An Elaborate hypothesis
of the The Suppression of Active-Pattern-Recognition
January 16th, 2007
by Stan Goff
The Squirrels
Where I live now, drivers are frequently obliged to stop in the middle of the street to avoid squashing squirrels. I live in North Carolina, and the Eastern gray squirrel has a scientific name, Sciurus carolinensis, that suggests I am living in their biological epicenter.
These rodents are — by best accounts — around 30 million years old, making them our great great great grandparents in evolutionary terms; and their adaptability to multiple climates, as well as urban landscapes, suggests they will be around long after we have figured out how to commit collective suicide. They are so thick in my own suburban neighborhood that we could harvest them for meat now without putting a dent in ther population. Our abundance of white oak trees sheds tons and tons of acorns each year — a squirrel staple — and squirrels are voracious omnivores, even occasionally indulging in cannibalism.
They have adpated through changing coloration almost before our eyes, with black varieties emerging in urban centers in our lifetime; but their behavioral patterns are more ancient inscriptions. Cars have been around for a century, more or less, with an explosive proliferation in the last 50 years. The result is a fatal mismatch.
Squirrel defensive patterns emerged to cope with other threats — hawks, owls, weasels, racoons, foxes, coyotes, bobcats, and big snakes. Today, we can add to that, dogs and cats; but they themselves are still behaviorally etched with hunting patterns they carry from their feral cousins. My own dog hunts them relentlessly in the back yard, and the squirrels win around 99 times out of a hundred… whereupon they bark back at the enraged pooch from the trees.
What the squirrel has perfected over the aeons is a combination of deception and footwork that matches the predators’ tactics.
When faced with a potential threat, the squirrel shifts her tail back and forth, flicking it in the same way a fisherman jiggles an artificial lure to attract the predator’s eye, or the way a bullfighter agitates a cape to deceive his victim. A squirrel’s tail can be bitten off fairly easily, leaving the rest of the squirrel intact to live on; and predators typically orient on movement. Squirrels can even heat their tails up to fool pit vipers, serpants that orient on thermal signatures from their prey.
In conjunction with this tail-deception, the squirrel does a kind of rapid-rewind two-step dance as the predator closes in, weaving back and forth like a boxer to set up a repetitious pattern of oscillation by the predator. At the last moment, in a kind of rodent jui-jitsu, Sciurus carolinensis breaks the rhythm of the back-and-forth, and dives 45 degrees lateral to the accelerating predator. The charging animal overshoots the squirrel, and by the time she can turn to remount an attack, Sciurus has scampered up some vertical surface, whereupon she can leap from tree to tree, or roof to tree, or tree to power line, and make her escape.
Over 30 million years, the species itself has recognized a pattern and adapted its defensive tactics all the way into a fixed neural pathway. When the squirrels on my street see an oncoming car, this amazing adaptation fails. They are reacting to a conscious predator, and the car is neither conscious, nor a predator. It’s just a car. The Gotcha Two-Step that lets the gray squirrels run up trees to talk trash back to my mutt doesn’t throw the car off at all. It is simply a terminal display without an audience, unless the driver sees the squirrel and slows down.
Thomas:
Nice, usable discussion; I like the distinction between transgressive performance & struggle.
I experienced the transgressive performances as a psychological validator, when not an automatic - if learned - response; see the same in others. I’ve used I Shalif’s technique to undermine this; it was also quite useful for getting over the ‘need to win every argument’ problem, and general listening, esp. to women when sufficiently internalized sexism - its been a long struggle
Tends to cause long-term change, when causative emotions tackled.
http://ilan.shalif.com/psychology/content1.htm
See if you like it if you’d rather not automatically post ‘ads’ for untested things
Political application: eg listen (a little self-discipline) to some argument which thoroughly disgusts you (for me, defense of the singapore government, originally), then apply (ch5 sec1-2, also ‘recycling.’) Also works for (consciously) undermining/eroding own sexism, racism etc.
It takes some initial effort to master (~5-10 hours); quite difficult to persuade others to try - in your terminology, “my view-point” resistance, eg “this is a cult, replace shalif with god; psychology is bunk” etc. It takes evolving strategies, which take time & effort.
17 January 2007, 12:17 amxenia:
Fantastic observations Stan.
As a person who was not socialized in an advanced capitalist society, I naively assumed I could shock my students away from the “choice” ideology by providing them with a clear example. I asked them if they really thought that a father from Romania selling his organs in order to feed his family was making an individual choice. They did not understand me at all and the next half hour revolved about the hypothetical (abled male) individuals on a desert island, making me want to tear my hair out.
17 January 2007, 6:48 pmpeggy:
A bunch of news stories about how squirrels have terrorized Googletown are to be seen at
http://www.google.co.nz/search?hl=en&q=Mountain+View+squirrels&btnG=Google+Search&meta=
I think it helps squirrels that they are cute and their meat is bitter.
***
Stan’s note: Not bitter at all, though often tough. Squirrel has accompanied rice or dumplings - parboiled or pressure-cooked to tenderize the meat - for many generations. My father cooked them with something called “blue” dumplings, a chewy flat dumpling recipe he inherited from his Michigan-folk. People also fry them like chicken or stew them. Squirrels may be lining up as a dietary protein source for post-peak-oil suburbia. (-:
18 January 2007, 4:38 amStan:
http://www.backwoodsbound.com/zsquir.html
18 January 2007, 6:55 amhttp://www.bowhunting.net/susieq/squirrel.html
http://www.jerrysbaitandtackle.com/Recipes/Squirrel.htm
http://www.mikewest.net/squirrel/recipes.html
Charles:
Wow, Stan. That’s a good essay you write there. I gotta finish it, before I comment. I had a formulation on plasticity of human nature recently. I’ll try to recall it.
18 January 2007, 4:33 pmCharles:
Yes, this is a very clear presentation of many of your basic ideas.
Maybe we are biologicaly determined to be less biologically determined than all other species ( as far as we can tell). (We may still have some instincts, i.e. more than Pavlovian training which is still _learned_ behavior ;empirically learned. We humans may still have some completely unlearned behavior, like all that goes on in the involuntary nervouos system. In other word, behaviors as instintive as our hearts beating. ah but what are they , Charles ?) Anyway, we are determined by our culture largely, our sociality, _as compared with other species_, which uniquely includes social connections to dead members of our species through messages, symbols, language. Only symbols can get across the death barrier.
Bourgeois or libertarian individualism is actually an idea closer to the state of other non-human species. Other species are less social, more solitary than we are ( because they can’t learn across the death barrier like we can through symbols). So, when bourgeois philosophy focusses on the individual, they are acutally philosophizing more like monkeys than like humans. Human are _homo communis_, not _homo (individual) sapiens, or individual smartguy (gender meaningful) “Sapiens” is a Robinsonade, in Marx’s term. The individual brain. We are characterized by a group of brains - communis . We are _the_ social animal.
We do still have some monkey in us though. Our higher social part properly dominates our individual monkey part. With the Bourgeois era, we are becoming a planet of the Apes, as the individual is coming to dominate the social in us, the monkey dominates the truly human, or _homo communis_, including in this living _commun_ity, dead members, ancestors.
We learn by imitation ( like monkeys) _and_ by symboling. But we can’t learn by imitating dead people, because they are not doing anything to imitate anymore. So, we can only learn from dead people through symbols. And only we humans can learn from the dead. Other species don’t have symbols to get across the death barrier. ( I don’t mean anything morbid by the death barrier)
So, ancestor “worship” or kinship starts human society. A living generation organized its relations among the living based on tracing relationship to a dead common ancestor. The first symbol is the name.
Pattern recognition logic is symbol understanding, culture.
Also, culture is a Lamarckian-like mechanism in the evolutionary sphere. Or I should say , it was way back when. With nuclear bombs and global heating, we have fallen in to unfitness in the Darwinian sense, and it is through use of symbols. Instead of inheriting acquired characteristics through culture that are adaptive, we have inherited acquired characteristics in our extrasomatic body which is culture which are patently maladaptive, on their face, prima facie, res ipsa loquitur, it’s obvious..
