Thinking Meat Project

Evolutionary psychology examined

Posted on by Mary / 0 Comment

David Buller has written a book, Adapting Minds, which critically examines some of the claims of evolutionary psychology. He’s summarized three of his analyses for Skeptic Magazine, looking at the a few of the important questions about our behavior that evolutionary psychology attempts to answer. (Actually I should adopt his usage; he uses “evolutionary psychology” to mean “the evolutionary study of mind and behavior”, while “Evolutionary Psychology”, or EP, represents a particular set of beliefs about the evolution of the human mind and human behavior. So what he’s critiquing is three claims of EP.)

The first claim he examines is that women’s extramarital affairs can be explained by a psychological adaptation aimed at seeking out genetically superior males to father their children (while keeping a reliable long-term partner around to help her raise the children). The second is that males and females have evolved different triggers for jealous behavior (males being more sensitive to sexual infidelity while women are more sensitive to emotional infidelity); the idea behind this is that males are more aware of threats to their paternity, while women are more aware of threats to the continued availability of a male’s resources for her children. The third is that a stepparent (often a stepfather) is more likely to physically abuse a child than the child’s genetic parents. He refutes all three of these, illustrating the shortcomings in the data that have been used to support them and providing alternative explanations of what might be going on. It was a fascinating look at some of the detail behind things I’ve read about in other places.

It’s not a short piece, but it’s well worth reading, especially in light of the frequent news stories about the ways our most important relationships are supposedly shaped by our evolutionary history. It’s hard for me sometimes to evaluate some of the news on this topic that I read (and write about here); I’m hoping that Buller’s book will be helpful in educating myself. Meanwhile, I learned a lot from this article.

http://www.skeptic.com/the_magazine/featured_articles/v12n01_sex_jealousy.html

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Deep time

Posted on by Mary / 0 Comment

I closed an earlier essay (That time of year) with a quote about the curious blend of terror and exhilaration that the contemplation of deep time can bring. On the one hand, we’re so tiny and so ephemeral in comparison with events that take millions or even billions of years, like the growth and erosion of mountains or the lifetimes of stars. On the other hand, here we are, able to understand something of these events despite the fact that we are so finite. That, to me, is one of the most amazing things about being thinking meat. As far as we know, we’re the only things on this planet capable of understanding events in the far distant past (and speculating about the far distant future).

Ptolemy expressed this feeling thus:

I know that I am mortal and the creature of a day; but when I search out the massed wheeling circles of the stars, my feet no longer touch the earth, but, side by side with Zeus himself, I take my fill of ambrosia, the food of the gods.

The night sky provides plenty of such ambrosia. However, the earth beneath our feet also offers suitable food for thinking meat in search of inspiration. When I visited Manhattan a couple of years ago, for example, one of the most compelling sights out of all that jam-packed island had to offer was a piece of rock in the American Museum of Natural History. Not a sapphire or a diamond (although the sapphires were spectacular), this particular rock came from a 2.7 billion-year-old banded iron formation in Canada.

It’s a big piece of beautiful rock with striking red and gray stripes. The earliest chapters of life on earth are bound up in this rock. When single-celled creatures began to release oxygen into the atmosphere as a by-product of photosynthesis, the oxygen reacted with iron and other minerals in the oceans, which precipitated out into the gorgeous red colors in the rock. This oxidation went on for the better part of a billion years, until the atmosphere and the ocean were saturated with oxygen. From such humble beginnings, life proliferated into its present diversity, after leaving its mark on the rocks.

I remember seeing a show on PBS about John Denver, including some footage of him at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. A companion was telling him about the great age of the rocks he was looking at (like the banded iron formation, they’re some of the oldest on the planet). In response he leaned over and put both hands on the rocks, leaning forward and putting his weight into the contact with the unimaginably distant past. I think I understand that urge. The banded iron rock in the museum was not in a display case, and there were no signs telling people not to touch it, so I somewhat shyly reached out and put my hand on it.

I can’t even begin to really understand what a billion-year interval is like, or how long ago 2.7 billion years is, but with my hand on the rock, I tried. The volume of life involved is striking too; how many tiny single-celled creatures did it take to produce the oxygen that reacted with so much rock? The earth of that time is as alien to me as the surface of Mars, and yet I could reach out and put my hands on the relics of that time, and understand at least some of the story behind it.

