“I Like Killing Flies”

A bioethicist for the Fish and Wildlife Service made the argument recently that humans have a duty to do what they can to save the species threatened by our destruction of their environment. I thought that a pretty bold statement for an ethicist who, unfortunately, didn’t elaborate on how he came to that conclusion. There are layers of unexamined assumptions in that categorical statement, not the least of which being that humans have any responsibility towards anything, much less another species. Where, pray tell, would these responsibilities come from and what would they be. Not to mention, how did he know about these responsibilities? Who made him the interpreter? I felt I was listening to George Bush: “I am the decider.”

The ethicist was talking about a plan to kill barred owls to make way for spotted owls. Thanks to habitat destruction, spotted owls have been losing ground, and they’re facing heavy pressure from barred owls which are increasing ground. The idea is to thin out a populous species to make room for a threatened species; threatened due to loss of habitat due to human activities.

At that level, we can all (I hope) agree that loss of habitat from human disturbance is probably the cause of the spotted owl’s decline. We can probably agree that the drastic decline in the number of species worldwide is caused by human destruction of habitats. What we’re going to have trouble with is agreeing that we should or have to do anything about it. The asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs, did it have a responsibility to the species it wiped out? Does a disease have a responsibility to its host?

I don’t think so.

There are no a priori responsibilities in the universe. There are no rights in the universe. It’s as simple as that. All rights and all responsibilities are created by people.

Rights and responsibilities are, essentially, aesthetic decisions. Ethical decisions, moral decisions are aesthetic decisions. The Golden Rule is an aesthetic decision: people don’t like getting punched.

One can make the argument that every member of every species has an inherent responsibility to perpetuate its kind. Presumably, “perpetuate” means, not only propagate, but provide for, as well. We all have to take care of our own kind; it’s the only obvious task we’re given. Beyond that, everything’s open to possibilities.

Which ultimately means that, unless it impacts us, that fate of the spotted owl is its own problem. From the bioethicist’s standpoint, saving the spotted owl because we’ve destroyed its habitat is purely aesthetic, but that doesn’t mean it’s valueless or unreasonable. We can all honor diversity of all kinds, owl species included, and do what we can to maintain as many as we can for our own enjoyment. Most of us can appreciate parks and wilderness set-asides for those very reasons. But killing one species for the supposed benefit of another has to be carefully weighed. Most likely, the barred owls are moving in on underutilized territory, and that, even if there were no barred owls, the loss of habitat would still doom the spotted owl. And, even should killing barred owls stabilize the spotted owl population, one would assume that killing would have to be regularly done in order to protect the spotted owls. It’s unlikely that a one-time operation would solve the problem.

It’s problematical to try and maintain a single species whose habitat has disappeared; even if it can be done, is there justification for the cost and effort? Could not the same cost and effort be put towards maintaining species capable of holding their own? In other words, how big should the zoo be?

There is no question that we are the asteroid, but there’s more question about whether or not we can reverse the asteroid. That seems particularly hopeless. Stewart Brand’s current fantasy of reviving the passenger pigeon is an egregious example of that thinking; even if a species can be somehow artificially maintained, without its natural habitat, it will never be a viable creature. It’s an odd ego-trip that makes one want to play god. (Surely there’s a line here about old habitats never die, they just get paved away.)

A large portion of the human race is living in denial. And that’s not including the climate-change doubters. I repeat: we are the asteroid; the world will never be the same again. Ever. We are a naturally occurring disaster; for all we know, it’s already happened on billions of other planets. That’s not our problem; our problem is denying that it’s happening here.

You want a good example?

Invasive species.

How many times have you heard warnings and horror stories about invasive species? A zillion, right? Two zillion, whatever. And we all know what an invasive species is, right? One that’s not natural to the area.

“Not natural,” what’s that?

But let’s step further back a minute: “invasive species.” What’s that?

If I’ve got the story right, every species begins with a mutation, some change which makes a new, slightly different, species which makes use of new ground somehow. If it succeeds, it has offspring who have offspring who have offspring who cover as much of the world as they can. There they go, invading wherever they can. It would appear that any successful species, by definition, invades wherever it can. Like us. Here we are, the most successfully invasive species in the history of the planet, and we’re complaining about those species hanging onto our coattails. Or, at least, the ones we don’t like.

