadays seem a bit simplistic, but that one really takes the cake. We were not designed to live only on apples and lettuce, and there is not reason to restrict ourselves to them. 

It is currently 7 30 in the morning. Time for breakfast. I think I will have a bowl of cereal. With milk! 

Monday, April 27, 2009

Bad blogger!

I confess, I am a bad blogger. I have thousands of notes, on just about any subject you can think of, in notebooks that span many years, but I seem incapable of turning them into something that people might like to read. For a while, I have been telling myself that it is just a question of time, and that the words will come as soon as all the pieces fall into place, but of course I know that the pieces will only fall into place if I "do my homework", which in my case means doing exactly what I am not doing, namely polishing each idea - in writing - until it becomes something that someone might like to read.

For many years, I tried doing this verbally, by throwing out ideas, just to see how they sound. Unfortunately, I can/could get quite argumentative when people dismiss the idea without giving it the attention I think it deserves. Which is in fact most of the time. End result: lots of unpleasant and unfruitful discussions, sometimes even to the point of losing the person as a discussion partner.

So now I do the same thing in writing. You might think I would have learned from experience, and would at least have the decency to feel guilty about harassing people with my mental diarrhoea. But there is a big difference: you, the reader, can stop reading any time you like, and I never get upset! A win-win situation all round, as far as I can see!

So congratulations and thanks for getting this far. I will try to continue to make it worth your while. :-)


Postscript: I just realized that Kathy Reichs does the same thing in the series "Bones" (a murder mystery t.v. series my wife and I try to watch when we can), but better: she delivers lectures on just about anything you can imagine on the sly, by integrating them into the plot.

Thursday, April 9, 2009

Instinct

A quick note before I dash of on holiday. 

I was just reading the Wikipedia entry on Instinct, and was surprised to read that there is a "hot debate" on whether or not humans have instinct. And the reason this is an issue at all is because - after having coined a very useful term (albeit one that does not really explain anything) - people sat down and wrote a definition that made the term completely useless.  

There are a lot of things wrong with the definition, but my main objection is a more general one: almost every single criterion is an absolute. To be considered instinctive, behavior must be automatic, irresistible, and unmodifiable. But there are many examples of behavior that most people would label instinctive, but that can be and is suppressed under certain circumstances. This may occur more often in humans (for the simple reason that we think too much), but it definitely not unique. As for "unmodifiable", the definition itself is contradictory: after having established unmodifiable as a criterion, it goes on to mention that "the organism may profit from experience and to that degree the behavior is modifiable". I don't want too be accused of being too categoric myself, but I fail to see a middle ground here: behavior is either modifiable or unmodifiable. It cannot be both at the same time.   

Of course, I understand why people like the idea of denying that humans have instinct: it makes them exempt of innate behavior, which is almost like getting carte blanche on your own destiny. But that is an illusion, I fear: free will is not quite as free as some people would like. If humans are electrons, free will is our ability to jiggle our trajectory. Only a few of us will succeed in jumping from one electron shell to another, and some might even escape the atom completely, but that is about as far as we can go. 

Irrespective of the in-fighting about definitions, the big question remains: how is innate behavior possible at all? It has to be hard-coded or hard-wired somewhere, but where and how? (Any input on this is welcome.)

Sunday, April 5, 2009

Taboos and evolution

For a long time now, I have been trying to find out why things are the way they are. And for the most part, I look towards the theory of evolution for explanations. To me, virtually everything we do, want, aspire to can be explained as a survival mechanism, which I will define here as a genetic response to circumstances that existed in the past. Countless articles and books must have been written on this subject, but I have yet to find one that deals with the totality of human existence in this way. This little blog will not be the exception - it would probably require hundreds or even thousands of pages to cover everything that I would want to cover, but what I can do is offer some piecemeal observations, on isolated issues that have caught my attention, in the hope that this will inspire others to make a more concerted effort. And the reason I think this is worth doing is that I think that understanding the causes of our own behavior goes a long way towards solving some of the problems that we deal with every day. 
(For those of you who are wondering why our survival mechanisms - which are by definition solutions - can be problems, the answer is that circumstances change more quickly than and our genes or our behavior. Behavior that is completely appropriate in one situation may be completely inappropriate in another). 
For today, I want to offer some thoughts on taboos. Of late, it seems to me, taboos are being seen more and more as unwanted obstructions to our freedom, as throwbacks from more primitive, less civilized times. I do not disagree with this, but I am not in favor of simply jettisoning all taboos in favor of "rational behavior", for two reasons. Taboos, to me, are nature's system of "keep out" signs, and they were put there for a reason. We should think carefully before pulling them up and throwing them on the bonfire. And secondly, just because we would like to act differently doesn't mean that we can (see also a previous blog entry on life and death). Nonetheless, I do have problems with the "reptile brain" aspect of taboos, that is, the fact that our reactions are hard-wired, and I am quite content to try to dismantle that part. 
One taboo I am thinking about specifically is the one on ending life (murder, suicide, abortus). The gut reaction to this is rejection, which is perfectly logical if we accept the maxim that the main purpose of life is to "go forth and multiply". But of course overpopulation has made it necessary to rethink our attitudes on that. Even rationality itself could be seen as a survival mechanism, because it allows us to survive conditions that did not exist in the past, and notably the ones created by overpopulation. 

