Although we sometimes refer to sadness as “the blues,” depression can often feel more like a state of unrelieved gray. Some recent research has found that in the retinas of depressed people, the response to black/white contrasts was notably lower than in healthy people. This backs up an earlier study which found that depressed people had a harder time detecting differences between black and white (I’m assuming they were talking about fairly subtle differences). The effect of viewing a more monotone world seems obvious (what a downer), but it’s not clear to me how to interpret it. This seems like evidence of a glitch in the sensory equipment that’s associated with depression. On the other hand, some researchers think that depression might be (or might have been) an adaptive withdrawal from the world; in that case, the change in vision might be part of the mechanism that causes that withdrawal. At any rate, the effect was big enough that they could tell most of the depressed people from the healthy ones.
This video, which pairs words from Carl Sagan with images from from Stephen Hawking’s Into the Universe and Brian Cox’s Wonders of the Solar System, gives Carl Sagan’s poetically expressed description of how our species has grown into a better understanding of the universe. Enjoy.
I’ve posted a couple of links lately to stories about humans, chimps, and violence. The New York Times recently ran a brief interview with two primatologists who study bonobos, the hippy cousin of chimps and humans. The title of the article is “Why Bonobos Don’t Kill Each Other,” and while that question isn’t really answered, it’s still an interesting look at bonobo research.
I’m really enjoying Eric Weiner’s book The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World, in which he describes his travels in 10 different countries in search of the meaning of happiness. (Oddly enough, of all the places I’ve read about so far, the one I can see myself being happiest in is Iceland. Yes, the winters are dark and long, but he describes a creative atmosphere and a freedom to reinvent yourself that I think I might enjoy.) Anyway, along the same lines, a Gallup poll of more than 136,000 people in 132 countries that ran from 2005 to 2006 has come up with some new insights into the link between income and happiness.
The survey, which its authors report as the first representative sample of the entire planet, asked respondents about their income levels, standard of living, overall evaluations of their lives on a scale of 1 to 10, and numerous quality-of-life indicators such as the degree to which they feel respected or autonomous or find their jobs fulfilling.
The results seemed to identify two different aspects of happiness: an overall feeling that your life is satisfactory and the experience of positive emotions. Life satisfaction does correlate fairly well with income, but evidently the link between enjoying life (or not) on a day-to-day basis is much less well correlated with income. Basically, the study seems to have identified two different types of resources: the possession of economic resources affects life satisfaction, and the possession of psychological/social capital affects day-to-day reports of positive or negative feelings. The study shows that these two flavors of happiness are separate, but I wonder about how they are related.
John Horgan at the Scientific American has written a follow-up to Nicholas Wade’s recent article on chimp violence. Horgan reviews the evidence for and against the theory that chimp violence is widespread and that our hominid ancestors inherited the tendency toward violence from our common ancestor with the chimps. Specifically, he explains why he has become skeptical of the theory. What kind of species are we really? Within the limits of our genome, we’re the kind of species we choose to be, but we may be going less against the grain than we sometimes think when we choose peace.
To understand the full spectrum of the human religious experience, it makes sense to study unbelievers, who have almost certainly been exposed to religious beliefs but chosen not to accept them, as well as believers. Researchers in the psychology department at the University of Waterloo are surveying atheists, agnostics, freethinkers, skeptics, humanists, etc., to try to get a handle on how they view and experience life. If you fall into any of those categories, consider contributing your data points. You can find the survey and more at the Atheism Rising web site. Yes, you probably live in a country that is WEIRD (or maybe WIRED or even WIDER, as a friend pointed out), but they’ve got to start someplace. (Although actually I’d be very interested in learning about the areligious in non-WEIRD cultures. On a somewhat-related tangent, I’ve long wondered what freethinking types did during the Middle Ages in Europe, for example, or in other times and places where everyone was assumed to belong to the prevailing religion.)
That’s a western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) country. Odds are most of you live in one too. So it’s unfortunate, according to a recent study, that people who live in such countries—and typically a particular subset of those people, to boot—provide much of our data on human psychology and behavior.