There’s a rock in the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum near Tucson that is equally impressive. It’s quite a respectable age (but not nearly as old as the banded iron) and is the result of more familiar processes. It’s an orangish sandstone, and it formed 800 million years ago in northern Arizona. On the surface of the rock, you can see ripple marks; the rock used to be sand near the shore of a huge inland sea. In addition to the ripples, there are dimples that were formed when raindrops fell on the wet sand. Another layer of sand covered the ripples and the rain marks, preserving them for all those millions of years. When I first saw the rock in 1987, it looked so similar to the rain-pocked and rippled sand I’d seen the previous summer on a rainy Florida beach that it stopped me in my tracks. Those raindrops had fallen 800 million years before, and here I was to see their traces.

It’s that feeling of knowing in some detail of long ago events that makes these ancient rocks so fascinating. When I visited the University of Utah several years ago, my friend Barbara, a geologist at the university, gave me a guided tour of the rocks on display outside the building where she works. One rock had fine layers of alternating light and dark materials, each layer a year’s deposition of sediments on the bed of a stream. One of the layers was much thicker than the others. “What about this one?” I asked. “That was a flood,” said Barbara.

I can imagine the booming rush of water sweeping down its channel, carrying a huge load of mud and debris, and the living things either swept helplessly along, or buried in the mud, or maybe hunkered down waiting for it to pass, with perhaps land animals nearby scurrying to higher ground. Then I thought how all that motion and drama was reduced over time to a relic, a thicker layer in the rock that told a story to two hominids standing outside on a sunny winter day millennia later, talking about rocks. Are any of the dramatic and heartrending geological or meteorological events of our time leaving behind traces in the rocks, traces that future beings are going to be able to identify from some calm vantage point after we’re all long gone?

Some rocks contain similar records of sediment deposition, except that they’re daily rather than seasonal. These rocks were formed in coastal waters, and the patterns of extremely narrow layers in them represent material deposited during high and low tides (the high tide layers are slightly thicker). The Hindostan whetstone rocks of southern Indiana are 300 million years old, and they show the tides of the ancient inland sea. With care, the timing between the tides can be calculated. (I heard an astronomer who studied these rocks say that until he started looking at them he had no idea tides were so complicated.) The time between tides is related to the distance between the earth and the moon, which has increased over time. By analyzing these and similar but even older rocks, scientists can track the slow retreat of the moon from the earth and the slow lengthening of the day. In nineteenth century Indiana, these ancient records of time and tide were widely used as whetstones and gravestones, so the gravestones around here might record not just the passing of a single life, but also several months of tidal history from millions of years ago.

One of the more exotic events that left its traces on the earth goes back to the heavens. A supernova explosion about three million years ago and one or two hundred light years away showered the earth with stellar debris, some of which was identified in sediments from the floor of the Pacific Ocean in 1999. This debris, in the form of atoms of an isotope of iron that could only have come from within a supernova, was the first such material identified on earth.

Of course the earth, the sun, and all that we can see in the solar system ultimately must have come from inside a star (Carl Sagan’s quote about us all being star-stuff was absolutely correct). But all the years of transformation since then have turned the star-stuff into the stuff of everyday life, which dulls the wonder of that knowledge most of the time. These atoms of iron, on the other hand, were fresh and relatively untouched from this distant catastrophic event. Distant as it was, this catastrophe might have affected earth’s climate and changed the course of human evolution, drying Africa out somewhat and sending our early ancestors out in search of wetter ground. This small sample of iron atoms is a tantalizing window into the history of our species and our planet.

Our brains weren’t shaped by any need to understand ancient floods that left their traces in the rocks, or to identify atoms that come from supernovae, or to contemplate the arid heights of northern Arizona and imagine a long-ago beach lapped by the waters of an inland ocean that stretched over what’s now prairie. It’s intriguing that we can do these things. The poignant awareness of our own brevity is balanced somewhat by our awareness of the deep past and the deep future. We can picture events and scenery that are far behind us in time, and this offers at least some consolation in the face of the sobering realization that our own role in the drama of the planet is minuscule and provisional.

