Remote Ready Biology Learning Activities

I add to Paul's welcome my own--am very glad you're here. And I add to his general invitation into this "useful public conversation" a specific set of queries I'd like you to respond to, please, by early Wednesday evening

How would you characterize your own story-telling style? Do you tend to the "uniformitarian" or to the "catastrophic," to continuous or discontinous types of tales? If the latter, which type of "catastropist" are you: "Biblical" (one who emphasizes plan, intention and plot resolution) or "modern" (one who doesn't tell stories-that-have-a-purpose)? Can you give an example of one of your tales?

Alternatively, you might tell us another story: are you looking for in this course? Is what you've heard and read so far "continuous" or "discontinous" with what you're seeking?

Looking forward to hearing from you-- Anne

...of the semester!

what i MEANT to say (before that last post slipped away from me) was "Invitation into Storytelling" and "WHAT are you looking for in this course?" (now: see how easy it is to correct oneself?)

On a SIDE note- There is a very interesting commentary on the tsunami by Hendrick Hertzberg called 'Flood Time," in this week's New Yorker. It starts out with "Nearly Four million men, women, and children have died as a consequence of the Congo civil war." Hertzberg goes on to list more and more events like this until finally reaching the recent tsunami. The reason that the world is so wrapped up in the tsunami, as opposed to other more "lethal" tragedies, according to the author is that "this is a drama that has victims and heroes--but no villains. No human ones, anyway." I found this idea really interesting and applicable to our discussion of catastrophies. Civil wars, massacres, epidemics, and not least of all tsunamis, can all be classified as catastrophes, but I think Hertzberg's idea that the ones we "care" most about are the ones not caused by man. any thoughts?

http://www.cnn.com/2005/EDUCATION/01/19/evolution.debate.ap/index.html

Welcome to Week Two of the Evolution of Stories. We'll begin discussing "what evolution is" this week, with assistance from the first four chapters of Mayr's book on the subject. If you have questions, responses, confusions, revelations, continuities, catastropes as you're reading....

please post them here--

While we're archiving: might as well include the past as well as the future.
Here's the *huge* snowman I told you about, as figure for
my story of our on-line discussion of varieties of storytelling styles...

My other "image" for today's class was the "möbius scarf" Debi Peterson knit for me; see Möbius Strip for a "mathworld" explanation how this works. For me, it operates quite nicely as an image for how stories may look different from different perspectives ("inside" and "outside"?) , yet on another level, "be the same" (form a single surface?)....

Having said that "all stories are linked together and that they flow continuously into each other and are built off of one another, " Carolyn asked, "How do you create links in posts?" The observation and the query seem to me directly linked: one of the exciting things about the web is its, well, webbiness...the easy ways in which one can move in multiple directions of exploration. A "uniformitarian," as Carolyn says she is, would naturally want to be able to link.

So here's how; it's fun and easy. Go to our course home page, where you'll find A Hands-On, Interactive Approach to HTML. It's filled w/ lots of web-weaving tools, including how to make links. If you get stuck, stop by my office or Paul's, and we'll show you the tricks of the trade.

and it will come out later looking like this

"will come out later" is interesting, both conceptually and practically. Your web browser doesn't actually show what it gets from another computer; it interprets what it gets and shows that (tells a "story" about it?). The stuff between <'s and >'s provides some instructions for interpretation (not though always reliably followed).

On a practical level, you should always use the "Preview for HTML" button below the posting window to check what your posting will look like (more or less) when it is interpreted. This is not only if you are making links but generally. In Carolyn's posting, for example, there currently appear a lot of funny looking characters. That's because she copied and pasted from some word processing program that uses hidden interpreting symbols that caused the browser to do some intepretations other than those intended. This sort of thing would show up in the "Preview for HTML" window and one can then fix them by retyping some of the characters in the posting window (click on "Preview for HTML" again to see the changes).

On another note, interesting Wednesday conversation, with a few ideas that I thought were worth noting (for myself and any one else interested) ...

Re "things can always be explained logically based on antecedents events" vs "principle of disorder"

Maybe in addition to catastrophic vs uniformitarian story telling styles, there are story telling styles which do and do not presume every event can be explained "logically"?

His story telling styles conflicts with the story he is telling?, is typological rather than population and presumes progress toward an end ("truth") rather than legitimacy of multiple explorations?

We also had an awfully interesting conversation upstairs on Wednesday afternoon. What I remember most strongly, and found most useful, were these things: first, the play between the notion that

• the world is continuous, and the disciplines are the "catastrophes" that disrupt the web, interrupt the connections between things; to study is to dissect, to insist on a "discontinuity" ....
• vs. the notion that the world is fundamentally a place of disorder, and what we do, as we study it, is identify causes and effects, make what is actually disordered continuous....

I suppose this was our version of the conversation going on downstairs, in which you were posing an opposition between the notion that "things can always be explained logically based on antecedent events" vs "principle of disorder"--only instead of two storytelling styles, we were thinking about how a certain sort of story might be generated in opposition to (as a way of "cleaning up"?) the world-as-it-is (okay: as we perceive it)...