Got to reread your essay.
18 January 2007, 5:30 pmpeggy:
Hi again Stan,
I’ve read your whole article now and have come to understand it is not just about squirrels. And I admit I have never tasted squirrel meat - just guessed it might be bitter because squirrels eat so many acorns, which are indeed quite bitter, and I know because I have tasted acorns, so … I retract the claim about squirrel meat, which was not based on empirical evidence.
I love your stuff, but in this article, I don’t understand your (and Bordo’s) critical view of empiricism. I am an academic and some of my male academic friends have accused me (in a friendly manner) of being too much of an empiricist, mainly because I have renounced elaborate theory-making, most of all theory-making based on very little, or no, empirical fact - “fact” meaning here just observation, direct experience of things in the world, such as direct experience of how sqirrel meat tastes. I don’t think that being an empiricist in any way excludes pattern recognition, approximation, or intuition. Meaning would be impossible without these things, after all. And I don’t at all see that empiricism creates social hierarchies, except insofar as people who have real, direct experience of the things they are talking about are accorded more authority in describing such matters than those who don’t. Like you - your authority is based largely on your real-life experiences, combined with your wide reading and your articulate way of developing an argument. But experience is the most important basis of real authority - at least in the world I inhabit.
Kindest regards,
18 January 2007, 6:25 pmBarb:
I was gasping at the length but each paragraph had some important idea that kept me going…will have another look to see how it could be done in chunks that may require “more than the attention span of a cat” but less than an obsessive like myself.
The most telling thing I can say about post-modernism is that in a recent cultural studies/management course, I got the best grade for a paper taking the piss out of both post-modernism and a particular artist. Not for its sparkling wit, but because it followed the exact format set out by the lecturer. Other papers and projects, in which I tried to present interesting ideas and facts in plain language, got lower grades.
website to enjoy: http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo
As far as what to do, activists can at least educate their own children to observe patterns in the world without letting their thoughts be ruled by advertising in all its forms, including youth or celebrity culture. Thanks for just calling it ‘consumerism’.
Far better to be exposed to it and learn to think around it than to ban it from view, as many precious Green granola liberals do. My son and I have been discussing advertising for about as long as he’s been able to really think about things (about four), so he knows how commercials are made, what they are trying to do and thinks about whether the thing (or lifestyle) being advertised is really worth having or not. Of course this hasn’t kept him from wanting stuff he sees on TV or getting caught up in several consumer fads (like Pokemon), but when this happens we make him spend his own money on it. So when the Harry Potter’s Laboratory made a lump of inedible green goo that didn’t look anything like the groovy ’snakes’ he’d seen, or the Pokemon cards started to gather dust, that was his savings he’d eaten into, not something that merely ‘appeared’ because he wanted it at some point.
I am aware as well, however, that we were able to do this because I was a full-time mum before he went to school, his dad worked part-time and shared his care equally - so I also had some time to think. We lived on a very small amount of money, but I had the strength and energy (and creativity) to resist tantrums and put an end to them at an early stage.
It’s much harder if you’ve been working all day at something else and can only think about immediate quiet, plus feel guilty about not spending time with your kid(s). And probably also don’t have time to sit and watch TV with them while you’re desparately trying to get the other housework done. Both parents need to be able to spend more time with their kids, especially in the early stages, and both need time away from them (and not necessarily on the job) to refresh their adult minds.
Although it was a virtuoso application of theory, in terms of popularisation you could probably jump straight from the squirrel story to how we’re un-learning pattern recognition (ie: participating in our own de-humanisation) to how consumerism is training us to freeze in the headlights of the juggernaut coming at us, not even do a dance to keep it at bay.
Anyway, great stuff, keep it coming!
18 January 2007, 8:45 pmDeAnander:
There’s something here which Stan, Illich, I and others have griped about, which I think needs to be teased out of the mix somehow — something about applied intelligence and ‘fitness’ and how this is destroyed by deskilling, Taylorism, and the relations of dependency that characterise industrialism. I can’t make a coherent linear exposition of this theme from a cold start so will note that
* industrialism and taylorism go hand in hand for obvious reasons
* both the core/periphery dynamic and the wage labour dynamic require the imposition of *dependency*, as does the profit motive (captive markets, addiction and addictive metaphors)
* the totalisation of capitalism means that no one would have the skill, or be legally permitted, to do *anything* for self or family without paying tribute in some form, either via licensing and permitting, by intelprop extortion (lease and use fees), or by having to pay a credentialled professional. this is the logical end state of the war on subsistence.
* the insatiable desire of industrialism to Enclose and to control therefore tends to produce unfitness, both by destroying the biomass to build the technomass and by deskilling and infantilising the subject population in its attempt to extirpate subsistence.
* the extirpation of subsistence “creates markets” (people have to buy things that they are prevented from making for themselves, or have been made too stupid to remember how to make for themselves) as well as creating abjectly dependent wage labour pools.
* specialisation of any kind tends to set in motion the precursor conditions which now blossom poisonously as industrial capitalism: Enclosure of knowledge, trade secrets, binding/coerced apprenticeship, unequal trade relations, core/periphery dynamics at the city-state scale.
question: is there a “happy medium” in which specialisation and techne are developed to the first watershed (cf Illich) but not beyond it? what checks and balances have been built into less imperialistic cultures to prevent the runaway processes that lead to regional (or in our case global) collapse?
18 January 2007, 8:53 pmDeAnander:
the corn riots in mexico this week illustrate Enclosure, the forcible “creation of markets,” and the dependency that destroys food security and national/regional autarky. the US agribusiness assault on Mexico’s native corn farming is decades old and has almost succeeded in its totalitarian agenda: wiping out all traditional cultivars, driving subsistence/market farmers off the land, forcibly creating markets for dumping the US glut of industrial-ag fossil-intensive patented corn. except that now the US corn feedstock (it can hardly be called “food”) is in demand to feed the ethanol scam and keep alive the fantasy of the private automobile paradise. now the hegemon exercises its option to stop supplying the resource for which it has created a dependent market, and the local subsistence base has been destroyed. result: corn riots, poor people going hungry.
18 January 2007, 8:59 pmCharles:
Some old rambling about a social instinct , ? “Person-to-person” way before the telephone was invented.
This passage is fairly anti-anti-essentialist:
“the extent to which the human essence has become nature to man (sic)”. How many times does he use “essence” in this ? Marx says, “I don’t care if y’all call me essentialist.” The human essence is a social essence. Sex is a natural sociality. Sex is our own natural destination ? Who says commies aren’t fun ? Holy Writ, indeed , from the Holy Ghost, fee, fi , fo , fum.
John Henry
^^^^^^^
” The direct natural, and necessary relation of person to person is the relation of man to woman, . In this natural species-relationship,man’s (sic)relationship to nature is immediately his relation to man ( sic ), just as his relation to man is immediately his relation to nature - his own natural
destination. In this relationship, therefore, is sensuously manifested, reduced to an observable fact, the extent to which the human essence has become nature to man, or to which nature to him has become the human essence of man. From this relationship on can therefore judge man’s whole level of development. From the character of this relationship follows how much man as a species-being, , as man, has come to be himself and to comprehend himself; the relation of man to woman is the most natural r relation of human being to human being. It therefore reveals the extent to which the human essence in him has become a natural essence - the extent to which his human nature has come to be natural essence -the extent to which his human nature has come to be natural to him. This relationship also reveals the extent to which man’s need has become a human need; the extent to which, therefore, the other person as a person has become for him a need - the extent to which he in his individual existence is at the same time a social being .” (end quote)
From the socallled “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844″)
http://gfdl.marxists.org.uk/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/comm.htm
19 January 2007, 10:31 amCharles:
Thanks again for your stimulating essay, Stan, and permitting “rambling” :>) Here some more ramble.
It is quite appropriate that the mirror neuron was found in a monkey. I say appropriate because it is sort of science fitting in with the folk wisdom of the expression “Monkey see; monkey do”. For monkeys and other species can and do learn by imitation. Humans learn by imitation too.