Researchers at the University of British Columbia examined a comparative database of information from various behavioral sciences and found that it would be hard to find a population less suited for broad generalizations about humans than the inhabitants of WEIRD countries, who provide far and away the majority of data for behavioral studies. The areas they looked at included “visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ.” College students in the US are a subgroup that has its own quirks that differentiate it even from the general run of WEIRD people, and I’m guessing that they are one of the more heavily used groups for psychology research.
So whatever other reservations you may have about things like how well surveys or lab experiments capture people’s real-life behavior and attitudes, add to that the possibility that what we’re learning about is really an atypical batch of humans. A few years back I read David Buller’s book on evolutionary psychology, Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature (Bradford Books), in which he made a fairly persuasive case for the idea that there is no single human nature that describes every human population. Even if there were one, it sounds like we wouldn’t necessarily learn what it is by looking only at people in WEIRD societies. It will be interesting to see what the psychological community makes of this and whether it has any effect on how future studies are done, or at least reported.
Being wrong is unpleasant, in my experience, but the fear of being wrong is even worse. Kathryn Schulz (who recently wrote Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error) has written an article for the Boston Globe about what’s wrong with how we view being wrong. The fear of making a mistake, especially a visible one, can be crippling, and it doesn’t necessarily help prevent mistakes; in fact, it can make it harder to analyze and understand what’s going on in order to rectify it.
Schulz notes that it is our capacity for inductive reasoning that makes us prone to mistakes; our ability to quickly generate likely answers sometimes leads us to accept the wrong one as true. Looked at this way, making mistakes goes hand in hand with being able to eliminate a confusing clutter of possibilities in favor of homing in on probable solutions. As in many other situations in life as thinking meat, we’re looking at a trade-off.
This essentially allows a reframing of the discussion of error. Rather than seeing it as revealing our deepest flaws and inadequacies, Schulz suggests that we accept it as part of the cost of doing business as a cogitating being and move on to understanding it. Only by understanding when and why we’re likely to commit errors are we going to be able to figure out workarounds. In fact, she goes so far as to suggest that we embrace our fallibility so as to better understand our mistakes and learn how to recover from them or avoid them in the first place. Intuitively this makes a lot of sense. When have you ever improved at anything by shaming yourself or trying to hide your inadequacies? (For that matter, when’s the last time this worked when you tried to change someone else’s behavior?) I haven’t read the book yet, but the article may give you a new take on being an error-prone thinker. (H/t Greg for the link to the article.)
Here are some interesting items that have crossed my radar lately.
Subjective information: This article from Seed Magazine may be relevant to a recent comment about the difficulty of answering personality test questions. The article examines the role of self-reported data of all kinds in science. People are asked about various aspects of their own behavior, but how accurate are their answers?
Chimp warfare: Nicholas Wade reports on war-like behavior among chimps at Ngogo, in Kibale National Park in Uganda. A recent paper on ten years of observations concludes that a group of chimps engaged in aggression to expand its territory.
A voluntary end to humans? Bioethicist Peter Singer has written an essay about the morality of bringing children into the world. Many people hesitate to have children whose lives they have reason to believe will be unusually painful or difficult. Singer points out that even a normal healthy life typically involves considerable pain as well as pleasure, and asks why we should go on reproducing at all. The reader responses are full of interesting takes on parenthood, the value of life, and the future of the planet.
Atheist posthumans:This essay provides a completely different view of the (post)human future, suggesting that posthumans will probably be atheists and furthermore that this would be a desirable development. I’m not sure I see super-intelligent posthumans in the future any time soon, but the discussion of atheism is interesting.
Steven Pinker, in a recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, proposes an explanation of how human intelligence evolved. He begins by noting that Charles Darwin had no problem believing that intelligence could be explained by evolutionary theory. However, Alfred Russel Wallace, who arrived at the idea of natural selection around the same time as Darwin, thought that because abstract reasoning would have been of no use to prehistoric humans, intelligence must have been the work of a superior being rather than solely the result of natural processes. Scientists have sided with Darwin, but Wallace’s point about the dubious adaptive value of higher cognitive functions to earlier humans is worth examining. Pinker offers an explanation of how we gained our unique profile of cognitive capabilities.