As we were playing w/ these counter-notions, my students taught me the meaning of a word I'd never heard before, one I have continued to roll over my tongue. I knew about "entrophy" (the distribution of energy within a system--the disorder of which tends to increase in time), but not about "enthalpy"--which is its heat content, or quantity of energy (which also tends to decline). (For more on this, see Energy, Entropy, Enthalpy.) Measuring how much energy there is, and observing how it is ordered, might be another way to talk about the process of evolution....

So: your assignment this weekend is to read four more chapters in Mayr, to think about what he's showing us about stasis and change, about randomness and order...and to post your reactions, thoughts and questions here by 5 p.m. on Sunday.

Mayr also puts Darwin in the center of the story in more tricky ways. I especially likes when Mayr talks about organisms achieving “success in Darwinian evolution,” (101). Rather than evolution existing, and Darwin doing his best to explain it, it’s as if Mayr believes Darwin thought of evolution, so everyone better do a good job of it.

Also, I find myself reading this with a completely self-centered, human-centered eye. (There was some better phrase for this Prof Grobstein used on Monday while talking about Titan.) I keep trying to picture the earth existing for millions of years without people. I know this is ridiculous; we’ve only been here for the blink of an eye. But the only way I know how to mark time is by history, stories, events, births and deaths. What was a day like when no one could separate it from the one before or the one after? Its so obvious (maybe geologists have an easier time of accepting it) but it feels counterintuitive. We are raised with humans at the center of our universe. I’m trying to get myself away from that.

A lot of you are saying Mayr is arrogant in his writing, and he expects everyone to eat up his theories as fact... but really, evolution is his LIFE, how else is he going to treat it? I like the idea of reading Mayr as a novel, in principle, but I agree that it's very difficult. We are, in essence, reading a story, but that doesn't mean that it reads like one. I find it easy to confuse the term "story" with "fiction," and I think that's where a lot of the confusion comes from. Unlike a typical novel, Mayr is presenting us with evidence and published data from journals among other things. If we're going to treat Mayr's book as a "novel" then we should compare it to other "novels" like Steven Hawking's A Brief History of Time. Maybe I'm making a really obvious point, here, but I think it's just easier to read a scientific piece as a THEORY as opposed to a novel.

On another note, as far as "scientific" writing is concerned, I think the style is largely uniformitarian. This isn't to say that there aren't interesting twists, but in general, science sets out to explain and make connections of things. The goal, anyway, I think is to create a continuous body of knowledge...

I also liked Mayr’s description of genetic evolution. It gave me a different entry point for the story of evolution. (evolution within evolution… genotypic evolution as a more focused view which connects to the broader view of phenotypic evolution). It reminded me of our class discussion on the types of story telling. You can approach a story from many different perspectives a narrator of writer must pick a level (or chose to interweave levels) on which to tell a story (a spectrum from broad (continuous) to focused (catastrophic)). There are many choices story teller makes (with or without conscious awareness) and the summation of these decisions makes each story and each telling of the story unique. Mayr tries to be both continuous and catastrophic (while reading the book, I noticed that he repeated uses the word continuous… he occasionally wrote the word catastrophe but not nearly as much… leads back to the question about science writing…). Mayr’s examples are catastrophic, but he wants to tell a continuous story. He wants to write about the evolution of the theory or evolution.

One of the things that I am really enjoying about this course is how it is helping me see science in a new way. The scientific texts that I have read have always struck me as pretty dry; they were informational rather than entertaining. We even use different words to name books from the different fields (texts v. novels). Attempting to read Mayr as a novel has breathed life into the science. Being creative and imaginative with the science has really helped me appreciate it more. One example is when Mayr mentions the German concept of ‘Bauplan’ which Mayr translated from ‘Body Plan’ into ‘map’ or ‘blueprint’. If I had been reading the book as a scientific text, I would probably have overlooked that piece of information; Mayr barely mentions it and it doesn’t seem so important. (also I would be reading it as a science text; I would not read it as part of the story, but just as a piece of information). Reading the book as a novel, however, I was struck by the images and ideas of a ‘Body Map’. It made the exploration and examination of the human genome seem more like an adventure. (it reminded me of pirates searching for a great treasure only to discover it wasn’t what they imagined it to be… the ‘junk’ DNA or the seemingly small amount of genetic difference that separates humans from monkeys) That is not an experience I can ever remember having with a science book.

Another thing- in response to what Ghazal said about how evolution is Mayr's life, and so it's natural for him to treat it as fact- I think that might be one reason why he writes about evolution as he does, but part of it I'm sure is just his own personal attitude towards science. Just as another example, I recently read a book called "T.rex and the Crater of Doom" (cheesy title, but it's a great book) by a man named Walter Alvarez. Now, Walter Alvarez has devoted virtually his whole life to studying the K/T (dinosaur) extinction. He was on the team that first put out the theory that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs, some 25 years ago. But his attitude couldn't be more different from Mayr's. The book is told a bit like a story, again- talking about the progress that's been made researching that extinction in the past few decades, but he emphasizes again and again how it's been a group effort. He emphasizes the importance in questioning widespread beliefs, in endless theorizing, in backtracking, in following up on opposing theories to see if there's anything to be learned from them. I don't remember him ever using the word "truth" (though I could be wrong). So I think a lot of it is just attitude... And ultimately I'd say the attitude of people like Walter Alvarez is far more helpful to science that that of Mayr.