However, I would suggest that imitation is not in its core equivalent to the Pavlovian operant conditioning learning. Ringing the bell everytime before food is brought to a dog, training up a reflex of salivating to a bell sound, even when food is not brought is the Pavlovian paradigm. The dog does no imitating in that Pavlovian scenario. Imitating would be the dog looking at another dog and doing the same thing that the other dog does.
So, imitative learning and operant conditioning learning are logically separable in the analysis, though they may be joined in the concrete process you are discussing, consumerism and the bourgeois mass media, advertising , etc.
Now the squirrel “dodge maneuver” you describe sounds like it’s an instinct. That is, it is not learned at all. It’s like that reflex humans have when a doctor takes a medical hammer and tapes the knee in a certain spot, and the leg involuntarily jerks. We don’t acquire that reflex by imitating or by Pavolovian operant conditioning. We don’t learn it at all. We have that “from our genes”. It sounds like the squirrel dodge maneuver is in their genes. They don’t learn it at all. They just know it based on birth rights.
So, with respect to your generalization that we are biologically determined not to be biologically determined, an elaboration of that might be , “humans have an ability to suppress instinctive behaviors more readily than other species can suppress their instinctive behaviors.” This is the unusual level of placticity in human nature. The squirrel can’t override their instinct to dodge only in one way. Squirrel nature lacks our level of plasticity.
And so , humans have an instinct for heterosexual sex, but they have a high ability to overrride that instinct. Nonentheless, does that instinct still exist in us ? even though we are able to override it readily, and human individuals can learn to enjoy non-heterosexual sex.
The reason I would suspect that we still have the heterosexual instinct in a large percentage of the human population is that it is so critical to survival of the species. It really is equivalent at the reproduction level to the beating of the heart at the survival/existence level.
Just as it would be very risky to rely on learning to send a conscious, voluntary message to make your heart beat everytime, and so our hearts beat based on involuntary nerve messages, so it would be very risky for the survival of a population over many generations to rely on each new generation learning hetersexual behavior to perpetuate the species. This suggests that there is significant involuntary nervous basis to hetersexual attraction and behavior, at least “underlying”. At least, this is the basic logic by which I infer a heterosexual instinct. It is plastic in individuals, but most individuals are likely to be born with it as a genetic inheritance. Trainiing, learning, Pavolovian and /or imitative, can override this instinct, but the instinct is there first before it is overridden in most people. I do not doubt that a minority of people may be born without it because of mutations or somesuch.
The main unique human learning ability is not imitating. Monkeys are famous for imitating. Would humans can do and monkeys cannot do is learn from symbolic communications. That is we can learn other than by sensually observing behavior. We can learn other than by having another human bodily demonstrate to us what we are learning. Monkeys and squirrels can’t do that.
Through symbolic messages, we can learn from the experiences of dead members of our species, even though they cannot bodily demonstrate to us their experience. We can learn from and imitate their experiences through symbols, which do not “picture” or “imitate” sensually the behavior we learn.
Of course, we can learn symbolically from living members of our species to, as when our mothers teach us by words, etc., etc.
Not all squirrel behavior is instinctive and rigid ,like the dodge maneuver. Actually, squirrels can think critically and make choices. If there is a nut to the left and a nut to the right, they can choice whether to go for one or the other first. Squirrels can avoid predators by thinking on the spot, as well as doing their instintive dodge maneuvr.
I don’t think the main difference between squirrels and humans is that squirrels don’t have _rational_ (sapiens) thinking. Humans are miss named _homo sapiens_, because rational or goal oriented thinking is not unique to our species. What is unique to our species is _symbolic_ thinking. And symbolic thinking is in essence _social_ thinking. Our brains our unique in the amount of communications we have and can receive from other members of our species , including especially messeages/symbols from dead members of our species. We are unique in our ability to share and learn from so many of the experiences of other members of our species. That is we can learn non-empirically, as your essay emphasizes, or other than from our own individual empirical experience.
Consumerism and commodity fetishism in capitalism , and media advertising, is an abuse of learning from symbolic representations. Actually, the antedote to consumerism would be to get kids and adults to do _more_ empirical learning , learning from their own, individual experience, learning from “hardknocks”. Stop “learning” from others’ experience on television. The not having to do it themselves makes it easy for them to “learn” fake representations of reality, to be fooled by the fake representations and symbols on television and elsewhere.
19 January 2007, 5:24 pmxenia:
re experience vs reflection
it is ultimately a false dichotomy, but…
experience is reified in capitalist economy. just look at what people will do for the sake of a cv (aka the nasty side of volunteering, which you often only see when you are the recipient of such calculated charity). not a single year of life can be unaccounted for in a cv, you cannot simply say: well, guess what? for a year, i lived off bread and water in a tiny apartment, and i mostly reflected upon life, and that’s it, i don’t have any piece of paper to show for it.
no, there has to be a neat definition, framing each segment of one’s life, referenced by a higher authority. this is one of the most odious sides of academia.
meaning also: behind the presupposition that experience reigns supreme is also the liberal ideal of the able-bodied, preferably male, middle to upper class subject who belongs to a stable “Western” state. If that person wants to go to Italy and experience it first hand, he can!
But what happens if you are severely constrained by physical disability, poverty, wrong or non-existant citizenship? if you are in prison (see gramsci)? what if there is objectively no way for you to go and experience Italy?
well, there is reflection, and this is where it is superior to experience. it is ultimately through reflection that correct action arises (i’ve met a bunch of people who had experiences comprable to mine, or more harrowing, yet they remain reactionary assholes!!)
it’s reflection, ultimately, while stan is sitting and taking care of a baby, seemingly doing nothing for his cv, that brings him to write such fantastic analyses.
19 January 2007, 5:37 pmStan:
On instinct v pattern recognition v mirroring, I didn’t mean to leave any impression that these were either counterposed or mutually exclusive. There can be Pavlovian conditioning to certain patterns that are recognizable, and they cna be learned through imitation, including mental imitation (visualization), as well as assimilated and elaborated upon through symbolic thinking.
When paratroops go through Jump School at Fort Benning, the cadre have three weeks to get everyone who goes through the school to do something that is intuitively pretty stupid… that is, jump out of a moving airplane (120 naughts) from between 800 and 1,250 feet above the ground. Sounds pretty simple, until you get up there. When the doors are opened, the wind starts roaring through the already noisy plane and one begins to feel very soft and small. Fear of loud noises and falling are probably instinctual. When people first started doing this, a lot of people got to the door and became very strong, strong enough to grab the edge of the door and refuse to get out by persuasion or force.
The school solved this problem by spending three weeks in which one practiced the exit jump on the command “Hit it!” about 50 million times. The instructors say “Hit it!” and everyone in the class, no matter what they are doing immediately jump, assuming the “tight body position, feet and knees together, slightly bent at the waist, chin down, hands on thesides of the reserve parachute, fingers spread… etc” Up they go, as they vocalize very loudly, remaining in this position, “One-thousand, two thousand, three thousand, four thousand!” I kid you not, the students do that at least 100 times a day every day for the first two weeks (the counting is to go through four seconds while they are falling to determine if the static line has had adequate time tojank the parachute off their backs). Repetition, repetition, repetition! It is literally programing all the students to approach a situation against a very primal urge not to do something, and overcoming it with a well-etched conditioned relfex.
And it works. Come week 3, Jump Week, there is almost never a jump refusal on the first jump any more. Then they do five jumps as fast as they can write the load manifests, just to get the roots in deep on that reflex.
Now… what are the kinds of social learning that lead anyone to sign up for this in the first place.
See, it’s complicated.
That said, I ain’t buyin’ the hetero instinct. That squirrel dance is pattern recognition and choreographed response down into the evolutionary circuits. Real human sexual behavior is not a set of hard-wired choreography. In fact, arousal can and does occur in the absence of partners, even through memory. Heterosex, in MOST cases, is also pervaded, erotically so, with social power. Writing that off as instinct is just too easy…
19 January 2007, 9:31 pmCharles:
That said, I ain’t buyin’ the hetero instinct. That squirrel dance is pattern recognition and choreographed response down into the evolutionary circuits. Real human sexual behavior is not a set of hard-wired choreography. In fact, arousal can and does occur in the absence of partners, even through memory. Heterosex, in MOST cases, is also pervaded, erotically so, with social power. Writing that off as instinct is just too easy…
^^^^^
OK. All meant as friendly discussion.