That’s the denial part. We have an illusion that everything should stay the same after we arrive except that we are there. Except for the roads we build. Except for the farms we build. Except for the cities we build. Except for the factories we build. Except…

Okay, about those invasive species; which ones were they again? Oh yes, the ones we don’t like. We don’t seem to complain so much about acres of invasive soybeans, do we? It’s the plants and animals that come along without asking that piss us off. It’s okay if we shag them along with us, but if they hitch a ride, they’re a no-no. Everyone knows that.

Small aside: You know those signature golden hills of summer in California? Everything that’s golden, all that splendid grass, is “non-native,” to California; and by that I mean it arrived after the arrival of the European-Americans. That’s our dividing line; if was here before the white man, it’s native, regardless of how arbitrary a rule that is.

And that’s what we mean by “invasive”: we know when it arrived and we don’t like it. If it showed up before us, it’s fine. (We feel the same way about people, too, but that’s another story.)

So, Mr. Ethicist, you can do what you can to save the spotted owl from flickering out; but I’d rather you did it without riding in on the high horse of moral duty; a duty that is questionable ethically and practically. I’d rather you said, “I like the spotted owl and want to do what I can to save it. And would you mind helping me pay for it?” I might even be willing to chip in some bucks. But trying to guilt-trip us into saving the spotted owl might backfire in the long run.

Just saying.

There is an argument, though, that goes: even though, as Earth-bound animals go, we’re quite clever, we have only a rudimentary grasp of how the web of life is stitched together, and we have no idea which species might, in the future, prove our salvation; hence, it behooves us, for our own future options, to keep as many of them open as possible; i.e. keep as great a diversity of life forms alive as possible. Now, that’s an entirely selfish reason to maintain diversity, but it’s reasonable and practical. From that viewpoint alone, it argues to keep the spotted owl with us. But, as we’re going to have to save millions of species, we have to do a cost analysis of which are more valuable to save and where should we spend our money. Simply because we “owe it to them” is not enough. We owe it to everybody; the question is, who can we reasonably expect to save and of what benefit do we think they might have for us?

Mind you, I’m not saying don’t blow the barred owls away. Who knows, maybe we have a glut of them. I like eating; I understand the need to kill things. But I’d like to think I’m getting a bang for my buckshot. I want to be convinced that this is a good expenditure of public funds, that it will safeguard our future. Right now it appears sisyphean.

Do other species have rights? No; but that doesn’t mean we have to be wanton or cruel. Nothing wrong with being nice guys; we should try it some time. I’m all for saving everything and having parks as big as all outdoors, but I’ve got a limited amount of bucks. Where should I spend them?

Tough call.

“Primitive human society ‘not driven by war’”

BBC 18 July 2013

Researchers from Abo Academy University in Finland say that violence in early human communities was driven by personal conflicts rather than large-scale battles.

They say their findings suggest that war is not an innate part of human nature, but rather a behaviour that we have adopted more recently.

The research team based their findings on isolated tribes from around the world that had been studied over the last century.

About those “isolated tribes”: if I read the sentences correctly, it would appear that the researchers are extending their findings of isolated modern tribes to prehistorical human group behavior. It would appear there are tons of assumptions there that haven’t been addressed, the most important of which being the assumption that the behavior of modern tribal societies mirrors that of past tribal societies. Without detailing exactly why one would make that assumption, the entire rest of their argument is suspicious. Why should we assume that all tribal societies throughout our time on the Earth have behaved similarly? What evidence do we have that that’s true?

Remaining tribal societies live in generally inhospitable places with minimal pressures from anyone wanting to take over their territory. I’m not sure those societies would behave the same as ones in the middle of resource-rich environments with many peoples coveting their land/territory. Furthermore, the remaining tribal societies are almost all in a permanent state of warfare with their neighbors as were the native societies of Europe and America and Asia. A reader of Peter Matthiessen’s Under the Mountain Wall, would get a very different picture of warfare among modern tribal societies than the authors present. It’s hardly personal feuds, as the authors suggest. One would have to examine their data carefully. But even if they found that most modern conflicts are limited personal conflicts, it doesn’t mean that larger-scale operations haven’t always operated in resource-rich areas. It’s a big jump that, perhaps, the authors cover in their paper but was missed in the reporting. One hopes.