Am a little unsure whether this is a new thought, or just a re-run of last week's View from Upstairs. I'd very much "liked" (is this a synonym for "wanted to believe in"?) the version of science's storytelling style that had been circulating among us last week: that it accounts for catastrophes by taking a longer view, placing them within a larger continuum...

but I think I heard in Paul's expanded story today just the reverse: that evolution is the construction of a continuum ("heritability") within catastrophe ("the sun's falling apart," formerly known as sunshine).

I know that some of you are reading (or have read) Chinua Achebe's novel Things Fall Apart in English 250. Am wondering how/if the tale we got today of "things falling apart"=generating new forms works as a description of that story. Maybe a local example of when/why falling-apartness doesn't inevitablylead to the construction of something new, but to death that just...

stays dead?

A quick sketch here of some of the things I would have liked to have gotten to (and, of course, will at some point, in one form or another). Talking about variation in the abstract is fine for a broad brush view of the story of evolution but a deeper appreciation depends on a better understanding of the genetics that underlies both inheritance and variation. Of particular concern is that genes influence but do not in general determine organismal characteristics and that it is organisms rather than genes which are subject to differential reproductive capability (Mayr is pretty good on both these points). Additionally significant is that variation reflects both gene mutations and, in sexual populations, a mixing of parental genes in the offspring. Both contribute to the variability of organismal characteristics but the mixing also tends to keep populations more similar (at least genetically) than they might otherwise be. Because of this, population change tends to occur without clear divergence ("anagenesis") into distinct populations unless two populations become isolated from one another. In the latter case ("cladogenesis"), there is an interruption of gene exchange ("reproductive isolation) and so populations may diverge from one another both genetically and in form/function. The latter, in general, reflects both the inherent randomness in the system and any selection pressures that are different for the two isolated populations. It is the cladogenesis process that helps to make sense of the nearer and more distant patterns of relatedness in "clumpy diversity".

This kind of tree-like pattern may make it useful to think of different kinds of organisms as different branches of an ongoing exploration of a space of the possible kinds of organisms (perhaps akin to an exploration of the possible kinds of story telling?), with the variation among organisms being the different versions of what has been generally discovered so far that creates the potential to generate new forms. To put it differently, in evolution there are, at any given time, multiple equally "successful" outcomes of exploration and variations of those outcomes, each reflecting lots of past (ancestral) observations. And this, plus continuing random variation, provides the grist for future explorations. Here too I think it may be worth thinking of parallels to story telling and revising. An interesting feature of the later is that stories can affect one another directly as well as by inheritance. While the inheritance feature is most strongly emphasized in the recent history of evolution of the story of evolution, there are a variety of reasons to suspect that some equivilents of a direct effect of stories upon one another (co-evolution as well as lateral spread of genetic material) will become a more prominent part of the story of evolution in years to come.

We also touched much more briefly than I would have preferred on the issue of whether there is "progress" in evolution. There is, as Mayr says, no reason to suspect a force "guiding" it in any direction, but there are features that are best described as exhibiting some directedness because of the internal dynamics of the process. This area too is likely to see substantial development in years to come. In short, perhaps the most important conclusion to be reached both about evolution and the story of evolution is that they are dynamic and to a significant degree unpredictable because of the central role that variation (and interactions among variations) .

I hope this, however sketchy, contributes to the ongoing conversation. Looking forward to hearing/talking more about what you all think not only of Mayr but additional takes on the story of evolution as well.

First: a "semantic" note: I very much like the description of different organisms as different branches of an ongoing exploration, but I'm not sure that "exploration" is the "right"/most "accurate" word here (though it's certainly hard, any more, to talk about "correctness" in this space....!). If randomness is just, well, randomness, undirected, w/out a goal, well...when that process of randomly trying out new things is called "exploration," I think we have a "story" on our hands, one that gives "meaning" to what is innately meaningless. It has the sound of "willfulness" to me; to my ear, there's just a taint of the pathetic fallacy in that term "exploration"....

And then a far bigger question. When Paul said, in class on Thursday, that things become more disordered BECAUSE of the 2nd law of thermodynamics, I thought, no: the "law" is "just" a "story," it doesn't explain WHY. So, like Arshiya, I've found myself wondering, too: WHY does the random action of molecules lead "innately"/inevitably toward more randomness? Why is the state of greater probability one of greater disorder? Why doesn't randomness proceed to a more stable state?

"Tell me why..."

The man who provoked Brittany's questions, called in his NYTimes obituary this morning "the Darwin of the 20th century, the defender of the faith," died on Thursday. The obituary details the significance of Mayr's contributions to understanding the role of geography in the origin of new species, as well as his founding the fields of philosophy of biology and history of biology. Two bits from this account snagged in my mind: one about his eating habits, the other about the way he argued. Between 1928-1930, Mayr collected more than 3,000 birds in the South Pacific:

He had to live off the land, and every bird, after being skinned for study, went into the pot. As a result, he is said to have eaten more birds of paradise than any other modern biologist....