I wouldn’t reduce it to _all_ instinct. I would see it as a combination of instinct and social training.
I’m just thinking that the notion of a repressable or plastic instinct doesn’t quite contradict it being pervaded with social power. (Note in the Marx quote, he’s saying that it is a uniquely _social_ instinct; it is a unity and struggle of both the natural and the social. It something we do naturally with other members of our species (social).
It’s like our eating is pervaded with social power and culture ,too, but no one would doubt that there is a natural instinct there that social/cultural traditions intertwine with. Culture dresses our instincts up in “clothes”, but there are still underlying “naked” instincts that don’t have their origin in learning.
Also, in the case of heterosex, some social power and culture enhance and reinforce the instinct , or go along with it in some ways. In other words, hetersex is both instinctive and reinforced by social learning.
20 January 2007, 8:37 amAudrey:
Far better to be exposed to it and learn to think around it than to ban it from view, as many precious Green granola liberals do.
I’m not convinced that discussions have an impact equivalent to the multisensory experience of consumerism, sexism and racism that we get from television. It’s one thing to speak persuasively about how a new product isn’t going to change your outlook on life. It’s another thing entirely to watch someone drab be transformed into a dynamic smiling person accompanied by music and vibrant background colors and adoring friends after they acquire some new gadget – and to see that day after day. If parents were issued sound effects teams and lighting crews, maybe then we’d be on equal footing.
I asked my students earlier this year how many had watched Disney movies when they were growing up. Almost all the hands went up. Then I asked how many had parents who discussed race or gender issues in the movies with them. Maybe one hand went up, maybe none, depending on the class. Then I asked how many discussions they’d had vs. how many times they’d seen the movies. The few with hands still up had maybe one or two conversations, but had watched their videos hundreds of times, they said. (Probably an exaggeration, but that was their impression.) Not unlike the jump school training, in many ways.
Even those who were having the discussions were rarely addressing the issues in an all encompassing way. One girl had asked her parents where the black people were. They had a talk about why they don’t exist in Disney-land. She remembered the conversation, but does that really negate the effects of growing up seeing every heroine as white? Does it even begin to address why they all have tiny waists and exaggerated curves and the happy endings revolve around the women always ending up with a man? A discussion of whether a toy will or won’t work as advertised doesn’t address why the children in those commercials all have comfortable upper middle class houses with thin attractive English-speaking parents - one of each gender and both of the same race as the child.
Deep down, I guess I am suspicious of those mirror neurons - don’t trust them at all, in fact. I suspect they have a mind of their own, and sneak around behind our backs learning behaviors and attitudes through repeated exposure in ways we don’t even realize, even if we tell them directly to look the other way or ignore what they’re seeing.
21 January 2007, 12:45 amTellurian:
You sure talk a lot, Stan. Is it really necessary to take such a long running start with those stinking squirrels? We have to read this stuff you know and, life being so short, is it absolutedly crucial to your argument to trace in such detail the hubris of those overweight squirrels in reading Chaucer, or whatever?
It’s no wonder you don’t have any stinking credentials; you probably can’t sit quiet long enough to listen to learned authority. Your idea of the opposite of talking is not listening, it’s waiting.
Oh well. That said there is no question that your focus on the deformation of pattern recognition of the population by power, especially of political and social reality, is of the highest importance. We are all miseducated, misinformed and misentertained from childhood to identify with the conceptual framing of the patterns of reality that fovor the power interests of the powerful, rather than the power interests of the dispowered population.
This is why we are all ideologically insane. We are taught from childhood the religious, political and scientific patterns of reality that prevent us from perceiving political and social reality in ways useful to the population, that might allow hunamity to survive. Humanity has been indoctrinated by the truth traditions of power-states in ways that prevent us from organizing ourselves to confront oppressive and despotic power. We identify with disfunctional conceptual patterns which are strongly resistent to simple logic and the evidence of our own senses.
Somehow we have to unlearn these disfunctional truth patterns. Unfortunately people are not very good at unlearning, worse than other species of animal studies ae valid. but it can be done.
In the learned traditions of agrarian power-states the conceptual pattern in physical science maintained that the earth was the fixed center of the universe. It took a great scientific revolution to legitimate the conception that the earth was a planet like the others and moved as they did. What was hardest according to J.D. Bernal in his four volume SCIENCE IN HISTORY was unlearning the old conceptual formulations.
Now it is necessary to change our conceptual patterns in social theory. Indeed we are changing them historically, but whether this can be done in time for our survival is a real question. Focusing on the problem of our dysfunctional pattern recognition in political and social reality is therefore crucial to our survival. Needless to say, it is not being done in academic social science.
21 January 2007, 1:33 amDeAnander:
Those mirror neurons are kinda haunting me.
The immediate thing I’m thinking is this: if little neurons fire off “mimicking” or “rehearsing” the behaviour being observed, as juveniles learn tribal behaviour from elders, as one monkey learns from another how to peel a fruit and so on, then… WTH is going on when men watch hours and hours and hours of pornography depicting the rape, torture, humiliation of women? Are mirror neurons firing off the whole time, educating and programming those men? are their motor homunculi vicariously raping, practising, rehearsing?
Radical feminists always said that pornography was “rape instruction manuals” and the mirror neuron research suggests we may have been absolutely right. What are the implications for such liberal shibboleths as Freedom of [Commercial] Speech? And what are the implications for the relative power of video media vs audio and the printed word? Do mirror neurons fire when a mechanic reads a manual on how to adjust a carburetor, if there are pictures? what if there are no pictures? what if the manual is read aloud to the mechanic, do the neurons fire?
Is it Monkey See, [Monkey Model with Mirror Neurons] Monkey Do? specifically a visual connection? what does this imply for the ethics — the legitimacy — of video propaganda, advertising, TV etc?
I’m thinking now of men watching other men fight — in a boxing ring or just in a brawl, and the way their own bodies mimick and echo the moves the combatants make or the moves the observers think the combatants should make — a kind of “acting out”. And connecting that with, e.g. hunting dances performed by tribal people the world over, in which lead dancers (experienced hunters) re-enact the stalk and the kill, and juvenile males (sometimes all children and youth) follow along, enacting with their own bodies the story being told, learning how to hunt. Mirror neurons at work?
21 January 2007, 2:29 amCharles:
If I might add, participation in this blog has persuaded me of a substantial portion of the radical feminist arguments - particularly, and especially the sharp struggle against rape culture.
My argument that there exists heterosexual instinct absolutely does NOT, NOT, NOT, NOT,NOT justify any aspect of rape culture.
However, I think acknowledging heterosexual instinct as a fact is critical in any program to abolish and cure men of rape culture. Rape must be understood, in part, as a profound perversion of a basic instinct. That is not a sufficient condition to cure it, but this understanding _is_ one of the necessary preconditions for abolishing rape, and rape culture. We will get nowhere with the problem if we do not have this understanding, acknowledge this biological fact.
Also, the existence of sexual instinct suggests some validity in the more common, old Freudian notions of some mental illness deriving from repression of sexual instincts. The latter is no longer in intellectual fashion with the post-modern critiques of Freudian essentialism.
22 January 2007, 12:18 pmSam:
DeAnander, I had those same scary thoughts about the particularly pervasive influence of videotaped pornography versus verbal communication of any sort after seeing the movie What the #$*! Do We (K)now!? Feminists have long talked about “the male gaze” and how media constructs our point of view by means of training us through repetition to see the world from the perspective of the men directing the cameras.
The same empathic mental processes that cause me to cry every time I watch The Color Purple are at work in men’s heads when they watch pornography. That knowledge frightens me so much I can’t dwell on it too long else I permanently lose a bit of the strained sanity my sore hands are gripping tightly.
22 January 2007, 8:54 pmpeggy:
De and Sam,
The thing is, we are not monkeys. There is something in us that chooses what we will imitate, how, and when. There are choices all along the way. Or, that is what I think.