Thinking Meat Project

Moral disengagement

Posted on by Mary

I went to hear Albert Bandura give a talk this afternoon on “Moral disengagement in the perpetration of inhumanities.” Bandura holds the David Starr Jordan Chair of Social Science in Psychology [which no longer seems to exist—December 2023] at Stanford and is well known for his theory of social modelling, which describes how people learn from others (not just from their own mistakes) and for his social cognitive theory, which sees people as active agents, not at the mercy of either their inner drives or their environments.

Although I had heard his name before, I didn’t know much about him, but he’s obviously one of the more influential psychologists of the twentieth century, so I was glad of the chance to hear him speak. His talk today began with the premise that people develop moral selves and manage their own behavior to keep it in line with their moral standards, but that’s only part of the story. Evil actions are often the product not of people with no moral standards, but of people who have disengaged themselves from their moral standards, so that they can do things they would otherwise describe as wrong, without losing their peace of mind or sense of themselves as decent people. His talk examined the mechanisms by which this moral disengagement happens, with lots of examples of the mechanisms in action.

Moral justification and euphemism have been around a long time and are familiar today: moral sentiments are used to justify actions that harm other people, and language is manipulated to make it sound like what we’re doing is not that bad or is not exactly our doing (e.g.: mistakes were made, surgical strike, collateral damage). Comparing harmful behavior to something benign is another tactic (Bandura quoted someone in the gun industry as saying that just as the fashion industry tries to come up with new products, so do gun makers).

Another set of mechanisms involves obscuring the role of the individual: displacing the responsibility onto an authority whose will you are duty-bound to carry out, diffusing responsibility (“Collective crimes incriminate no one,” said Napoleon), and minimizing, disregarding, or disputing the harmful effects. This last, he said, is why the famous photo of the young Vietnamese girl burned by napalm was effective in mobilizing resistance to the Vietnam War; it made it impossible to deny the horror of the war. He also discussed the complex ways in which a responsible authority is kept in deliberate ignorance, and wrong-doing by underlings, when discovered, is described as an aberration, perpetrated by people who didn’t know what the rules were. (I thought of Abu Ghraib.)

The last set of mechanisms involve dehumanizing the victim, through demonizing or bestializing him or maybe blaming him. This is another very old and very familiar strategy.

Bandura described these mechanisms at work in the tobacco industry, the gun industry, and the perpetuation of social inequities. He had lots of good quotes illustrating the twists and turns the human mind can take in trying to justify its decisions (including one from Orrin Hatch: “Capital punishment is our society’s recognition of the sanctity of human life”).

This was all interesting, but the last five minutes of the talk were the most thought-provoking. He said that agression is not an inevitable part of human behavior that’s rooted in human nature. The capability is there, but since aggressive behavior varies so widely on the personal and group level, and can change dramatically over time on the national level, he said that the answer to human aggression lies in ideology, not biology. We need social structures that make it difficult to disengage ourselves from our moral standards, and we need to promote a sense of our common humanity. As far as I’m concerned, he could have started the talk with that and I would have been very interested to hear what those social structures might look like, and also how each of us can recognize and avoid these mental strategies in ourselves.

I don’t agree about the answer being in ideology and not in biology. Is it entirely the social environment that makes some people Quakers and some muggers? (I’m guessing it’s safe to assume there is no significant overlap in the two groups.) Is there no biological component to which circumstances predispose a person to aggressive behavior? If we need a social environment that helps us to be the best of who we are rather than the worst (and I think we do), surely it would help to understand all the factors that go into our environment, including physical factors. Biology can tell us not just about individual neurochemical differences that influence personality and behavior, but also about differences in propensities toward aggression over the course of a lifetime or maybe even cyclical variations over the course of a day or a year. In my opinion, the social and physical components of who we are and how we behave are so intertwined that we need to consider both if we want to change anything about how we are.

