People are shaping their own evolution, and adapting to pressures of their own making.
Archive for evolution
Human Culture, an Evolutionary Force
Posted in Relay with tags evolution, nature on April 3, 2010 by bawehaliMachiavellian insects evolve bigger, social brains
Posted in Relay with tags biology, ecology, evolution, insects, nature, science on March 31, 2010 by bawehaliDiscoveries about the brain of the humble sweat bee, with its unusual social structure, have allowed biologists to collect some of the best evidence yet that living in a society can boost brain size.
Warning: Your Reality is Out of Date
Posted in Relay with tags evolution, psychology on March 25, 2010 by bawehaliNew facts – especially complex ones that replace existing beliefs, may take a while to soak in…Introducing the “mesofact.”
A Virus With Shoes
Posted in Hyper-Essay with tags biology, ecology, evolution, language, nature, science on January 9, 2010 by bawehali
People suck, and that’s my contention. We’re a virus with shoes.
—comedian Bill Hicks
I actually like quite a lot of people, but there’s much to recommend Hicks’ notion that people are viruses with shoes. It’s a fact that well over 40% of the human DNA chain is viral in origin, as Michael Specter writes in a fascinating New Yorker article, “Darwin’s Surprise”:
Nothing—not even the Plague—has posed a more persistent threat to humanity than viral diseases: yellow fever, measles, and smallpox have been causing epidemics for thousands of years. At the end of the First World War, fifty million people died of the Spanish flu; smallpox may have killed half a billion during the twentieth century alone…
Scientists have long suspected that if a retrovirus happens to infect a human sperm cell or egg, which is rare, and if that embryo survives—which is rarer still—the retrovirus could take its place in the blueprint of our species, passed from mother to child, and from one generation to the next, much like a gene for eye color or asthma.
One scientist interviewed for the New Yorker article, Thierry Hiedmann, contends that the mapping of the human genome project and recent findings about “endogenous retroviruses” show that genes and viruses are not, in fact, distinct entities, and that the concept of virus and humanity as enemies or combatants, rather than as co-evolutionary forces, is in error. Heidmann and others have even suggested that without viral influence, mammals might never have developed a placenta, which protects the fetus and gives it time to mature and led to live birth. “These viruses made those changes possible, [and] It is quite possible that, without them, human beings would still be laying eggs.”
So the stuff of us, the meat of our matter, is partially viral in origin. What of our language, and our culture?
Well. That partially depends on whether or not you believe language shapes thought or vice-versa. Lots of smart people disagree on this particular point. On one side are those like, oh, Noam Chomsky, who say cognition and certain brain structures give rise to infinitely varying, yet universal, linguistic impulses.
On the other side there are linguistic relativists, like the curious Benjamin Lee Whorf, an amateur linguist (Darwin was an amateur biologist) and evolutionary biologist, botanist, theologian, and physicist, who in addition to linguistics, wrote about gravitation, “being,” trees, color theory, evolution, large stemmed plants, electromagnetism, dreams, and even wrote a Hopi-English dictionary.
Whorf grew to prominence and influence through his work, exploring how languages shape the habit and thought of their users.
Presume, as many linguists do, that there’s a middle ground between these two positions, and admit the possibility that language acts on people much as people act on or through language.
“A virus operates autonomously, without human intervention. It attaches itself to a host and feeds off of it, growing and spreading from host to host. Language infects us; its power derives not from its straightforward ability to communicate or persuade but rather from this infectious nature, this power of bits of language to graft itself onto other bits of language, spreading and reproducing, using human beings as hosts.The notion of the meme—coined in 1976 by Richard Dawkins to illustrate the field of memetics—crystallizes this view of the communication process. Georges Bataille similarly argued that communication was best understood from the perspective of contagion. In Bataille any human being is no more than a conduit for communicative process, a channel for ideas which pass through him/her.”If, as it appears to me, a book is communication, then the author is only a link among many readings.” The author is simply a node on a network, through which ideas pass…
Subjectivity is an illusion, one that allows us to operate comfortably in this plane of existence, but which nonetheless masks true reality, in which there is no division between subject and object: “There is no longer subject-object, but a ‘yawning gap’ between the one and the other and, in the gap, the subject, the object are dissolved; there is passage, communication, but not from one to the other: the one and the other have lost their separate existence”
—Bernardo Attias, Associate Professor of Communication Studies at California State University
Language and humanity itself as a virus were major themes in the work of William S. Burroughs, who employed a number of techniques to explore the murky relation between language and its host. One of his better-known techniques was to employ a “cut-up” method that allowed him to splice, fold-in and reassemble different texts or parts of texts, sometimes to surprising effect. The technique seems not to have yielded much literary fruit beyond that willed into being by Burrough’s own fevered imagination, but when pondering the all-encompassing constancy of flux, and the role of human beings and viruses as co-evolutionary partners, and when wondering at the viral properties of language and culture, it’s worth considering the thoughts of a visionary like Burroughs, who identified as a Manichean, and who believed he was writing mythology for the space age:
“I am advancing the theory that we were not designed to remain in our present state, any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole forever,” wrote Burroughs, suggesting that what human evolution requires is actually a biological mutation away from that which one knows as human.