There are many images out there - millions, billions. The people who get lost in pornography world, I don’t know what to think of them, because I do not know them. Stan has spent some time, when he was in the army, watching pornography, and he remembers the time with disgust. I wonder about all the others. Do they reflexively mime it? This is an empirical question, to which one could, in principle, find empirical answers.
Stan’s work is provocative, because it sparks so many thoughts. Sometimes it makes me ride off in all directions. Jane would find this a humorous sight. But maybe it is better than riding off in just one direction. That can have less humorous consequences.
I am sleepy and my neurons are firing without rhyme or reason. Sorry, and to bed.
23 January 2007, 5:29 amBarb:
“A discussion of whether a toy will or won’t work as advertised doesn’t address why the children in those commercials all have comfortable upper middle class houses with thin attractive English-speaking parents - one of each gender and both of the same race as the child.”
Well, Audrey, no. All I’ve been trying to do is get my son to think about the idea that advertising does not represent his best interests - to start somewhere. As it is I can’t stop him watching TV or absorbing the other general cultural ‘messages’ around us even if I could ban TV. All I can do is try to get him to think about it - and learn his own lessons.
The fact that advertising is also sexist, racist and classist like the rest of society is something he’s managed to pick up on by himself because our circumstances are not as privileged as you imply - he initiates those discussions.
And of course ‘discussing advertising’ with kids is not the whole answer, (!) it is a place to start, something to do here and now. I feel that the main message to question and resist is that the product is good for you, and that the ‘lifestyle’ is desirable.
23 January 2007, 5:41 amStan:
The whole “choice” thing is potentially dichotomous. We learn it that way. ‘We can either choose, or we can’t.’ One of the things I tried to get at in this hypothesis is that Pavlovian conditioning, imitative behavior, “intent,” and cognition-affect are inter-operative.
Anyone who’s dealt with addiction, or any of its behavioral analogs, will testify that choice-or-no-choice is an oversimplification.
Just mull over “intent” and neuronal activity for a second, and we can see how mind-bending this becomes. That “bending,” I’m convinced, represents a gap in understanding of some kind, but whether the gap itself is limited biologically, circumscribed by standpoint, or a reflection of real paradoxes is an open question.
I believe, however, that what we are most immediately confronted with is an epistemological issue. We need symbolic-metaphoric-allegorical-conceptual/affective representations that get us closer to a “knowledge” that gives us what we need to struggle for better lives that are not lived at the expense of others.
Advertising is a political issue. That is exactly why its defenders say, “Lighten up, it’s just an ad.” They want to conceal its political nature. The solution is a political one: prohibit anything that qualifies as “demand production” propaganda, in the near term - prior to total transformative change - ban all advertising aimed at children. All of it. It’s important to work with our own kids, but I can say from first hand experience, that even that does not work. it is too ubiquitous; and it becomes part of the “youth culture” they experience in school and with same-age friends. Advertising constitutes much of youth culture.
23 January 2007, 9:46 amCharles:
What is a symbol ? It is where something is used to represent something that it is not. The sequence of sounds or letters “d-o-g” is used to represent something that they are not, and so is a symbol. A picture of a dog, represents the dog , but it also mimics or imitates the appearance of the dog. To the extent that a picture of a dog “imitates” or is similar to what it represents, it is _not_ a symbol. ( Of course, a picture of a dog is not that dog, so to that extent a picture is partially symbolic)
* see below on symbol and origin of human society
Words are different from pictures in this way. Thinking in words is different from thinking in pictures.
Communication through words, spoken and written, have dominated human culture for many millenia. Of course, there is theatre, ritual, portrait art etc. by which activities are directly demonstrated, pictured, but most human communication includes words, i.e. fully symbolic communication.
With the mass production of movies, television and video, this millenia old structure is revolutionized. Television is communication through pictures, mainly. There are of course words too, but a main aspect is the many, many pictures. Humans have long had pictures, but they couldn’t mass produce them in the way they can mass produce words. With television, and mass producing pictures, comes the capacity to do much more picture communication than ever before. ( Moving pictures or picturing motion are even more like concrete reality than stills)
With respect to this discussion, I point this out, because thinking in words is more “cognitive” than thinking in pictures. Words are more symbolic than pictures (as explained above). Television watching involves much non-symbolic, non-cognitive thinking.
With respect to television mesmerizing children,
_ and undermining critical thinking_ , we might consider that the less symbolic , less cognitive nature of television watching is a factor. Picture thinking is more passive, less active than word thinking.
So, perhaps, use of mirror neurons are not conducive to critical thinking. Imitative thinking is more monkey-like. Television, picture thinking, induces monkey-like thinking, passive thinking, rather than critical thinking. Television induces an imitative, passive mood.
Imitation involves no stage of making a judgment as to whether or not to do what is being observed. It’s just “monkey see; monkey do” . Not “monkey see; monkey think; monkey do or not do.”
How do we get kids to use their mirror neurons less, given that television is dominating what they “see” ?
* Symbols can get across the death barrier between generations of people, I mentioned earlier, because the symbols themselves are not the dead person being represented. The name of a dead ancestor can represent that ancestor to descendants in a way that the dead ancestor herself cannot ( because she is dead)….Thus, humans with symbols can communicate with and learn from the experiences of dead members of the species, _learn from dead members of the group_, in a way that no other species can. By this we can accumulate and learn from the experiences of many, many generations in the way other species cannot.
23 January 2007, 1:42 pmStan:
Let’s net get diverted thinking mirror neurons are “mirrors.”
These are also “intent” neurons. When I baby sees someone stick out her tongue, and does it back, the monkey-see-monkey-do process is anything but simple. How does the child KNOW that her tongue corresponds to the adult instigator?
Ramachandran’s essay is worth a read.
These little neurons may be the basis for empathy itself. They almost certainly have a great deal to do with language — our vast, cognitive-symbolic archive.
23 January 2007, 2:19 pmCharles:
Indeed, how does the monkey know that her body part corresponds to the body part of the monkey instigator she imitates ? I’d take the “mirror” to mean the imitator is “mirroring” the monkey or person they imitate. The imitator acts like a mirror. This would be “picture thinking”.
23 January 2007, 5:17 pmBarb:
Hi Stan,
Yes, advertising is a political issue, and yes ban all adverts directed at kids ‘prior to total transformative change’. In the meantime there’s also Adbusters - I’ve had their calendars up for five years in my house. Sometimes subversion in the same media is more memorable than discussion about what’s wrong with what’s normally out there. I would never claim that my son is or will ever be totally immune from consumer culture - or that even I myself am, for that matter. At least he is aware (as I’m sure your kids are) that there is another way of thinking he can use when (or if!) he feels he needs it.
By the way all (at least) human sex is about power relations - heterosex, homosex, monosex, autosex, sheepsex whatever. What people need is the time, space, health, freedom from worry, freedom to choose who and when, freedom from abuse, etc required for good sex, however they want to experience it. There is a lot of bad sex going on (whether we see it commidfied or not, whether it is violent or merely empty) because of the lack of all these conditions in peoples’ lives, and it needs to be called for what it is.
But I have to say after twenty years of feminism I’m tired of talking about bad sex can be, and how much of it there is. I am more interested in the conditions needed for good sex - which is why Willhelm Reich was a Marxist and worked hard to set up free sex clinics (contraception and counselling) in Germany and Russia before he was thrown out of the Communist Party. Whether a penis is a domineering organ because of its penetrative function or a vulnerable one in the way it dangles around most of the rest of the time; whether a vagina is engulfing, or vulnerable to penetration - when I’m having good sex I’m not worried about any of that. And afterwards I feel energised in the struggle for the right general conditions to have more. I’m not rich enough to buy them for myself, although sometimes I can steal some.
It is necessary to critique the bad sex going on all around us and to us, and the fucked-up power relations it exposes on every level. But if our kids are going to listen, we also have to be talking about good sex (if we’ve had it), and try to set a good example, so far as we are able, as part of our own lives. They will live as they will from a whole set of ‘outside’ circumstances and influences, but like thinking critically about advertising, talking about good sex (when they want to!) and helping them come to their own conclusions about what that might be gives them another tool they can use later in life. Whatever ‘mistakes’ along the way.