Thinking Meat Project

Personality, gender, and heart disease

Posted on by Mary / 0 Comment

One component of type A behavior is hostility. A recent study of more than 3,000 people showed that while the distribution of different levels of hostility was about the same in men and women, the medical profiles of the two sexes differed. The more hostile men were more likely to suffer from heart problems than those who were less hostile, whereas women showed no such correlation. The more hostile women, however, had a higher incidence of diabetes. No telling yet why there is a difference, but it’s an interesting finding. I’m curious about the biochemistry involved, and also about how it got to be that way.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/11/051115171537.htm

Thinking Meat Project

Dagger of the mind

Posted on by Mary

I just got back from an excellent production of Macbeth at Indiana University. When I think of Macbeth, I think of ambition, the lust for power, and violence (and the play is certainly full of those). But I had forgotten that so much of it is about the source of all these things: the mind, and in particular the murky territory of the troubled mind. “Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,” Macbeth asks the doctor, “Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, raze out the written troubles of the brain…?” Even with less damning and horrible memories than those that drove Lady Macbeth insane, we sometimes ask medicine that question today. In other places in the play mental states are rendered brilliantly: “O, full of scorpions is my mind” says Macbeth; and when he envisions a phantom dagger shortly before murdering Duncan, he calls it “a dagger of the mind”.

I’m prone to see thinking meat ideas in unexpected places; it certainly looks to me like Shakespeare has a lot of things to say about the problems and the mental and emotional strategies of thinking meat. There are places in the play where characters give each other advice on managing troublesome emotions and memories: Lady Macbeth urging her husband not to think of things that can’t be undone and will only drive them mad if they dwell on them (and look where that got her); Macduff, after his wife and children are killed, being counselled to turn his sorrow to rage and revenge. The characters also examine their own motivations, the effects of fear and of ambition on their behavior. And of course toward the end we get Macbeth’s ruminations on the meaning of life:

“…all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”

It’s full of extreme and disturbing situations, but even so Macbeth shows aspects of the human condition that we can all recognize. There’s plenty of mind food there for thinking meat to ponder.

Thinking Meat Project

Memorial trees

Posted on by Mary

I read a kind of a peculiar story from Wired News. A company called Biopresence is working on a way to create living memorials by adding human DNA from a dead person to the genes of a tree. The genetic manipulation would be done in such a way that the human genes would not affect the appearance of the tree or the function of the tree’s own genes. When my mother died five years ago, I found some comfort in the fact that some of her genes lived on in her children and grandchildren, so her physical essence wasn’t quite gone. But part of the comfort is in seeing that DNA expressed; I and some of my brothers have her nose, for example, and I have inherited some of her stubbornness. It’s kind of a romantic idea, I guess, to have a loved one’s DNA bound up in that of a tree, but to me it’s not all that meaningful. To each his own. The estimated cost is $35,000; if I were going to spend that kind of money memorializing my mother, I’d give it to an organization that helps teach children to read and gives them books, or that researches hypertension and stroke.

Best of Thinking Meat

That time of year

Posted on by Mary / 0 Comment

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang…

Shakespeare’s sonnet compares human aging with the aging of the year, and closes with the lines:

This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

I have long been haunted by these lines, by their recognition of how short a time we are here and how dear the things of everyday life appear in light of life’s brevity. The metaphor comparing the times of human life to the seasons of the year is a common one. It must be where the original impulse for All Saints’ Day, All Souls’ Day, and their earlier predecessor, Samhain, came from. (This time of the aging of the year is especially meaningful to me because my mother died in mid-November five years ago, so October is filled with bittersweet memories of the last time she was here, and with thoughts of endings.) When we think of ourselves as mirroring the life we see around us, we realize that the poignant difference is that after our autumn of aging and death, we don’t come back in the spring.

The idea that if we lived forever, life would lose something of its preciousness is also an old one. The knowledge that we won’t always be here can give life an edge, an energy, that urges us to cherish every moment. It matters a lot to me to appreciate and cherish the experiences of my life, but I have always been reluctant to admit that death is part of what helps us to do this. Couldn’t I cherish every moment even if I had a lot more of them, perhaps a limitless number? Is eventual death really the price we have to pay for this feeling of joy at being here?

Certainly plenty of people have said so. The biblical Psalmist equated knowledge of life’s brevity of with wisdom. Paul Theroux said, “Death is an endless night so awful to contemplate that it can make us love life and value it with such passion that it may be the ultimate cause of all joy and all art.” And Mozart, in a letter to his father, described death as “the key which unlocks the door to our happiness.” If we lived forever, would we procrastinate and never do the things we want to with our lives? Would we take life for granted?