Burroughs also had some interesting things to say about The Johnsons and the Shits and their epic battle for the very light of the world. Burroughs always did have a way of making profane things like “Get over yourself, changeling,” and “extinction is inevitable” sound somehow like an already familiar pulp novel.
Here Comes the Ocean (and the Triumph of Slime)
Posted in Hyper-Essay, Review & Write-Up with tags ecology, evolution, government, water on February 17, 2009 by bawehali
Climate change is causing the sea to rise far faster than expected, potentially a meter or more by 2100. Perhaps that doesn’t seem so dire to you. Perhaps you read that sentence and think: “Pity; there go some beaches and beach-front real estate.” Maybe you think: “You know, I’ve always liked the ocean more than New York City anyway…” If so, you may not be getting the picture, because a rise of just one meter will literally drown cities and towns across the globe, displacing millions of people, creating food shortages, epic political conflicts and disease epidemics.
It is not just the amount of overall rise that is of concern. Storm surges will increase dramatically in strength if baseline sea level is higher. Hurricanes and typhoons have already increased significantly in strength and duration, an effect scientists attribute to climate change, and this is expected to continue. More than 10,000 people have been killed in storm surges in the Bay of Bengal alone in the last 300 years, and such surges could increase exponentially in the coming years. This means that the watery ends of Miami, Tokyo, New York, Mumbai, Shanghai, Jakarta, and Dhaka are not just possible, but actually likely.
Their ends might come from the sea, something like this:
…or from the sky, like this:
(The already disappearing island of Kiribati is, of course, already f–ked.)
Even if we stabilize carbon emissions immediately—an impossible task given global political and economic forces—we will still see significant or even catastrophic sea-level rise for centuries to come.
Many people still consider the anthropogenic aspects of climate change to be merely theoretical, and regard dire climate change forecasts like those limned in this pithy blog post as alarmist, worst-case scenario scaremongering. (Among this group, you most likely can find a good number of people who believe in things like “intelligent” design and Norse origin mythology, too…)
But consider that all modern coastal development and industrialization have taken place under a period of temporary sea level stability, which would not likely have been maintained long term even without the anthropogenic effects of climate change accelerating sea level rise. During the last Ice Age 20,000 years ago, sea level was about 120 meters lower than today—and the average temperature then was only four to seven degrees Celsius colder! In the Pliocene era three million years ago (at least 2.5 millions years before homo sapiens even appeared) sea level was forty meters higher than today.
We, you see, are only blips in the deep-time soup of the planet.
Or maybe it would be better to say deep-time slime. Why? Because climate change—largely inevitable and natural, but quickened by human industrial activity—is not only making oceans higher and warmer, but also more acidic, a trend which could have sweeping ramifications. As the pH of the ocean drops, the calcium carbonate creatures that range from zooplankton to shellfish have a harder and harder time making their shells.
(If you’ve never considered the considerable beauty of zooplankton, click below to see a slideshow of images by Ernst Haeckel, many of which depict zooplankton called radiolaria):
There have already been significant reductions or changes in calcium carbonate creatures because of acidification, with effects resonating up the food chain. If this continues, scientists envision the oceans becoming more and more populated with jellyfish, algae and slimy, more genetically basic creatures—it has been called “the rise of slime.”
So taking these trends to their most extreme long-term conclusion, we can envision our terrestrial world being swallowed up by epic storms and the slow-motion apocalyptic rise of ocean waters filled with primordial slime…as humans retreat and fight each other over increasingly scarce food and fresh water.