I’m with Peggy about the sparking off of ideas, thanks for being the tinderbox.
23 January 2007, 6:32 pmpeggy:
Stan,
I agree with everything you have said in your last two posts. The word “choice” is highly charged politically. In my sleepiness last night, I may have forgotten that, or more likely, didn’t care.
Those mirror neurons are, I imagine, way below the surface of consciousness, as is most of our bodily including brain activity. And, as you said, whatever they do, it is complex and mysterious.
Having said all that, and acknowledging the enslaving power of addiction, I still believe that every moment contains many branchings of many roads. Usually, without thinking, we follow the road most travelled by, the most deeply entrenched neural pathway. But also, I think, some stubborn, anarchistic little something inside us has as its whole job demanding resistance to habit, calling us to follow another road, or even make a whole new one, beating down all the thorny jungle in the way. There is an elaborate hypothesis for you! And after I said I eschew such things …
And yes, for enabling a child to grow and find a viable path for herself in the world, I think it is best to show her as many possibilities and you can, lay them before her like so many items of food, without prejudice. It is heartbreaking sometimes, like it would have been for you when your son chose to go to Iraq, and then to return to Iraq after having come home. But there it is, his choice, his decision, resisting the easiest path. And maybe for him, it is the best thing.
23 January 2007, 6:54 pmAudrey:
Barb, I didn’t mean to imply anything at all about your circumstances one way or another, sorry if my post came off that way.
I agree that we can’t, in an urban/suburban American society at least, reasonable shield our kids from the advertising culture completely. Somewhere between attempting to ban all access and actively providing it is a sweet spot. I was lucky in that my kid was raised without a tv in an environment without a lot of Americans until she was school aged. I wouldn’t say I was sheltering her from tv/American culture exactly – that implies some amount of deliberate ongoing protection, like yelling at her to get out of the street, as opposed to just living where there’s not any traffic. It was more that it just wasn’t something we valued enough to have in our household, same as cigarettes or brussel sprouts. That didn’t prevent her from having occasional exposure to both, and we still were able to have talks about why cigarettes and brussel sprouts are disgusting.
What it did, though, was prevent her from having constant exposure to the point where conditioning would be an issue. Leonard Eron’s testimony to the Senate addressed long term affects of that conditioning: “the amount of violence youngsters watch on television at age 8 is related to their aggressiveness 10 years later (as reported to Senator Pastore’s Committee in 1972) and to the seriousness of criminal acts 22 years later at age thirty. These relations hold up even when initial aggressiveness, IQ, and social class are statistically controlled.†http://commerce.senate.gov/hearings/0518ero.pdf
Sprinkle in the gender messages we get from tv, and we’re very close to exactly what’s haunting De.
98% of households in the US now have a television – and people seem to have gotten the idea that it’s inevitable they will have one – as if it’s no longer a matter of choice. It’s viewed as extremist, an act of rebellion, to not have one. I don’t think Barb is unique in classifying those without a tv as “precious Green granola liberals.†As a culture we’ve forgotten that people throughout history lived without them. It’s now considered abnormal – maybe even detrimental to our kids’ development - to not bring corporate marketing inside our own homes, or to not expose our kids to the stereotypes, gender roles and violence shown on popular tv.
23 January 2007, 11:20 pmDeAnander:
My parents were Nixon Republicans, and they would not have a TV in the house until I was 8 years old; my mother did not want me to be “brainwashed” (her words) by advertising and morning cartoons, until I had learned to read and formed a firm attachment to books. It worked. I started reading around age 3 or 4 on Mama’s lap, and by the time TV bewitched me (as of course it did — its moving images are irresistible even to my cats, let alone to the hypertrophied primate brain) it was a secondary, not a primary influence.
This is not to say that books are somehow innocuous and can carry no bad messages — heck, I read Ayn Rand around the age of 10 or 12 and that had a warping influence it took years to recover from! — but that I was socialised into verbal, written-word story telling and reasoning before I was socialised into limbic, visual-stimulus, mirror-neuron communication. I do think it makes a difference. I am not sure of all the ways in which it makes a difference. Maybe I am underequipped now to be a critic of TV-style media; I know I have no patience or interest in producing it. I think my attention span was longer, as a 20 year old, and my perseverance at intellectual tasks more robust, than what I observe in undergraduates on my campus today. Though it is a cliche (forever) that older folks always think this generation of students is duller than their own was in its time, there’s a general consensus among educators that something frightening is happening in the US education system and we are receiving at University level students who lack the most basic literacy skills. Shall we blame TV, or secondary education systems starved of money, or behavioural problems related to corporate food, or…? who knows.
My point, if there was one
is that one does not have to be a Precious Green Granola Liberal (rather a contemptuous locution, no?) to want to protect one’s children from corporate TV. Many right wing evangelicals do the same; Amish kids don’t watch TV until they reach the age of rumspringe; and my conservative parents simply thought it was bad for youthful brain development and would impair my literacy and my chances for professional advancement later in life.
I am all in favour of a ban on all advertising. IMHO advertisers should be restricted to a decorative “crest” design such as was used to mark the different clans of Tokugawa Japan. Within the simple circular form of those crests is infinite scope for artistic cleverness and sophistication. I don’t mind them marking their products with their crest or sigil, so that we know (for better or worse) who produced the goods around us. If they want their employees to wear coats or headbands with the company crest stencilled on them, whatever… but an end, please, to the culture in which whole movies are designed merely to “place” products in the public view, where more artistic craft and technical wizardry goes into 10 seconds of advertisement than into a 1-hour tv show; where ads are crafted with the most informed psychological technique to hit us on all our weakest emotional and spiritual nerve endings, but consumers are deprived of the psychological expertise to defend themselves against this meticulously crafted attack.
Advertising today is like an ubiquitous, hypereducated psychopath, an ultra-Ripley, whispering in our collective ear 24 hours a day, charming and conning us with every trick in the book, utterly without conscience, full of charm and dazzle, out for only one thing: to manipulate us for his own personal gain. Why we tolerate the presence of this charming psychopath in our midst — even invite him into our homes and schools — is one of the mysteries of social control and power under late capitalism. As Stan has pointed out, ironically one of the few places in the US where you can go to get away from nonstop saturation advertising is … a military base.
24 January 2007, 2:34 pmCharles:
Ramachandran’s essay is worth a read.
^^^^^
CB: You might not be surprised that I see a shortcoming in Ramachandran’s hypotheses in that he does not use the concept or seem to recognize the symbol in his analysis.
He thinks that the main way humans learn is through very rapid and extensive imitating, thus the importance of mirror neruons. But humans’ unique learning ability is through symbolic communication, not through imitating.
Insertions below.
THE BIG BANG OF HUMAN EVOLUTION
The hominid brain grew at an accelerating pace until it reached its present size of 1500cc about 200,000 years ago. Yet uniquely human abilities such the invention of highly sophisticated “standardized” multi- part tools, tailored clothes, art, religious belief and perhaps even language are thought to have emerged quite rapidly around 40,000 years ago — a sudden explosion of human mental abilities and culture that is sometimes called the “big bang.”
^^^^
CB: “Perhaps even language” , but perhaps not. Language is fundamentally symbolic. Humans were probably thinking symbolically 200,000 years ago. The rapid growth of the brain before that was due to a positive feedback loop between symbolic thinking and brain size.
The big bang of cultural artifacts found 40,000 years ago was , as the evidence shows, not due to a change in brain size or quality, but becaue of a quantitative accumulation of cultural knowledge going through a qualitative leap.
^^^^^^
If the brain reached its full human potential — or at least size — 200,000 years ago why did it remain idle for 150,000 years?
^^^^
CB; It didn’t remain idle. It was accumulating knowledge and passing it across generations through symbols, language. Cultural _devolopment and evolution_ do not occur because of change in brain size, but because of accumulation and passing on of knowledge from concrete experiences over generations.