I don’t know, but this time of year certainly brings a sense of urgency when we think of enjoying the last of things (the last produce from the garden, the last flowers, the last warm evenings, the last of the light) before they vanish for a while. Recently we had a mild sunny day after some cool gray days. It’s October, so I knew that winter will soon be here and I will be coming home from work in the cold and the dark. So I decided to go out for a walk and watch the nearly full moon rise. If it had been May, and I knew I had many more long warm evenings ahead of me, I might have skipped the walk. In the big scheme of things, the pleasures of a walk before dinner are minor, but they are real, and I might have missed them without the pressure of the changing seasons.

This is part of what people are getting at when they talk about how having eternity at our command would spoil things. If we didn’t know that our time is finite, would we ever do the things we want to do? Most of us would drag our feet forever when it comes to paying taxes or getting our teeth cleaned, but would we really put off joys like a walk on a pleasant evening? I’d love to say that if I knew I’d live forever, I’d manage to get just as much pleasure out of each passing day, but I have to admit that it’s probably not so.

A. E. Housman talks about the other end of the year, and of life, to make the point in his poem Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now. In the poem, a young man realizes that even the 50 springs he likely has left to him is a short time to look at the cherry trees in blossom, so he must go out to see them now. Garrison Keillor wrote a witty variant that talks about the autumn end of the year and of life; a 60-year-old man realizes how few autumns he has left and concludes that

It’s rather sobering for a fellow
To see the maples turning yellow.

Being reminded of our mortality can thus help keep us more focused on using our time well. Oddly enough, in the alchemy of the human mind, this can foster either a carpe diem attitude or one of renunciation. The phrase memento mori is basically a reminder that we are mortal, and expresses an important theme in art. Being mindful of death not only keeps us more intent on using the time we have; it can keep us humble because everyone, no matter how important or powerful, is subject to death. In Christian art, fleeting earthly pleasures were presented as shallow or meaningless in the light of the eternal truth of God and heaven; thus the memento mori theme goaded people to reject rather than savor the joys of our brief time here.

That’s one way of dealing with the idea of death. There’s also a pessimistic view that nothing we have here is worth missing all that much when we go; that’s one way to get past the fear of death. Some see pain and woe and are not really all that sorry to go; some advocate living life such that you are not leaving anything important behind when your time comes; you should not be so attached to anything you are doing that you will mind setting it down when the time comes. This is hard for me to accept.

No matter how bad things get, life has still generally got something that keeps me wanting to stick around and see what happens next. I liked a recent quote from Freeman Dyson about how the best way to learn the future of science is to live long enough and watch what happens. (That’s my plan for the future of everything.) There are so many stories, personal and global, for which I will never know the endings; I want to live far enough into future times that I can get at least some of the answers, and some perspective on what we’re living through right now.

Also, life is full of things that I want to do. One of the most painful parts of the fear of death is the fear of not getting the chance to do all the things you have it in you to do. Keats wrote:

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain…

I know the fear. Not that my brain teems with anything like the things that his did, but such as it is, I want to express what’s in there. Not to mention that I’d like to understand better what’s in there too.

Some philosophers have advocated the contemplation of death as a way to become familiar with it and stop fearing it. Seneca recommended this, and I believe it is an important part of some Buddhist traditions. More recently, Muriel Spark said that “[w]ithout an ever present sense of death life is insipid.” Horace told us to “Think each day, when past, thy last; the next day, as unexpected, will be the more welcome.” But I find the regular awareness of death to be so unsettling that I cannot enjoy living. For me, it leads to the very fear it is meant to quell.

When you consider how to follow Horace’s advice, you realize that practically you cannot live as if each day were your last, because you wouldn’t pay the rent or go to work. And realizing that life is a balancing act between present and future, if you try to simply keep the emotional awareness of your finitude ever before you, you can be in for some highly unpleasant experiences. (It’s not a good idea to meditate on the brevity of life during a long frustrating day at work, for example, lest you leap up from your desk and run headlong out into the sunshine.) And even when you have free time to enjoy as you like, it’s possible to be paralyzed by the feeling that you have to choose wisely because this might be the last free time you get. For myself, I find that I need to rely on at least a provisional assumption that there will be a future, where I can correct the mistakes I make today, enjoy the things I can’t today, and accomplish the things I don’t finish today.