Dr. Mayr, a strong believer in the Hegelian dialectic as a way of advancing understanding, was known for his definitive proclamations, which often inspired as many heated rebuttals as nods of vigorous agreement...."no one will agree with all his positions, analyses, and opinions....But anyone who has failed to read Mayr can hardly claim to be educated in evolutionary biology."

That posting "flew away" before I was finished. There was a third very striking thing in Mayr's obituary, one I'd like to return to in class:

When he went to New Guinea...there was a popular school of thinking known as the nominalist school of philosophy that held that species did not, in reality, exist. They were merely arbitrary categories, little more than names...."The coincidence of what Western scientists called species and what the natives called species was so total that I realized the species was a very real thing in nature."

Reading Mayr and asking ‘What Evolution Is’ has lead me to another question; what is progress. Some of the posts Natalie, Jenn , Liz , and others really intrigued me. Liz talked about the future of humanity by referencing Gattaca, a movie which reminded me of the novel “A Brave New Word” (by the way, is T.H. Huxley (who was mentioned in the book) related to Aldous Huxley?) Both of these story telling media ask the question, where is humanity headed? Are we progressing/evolving in a positive direction?

The direction of progress relates back to our class discussion on the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. We discussed how life sustains itself on disorder (the sun breaks down, plants photosynthesize, plants get eaten, animals get eaten, animals die, decompose back to the earth). Taking this chaotic view into account, is there a perspective on progress that is constructive, optimistic, positive? The more we progress, the more we seem to move away from the evolution, we seem to be aiming to transcend evolution. There are medicines to cure/relieve many ailments. We have developed techniques to allow people to live (and pass down their genes) with what would have otherwise been a mortal condition. We genetically modify our crops to make them more resilient and resistant to insects. Our lifespan and longevity is getting progressively longer. I do not argue that that progress in the field of medicine is a good thing (and I definitely don’t want to argue a case for genocide/eugenics), but are we digging our own grave. The growing resistance of medicines and pesticides that Mayr talks about could lead to problems. What happens if a ‘super’ disease develops/evolves that is resistant to all forms of intervention/medication that we have. Or perhaps a ‘super’ pest will develop/evolve that will eat our crops. Diseases like Alzheimer’s disease appear in elderly people. Are we not capable of living for so long; is that a ‘natural’ means of correcting the balance which we have disturbed? I am still working through these questions (and I doubt I will reach an answer… just develop more questions…). Mayr has helped me begin to develop an idea of ‘What Evolution Is’… now I am starting to wonder what the implications of evolution are…

This, friends, is one of the richest explorations into both science and evolution that I've ever seen. Thanks all. There's more than enough here to keep not only us but many others thinking about evolution in terms of observations, stories, implications of stories, and new questions requiring new observations, stories, etc for many years to come. And more than enough to give us a take off point to move on into some broader implications of the story of biological evolution, including its possible significance for literature. Thanks again to all.

We don't NEED more but ... an interesting and relevant article about avian brains appeared this past week (see links at the bottom of my notes for another class. Its an argument that "story" (in particular the names applied to things) is an important element of science that is somewhat independent of observations. And it bears as well on the issue of "uniqueness" (and "perfection"?) of humans, suggesting that birds may have a more sophisticated brain than they are being given credit for in many current scientific stories. Not human, different, but ... also successful?

I am fascinated by Mayr's section on Altruism. This is the kind of thing science does that I can actually have some use for.

The biological story of how we have ethics, morals, conscience is an amazing question. As Mayr asks "is not selfishness the only behavior that can be rewarded by selection(256)?" I'm taking this Sociology of Deviance class right now. One main school of thought is about the functionality of deviousness, about how none of it (crime, violence, deviance that leads to positive social change, people like Ghandi, etc) would exist if it didn't serve some purpose in society. Also, there are theories about how everyone starts life in a state of low self-control, and have to be socialized to delay gratification enough to not just rob people and have sex constantly (I am grossly over simplifying).

These are connecting in my mind as two different ways to tell the same story, the story of ethics, in a biological and sociological sense. I think the reason I thought of myself as a continous person, three weeks ago when we started asking, was b/c I like to look at the laws that govern human behavior as continuous; people loved and hated and laughed and cried and all of that bs thousands of years ago just as they do now. But now, through Mayr, I'm trying to look at every act of kindness, every altruism, as a catastrophic event going against the rest of evolution. Maybe I'm overreaching to far in the other direction now, possibly.

I'm excited, because I didn't know this kind of science got to talk about this.

I dropped by this evening intending to "clean up" the forum on Mayr and "open up" a new one on Dennett...but am finding myself led, instead, to gather together a number of references and links which arose this afternoon, as folks in my section were helping one another along w/ our individual story ideas and expansions....

You might want to check out

• the chemist Roald Hoffman on Narrative

• Cheryl Chen's very useful talk about The Philosophy of Time

• the theologian Mary Daly's suggestion that Deity is too dynamic/too much in process/changing continually, to be a noun, and would better be described as a verb (following Buckminster Fuller's "God is a verb") is in Ms. (Dec 1974): 58-62, 96-98.