The explanation rests on two things: the idea that we evolved to fit a cognitive niche, and our capacity for metaphorical abstraction. The concept of a cognitive niche originated with John Tooby and Irven DeVore; the basic idea is that we brought to the evolutionary arms race the rudiments of several characteristics that allowed us to exploit other organisms by reasoning and information-sharing rather than by sheerly physical or chemical means (running faster, producing toxins as plants do, etc.). Once we began to move into this niche, new possibilities opened up, and a host of peculiarly human traits likely co-evolved. Pinker emphasizes three traits: the smarts needed to develop and use tools, the capacity for cooperation with those to whom we are not related, and the capacity for the uniquely human combinatorial system of grammatical language.
He discusses briefly how various quirks of the human organism (for example, our relatively long childhoods and long lives, our cultural differences) could have arisen as a result of the development of these capabilities, and also some of the factors that might have predisposed us toward moving into the cognitive niche (prehensile hands, the inclusion of meat in the diet, living in groups).
This is interesting for several reasons. For one, it’s intuitively appealing (to me, at least) to think of a multitude of interwoven causes for something as complex as human intelligence rather than a single development on which everything else hinged. Also, this theory might explain very nicely why we seem to share some capabilities with other animals, things that were once thought to be uniquely human (compassion for conspecifics, tool use, etc.), but we are the only ones to have such well-developed versions of them and to have them all in combination. Pinker also mentions that we test and fine-tune our strategies on the fly within our own lifetimes rather than relying on the much slower pace of evolutionary change to develop responses to environmental challenges or changes in the organisms we eat or otherwise exploit:
Because humans develop offenses in real time that other organ-
isms can defend themselves against only in evolutionary time,
humans have a tremendous advantage in evolutionary arms races.
This seems to explain why we are uniquely destructive as well, and it gives us (although we should already know this) an extraordinary responsibility.
I was also struck by the following:
The selection pressures that the theory invokes are straight-
forward and do not depend on some highly specific behavior (e.g.,
using projectile weapons, keeping track of wandering children) or
environment (e.g., a particular change in climate), none of which
were likely to be in place over the millions of years in which modern
humans evolved their large brains and complex tools. Instead it
invokes the intrinsic advantages of know-how, cooperation, and
communication that we recognize uncontroversially in the con-
temporary world.
This seems to sidestep my objections to the way evolutionary psychologists sometimes seek to explain our behavior and the way they assume there was a single environment that definitively shaped everything about us.
You still have to wonder how we developed the ability to understand and use things that our ancestors had no pressing need for (differential equations, the concept of the state). That’s where the idea of metaphorical abstraction comes in. Basically, this means that we are able to take relationships that apply to space and force and then abstract them out to apply to other things. Our language is full of such metaphorical uses; when the Dow goes up, it doesn’t really ascend skyward, for example (although when it falls we do sometimes seem to hear a certain sickening thud). These metaphors reveal that we have pressed various physical concepts into use in novel ways. The power of this is that it allows us to mentally combine and manipulate abstractions. He gives lots of interesting references to the literature on this capability.
The article also offers some insight into how the theory of the cognitive niche could be tested, which I find exciting:
The theory can be tested more rigorously, moreover, using the
family of relatively new techniques that detect “footprints of selection” in the human genome (by, for example, comparing rates of
nonsynonymous and synonymous base pair substitutions or the
amounts of variation in a gene within and across species). The theory predicts that there are many genes that were selected in
the lineage leading to modern humans whose effects are concentrated in intelligence, language, or sociality. Working backward,
it predicts that any genes discovered in modern humans to have
disproportionate effects in intelligence, language, or sociality (that
is, that do not merely affect overall growth or health) will be found to
have been a target of selection. This would differentiate the theory
from those that invoke a single macromutation, or genetic changes
that affected only global properties of the brain like overall size, or
those that attribute all of the complexity and differentiation of
human social, cognitive, or linguistic behavior to cultural evolution.
However, Jerry Coyne, in his blog Why Evolution is Truediscusses this paper and goes into some very interesting details on why such testing would be difficult.