However, it’s hard not to think about death. It is always before us. Montaigne, after listing a number of unexpected deaths, asks:

These so frequent and common examples passing every day before our eyes, how is it possible a man should disengage himself from the thought of death, or avoid fancying that it has us, every moment, by the throat?

So ignoring it doesn’t seem possible, but dwelling on it can be paralyzing or anxiety-provoking. Everyone has to consider what to do with the knowledge that he or she will die someday, but how? My own approach to this question comes through a Catholic childhood in which I assumed that everyone I loved would live forever in heaven, no matter what happened down here. I realized as I grew older that even this belief doesn’t really do away with the fear or the grief of death entirely, and I couldn’t find a good reason to believe in the promise of immortality anyway. But I’ve had a hard time replacing my original beliefs about mortality with new ones that I can live with.

Things have become easier as I have learned more about how life arose and continues on the planet. It’s scary to start seeing yourself as a vulnerable animal whose mind is part of your body and therefore can be wiped out by any number of accidents and is subject to the inexorable effects of aging and eventual death. But after you think about it some more (years more, in my case), you start to see how humans fit into the natural landscape and why death is a necessary part of the picture.

Tyler Volk, in his book What is Death?, explained how death is so interwoven with the processes of life that we would not be here without it. Longevity is the result of a trade-off of sorts; the more likely a creature is to survive the daily assaults of disease, predators, and other forces of nature, the more it will invest in maintenance and repair. Bigger animals or those that are somehow protected (creatures that fly, tortoises in their shells) will tend to have a longer life expectancy. (This reminds me of the balance each of us must strike between deciding when to live for today and when to save for tomorrow.) He describes death as the price we have to pay, after the fact, for our time on this earth. He also quotes Carl Sagan’s beautiful phrase about how the “secrets of evolution are time and death.” Without death, evolution would not work, and complex life would never have arisen. In the most basic biological sense, we would not be here without limits on our time here.

So death can be seen as an admission price that we pay at the end of the experience rather than the beginning. The biological understanding of this is recent, but the idea is not a new one. Robert Browning wrote of wishing to “in a minute pay glad life’s arrears Of pain, darkness and cold”, and Montaigne wrote that “Your death is a part of the order of the universe, ’tis a part of the life of the world…’tis the condition of your creation; death is a part of you.”

Edward Abbey wrote of being recycled into the life of nature after we die. In particular, he addressed those who are about to die in the desert and be consumed by a buzzard. In that situation, he said, you can comfort yourself with the idea that after you die, “your essence [will be] transfigured into the fierce greedy eyes and unimaginable consciousness of a turkey vulture. … For most of us a promotion in grade, for some the realization of an ideal.” I don’t know that I’d go that far, but I can see his point.

Thoreau, in his essay Autumnal Tints, lovingly describes the many colors of fall in New England, from late August through the last leaves of October or November, and also speaks of how the leaves, going so serenely and beautifully to their rest, teach us to die. “When the leaves fall, the whole earth is a cemetery pleasant to walk in,” he says. I re-read this essay every fall. I sometimes have a hard time adjusting myself to the approach of winter—the short dark days, the cold—so every fall I hang onto his words as we head into the darkness.

So the view of ourselves as part of nature’s cycles can bring some hard-won peace. Which brings me back to the idea of death giving life its savor, because, melancholy as this time of year can be, and as little as I like to think about death, I also find a certain passion in thinking of how briefly we are here. I listen to the chorus in the second movement of the Brahms German Requiem, for example, singing all-out about how all flesh is as the grass, and it stirs my soul. Marcus Aurelius found any number of poetic ways to speak of our finitude, including this:

The great river of Being flows on without a pause; its actions forever changing, its causes shifting endlessly, hardly a single thing standing still; while ever at hand looms infinity stretching behind and before—the abyss in which all things are lost to sight.