• Process theology (which emphasizes the importance of the sciences in theology, has some philosophical kinship with evolutionary thinking, and is grounded in the work of the mathematician-philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947)
  
  
• Michael Behe's op-ed piece arguing for intelligent design theory: "Design for Living" NYTimes: Feb. 7, 2005

• the Science Times piece about birds being "Smarter Than Anyone Thought": Feb. 2, 2005

• the Science Times (?!) piece on the reclamation of the category "evil" by some forensic scientists: Feb. 8, 2005.

So, last thoughts on Mayr or first ones on Dennett or ... a mix of the two? Here's a bridge topic to think about if you need something:

The New York Times Book Review is featuring Alan Lightman's new collection of essays, A Sense of the Mysterious: Science and the Human Spirit, this weekend (2/13/05). The reviewer observes,

Science happens to be excellent training for literature; it calls for both narrative ability and a grasp of style, and it sometimes seems as though the "arts-science divide" simply reflects the humanities' refusal to believe that anything that originates in a lab could possibly be attractive.

Not a bad way (by my lights, though I expect Paul may tell the story somewhat differently!) to describe the arc of this course, which begins with biology as the ground from which culture arises, and out of which it is (purposively?) made; that is, it uses "science as excellent training for literature...."

And if we're talking about dangerous ideas, here's one:

http://www.cnn.com/2005/HEALTH/diet.fitness/02/15/one.mans.immortality.ap/index.html

A new story of the future, one that's freaking me out.

In the “Evolution of Meanings” chapter, one idea lead me to a new question. On 416 in the footnote, Dennett mentions one of the facts you could tell an AI is “toasters can’t fly.” But the thing also “deduce surprising implications.” So I’m wondering: if you explain to the thing what flying is, and you show it a toaster, will understand? Same thing with human minds; how much info do we need before we make the inferences? Is that the point where we have meaning?

But Dennett’s black boxes don’t do it for me, like PG’s computer games in class, they never move me. I keep thinking that someone made them to be that way. They don’t work for me, because I know that someone designed these examples for this purpose. Dennett didn’t find those boxes; no matter how plausible they are, he invented them. I know my love for the Library of Babel seems to oppose this, but that at least is a thrilling concept.

I’m also getting a little fed up with Dennett’s ‘y’all suck’ attitude towards the opposition, even more so than Mayr, cause Dennett’s dropping names like he wants to rumble. At the end of some of the “the other guy is a big fat idiot” sections, I’m not always sure what his point is, other than that the other guy is wrong, wrong, wrong.

I googled pictures of all of them, just in case they do fight. Chomsky, Gould, Searle, Penrose and Godel (if he were alive) look like if they got together, they could take Dennett, easy, especially since Gould looks like a young Andy Reid. But Dennett kind of looks like classic pictures of God. Maybe he’s got superpowers.

One thing that confused me, however, (and I could have just misunderstood what Dennett was saying) was how cultural evolution could affect our physical existence. Dennett used the example of height, and how in the past couple hundred years, humans have grown in average height by several feet, even, which is much too quickly for biological evolution. But I don't understand how that could simply be a product of culture. Overall though, I found these chapters particularly interesting, and it will be even more interesting to see what everyone else got out of it during class discussion.

Although I was told today that "they got it" (even if I didn't...) I'm not sure "they" did-- and I'm sure I didn't. Here for the record are the points (here for the answering are the questions?) where I'm more confused than I used to be:

• what sorts of stories do the storytellers tell? all types? including preservative stories (those used to conserve historical records or revel in family traditions)? or just one sort: the kind that insist on newness, that gesture toward alternative, not-yet-conceived-of worlds?
  
  
• this notion that we look @ things from the perspective of our own internal experience--and then assume that the same awareness underlies the behavior of other things (what we in literary studies pity-ingly call "the pathetic fallacy") makes sense to me; would it be accurate to say that this is a (wierd? inverse? logically identical? more mature?) version of "theory of mind" (the developmental stage that a child goes through around the ages of 3 or 4, when she realizes that other people have minds of their own, that they are NOT thinking the same thing she herself is...)?
  
  
• though convinced that apparent purpose can be the result of random or algorithmically directed activity, I'm still chewing over this problem of "where the rules come from" (not quite settled, in other words, that "this isn't a problem")
  
  
• and I think that that problem keeps arising because the examples we've seen so far are those of computer-generated games, where clearly the rule sets have been designed by, well, designers, who seem repeatedly to select rules that (for "segregation," move to get away from cells colored differently from you; for "the game of life," change color if there are too many/too few cells around you) seem operationally identical
  
  
• the use of the language of "preference" and "happiness" to describe the "decisions" of the cells in these games really muddies the argument that they have no internal experience; more importantly, noticing that e-a-s-y slide from intention to lack-of-it, I became VERY confused about what difference it makes after all: if the cell moves, whether it "feels happy" or is just "following an algorithm"--well, so what? it's moved...and change/evolution's occured.
  