^^^^^
Most scholars are convinced that the big bang occurred because of some unknown genetic change in brain structure. For instance, the archeologist Steve Mithen has just written a book in which he claims that before the big bang there were three different brain modules in the human brain that were specialized for “social or machiavellian intelligence”, for “mechanical intelligence” or tool use, and for “natural history” (a propensity to classify). These three modules remained isolated from each other but around 50,000 years ago some genetic change in the brain suddenly allowed them to communicate with each other, resulting in the enormous flexibility and versatility of human consciousness.
I disagree with Mithen ingenious suggestion and offer a very different solution to the problem. (This is not incompatible with Mithen’s view but its a different idea). I suggest that the so-called big bang occurred because certain critical environmental triggers acted on a brain that had already become big for some other reason and was therefore “pre-adapted” for those cultural innovations that make us uniquely human. (One of the key pre adaptations being mirror neurons.) Inventions like tool use, art, math and even aspects of language may have been invented “accidentally” in one place and then spread very quickly given the human brain’s amazing capacity for imitation learning and mind reading using mirror neurons.
^^^^
CB: But the unique quality of human learning is not imitation ( monkeys learn through imitation , as this author says elsewhere). It is learning through symbolic communication, especially language. It’s not through “mind reading” , but through reading symbols expressed by another mind.
^^^^^^^
Perhaps ANY major “innovation” happens because of a fortuitous coincidence of environmental circumstances — usually at a single place and time. But given our species’ remarkable propensity for miming, such an invention would tend to spread very quickly through the population — once it emerged.
^^^^^^
CB: Yes, it would spread fast, but not because of miming, but rather through symbolic and linguistic communication.
^^^^^^^
Mirror neurons obviously cannot be the only answer to all these riddles of evolution. After all rhesus monkeys and apes have them, yet they lack the cultural sophistication of humans (although it has recently been shown that chimps at least DO have the rudiments of culture, even in the wild). I would argue, though, that mirror neurons are Necessary but not sufficient: their emergence and further development in hominids was a decisive step. The reason is that once you have a certain minimum amount of “imitation learning” and “culture” in place, this culture can, in turn, exert the selection pressure for developing those additional mental traits that make us human . And once this starts happening you have set in motion the auto-catalytic process that culminated in modern human consciousness.
A second problem with my suggestion is that it doesn’t explain why the many human innovations that constitute the big bang occurred during a relatively short period. If its simply a matter of chance discoveries spreading rapidly,why would all of them have occurred at the same time? There are three answers to this objection. First,the evidence that it all took place at the same time is tenuous. The invention of music, shelters,hafted tools, tailored clothing, writing, speech, etc. may have been spread out between 100K and 5k and the so-called great leap may be a sampling artifact of archeological excavation. Second, any given innovation (e.g. speech or writing or tools) may have served as a catalyst for the others and may have therefore accelerated the pace of culture as a whole. And third, there may indeed have been a genetic change,b ut it may not have been an increase in the ability to innovate ( nor a breakdown of barriers between modules as suggested by Mithen) but an increase in the sophistication of the mirror neuron system and therefore in “learnability.” The resulting increase in ability to imitate and learn (and teach) would then explain the explosion of cultural change that we call the “great leap forward” or the “big bang” in human evolution.
^^^^
CB; However, again, the main unique characteristic of human learning is not through imitation , but through symbolic thinking.
^^^^
This argument implies that the whole “nature-nurture debate” is largely meaningless as far as human are concerned. Without the genetically specified learnability that characterizes the human brain Homo sapiens wouldn’t deserve the title “sapiens” (wise) but without being immersed in a culture that can take advantage of this learnability, the title would be equally inappropriate. In this sense human culture and human brain have co-evolved into obligatory mutual parasites — without either the result would not be a human being. (No more than you can have a cell without its parasitic mitochondria).
^^^^^^^
25 January 2007, 3:40 pmStan:
I’m not at all sure that Ramachandran is saying that mirror neurons “only” provide imitative capacity. In fact, I’m sure he is not; and that was my point earlier. This is a reductive as well as retrojective representation of the MN.
He is taking issue with those who want to posit some Dawkinesque molecule suddenly appearing on the scene. The cultural (including symbolic) takeoff is not possible without the MN substrate, but there was a point where environmental “breakthroughs” were the catalyst for this sudden actualization of potential. Perhaps learning to use fire.
By thinking of it as “just” imitation, we are looking backward (retrojecting?). What imitative learning has to be compared to is what came before it… which is heritable, hard-wired learning… then conditioned reflex learning, etc. I have seen chickens that can be trained to win or draw at tic-tac-toe (in a carnival machine) every single time. But they are not imitating assimilatively. It’s pure CR.
Ramachandran says that language is “an extraordinary ability.”
Watch kids learning language. They imitate until it works, until it makes something happen.
Ramachandran doesn’t set out to show everything about language (including semiotics). He sets out to refute a genetic explanation for the “big bang,” a culturally Lamarkian explanation instead of the DNA-reductive Darwinian one.
25 January 2007, 4:07 pmDeAnander:
More evidence on negative effects of TV on young viewers
I note that the “baby video” boom is another facet of the conversion of all solutions into sales. now you can entertain, educate, and socialise your baby w/o doing a lick of work, without actually having to interact with your baby — just pop a cassette in the VCR or a DVD in the drive and your parenting will be done for you. eroding the intersubjectivity or conviviality between parents and babies, between children and adults, between children and other children… and putting product placement in its place.
25 January 2007, 4:19 pmCharles:
I’m not at all sure that Ramachandran is saying that mirror neurons “only†provide imitative capacity. In fact, I’m sure he is not; and that was my point earlier. This is a reductive as well as retrojective representation of the MN.
^^^^^
CB; Yes, I’ll accept that s/he isn’t saying MN only provide imitative capacity. But if we put aside the MN’s for minute , s/he does emphasize imitative learning in humans, in saying:
“..”invented “accidentally†in one place and then spread very quickly given the human brain’s amazing capacity for _imitation learning_ ( emphasis -CB)and mind reading using mirror neurons. ” and
“And third, there may indeed have been a genetic change,b ut it may not have been an increase in the ability to innovate ( nor a breakdown of barriers between modules as suggested by Mithen) but an increase in the sophistication of the mirror neuron system and therefore in “learnability.” The resulting increase in ability to _imitate and learn_ (emphasis -CB) (and teach) would then explain the explosion of cultural change that we call the “great leap forward” or the “big bang” in human evolution.”
^^^^^
CB: I agree with the goal of refuting change in brain quality ( “Dawkinsesque molecule suddentl appearing” or different brain modules suddenly being able to communicate with each other). It’s just I disagree with Ramachandran thinking that it’s imitative learning ability that is key in the uniquely human way. Or to say it more precisely it is not the imitative _aspect_ of learning that causes the leap 40,000 years ago. Symbolic learning _is_ imitative in some ways; but it is not the imitative aspect that is critical in getting to the leap.
I would speculate what happened at a leap 40,000 years ago was the accumulation of _symbolic_ knowledge, i.e. culture, experienced a qualitative leap after millenia of quantitative accumulation. The key to the accumulation is that culture/symbolic knowledge can pass through many generations , be added to, and therefore accumulate. ( This is the true primitive accumulation ,ha, ha joke).
^^^^^^^^^
He is taking issue with those who want to posit some Dawkinesque molecule suddenly appearing on the scene. The cultural (including symbolic) takeoff is not possible without the MN substrate, but there was a point where environmental “breakthroughs†were the catalyst for this sudden actualization of potential. Perhaps learning to use fire.
By thinking of it as “just†imitation, we are looking backward (retrojecting?). What imitative learning has to be compared to is what came before it… which is heritable, hard-wired learning… then conditioned reflex learning, etc. I have seen chickens that can be trained to win or draw at tic-tac-toe (in a carnival machine) every single time. But they are not imitating assimilatively. It’s pure CR.
^^^^^^
CB: But note, monkeys had imitative learning, so what came before imitative learning in humans, was not just hardwired instincts, or operant conditioning, but imitative learning in apes and monkeys, too.