I don’t know exactly why these move me to such joy, exalting rather than terrifying. Maybe it’s the big-picture view of our own lives against the backdrop of something immense. For all that we are so ephemeral, we can understand so much of things we will never personally see or do; maybe that’s the blessing, the other side of being given a foreknowledge of our own deaths. Robert Macfarlane, writing of the horror of contemplating the vast stretches of time that are required for mountains to build up and wear down, writes:

Yet there is also something curiously exhilarating about the contemplation of deep time. True, you learn yourself to be a blip in the larger projects of the universe. But you are also rewarded with the realization that you do exist—as unlikely as it may seem, you do exist.

For me, those words express a crucial shift in perspective that I have made: from believing that eternal life in the hereafter was a given, to rejoicing at being here at all, even for a little while. Understanding as much as possible of how human existence came to be is, for me, a way of appreciating my life without slipping over into the fear of losing it.

Acknowledgements

Many of the quotes in this essay come from my own collection, but I recently discovered Michel de Montaigne’s essay That to study philosophy is to learn how to die, and I have borrowed some of the quotes he used and also some of his own words. I also borrowed a few quotes from a web site on this topic, The Key to Life Is That It Ends… [alas, web sites also end, so it is now defunct—June 2018].

Thinking Meat Project

How humans relate to nature

Posted on by Mary / 2 Comments

What is the goal of conservation biology or environmental activism? (Or to put it more generally, what is our obligation toward nature?) If the goal is to preserve nature in as pristine a state as possible, untouched by humans, how does this account for the fact that humans are not separate from nature but rather a part of it? This afternoon I heard a lecture by J. Baird Callicott, a noted environmental philosopher, about this question. (The talk was organized by Indiana University’s Poynter Center for the Study of Ethics and American Institutions.)

Callicott outlined some of the attitudes toward humans and nature over time; most relied on some kind of metaphysical essential attribute of man that separated him from nature. Man was created in the image of God, for example, or man was the rational animal. Darwin turned this kind of thing upside down when he said that our supposedly unique capabilities (e.g., for speech or intelligence or ethics) evolved over time from proto-capabilities in other species. This idea that there is no boundary between us and other species is central to Aldo Leopold’s land ethic, which “changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it.” (Quote from A Sand County Alamanc)

But, as Callicott stated the resulting paradox: “If Homo sapiens is a part of nature, then human actions, no less than the actions of other species, are natural–just another intriguing chapter in the biography of the earth, no more subject to ethical praise or condemnation than the actions of other species.” And of course many of us would take vigorous exception to that idea, which has consequences for how we treat the land and the creatures we share it with. (In his book Conversations with the Archdruid, John McPhee quotes Floyd Dominy (former Commissioner of Reclamation, and big on dams) as saying: “Nature changes the environment every day of our lives–why shouldn’t we change it? We’re part of nature.”)

Callicott found a resolution to the paradox by considering the various time scales operating in nature, from the organismic (operating at the level of the individual organism, and including processes of metabolism and photosynthesis), to the ecological (processes of succession and disturbance), climatic, evolutionary, and geomorphological. The processes of the organismic scale range in duration from one day to about a thousand years, of the ecological scale from one year to thousands of years, and so on, with each scale having a longer timespan. Geomorphological cycles are the longest of all, some of them stretching into the billions of years.

Humans speciated on the evolutionary time scale, and evolved the capacity for culture on the same scale, which places humans and human culture both within the time scales of nature. But human culture, once launched, is Lamarckian (relying on the inheritance or transmission of acquired or learned characteristics) rather than Darwinian, and thus operates on a much shorter time scale (and Callicott presented a brief summary of weapon technology to illustrate that it’s not only faster, it’s speeding up these days).

And this is where the resolution of the paradox arrives: we cross the boundary between human and nature when we begin to “transform ecosystems faster than other biota can adapt.” So we are a part of nature, not set apart by God or by our special abilities or by something in our essence like our rationality; but at the same time we are not free to do whatever we want and claim that all our actions are natural and thus value-neutral and not subject to moral judgment. We need to act appropriately with respect to the spatio-temporal scales of nature.