In short, Pinker’s paper is full of meaty food for thought and discussion, and it also offers a way to look for evidence, problematic though that may be. Fascinating stuff! The entire paper is available online. The full citation is:
Steven Pinker, The cognitive niche: Coevolution of intelligence, sociality, and language. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, May 11, 2010; 107 (Supplement 2): 8993–8999. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0914630107
In the early 1970s, a Doonesbury comic strip showed a classic moment in which a rebellious crowd of protesters that couldn’t agree on anything found a rallying point: they agreed that they wanted to kill the moderator who was urging them to find common ground in order to effectively fight the system. This captures very nicely the Jekyll and Hyde nature of in-group cohesion. It can be heartwarming, but it often comes with animosity against an out-group.
Some recent research into the workings of the hormone oxytocin revealed that emphasizing its role in fostering trust and interpersonal connections doesn’t tell the whole story. While oxytocin is sometimes called the cuddle hormone because of its importance in pair bonding and maternal behavior, it’s also important in two facets of in-group cohesion: altruism toward those on your side, and defensive aggression against the other side. Male volunteers participated in three experiments where they self-administered either oxytocin or a placebo and then were presented with choices that had various financial consequences for themselves, their in-group, or an out-group. Oxytocin spurred generous, even self-sacrificing, behavior toward one’s own group; if the out-group appeared threatening, oxytocin also spurred defensive aggression to counter the threat.
This article from Science Daily has more information, including a bit about the possible evolutionary implications. The last paragraph seems to be saying that the existence of a neurobiological mechanism that promotes in-group altruism and out-group aggression would support the idea of group selection—selection for behaviors that benefitted an individual’s social group rather than the individual—which is an interesting twist in the discussion on group selection.
It’s interesting that when the out-group didn’t appear to be threatening, only the altruistic behavior appeared. It’s also interesting that one way people have encouraged aggression against others (and, in a roundabout way, social cohesion) has been by emphasizing (or in some cases perhaps even fabricating) evidence that the others are somehow a threat. I’m thinking of the portrayals of enemies during wartime, for one, but also social battles like the one over gay marriage. It’s hard for me to see how widening the definition of marriage to include loving, long-term commitments between same-sex adults poses a threat to heterosexual couples, but plenty of people do feel threatened. Maybe those who encourage such fears are pushing an old (and evidently effective) emotional/neurochemical button.
You may remember hearing about some work that looked at different aspects of morality and found that people who are politically liberal emphasize certain of these aspects, and those who are politically conservative tend to consider them all. (Liberals emphasize caring for others/avoiding harm and fairness/reciprocity, whereas conservatives also consider in-group loyalty, purity, and authority/respect.) A new study expands our knowledge of the relationship between personality traits and political views.
The new work looks at several of the Big Five personality traits: Openness/Intellect, two different aspects of Agreeableness (Compassion and Politeness), and the Orderliness aspect of Conscientiousness. Previous work had indicated that a conservative political outlook was negatively correlated with Openness/Intellect and positively correlated with Conscientiousness. The current work adds a little nuance: the negative correlation between conservatism and Openness/Intellect still holds, and a positive correlation between Orderliness (rather than overall Conscientiousness) was found. Furthermore, a liberal/egalitarian outlook was linked to higher levels of Compassion and a conservative/traditional outlook with higher levels of Politeness.
“Level” is a key word here, it seems to me. With personality traits, everyone falls somewhere on a continuum, so even those who are, say, profoundly introverted still enjoy spending time with others—just not nearly as much as those who are highly extroverted. So these differences are not apples and oranges, exactly; we should in theory be able to find some common ground and at least understand the other side’s point of view, even if we disagree with the degree to which they emphasize one thing or another. This article from Science Daily closes with a quote from one of the new study’s authors to the effect that we appear to need both the liberal and the conservative mindset in any society.