  
• ditto (all questions above) re: sleeping....With the notable exception of going under anesthesia, I really don't think I have ever had the experience of not having experience. Of not being aware. Of not thinking.

Anyways, I should get to the point… In class today, as Paul talked about the neocortex as our own internal story teller, I thought that the neocortex could be a modern philosophical ‘seat’ for the mind. I am still mulling this over, but I really like this idea (especially because it seems to display an evolution of Descartes idea… Gall was first to place mental functioning in the brain… Descartes placed the ‘mind’ in the pineal gland, some modern philosophers place it in the neocortex… it is its own evolution…). I have a few questions… Is mind and soul the same thing? How are mind and soul connected to consciousness? Could our story telling ability be located outside the brain (like in a spiritually significant place like the heart?)? Is the ‘mind’ less/more connected to the body in different states of consciousness (I would venture to call sleep and dreaming different states of consciousness)? Are our ‘souls’ (or minds or consciousnesses) our story tellers? What happens when you have a lack of consciousness (like maybe a coma… which I think is related to a connective web-like (and it had to come back to the web… I told you I was an uniformitarian story teller) structure in the brain called the reticular formation)? And, following off of Anne and Maria’s questions… can you have a lack of consciousness (which leads to a lot of ethical questions about coma patients)?

On another note, I thought that Brittney and Michael had a nice link when they referred us to “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”… funny stuff. With all the heady conversations we have been having about suns falling apart and such it is nice to take a step back and have a laugh... (After all, we are all going to be destroyed to make way for an interstellar highway right?) and the fact that the humor has intelligence is a bonus. I am going to add another injection of humor, this time relating back to our initial class discussions. Has anyone ever heard Eddie Izzard’s “The Tyranny of Ducks”… he talks about the hole in the ‘Biblical Flood’ story? Ducks would have survived (“We normally swim down here, now we’re going to swim up here”…) He says that all the evil ducks must have survived the flood… technically, the world should be ruled by ducks… funny stuff… Makes me wonder about the ‘holes’ we don’t see or gloss over in other stories…

Well I will stop now… ‘night everyone!

On alternate days this semester, I'm teaching another "two cultures-crossing" course on Beauty with Sharon Burgmayer of the BMC Chemistry Dept. Sharon thought our class on "The Evolution of Stories" would take an interest in a book she's been reading, Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire, which intersects quite interestingly w/ the lecture we got on Monday about how much of what we observe in other things (like plants) can be accounted for "algorithmically," rather than by our own characteristics of internal experience and free will. As Sharon reports it, Pollan argues that our "grammar" of dividing the world into subjects and objects is "all wrong, really nothing more than a self-serving conceit":

A bumblebee would probably also regard himself as a subject in the garden and the bloom he plunders for its drop of nectar as an object. But we know this is the failure of his imagination. The truth of the matter is that the flower has cleverly manipulated the bee into hauling its pollen from blossom to blossom....In a coevolutionary bargain like the one struck by the bee and the apple tree, the two parties act on each other to advance their individual interests but wind up trading favors....Consciousness needn't enter into it....Bees and humans alike have their criteria for selection....The fact that one of us has evolved to become intermittently aware of its desires makes no difference whatsoever to the flower...taking part in this arrangement. All those plants care about is what every being cares about on the most basic level: making more copies of itself. Through trial and error the plant species have found that the best way to do that is to induce animals--bees or people, it hardly matters--to spread their genes....I approach...the complex reciprocal relationship between the human and the natural world...from a somewhat unconventional angle: I take seriously the plants' point of view....

So, back to the drawing/discussing board: does our taking seriously the plants' point of view mean acknowledging that they use us, w/out a conscious awareness that they are doing so....?

Have been chewing over (among other things) that “ideal” idea of “altruism” we were given to work with on Monday. In hopes that we (at least in one small upstairs group…) might work with it further on Wednesday, I offer you, from Wikipedia, this geneology:

The word "altruism" was coined by Auguste Comte, the French founder of positivism....He believed that individuals had a moral obligation to serve the... "greater good" of humanity. Comte says, in his Cathechisme Positiviste, that "[the] social point of view cannot tolerate the notion of rights, for such notion rests on individualism. We are born under a load of obligations of every kind, to our predecessors, to our successors, to our contemporaries. After our birth these obligations increase or accumulate, for it is some time before we can return any service.... This ["to live for others"], the definitive formula of human morality, gives a direct sanction exclusively to our instincts of benevolence, the common source of happiness and duty. [Man must serve] Humanity, whose we are entirely." Advocates of altruism as an ethical doctrine maintain that one ought to act, or refrain from acting, so that benefit or good is bestowed on other people, if necessary to the exclusion of one's own interests…altruism is distinguished from ethical egoism, which prescribes that one's actions ought to further one's own interests.