Saturday, April 4, 2009

Life after death - the Second World War and the Baby Boom

For the past 200-odd years, the birth rate in Western industrialized countries has declined, in line with the slow change from a rural to an urban economy, the basic explanation being that large families are necessary and useful on the farm, but not in cities. If we generalize even further, one could say that birth rate declines as the population increases. 

If this explanation is correct, and I think it is, why was there are a Baby Boom? According to Marvin Harris, author of "America Now" (later republished as "Why Nothing Works"), the main cause was also economic (namely the opening up of new markets after the Second World War). I do not dispute that this will have had an effect, but I think that psychological motives were at least as important. 

To me, the gradual decline of the birth rate was a triumph of reason over instinct. The first goal of life in general is to have offspring. Nature does of course have mechanisms to counteract the effects of overpopulation, but as far as I know, only humans are in a position to not only predict the long term effects, but consciously and willingly do something about it. But when we do, we also create a tension between what our bodies were designed to do, and what our brains tell us is best for us in the longer term. 

Combine this idea with the well-know effect that danger has on our impulse to procreate (the link between eros and thanatos), and add a threshold effect, and you have the Baby Boom: after the well-publicized trauma of the Second World War, a lot of people, and presumably especially the victors, found it much harder to suppress the urge to celebrate their survival by having more children. And voila! like a dam breaking, instinct wins out over reason. 

Addendum: this may sound depressing - "how can we ever progress?", you might wonder - but that weighs less on my mind than the irritating suggestion that sheer willpower can overcome genetically encoded natural disposition. A key flaw in the otherwise very entertaining animation film Madagascar is when the zoo-raised lion, in the wild and almost overcome with hunger, succeeds in suppressing  his natural urge to eat his friend the zebra. Obviously, the film is really about humans, not animals, but it is still a ludicrous idea, as I have felt obliged to explain to my children.  

Thursday, April 2, 2009

One or the other - you can't have it both ways

When I was a teenager, it was a well-known "fact" (read: consensus opinion, or truism) that when you put two similar but different elements in one end product - the most obvious example being the radiocassette - one of the two would suffer. I can't remember exactly why people believed this, and I am not sure it is all that true, but we definitely believed it. 

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about the many links between technology and the way I experience and appreciate music. I will definitely write about that some other time, but for now,  all I have to offer is a strange similarity between this somewhat dismal view of combi-electronics and the bands I liked as a teenager, namely the fact that many of them made great music (or at least, music I still like today) but lyrics that I like a lot less. 

As a teenager, this was not a problem, because I never really listened to the lyrics. I would hear a word here and there, and maybe the most striking line of the chorus, but I was usually blissfully unaware of the inanity that populated some of the more popular tunes of the Beach Boys, the occasional pretentiousness of some of my favorite Simon and Garfunkel songs, the ear-pleasing but not always intelligible phrasings in some Supertramp songs ... and I could go on. 

Of course, each of the above groups have written and composed songs that deserve to be heard again and again, but even so, there are not too many people out there who can do both equally well. Paul Simon in his later years (after going it alone) is probably the exception, together with Cole Porter, but I am definitely much more impressed by Brian Wilson's musical than lyrical skills.   

Now the solution for this, you might think, would be to get a great composer and a great song-writer together. But that seems to be just as rare as having both qualities in the same person. Off the top of my head the only such combination I can think of are the Sherman brothers (of Disney's  "Jungle Book" fame) and Elton John and Bennie Turpin, and then especially for Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. (Lennon and McCartney don't count - they stimulated each other, but often wrote the songs alone, as was the case in many bands). 

Just a thought.