So why are these differences in mindset so sharply and painfully divisive in US politics at the moment? I think part of what is going on is that because political views are linked to personality traits, they often feel like self-obvious views of how the world is and how things work. They’re taken for granted like the water a fish swims in. It can be very difficult to examine them rationally and be prepared to compromise to accommodate the fact that the world and how it works look very different from behind another set of genetic and environmental influences. This leaves aside nasty tactics such as dishonesty or pandering to prejudice, ignorance, or selfishness, the need for an educated citizenry to make a democracy work, and things like the confirmation bias, which tends to make us notice the evidence that confirms our views and discount the evidence against them. I think all these other things come into play partly because our beliefs about the relative importance of fairness, order, or compassion are so inherent to us that we have a hard time taking other rankings of them seriously. I don’t know if it’s a failure of the melting pot, a failure of education, or some more fundamental human flaw, but somehow we haven’t really developed the capacity to use both mindsets productively rather than set them at each other’s throats. Maybe they can’t be consciously accommodated in a single society but must battle it out, back and forth, over and over again?
There are those who say that the development of agriculture was a bad idea. It’s about 12,000 years too late to do anything about it, and as I sit here in an artificially lit room late at night with my laptop connected to the wide world and my stomach pleasantly full of smoked salmon and petite syrah, both of which come from far away (not to mention my blood pressure nicely under control due to medication), I have to say that the civilization that sprang from agriculture is not altogether undesirable. On the other hand, earlier this evening I looked at a heartbreaking series of recent photos from the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s enough to make me wonder if even the greatest achievements of the human mind, which have been possible only through the development of a way to accumulate our knowledge from generation to generation (i.e., civilization) are worth the destruction we have wrought.
Those reservations have to do with our effect on the planet, though. The arguments about agriculture being a bad idea have to do with its effect on humans, and that is the central point of a new book by Spencer Wells, Pandora’s Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization. Wells, a geneticist, directs the Genographic Project, which uses DNA samples from humans worldwide to trace the story of our migrations out of Africa and across the planet.
I haven’t read Pandora’s Seed yet, but an essay Wells wrote for Seed Magazine sparked my interest. After noting the current rapid pace of change and describing some of the ills of westernized societies, which are on the rise in developing countries, he writes:
This seemingly inexorable march toward western unhealthiness made me wonder why it happened in the first place. Is there some sort of fatal mismatch between western culture and our biology that is making us ill? And if there is such a mismatch, how did our present culture come to dominate? Surely we are the masters of our own fate, and we created the culture that is best suited to us, rather than the other way around?
I would really like to know the answer to this question, or even an explanation that might hint at an answer, but I guess I’ll have to read the book, because the article doesn’t really give one. He talks about how we adapted biologically to the changes in our lifestyle, mentioning the accelerated rate of change in our DNA in the last 10,000 years compared to the previous 500,000, which is interesting stuff. I’m assuming the point here is that cultural evolution moves so fast that it outstrips the capacity of biological evolution to keep up because the latter moves much more slowly even at this accelerated pace. Wells mentions a cycle that repeats over and over again in human history but doesn’t really explain what it is and how it is relevant to this problem.
The essay focuses on three challenges we face that evidently are discussed in the last section of Wells’s book: our ability to engineer our genes, climate change; and the fact that we live in a networked world that has, as he describes it, resulted in the loss of “the traditions that guided much of humanity over the past several thousand years.” Regarding this last problem, he says: “Providing an inclusive mythos for the modern age will be a significant challenge of the next century.”
My hackles rose when he described the down side of secular rationality as the “loss of faith and certainty.” I was reminded of something Richard Feynman said: “I can live with doubt, and uncertainty, and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.” And as I wrote recently, I consider the loss of faith to be a step forward. On the other hand, Wells has traveled to remote corners of the world to gather DNA samples, so I’d like to know more about how he sees this loss of faith and certainty playing out in the lives of people around the world, and whether he has any thoughts on how that “inclusive mythos” might be crafted. There certainly are growing pains involved in growing out of faith-based certainty and into a more nuanced, reality-based view of human knowledge about the world, in individual lifetimes and in the lifetime of the species. I hope he’s not saying that these growing pains are not worth the resulting process of maturation.
In short, the essay generated more questions than answers for me, so I will have to read the book and see what it’s all about. Another book on the pile, oh boy!
The more I learn about fish oil, the happier I am that salmon tastes so good. Fish is an excellent source of docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), which is an essential part of the human brain and appears to be vital for healthy brain function.