In the study of behavior, altruism refers to behavior by an individual that increases the fitness of another individual while decreasing the fitness of the actor. This would appear to be counter-intuitive if one presumes that natural selection acts on the individual. Natural selection, however, acts on the gene pool of the subjects, not on each subject individually. Recent developments in game theory have provided some explanations for apparent altruism, as have traditional evolutionary analyses. Among the proposed mechanisms are:

• Kin selection including eusociality (see also "selfish gene")
• Reciprocal altruism, mutual aid
• Behavioral manipulation (e.g. by parasites)
• indirect reciprocity (e.g. reputation)
• bounded rationality (see e.g. Herbert Simon)
• strong reciprocity
• sexual selection

The study of altruism was the initial impetus behind George R. Price's development of the Price equation which is a mathematical equation used to study genetic evolution. An interesting example of altruism is found in the cellular slime moulds, such as Dictyostelium mucoroides. These protists live as individual amoebae until starved, at which point they aggregate and form a multicellular fruiting body in which some cells sacrifice themselves to promote the survival of other cells in the fruiting body. Social behavior and altruism share many similarities to the interactions between the many parts (cells, genes) of an organism, but are distinguished by the ability of each individual to reproduce indefinitely without an absolute requirement for its neighbors.

Interesting...based on Annie's report about altruism, it sounds as if the downstairs group was today several branches ahead of the upstairs group on the evolutionary tree....

We upstairs spent most of class re-working our way from the bottom up.

Got a-holt of memes (=units of cultural transmission, aka modifiable ideas) and worked through the degree to which cultural evolution can(not) effect biological evolution. Reminded ourselves of the slow rate of biological change.

Looked briefly @ the active inanimate.

Then worked for a while w/ the model-builders. Made an important decision that they have language, because they build models, i.e. have a symbolic representational system--they see the fly in the eye, in order to reach out and grab the fly, etc. etc.

Then settled in w/ the story-tellers, whom we distinguished from model-builders not because they have language, but rather by their ability to

• imagine alternatives to what is ("counter-factuals")
• gather and compare multiple stories (perhaps a subset of 1) and
• make meaning (please note/appreciate our meme of the day: make "meme-ing").

Will perhaps get back to you on this one.

I loved class today! No reflection yet. Still processing...But here's an aside:

I spent around three months last year doing evolutionary bio research on selfishness and altruism demonstrated by eusocial paper wasps. Besides learning how to avoid being stung on my nose, I inadvertently picked up some other things along the way as well! The scientist I was working with was looking at why the queen wasp is the only reproducing member in a wasp society. All sisters, workers exist simply to feed, groom the queen who beats them up every few minutes and doesn�ft let them make babies! I know that this was a huge dilemma to Darwin and he dedicated an entire chapter in Origin thinking about bees and wasps. How can individuals without own offspring exist if reproduction and inheritance are the foundation of the whole theory?

The proposed explanation for altruistic behavior in insects is the idea of group / kin selection (Hamilton's Rule). According to this idea, the unit of selection for altruistic alleles of an originally selfish gene would be the colony or deme (gene, meme, NOW DEME ??), not the individual. More simply, it is the idea that in looking after your sibling, the queen, you're actually adding advantage to your own reproductive fitness. Or parent. offspring is not the only way in which an individual can ensure the spreading of one�f genes. So this is another case of situations appearing altruistic, cooperative when it�fs actually just another bunch of selfish genes. Or model-makers responding to certain rules / genes.

So this scientist, although he made me sit in his lab, sorry VESPIARY (place you keep wasps) for hours with my nose against the wasp cage, is actually pretty cool. He�fs also studying conflict in animal societies. For example, why do male langurs perform infanticide, kill their own offspring when clearly it seems contradictory to Darwinism? Or why do male tigers kill their cubs? (it�fs always the males isn�ft it ?)

So is this Conflict�E Cooperation�Eand Altruism�Eand outcome of cultural evolution or a biological one? It seems as though the things we interpret as culture are very easily explained by biology as well. Following on from our discussion upstairs, perhaps Meaning�E Purpose�E Truth�Eare just alternate stories. It is this ability to imagine alternatives, parallels, and to compare many stories that makes story-tellers different from model-maker paper wasps.

Phew!

Beginning altruistically: Arshiya, you'll find above the explanation for all those funny looking characters: because you, like Carolyn before you, copied and pasted from some word processing program that uses hidden interpreting symbols that caused the browser to do some intepretations other than those intended.

Moving from the practical to the theoretical...

Having been denied the downstairs conversation about altruism (while deeply engaged by the upstairs one on meme-ing making) I find myself still talking w/ you guys below, linking what you (evidently) said w/ what I was musing about above....

It was the early 19th century founder of sociology, Auguste Comte (1798 -1857) who coined the word "altruism." What's interesting me @ the moment is Comte's investment in "positivism" (briefly: the argument that the logical truth of a proposition must be grounded in its accordance with the material world, rather than referring, finally, to theological or metaphysical claims). For obvious reasons, positivists favored the scientific method. Now, the "illumination" that struck me today was that there may be/probably is an obvious connection between the social activity that is science (gathering as many stories as possible, from as wide a variety of sources as are available, and comparing them), the study of society that is sociology, and the coining of the word "altruism"--which implies a judgment on a self that does not aim for (but may actually harbor an inclination contrary to) the common good. So:...

Where'd that contrary self come from? From whence did it arise? Were there no such selves before...?