Kill your horror. After all, it’s only natural and very likely inevitable. Besides, as the always forward-thinking writer, William S. Burroughs once wrote, seemingly contemplating both simple corporeal human death and the possibility of space colonization: “We’re all here to go.”
—with reporting by Kari Lydersen
Birds Attack!
Posted in Hyper-Essay with tags evolution, film, nature on May 11, 2008 by bawehali
Birds, who once were dinosaurs, could take over the world (again) if they wanted to. And not just in the movies, a la Hitchcock’s 1963 terror, The Birds. (If you haven’t seen the movie, check out this well-edited one-and-a-half-minute version of it.)
In Kagoshima, a city on the southern island of Kyushu, in Japan, crows have just recently been on the attack: destroying power lines and fiber optic cable, stealing candy and bloodying children’s faces, and outwitting human “crow patrols” by building decoy nests. It was also reported recently that crows had been caught on film making tools, a behavior previously thought restricted to humans and some primates. Check out this charming and provocative video of hacker/designer/Power Point jockeyJoshua Klein, who created a vending machine for crews, which he then taught them how to actually use….
You see, birds are smart: They make tools, have sentries, navigate by magnetism, sense impending geophysical events and, of course, they can fly.
The whole birds-were-once-dinosaurs thing is one of those boggling things that just seems so obvious once you think about it or, really, just look at birds for a bit.
“Rahonavis is a primitive bird from 80 million-year-old rocks of Madagascar. Despite being more bird-like than Archaeopteryx, raven-sized Rahonavis retains some very distinctive theropod features including the distinctive slashing claw used to murderous effect by Velociraptor in the film Jurassic Park. Velociraptor is thought to be about as close as a dinosaur gets to being a bird without actually being one.”
* * *
It’s interesting. I was talking to my mother about birds the other day, and when I mentioned their ability to navigate by magnetism and, I’d heard, listening to underground rivers, she said: “Yeah, with their lodestone.” I’d heard the word “lodestone” before, but never knew what it meant. When I asked, she said it was like a magnet in their heads that let them find their way.
My mom sometimes shares folky wisdom that I don’t quite know if I should believe. For example, that if buttercups turn your chin yellow you like butter, that Santa Claus actually exists, or that if your tongue is coated, it means you’re constipated. That last one has always seemed deeply disgusting to me.
But anyway: Lodestones. Mom spoke of it as a kind of known thing, but I went looking online, and science, as so often seems to be the case, only recently caught up with known things.
The discovery in 2004 of tiny deposits of a mineral called magnetite (lodestone) in the beaks of pigeons and bobolink (a North American songbird) biased the debate [about how birds navigate] towards the hypothesis that birds can read Earth’s magnetic field (image).
* * *
So, do the math; birds can fly, solve problems, make and use tools, organize, and navigate by magnetism. Why do they put up with us? Against all reason, birds must like us. Despite modern industrial chicken “farming,”, despite our erecting cell phone towers that disorient them, wind farms that sometimes clobber them, or mountains–continents!– of trash that poison them, they must just like us anyway, you know, the way you might love that guy who sometimes gets mad and beats the crap out of you. Like that.
It wouldn’t be because they’re meek or physically incapable of carnage, either. Check out just one type of one species, the golden eagle: flying down and killing a deer :: or strategically hunting goats by knocking them off of cliffs.
That’s the only possible explanation for why they haven’t already devoured us, pecked us underground, or made pinnipeds of us. They must enjoy watching humans. Who knows? Maybe the second most popular leisure activity among birds is peoplewatching. I suppose a few — buzzards in particular — must also possess a gustatory appreciation for people and our reputedly pork-like flavor.
Their feelings toward us must be very complex. After all, in addition to lodestones, they possess specialized limbic systems in their brains, necessary for true emotional behavior. Outside of birds, this system only exists in the higher vertebrate species. So things like rage, fear, and curiosity are not merely anthropomorphic projections when it comes to birds.
I wonder what finally set the crows of Kagoshima over the edge?
Designing Our Own Demise
Posted in Interview with tags artifical intelligence, cognition, evolution, robotics on September 6, 2000 by bawehaliBrian Awehali interviews robotics expert Hans Moravec
Hans Moravec is a leader in robotics research, founder of the robotics program at Carnegie Mellon University, and the author of several books, including Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence and, most recently, Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind.