The issue, it would seem, is one of scale. Small, local conflicts can be described as personal conflicts; but that may just be because hunting-gathering societies don’t tend to gather in such large organized masses as farming societies do, so the conflicts of farmers tend to be larger in scale than those of hunter-gatherers. Are the authors reserving the use of war to large-scale conflicts? That would seem defeating and inaccurate. In the end, it seems a semantic problem more than anything else.

Acid Tongues and Tranquil Dreamers

…The fact that, in general, only the best-adapted member of a species will survive to reproductive age.

        pg. 118, Acid Tongues and Tranquil Dreamers, Michael White

[Having no way to contact Mr. White, I thought I'd let this note free on the Internet. Go, little note, fly away.]

Dear Michael,

My son thoughtfully turned me onto your book and I’ve been thoroughly enjoying it. I do quibble about the style sheet used to inform your punctuation, but that’s a minor point.

A somewhat larger point is illustrated by the sentence reprinted above, the one about “best-adapted members,” which itself illustrates a common misunderstanding of Darwinian evolution. As written, the sentence implies that natural selection is done at the individual level, the same error the social Darwinists make (and, frankly, most people).

The reality is that individual survival has little or nothing to do with natural selection. In general, most members of a species survive until reproductive age as one mounts the evolutionary chain. Those species designed with massive infant-death rates—frogs, say—are designed with the scatter-shot effect in mind: those who survive do so because of sheer luck, the predator didn’t find them; one has enough offspring that who gets eaten is immaterial. By the time one gets to, say, zebras or people, most offspring are expected to survive.

Natural selection is done at the genomic level. What that says is that, on average, individuals who possess mutation X have a better reproductive rate than those who don’t possess it. It’s concerned about the overall average, not the success of any particular individual. For example, an individual might have a mutation which would allow the possessors, on average, a longer life span; but that individual might have only one offspring before being dispatched by misfortune. Nonetheless, thanks to that one offspring, the mutation could be spread throughout the species, even though it gave no benefit to the individual in whom the mutation occurred.

The confusion appears to be a conflation of pecking order and natural selection. It’s fairly understandable that, observing natural pecking orders, one thinks that the selecting done to achieve that order is the same selecting that determines the direction of evolutionary change or dominance. They are unrelated, but, unfortunately, most people equate the two, as the quoted sentence illustrates.

Pecking orders evolved, not to insure that the best genes get together, but rather to maintain order within the species. Not only did pecking orders evolve, so did infidelity, which insures that, despite pecking orders, the gene pool will continue to be thoroughly mixed. It’s the mixing which is important, not the dominance.

Thanks for your time,

Johan Mathiesen
Portland, OR

“Scientific evidence that you probably don’t have free will”
George Dvorsky, io9.com, 1/14/13

As the early results of scientific brain experiments are showing, our minds appear to be making decisions before we're actually aware of them — and at times by a significant degree.… 

They had no choice but to conclude that the unconscious mind was initiating a freely voluntary act — a wholly unexpected and counterintuitive observation.

One never knows how accurate reporting is. If this report is true, it is truly shocking, but not for the reasons the reporter thinks. The shocking part is that, according to the reporter, the scientists who noticed this phenomenon—our brains working before we know it—found it a “a wholly unexpected and counterintuitive observation.” Really? What were they expecting? And “counterintuitive”? Whose intuition are we talking about?

Oh, I get it, the researchers were religious; they believe in free will. No wonder. They must have thought that god gave us an extra mental power that he skipped giving the rest of the living things: free will. Gee, what is free will? No one, it will be noted, has ever presented any evidence for free will, much less a definition, although we’re now getting evidence that there isn’t any. Trust me, if you don’t believe in free will, it’s intuitive that researchers will confirm such.

Free Will Versus Instinct

Believing in free will is akin to believing in god, except that I can understand god, while free will eludes me. Where I get lost is at the beginning; I can’t see a difference between free will and any other kind of will. Will meaning “choice,” not, say, the “will to succeed.” But choice. How are there two kinds of choice? Either one has a choice or one doesn’t. If one has a choice, one has the option of making said choice. One is always equally free to choose either of two options. The consequences may be radically different, but one is always free to make the choice. There isn’t, though, room for but one kind of choice; if there’s another, I haven’t run across it yet.