In fact, it’s possible that an expanded diet that included fish and other aquatic creatures was a necessary part of the process by which our brains grew to their relatively large size. A recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences examines fossils from a site in Kenya that indicate that pre-Homo hominins had added aquatic animals to their diet about 1.95 million years ago, before the emergence of Homo erectus and other ancestor species to our own. Perhaps the addition of these protein-rich and DHA-rich creatures to the hominin diet provided the energy and nutrients needed to support bigger brains. This story from Wired has more information, and the paper is: Early hominin diet included diverse terrestrial and aquatic animals 1.95 Ma in East Turkana, Kenya, David R. Braun, John W. K. Harris, Naomi E. Levin, Jack T. McCoy, Andy I. R. Herries, Marion K. Bamford, Laura C. Bishop, Brian G. Richmond, and Mzalendo Kibunjia. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 107 No. 22, June 2, 2010.
The Economist has written this article about a recent “Celebration of DHA” in London. The article briefly describes the importance of DHA for not just the emergence of large human brains, but perhaps the emergence of nervous systems in the first place. It also talks about the current human diet in many industrialized countries, which tends to substitute omega-6 fats for omega-3 fats, and goes into some of the detrimental effects of this switch. Eat your fish!
I’ve been watching the Ken Burns series on the history of America’s national parks (highly recommended). I’ve noticed how many of the people he interviews or quotes talk about how they love being surrounded by natural settings because of the way it makes them feel. The repeated message seems to be that there is something about nature that resonates in the human psyche. Some recent research indicates that this may be more than a subjective judgement. Spending time outside in nature makes people feel more energetic, according to researchers who completed five separate studies that looked at both actual time spent in natural settings and imagined time in such settings. The researchers took into account the effect of physical activity and the socializing that tends to go on when people are hiking or camping together, and found that the increased energy could not be attributed entirely to these mood boosters. It’s evidently due to something about nature itself.
This is an interesting finding, especially the part about how as little as 20 minutes of time outside in nature during the day can be enough to trigger the energy boost. Indiana University’s master plan for the Bloomington campus involves planting lots of trees, restoring an urban waterway (the Jordan river), and creating more pleasant walking paths. There are a lot of reasons that all of this is a good idea, but maybe part of the benefit to campus inhabitants will be that it makes them feel good to spend time outside among the trees or walking along the river.
This article from Science Daily has more information, and the full article is:
Richard M. Ryan, Netta Weinstein, Jessey Bernstein, Kirk Warren Brown, Louis Mistretta, Marylène Gagné. Vitalizing effects of being outdoors and in nature. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 2010; 30 (2): 159 DOI: 10.1016/j.jenvp.2009.10.009.
Remember the Total Perspective Vortex in one of the Hitchhiker’s Guide books? It was supposed to offer an accurate glimpse of your true place in the staggeringly immense universe, and its deadliness proved that, as Douglas Adams put it, “In an infinite universe, the one thing sentient life cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.” Maybe a totally accurate sense of proportion would indeed be unendurable, but I love things that have the capacity to lift me out of my self-absorption and show me something of the true scale of the earth, the solar system, or the universe. This video, which combines two video sequences and words by Carl Sagan, fills the bill. Enjoy.
NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is returning some wonderfully detailed images of the lunar surface, and you can help analyze them. Moon Zoo, a companion project to Galaxy Zoo, invites people to examine LRO images, mark craters and interesting features, do rough estimates of the number of boulders, and do more extensive crater description. It’s easy to learn how, and like Galaxy Zoo, it’s strangely addictive. Citizen scientists, go for it!
I’m currently at work on a novel, so I’m more alert now to the ways that fiction writers create compelling imaginary worlds and characters that seem real. I’ve been an avid reader since I was little, but I’ve usually been content to let writers work their magic and to think about the themes they explore without getting too deeply into the techniques they use. It’s interesting to look at fiction from the inside and try to understand those techniques. Applying them myself seems to be a fascinating blend of conscious effort and subconscious serendipity that I notice only after it’s done.
A recent news story reported on a study of how Rembrandt made his portraits so compelling. It’s not clear whether he was applying a set of methods consciously or instinctively, but researchers at Simon Fraser University and the University of British Columbia have helped clarify how he did it. They created portraits that reproduced Rembrandt’s techniques and used them to identify specific features that attract and guide the eye.