Moravec is in firm belief that machines will acquire human levels of intelligence by the year 2040, and that by the middle part of this century, they will be our intellectual superiors.
Also, says Moravec, humans—in hopes of immortality—will soon be transformed into what he calls “ex-humans,” as they upload themselves into an entirely new breed of supercomputer that allows one to “live” forever.
I talked with Hans Moravec about his recent book, Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind, as well as the past, present and, according to Moravec, certain future of robotics.
Generally speaking, what is a robot?
Moravec: Well, there are some industry definitions that are descriptive of existing things but really, for those of us who are less passionate, it’s a machine that does what living things do.
And what was the first real robot?
Moravec: If you were born before the 20th century, you’d probably want to point to clockwork mechanisms and even industrial machinery. At least those things were animate, which is a very big distinction from things that just sit there.
So the progression from simple tools to complex machines?
Moravec: To a self-powered machinery—whether it’s powered by springs or water or steam. But in the 20th century something new was added, namely, a sensory detector—sensors, basically, which allowed the machine to respond to things going on outside of it in a non-trivial way. I guess with mechanical machinery you have levers and things that could sense large forces. But once there was electronics, you could have things that could respond to light or to sound or to pressure.
So the ability for these machines to take in data on the environment?
Moravec: Right. So I think it’s perfectly fair to call electronically actuated industrial machinery “robots.”
And what was the original meaning of the word “robot”?
Moravec: Well, “very hard work,” or basically “work,” sort of bordering on slave labor.
To switch gears a bit, why is it so difficult for computer programmers to mimic common sense, or what could be called true artificial intelligence?
Moravec: Well, I know there are a lot of theories. One glaring reason is simply a matter of scale—basically, to make something like a human brain you require a million times more computing [power] than we have today; at least, for those of us who don’t work at the national labs.
At a hundred trillion calculations per second I’d say that’s almost enough computer power. And if people were doing artificial intelligence on those machines, then the criticism “it’s not working” would be valid, but actually people are not doing artificial intelligence. They’re doing physical simulation.
And in order to do artificial intelligence in robotics, I think, you need a lot of trial and error.
So I think we just have to be a little more patient and wait for the computers to come along. But meanwhile we now have computers that are powerful enough to do the job of at least small nervous systems. So my [Macintosh] G4 can do about as much computer power on my retinal scale as a guppy. So we should be able to get a sort of guppy-like performance out of our robots right now.
So when do you think we might see the first robot possessing artificial intelligence?
Moravec: Well, computers are doubling in power approximately every year now, so [I think] the answer is about 30 years.
Won’t that require an exhaustive amount of human programming?
Moravec: Indeed, it is a major effort to create [such a] database. The most comparable thing to date has been the building of the CYC common sense reasoning system.
And what was that?
Moravec: One of the meanings is the “cyc” in sounding the word “encyclopedia.” You know that word, don’t you?
But also, you know, it sounds like psychology. And this was a project begun, I think now, 15 years ago. It was to be a 10-year project. It was started by Doug Lenat, who was a Stanford graduate, who earlier in his career had written some mathematical reasoning programs.
Later, he wrote a more abstract thing that taught about meta-concepts called HEURISCO. It figured out heuristics for reasoning programs. Then there was [the CYC] project. He was working at the MCC, a consortium of companies for computer research, including some artificial intelligence research.
That’s interesting. A particularly curious point in your book is when you talk about robots being imbued with human values and human feelings. Is this where that comes into play? Because in order for this to work effectively, we have to find a way to give them the ability to understand psychological models, human values, human feelings.
Moravec: That’s right. To a first approximation, this isn’t that hard. There are in fact…all of these things that I’m talking about have all been done to various extents by generations of students, you know, in our…robotics. So there are toy versions of all of these things that I’ve been talking about. Only now, by the time of such robots they have to be done really well, and much more completely, and on a much larger scale. But in fact, you know, having a logical system that reasons about psychological variables isn’t as hard.
So there are certain cues that you read and then you incorporate them in a model—[to see] if it’s going to hit or if it’s going to give me a banana. And as you make the details richer, you get more nuances and subtleties, and that aspect of the simulation will have to be tuned up just like the physical aspect and again, there are at least toy versions of systems that interact psychologically now.