The term “free choice,” though, implies that there are at least two kinds of choice, right? Free and not free. The implication is that there are fundamentally different kinds of choices available, one which one is compelled to make, and another which one is free to choose anyway he or she likes. We tend to think of this latter kind of choice as, if not uniquely human, then confined to the larger animals. Primates, maybe. Don’t know about dolphins. The implication is that this kind of choice appeared somewhere along the evolutionary line; that prior to the appearance of such kind of choice, there was only instinct, which, everyone agrees, is no choice at all. We pride ourselves on not being instinctual, on being able to think for ourselves, to make good and bad decisions.

We are, perhaps, a bit prideful.

The difficulty with this line of reasoning is that it’s unexplained from whence this new manner of thinking comes. And how it works differently from other manners of choice. How there can be two methods of making choices has not been approached by the philosophers, much less by the neuroscientists. It seems mixed up with the notion of consciousness and self-consciousness; the difference between them isn’t clear either.

Fundamentally, the simplest living organism possible has to be able to find food, recognize it as distinct from non-food, and decide to process it. At its most basic level, finding and recognizing food is akin to deciding to process it. Still, the organism has to know how to position its body in order to process the food it has found. It has to have a sense of where its body is and where it isn’t, and it has to have a sense of how to move its body to another place. Conscious or self-conscious? You can call it what you will; regardless, it has to be conscious of itself and its surroundings in order to survive. Every living thing has the same requirement. Every.

So, how does this little, primitive, one-celled critter go about processing the signals it receives from its environment; and how does it communicate within itself? Chemistry and electricity, right? Nothing but. Chemical signals and electric currents transmit all the information the cell needs. What’s more, when two cells decided to get together and become a multi-celled critter, they retained the same methods of communication: chemicals and electricity. In fact, no matter how many cells clump together to make no matter how big a critter—a redwood or a whale—the communication channels never change: chemistry, electricity.

It’s not that these were the best channels available to living things out of which to build communications platforms, it’s that they’re the only channels available. Gravity, for example, doesn’t work well as a communications devise. Yet messages can only be sent using the materials at hand. Chemicals make good triggers; electricity is fast.

But as we noted, once that one-celled critter found something to eat, its triggers said “eat,” and the processing process began. The choice to eat was automatic. But it was a choice; theoretically, the critter could eat or not eat.

How the critter made the choice to eat was because it operated with an algorithm (paradigm/software/criteria) that said when triggers X, Y, and Z fire, swallow that puppy.

As the critters (I call them “critters” to lump together all living things, animal or vegetable) get larger and competition appears and predators appear, the algorithms become more and more complex. They evolve. Yet, the mechanisms of communication between the various cells and the ruling algorithms remain the same: chemistry and electricity. Even when you get to people, the only way the various parts of the body communicate with each other is through chemical signals and electrical charges. There is, fortunately or unfortunately, nothing that Mother Nature can add to the mix.

Needless-to-say, when sex was invented, the algorithms became hopelessly complex. Understandably so, though, given the kinds and complexity of sense and response organs. Choice and decisions, necessarily, must be made virtually instantaneously, especially as mobility and predation increase. The algorithms have to be acted upon sans debate.

In the end, all living things possess the same three things: sensors, output terminals, and CPUs. They can read the environment; they can interact with the environment; and they have a pile of software to work out the details and coordinate things. The bacterium has these. You have these. The bacterium uses those three capacities to find and consume food; we do too. (We also use them to facilitate DNA mixing.) In both the bacterium and us, all the interior communication is done by the same chemical/electrical routes; nothing new has been added to the mix. The signals that make the dog’s mouth move when it barks or our mouths move when we speak, are made and processed the same way. Neither us nor the dog, of course, is aware of the millions of interactions required for every bark, every word. What could awareness of that even be like? (Zen masters and LSD aficionados?)

As you can imagine, this has profound implications as to where another form of choice could come from. So far, we can only envision a mechanical, albeit highly complex, method of functioning. Essentially, we have only instinct at this point in the discussion; there is no place for anything else. Even thought, no matter how complex and self-reflexive it seems, has, at this juncture, only a mechanistic explanation, an instinctual explanation. No other explanation—other than God—has been put forward. Where would thought come from if not from a complex function of our CPUs? How is my song any less instinct that that of the nightingale?