Cherríe Moraga spoke @ BMC on Friday afternoon. In her talk, I heard, obliquely, a running commentary on our discussions, here, about the role of the unconscious, of the academy, of individual free will in making sense of the world:

• your ego is the stupidest part of yourself

• you know the answer to the question you are asking, as demonstrated by the fact that you have the consciousness to ask

• let us adjust the lens, challenge the "I," singularity, individualism, progress as a plot line w/ a goal @ end

• parenthood teaches you not to think about yourself first: you just want somebody else to flourish. Aside from forcing you to practice your politics (because this entity is looking @ you), being a parent means being responsive to something larger than yourself. It enables you to appreciate the work of revolutionaries, who risked the "I" for the "we" (vs. the notion of the "we" silencing the "I" that has seemed inherent, so far, in our discussion of altruism)

• therapy is the privitized gringo consciousness that our illness is individual, as is our cure

• I wake up every morning knowing I can leave my (university) job: otherwise I'm not free

• the biggest illusion of academic discourse is that conflict is resolvable; even Marxism had a dialectic. As we change and grow, we move in and out of inconsistency; this is not contradiction, but evolution

• in a site of deprivation, as a response to genocide, the clan mentality can be (strategically) useful; but the identity of the clan must be malleable, open to shifting and changing (or, as Dennett says, p. 515, respect traditions, but not at all costs: "We must find accomodations").

Jessica called my attention, during her conference y'day, to a (sort of cheesey) NYTimes Science Times article "The Next Einstein? Applicants Welcome" (3/1/05). What caught my eye (among lotsa stuff that didn't) were several observations:

• here are some of the Big Questions that are haunting physicists today....What happened before the Big Bang? How do space and time emerge from formless eternity?
• Did God have a choice? Are all the features of the universe, like the number of dimensions and the masses of elementary particles, predictable and inevitable according to some unknown law, or are some of them environmental accidents, meaning we simply live where conditions are favorable...?
• Einstein was able to be a philosopher as well as a physicist, addressing deep questions like the meaning of simultaneity and often starting his papers by posing some philosophical quandary. But philosophy and physics have long since gone their separate ways. Physics has become separated from the humanities. "Everything tells us science has nothing to do with the ideas of ordinary life"....

When I'll bring back one question in particular which remains for me from the first more "science-y" half of the course: how do "signals 'down here' become evident 'up there' as emotions" (=how/why does the unconscious reception of sensory inputs get transformed into conscious apprehension of feeling?)

And then of course I've got lotsa questions upcoming about the evolution of stories...what stories, for instance, do you think Middlesex arise from (and why)? What revisions does it make in those stories? What new stories does it give rise to? How helpful, in short, is the concept of evolution in thinking about/beyond this text? About/beyond literature more generally?

Welcome back!
So, folks...picking up from where we left off:

How useful is the story of evolution for thinking about the evolution of stories? By 5 p.m. this Tuesday, post your reactions to our first "test case" (text case?): Eugenides' novel Middlesex.

What's your interpretation of it, your responses to its genetic and literary history, as told in class on Monday...?

What have you been thinking about what you have been recently reading and hearing....?

I cannot take the lens of evolution off of my life right now. My mother and I are both differently (not higher or lower) evolved versions of my grandmother. There has been so much passed down, and yet very notable variations. Most striking for me are the things that are getting expressed due to environment. Much of the debilitating fear and angst that has marked my grandmother’s life has abated in my mother and myself. At the same time, my grandmother and mother complement me on my independence, something I believe is in both of them, but the setting of their stories didn’t lead to its expression.

This (intensely personal, sorry) observation has affected and been affected by having Middlesex in my life. Meanwhile, I’m having fun silently recasting all my friends in their appropriate genders. If we did rewrite the gender/sex system, would we just add a 3rd middle gender? Or do it on like a 1 to 10 scale? We have to have some categories, for the sake of advertising.

boxes, and metaphors for getting out of them.... Name: Anne Dalke Date: 2005-04-06 23:12:23 Link to this Comment: 14362

Thought I'd fill in some background for Arshiya's not-so-silly-@-all post...we'd worked our way, upstairs this afternoon, from interrogating the "normal" to the difficulty of altering pronouns (which are "function words," rather than "content words," and so very hard to change) to reflect multiplicities of gender....were comparing Farsi and Chinese (which have no gender) with French and Spanish (which ascribe grammatical gender to things that don't have biological gender...)

...this went on until Jessie observed how "boxed in" she felt, as a result of this class, how increasingly aware of her inability to get outside the language available to her to describe experience...

and I, distressed (because I thought this class was all about offering ways OUT of boxes...)

invited an associative game, using metaphors to articulate ideas, and generate their associated networks of related ideas--to illustrate how we can come up w/ new ways of interacting...

I actually drove back to English House tonight to take a photo of our metaphor-board, only to find it erased, alas. Here are the ones I remember:

Self	Classmates	Teacher	Class
big ears	mouths	finger	body
wildflower	insects	soil/water/environment	garden
clam	ocean	sand	pearl
sponge	water	"wringer"	??
led	led	leader-outer	from educare=L. to lead out
player	team	cheerleader	game