They created modern analogs to four of Rembrandt’s late portraits, matching them as closely as possible to the originals in terms of pose and lighting, as well as the use of colors, brush detail, and various other stylistic attributes. Then they manipulated the level of detail in four different areas of each image and recruited viewers to take a look. They monitored the viewers’ eye movements as they examined the images and also asked about their subjective preferences. Areas of finer detail held the viewers’ gaze longer, calming and guiding the eye; when this happened, viewers rated an image as more artistically pleasing. So one trick of the painter’s trade appears to be selective and subtle use of detail to control the way the painting is experienced.
I have never learned to paint, so I don’t know if this use of textural variety is taught explicitly or if painters apply it consciously. Are there any painters out there who can tell me about their experiences?
One of the more interesting claims in last year’s announcement of the species Ardipithecus ramidus is that Ardi appears to have been bipedal and that the species lived in a forested environment. This casts doubt upon the hypothesis that bipedalism arose when the environment of our pre-human ancestors shifted from forest to savanna, because walking on two legs made gathering food less energy-intensive than going about on all fours in a more open savanna environment.
However, a team of eight scientists (anthropologists and geologists) have examined the evidence given in the original report on Ardipithecus and conclude that it supports the savanna hypothesis after all, suggesting that Ardi lived in a. This press release from EurekAlert has some of the details. It’s a fascinating story in which different lines of evidence—carbon isotopes levels in the teeth of grazing animals, silica phytoliths (microscopic grains in plant tissue)—are brought to bear on the big question of when and why bipedalism emerged. (For some of the debate about whether or not Ardi was bipedal, see this article from Scientific American from last fall.)
On May 28, 585 BC, a total eclipse of the sun was visible from the Ionian island of Miletus. What makes this particularly noteworthy is that Thales of Miletus predicted the event. Thales was the first thinker that we know of to propose that every observable event has a physical cause. He rejected supernatural causation and the role of the gods. It’s not clear exactly how he knew the eclipse would occur, but he explained it as a natural event, evidently on the basis of knowledge of the cycles of solar and lunar motion and eclipses. He apparently understood that the sun was darkened because the moon passed in front of it, not because the gods were upset or were trying to tell us something. This belief in natural causes and in our ability to discover them was the hallmark of his legacy. To quote from the article about Thales in The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
“Because he gave no role to mythical beings, Thales’s theories could be refuted. Arguments could be put forward in attempts to discredit them. Thales’s hypotheses were rational and scientific. Aristotle acknowledged Thales as the first philosopher, and criticized his hypotheses in a scientific manner.”
In short, Thales was the first to articulate what we would describe today as the scientific approach to knowledge. In last week’s What’s New, Robert Parks said that the eclipse marks the birth of science, and that seems as good a way to see it as any.
For me, the birth of science marks the beginning of a tremendous coming of age for our species. When you stop to think about it, it really is astonishing that we bipedal apes, with our inherent cognitive biases, limited life spans, and severely limited physical survival zone, have managed to learn so much about not only the things we see around us every day, but the distant past of our planet, the microscopic and quantum underpinnings of our world, and the far reaches of the universe.
This is why I’ve never really understood a recurring lament in the western world. The story goes that life was pretty good for us when we had a story of a god who created the world, damned us, and then redeemed us, a story that put us at the center of the narrative of all of history. We thought we had a purpose, because this god had given us one. We thought that if we did the will of this god here on earth, he would give us eternal life with all of our loved ones hereafter. We thought that however capricious he might seem to be, he loved us and was looking out for us, despite some severe testing from time to time (or, for many people, more or less constantly).
This cozy nursery story of a personal god and his plan for us was challenged by Copernicus’s suggestion that the sun did not go around the earth, and that in fact it was the other way around. Earth is not the center of the universe, but merely one of several planets circling the sun. Worse was to come: The sun wasn’t the center of the universe, but merely one of many stars in the galaxy, and not even a particularly prominent one at the center—not Rome or London or New York, but some dusty backwater in the provinces. The galaxy was one of many galaxies in the cosmos, none of them particularly favored with a central location. Furthermore, the earth was vastly older than the Biblical story taught. For many, the most serious blow is that all the evidence suggests that we, and all the other living beings on this planet, were not created ex nihilo by a deity, but were the result of a long, entirely natural process, what Carl Sagan described poetically as a matter of time and death.