In the end, it appears we don’t even have a definition for “will,” much less “free will.” (We carry this problem with us when we think about computers; we worry about when they’re going to be able to spontaneously write and install their own software without wondering where the computer’s existing software would generate that idea within itself; we think that at some point “will” will arrive as if the computers will be touched by the finger of god and become alive; and that being alive will be a fundamental change for the computer. We speak of the “singularity” as if a magical transformation will appear at a point in the future when machines become “alive.” We have faith that we can create life by software, if not by electro-chemistry.)

Ah, people; we’re so cocksure.

The Carbon Age

Mathias has lent me a book, The Carbon Age, by Eric Roston detailing the role of carbon in—well—the Universe. On page 48, Roston lists five things to remember about evolution, including: “only populations evolve; individuals adapt,” and “evolution has no goal.”

Ah ha! Someone tell that to the paleoanthropologists. It was a startling revelation to read those words as I’d begun to think I was crying in the wilderness. I’ve most often termed it that “DNA evolves not individuals,” but I believe we’re saying the same thing. And aimless evolution insures that one can’t evolve to escape danger. Thank you, Mr. Roston.

Mr. Roston didn’t use my favorite encapsulation that “evolution follows opportunity, not necessity,” but he well could have. In any event, it’s an unequivocal statement of the reason why people couldn’t have abandoned the trees because of the trees’ disappearance. That’s a goal: “We have to learn to stand up because the forest is going away,” (or its concomitant error, “Us fish should learn to walk on land to avoid predators”). As Roston points out, it couldn’t have happened. Those are side benefits to the effects of natural selection, not the intent. You can be quite sure that what drove us to the ground and fish to terra firma was food, pure and simple.

If I understand what I’m told, what distinguishes our ancestors from the pans is bipedality. We maybe didn’t give up our arboreal ways completely at first, but we right away began walking upright. For what we know, we didn’t have a period when we were knuckle-walking out on the velde, having abandoned the trees, but not yet taken to standing up straight. (How would we tell?) We never seemed to have went through a baboon period; we walked out of the forest upright.

That being the case, then abandoning the trees went hand-in-hand with walking upright. That fact uncouples bipedalism from the fate of the forest. If bipedalism first appeared in a savanna-like environment, it doesn’t mean that the environment was the cause of the bipedalism. Not to mention that it’s not agreed as to what kind of environment bipedalism first occurred in.

Ergo, I repeat, any theory of human evolution that doesn’t account for our letting go of the branches is no theory at all; and that “forgoing the forest because it was disappearing” is a circular argument. Fail.

carbon atom: examiner.com

On the Waterfront

Past Horizons, June 8, 2013

“Beachcombing for early humans in Africa”

In the middle of an African desert, with no water to be found for miles, scattered shells, fishing harpoons, fossilized plants and stone tools reveal signs of life from the water’s edge of another era.

The article goes on to talk in general about the state of early hominid archaeology in East Africa and about previously moister conditions, etc.; the idea being that, if you find old shorelines, you stand a better chance of finding old fossils and artifacts.

Sorry, but it’s time for another “Well, duh!” Where else would you expect to find evidence of early humans? Besides caves? (As if scads of early humans populated all the caves from Ethiopia to South Africa. How the hell many caves were there?)

It’s telling, though, that despite the nearly universal finding of fossils from shoreline conditions (barring caves, which are always located near water), early humans are invariably depicted as savannah-living creatures. Whoever wrote this article, for example, was able to calmly write about the human relationship to wetter conditions without ever once making the connection between the conditions and the sites where she was finding the fossils and artifacts.

Okay, I’m no scientist. I know nothing about foot bones or ear bones and I have no opinion about which hominins were capable of what. I rest all my scientific expertise on one statistics of sociology course a half-century ago. What better credentials than that, eh? But that statistics course said: if it looks like a duck, squawks like a duck, and swims like a duck, odds are it’s a duck. I believe that. It’s not proof that it’s a duck, but it has the likelihood of being a duck, fair enough?

So, if one consistently finds evidence of early humans in close proximity to what were, at the time, bodies of water, one can assume a high probability of a causal relationship between them. It’s not likely that the water came to the people.

Just saying…