Well, there it is in a nutshell; the talk lasted an hour, with half an hour of question-and-answer afterward, so this is just a sketch, but it should give you the gist of it. I found it a reasonably coherent way to resolve something that I have puzzled over. I need to think about it some more, but this certainly gave me some ideas to chew over (and some more ideas for books to read). Some interesting questions came up afterward, including one about practical recommendations arising from all this. He gave several examples of ways to make our footprint smaller, e.g., vegetarianism (not for the sake of livestock, who might not be alive at all if we weren’t raising them for food, but for efficiency of land use–since we get relatively little food out of animals for each pound of grain we put in, it would be more efficient to eat lower on the food chain–which frees land up to go back to an uncultivated state). He mentioned an initiative he’s involved in in Denton, Texas, where he lives, to concentrate development so as to leave room for green space. (If it can happen in Texas, he said, it can happen anywere.)

I’d be very interested in hearing anyone else’s thoughts on this subject. Like I said, I’m still chewing it over myself.

Thinking Meat Project

How dangerous is it on this planet?

Posted on by Mary / 1 Comment

Well, it’s evidently more dangerous these days, but that’s because of us humans. This article from Live Science discusses how things that used to be just natural events have become disasters either because more humans are living in areas where they are vulnerable, or because we’ve changed the environment in a way that increases the harmful effects of “hydro-meteorological events” like floods or major storms. I read Jared Diamond’s Collapse this spring, and then I read a series on global warming in the New Yorker that was gloomy in the extreme (it was strange to try to come to grips with the idea that we might really be on the brink of irrevocable and disastrous climate change, maybe even the collapse of civilization, while reading this in the New Yorker amidst the ads for vodka, jewelry, and luxury travel). And after all the disasters so far this year, we have another hurricane on the loose that has already tied one record (for the most named storms in a year, 21) and set another (this was for a while the most powerful Atlantic hurricane ever recorded). It’s hard to know how to take all the news of actual and pending catastrophe; ignore it at your peril, but pay too much attention to it and you go crazy.

http://www.livescience.com/environment/051017_natural_disasters.html

Thinking Meat Project

The nature of religious belief

Posted on by Mary

Is religion good for you or bad for you, in an evolutionary sense? I’ve certainly seen plenty of evidence in my own life for both positive and negative emotional effects of religious beliefs, and there are arguments on either side for whether it helps or hurts humans to survive and reproduce. A few months ago I read Robert Sloan Wilson’s book Darwin’s Cathedral, which examines the idea of religion as an adaptation. Now I see that there’s another book out on the nature of religion, The Story of God by Robert Winston. Here are some excerpts published in The Guardian that discuss the possible genetic basis for religious belief, possible survival and reproductive benefits, and religion’s costs. Winston draws a distinction between extrinsic and intrinsic religiosity: extrinsic is when you go to church or synagogue for the advantages it confers or because it’s part of the expectations of your group—basically because it helps you thrive as part of the group. Intrinsic religiosity, on the other hand, is what it sounds like—your spirituality is an integral part of who you are and how you find meaning in your life. In a study of various religious groups, including snake-handlers in the southern US, the people whose religious beliefs were extrinsic (mostly mainstream churchgoers, not the snake-handlers) had a higher rate of mental illness.

I’ve seen in my own life how the Church can offer a great deal of comfort, but often in situations where adherence to the Church’s rules is what was causing misery in the first place. On a less personal level, what struck me when I heard Robert Sloan Wilson give a talk here at IU was the problems with religion as a means for cohesion within a social group. For all it does to help members of a community thrive, the down side is that the community is struggling for survival against not just the forces of nature but also against other groups of people. What it seems like religion does is raise the level of the struggle from being man against man to church against church, or more accurately belief system against belief system. And look what that’s done for the world.

(Added 10/22/05) I ought to clarify that Wilson in general spoke positively on the effects of religion on social groups; the downside that I noted seemed obvious to me from what he was saying, but it wasn’t something he emphasized.

An interesting side note is that when Winston talked in the Guardian piece about genes that might influence personality and affect how strongly religious a person is, he mentioned the dopamine receptor gene DRD4. Coincidentally, I read a press release from the University of Michigan yesterday that talked about a link betwen a variant of this gene and a tendency toward hypertension, due to the gene’s influence on how the kidneys process sodium. (I was interested in this because I have evidently inherited hypertension from my parents.) The results the UMich researchers got was unexpected because the gene was being studied for its role in personality and behavior, and the hypertension discovery was something of a bonus. It will be very interesting to see if other collaborations between behavioral geneticists and medical researchers will reveal other unexpected connections like this.