Actually, there was a system built here—the program was called “Oz.” The creatures living in Oz were called “woggles.” They were rendered on a screen as sort of egg-shaped things with big eyes, and they could interact with each other in the three-dimensional world, and there would, in fact, be attractions and dislikes, and those would register in the way the eyes moved—the way they looked, and you know—the way the pupils changed. And then the woggles would respond to each other. So if this one woggle gave another woggle a dirty look, then there would be variables corresponding to fear and anger and the like, and all of those things which would adjust according to some formulas. And then, depending on the state of the woggle, it would then react and send out vibes. So you could have two that would suddenly hate each other or like each other.
So CYC was going to provide common sense for expert systems. A medical diagnosis system, you know, given the symptoms of a rusty bicycle prescribed an antibiotic. And that’s because it doesn’t know what a bicycle is or a person or rust or anything. It doesn’t know what it’s talking about. Well, what if it had facts about that…knew that bicycles don’t get, you know, skin infections and humans don’t rust, and antibiotics are only appropriate for living things and so on. Then it could just add that into its reasoning. And, in fact, would eliminate, you know, a solution like the simple expert system can come up with. So the way you start to do that, according to Lenat, is you take statements in an encyclopedia and then you break them down.
So, you know, Napoleon was imprisoned on Elba. Well, what’s a Napoleon?
Napoleon is a man.
What’s a man?
A man, you know, is a living thing, and a man has two arms and a head.
Eventually you can work it down to very primitive concepts. Like when you put an object on top of another object, then the first object is underneath the second object. And they figured it would be several million assertions—several million logical sentences when they were done. And they had a team of half a dozen knowledge engineers working day after day.
And they’re still at it, you say? Fifteen years later?
Moravec: Well, sort of…it wasn’t as successful as they hoped it would be. But it was still a decent first try.
What was unsuccessful about it or less successful than they would have liked?
Moravec: Well, the idea was that eventually there would be enough knowledge in the system that the thing could interpret statements without having humans package [things] for it. So it would basically be able to read books, you know, and extend its knowledge, and it certainly never reached that state. And even its basic understanding of anything is so limited that you can play with versions of the system and it can still make really stupid mistakes unless you follow the script.
You’ve gotten some strong reactions to the book and especially to the more futuristic aspects of it. And the part that scares a lot of people is that once reasoning comes in and robots become able to think for themselves and outsmart us, and be physically more adaptable. You see them first automating human tasks, and then sort of a period of prosperity where many things are mechanized and perhaps people are more free to pursue their own pleasure or self-actualization, to put it in psychological terms. Then, you basically predict that down the road what this would lead to is, we would give way as a species to robots and that they would essentially be our progeny. Not in the way…similar, but different, in that they would be children of our minds.
Moravec: Yes, you summarized it quite well.
Okay. And it seems like while reading your book one has an immediate, visceral reaction like: “Oh, well…no! Why would we want that?“
But you seem to have a very different take in terms of it being a natural or even desirable progression.
Moravec: Well, I was thinking about it [for a] really long [time], and the earlier stage in the evolution of that position was in my previous book where I had…
…that was in Mind Children?
Moravec: Yeah. I had that outcome, but I also had a whole chapter sort of entitled “Grandfather Clause” devoted to the idea…well, we can’t beat them, but we can probably join them, so there’s the proposal that we can augment ourselves to become as smart as they are, to keep up with how smart they’re becoming.
You call that “Xs,” [ex-humans] right, in this book?
Moravec: Well, here they’re…the Xs, frankly, are mostly just robots. I mean, there may be a few human beings that sort of tag along as junior partners.
But in the first book it was sort of…it had a bigger role for converted people. But now…I really think that that’s not going to do much and that’s not going to work. It’s like taking an oxcart, and replacing the wooden wheels with rubber tires, and the ox with a motor, and the tiller with a steering wheel—and building a car. You’re still going to have a pretty lousy car because of the legacy of the oxcart that you kind of carry with you when you make these incremental changes. You’re much better off going to a drawing board and designing a car that’s a car from the ground up. Even though you want to retain the most important parts of the oxcart, like the ability to move along flat ground, but you only retain the parts that are really worth retaining. So, I think it’s like that.
You see it as a basic evolutionary transition.
Moravec: Our offspring…we should design them like any product—to be as good as possible and not try to retain things from the past simply for reasons of nostalgia.