The basic story line is that science has slowly ejected us from our place at the pinnacle of earthly creation, below only the angels and god, that it took away our belief in ourselves as having a special role and a unique meaning. However, I think this is totally backward. When Thales predicted that eclipse, we were still in our infancy in terms of coming to terms in a rational way with the physical reality in which we live. We were at the mercy of superstition and ignorance. Since then we’ve been like children leaving the illusory safety (and real bullies) of the playroom and becoming increasingly better acquainted with reality. The millennia since Thales have been a remarkable, if sometimes slow, journey. All those ejections from the center of the universe have actually been a series of amazing gains in our knowledge and abilities. We’re not being demoted; we’re growing up! It’s not been a continual story of loss and exile; we’re coming home! We’re learning the true nature of our surroundings and our true place in the big picture. Weeping over what we supposedly lost is like mourning over losing the helplessness and ignorance of childhood.
The world is not lonely and empty without the supernatural. It’s still filled with all of our fellow humans (some of the ones who are not here any more have even left their thoughts behind for us to share), not to mention our rich connections with the natural world. The world is not devoid of meaning; we can decide what it means. Many are choosing systems of meaning that are free from concepts of sin, divine retribution, and inherent guilt; once you realize that we are, to some extent, creating our own viewpoint, why not create a positive one? The emotional connections we form with family and friends can be strong and enduring even in the total absence of the supernatural; I think they offer all the comfort possible or needed in an imperfect world. There is not a shred of evidence for life after death, save the brief immortality of living on in the hearts and minds of those with whom we have shared ourselves. That’s enough, in my opinion.
If you yearn for connection to something bigger and more permanent than yourself, at least two compelling possibilities are available. First, human exploration and the expansion of knowledge are an enduring intergenerational saga that rivals any other story ever told for drama, satisfaction, heroism, struggle, adversity, and triumph. Second, the natural world was here long before we appeared and something of it will go on long after the last of us is not even a memory. Like it or not, we’re a part of it, and we can turn the story of our planet’s ecosystems toward tragedy or toward fulfillment. Either or both of these grand narratives offer enough meaning to fill many lifetimes.
Furthermore, the story of our species, our planet, our universe, is fascinating. It’s not always comforting or comfortable, but it’s the bedrock physical reality on which we live. We need to know how it works in order to know how to live well within its limits and understand all of its possibilities. Not only that, though: it’s beautiful! From fragments of ancient bone, we can slowly trace our lineage. From photons shed long ago by distant stars and galaxies, we can puzzle out the story of the universe. We can sit on a mountain at 7000 feet and see the fossils of marine animals, or walk along an Indiana creek and see the fossilized crinoids, and understand a former world very different from the one we know. We can examine DNA and begin to understand the deepest biochemical roots of our nature and the evolutionary links in the tree of life. Scientific knowledge is not just a source of power; it’s a source of wonder.
So, happy birthday, Science! I offer best wishes and great respect to all who have used careful observation, dispassionate analysis, and reasoned argument to advance our knowledge.
, in which he describes his travels in 10 different countries in search of the meaning of happiness. (Oddly enough, of all the places I’ve read about so far, the one I can see myself being happiest in is Iceland. Yes, the winters are dark and long, but he describes a creative atmosphere and a freedom to reinvent yourself that I think I might enjoy.) Anyway, along the same lines, a Gallup poll of more than 136,000 people in 132 countries that ran from 2005 to 2006 has come up with some new insights into the link between income and happiness.
, in which he made a fairly persuasive case for the idea that there is no single human nature that describes every human population. Even if there were one, it sounds like we wouldn’t necessarily learn what it is by looking only at people in WEIRD societies. It will be interesting to see what the psychological community makes of this and whether it has any effect on how future studies are done, or at least reported.
) has written 
. Wells, a geneticist, directs the Genographic Project, which uses DNA samples from humans worldwide to trace the story of our migrations out of Africa and across the planet. 