To me the thing about controlled fire is not that the technique was invented. It is that the knack of controlling fire was passed on to the next generation who used it after the inventing generation was dead.
(By the way, global warming portends the end of the superepoch of controlled fire as energy source, no ? It’s not just the end of industrialism, but the end of fire !)
I usually say the key thing about the wheel is not that it was invented, but that it didn’t have to be reinvented because with culture it could be passed on. The great leap was not having to _reinvent_ the wheel.
A genius individual chimp might figure out how to control fire. But she couldn’t pass it on to future generations of chimps, because she wouldn’t have culture and language. The invention would die with its inventor. The human difference is that culture and language allow humans to pass on inventions to future generations. And the inventions accumulate. The passing on to future generations is the “inheritance” aspect of the LaMarckian principle. The Lamarckian principle being _inhertiance_ of acquired characteristics. ( Whereas the rule in Mendelianism is _no_ inheritance of acquired characteristics). Culture is LaMarckian, and not “Mendelian” ( Whereas genetic inheritance is Mendelian and not LaMarckian)
Culture makes inventions like controlled fire( “aquisitions”)by one generation heritable by future generations. It can do this because culture is symbolling ,and symbols can get across the death barrier. Direct imitations cannot get across the deathbarrier, because the person to be imitated is dead, and therefore can’t demonstrate , say, how to spark and control a fire. A verbal description of how to spark and control fire can get across the deathbarrier.
^^^^
Ramachandran says that language is “an extraordinary ability.â€
Watch kids learning language. They imitate until it works, until it makes something happen.
Ramachandran doesn’t set out to show everything about language (including semiotics). He sets out to refute a genetic explanation for the “big bang,†a culturally Lamarkian explanation instead of the DNA-reductive Darwinian one.
^^^^^^^
CB: I agree the cultural/Lamarkian explanation is better than the DNA-reductive Darwinian one.
Note that the essential ( extraordinary) characteristic of language _is_ its semiotic aspect.
I just wish Ramachandran had discussed culture and symbolic learning rather than placing emphasis on “imitative learning” ( whether through the MN or not ). It’s not the learning through imitating that is the big difference in humans ( afterall, as everybody notes monkeys can learn through imitation) It is the ability to learn through symbolic communications.
Now if s/he hypothesizes about mirror neurons and the brain’s symboling ability I want to hear what s/he has to say. However, symbols don’t “imitate” what they represent. The signifier has an arbitrary (conventional) relation to the signified. Thus, the essence of symbolic thinking is the ability to think of as identical two things that are not identical i.e. a contradiction, a unity and struggle of opposites, the symbolic dialectic. So, we think the sound sequence d-o-g as if it were the same thing as an actual dog, when actually it is not.
What we are looking for is a neuron, not that mirrors, but that facilitates our putting an equal sign between two things that are not equal, an arbitrary identification of two things that are not identical. That would be a symboling neuron.
Thanks again
25 January 2007, 5:25 pmSam:
From De’s post: “By targeting babies, companies are marketing not just products but lifelong habits…removing them further and further from the very experiences that are essential for healthy development-and for democracy.”
There was a study released a few years back about the tv show Friends and how people’s brains reacted to seeing Ross & Rachel’s faces the same way they react when they see their real friends and family. Think about the intensity of celebrity fans and how they act and speak as if they really know and have an actual relationship with the celebrity when they’ve really never met them before.
That Friends study got me thinking about my childhood celebrity crushes and how the emotions intended to help me learn to interact with others were wasted on boys I would never actually meet and to whom I would never have any relationship. From Fred Savage on The Wonder Years to Joe Elliot from the band Def Leppard, I retreated into safe and non-threatening media fantasies with the emotions that should have had me getting crushes on and interacting with the boys around me.
Not to say I didn’t develop feelings for certain boys, but they were not as intense as the celebrity crushes because real people fart, get sick, get in bad moods, say the wrong thing, and generally disappoint when compared to airbrushed, uncomplicated rock and tv star fantasies.
25 January 2007, 6:56 pmAudrey:
De’s comments about television are reminiscent of the recent baby stroller discussions here. Strollers put that artificial layer of fabricated crap between parents and children. Televisions do the same, inserting themselves into our interactions. Even with educational programming and parents spending quality time watching the tv with their kids, the child stares at the television instead of the parent, and the parent spends a lot of time staring at the tv instead of the child. Neither parent nor child is directly interacting with the tv, but that’s where the attention is.
A few years back, I used to be a coach for Science Olympiad. One of the events was “Reflection Relay.†Student teams were given a light source and small mirrors, and they had to arrange the mirrors so that the beam of light, when it was turned on, would bounce around a series of obstacles to hit a target. Watching tv together and talking about it during commercials or after the show, strikes me as the social equivalent of Reflection Relay.
As for imitative vs. symbolic learning, I’m not convinced there is a clear demarcation between the two. My experiences have often revolved around blurring those lines. When I studied Russian, I was one of about 20 people in the military’s experimental Suggestopedia class. While the other classes studies vocabulary, did written exercises from text books, and took quizzes on what they’d just been “taught,†our group sat in easy chairs listening to classical music, while the instructor whispered Russian poetry to us in the background. The idea was that we would learn the language in the way that infants learn language – by acclimating ourselves to the sounds of the language itself, before being bogged down in meanings. Ludger Schiffler, who was involved in researching and testing those techniques, went on to develop his own language learning methods based on the discovery of mirror neurons. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suggestopedia)
Some of my students aren’t verbal at all. Some can’t read; some can’t process oral language. But if I demonstrate something, they can pick up that skill. Today we had midterms, and one boy couldn’t understand the directions. It wasn’t just that he couldn’t read them, or didn’t know the vocabulary when I read it to him. He understood what the words meant. He was looking at words that basically said “Do this, this and this in PhotoShop,†and he kept pasting those words – “Do this, this and this†into photoshop as text, rather than performing the actions. He was copying (mirroring?) the language exactly, with no symbolic thought at all. Sometimes he functions better with sign language even though he’s not deaf and it’s a second language for him. It’s every bit the language that any other language is, with abstract symbols and grammar. And yet it’s visual and (often) imitative, and somehow it gets the symbolic part of his brain engaged.
Nowadays, being in a school that has a strong sign language culture, I’m very aware that I manage the classroom better when I don’t tell students what to do. We have a no-hat rule in our school, for instance (which I detest). Teachers have been griping for years about how wearisome it is to start each class by telling the same kids to take off their hats. The students and teachers go through the same talking points again and again, and the more a teacher tells them what to do, the more the students rebel. I finally figured out if I talk, they will talk – derailing a lesson while everyone’s distracted by the anticipated power struggle. But if I’m quiet, they’re quiet. Now we’re down to a sort of short-hand; I catch their eye and tap my head twice. And the hats come off without a word. I can’t say for sure whether mirroring the action fosters cooperation rather than confrontation, or whether using language and symbols triggers thought and therefore debate, but I do know that I’ve never had to stop teaching to debate the dress code when I’ve motioned, rather than told them, to remove the hats.
25 January 2007, 10:35 pmCharles:
Stan,
Here’s your malsculinist male =reason and conquest/attack on nature straight from a great palamino’s mouth.
C
^^^^^^
sociobiology thread
A.N. Whitehead. The most succinct version of this
criticism is found in The Function of Reason. This is now available
free online at:
http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=6326292
The following passage from Chap. 1 summarizes a key criticism.
“there is another factor in evolution which is
28 January 2007, 2:44 pmnot in the least explained by the doctrine of the
survival of the fittest. Why has the trend of evolution been upwards?
The fact that organic species
have been produced from inorganic distributions of
matter, and the fact that in the lapse of time organic
species of higher and higher types have evolved are
not in the least explained by any doctrine of adaptation to the
environment, or of struggle.
“In fact the upward trend has been accompanied
by a growth of the converse relation. Animals have
progressively undertaken the task of adapting the
environment to themselves. They have built nests,
and social dwelling-places of great complexity;
beavers have cut down trees and dammed rivers; insects have
elaborated a high community life with a variety of reactions upon the
environment.
“Even the more intimate actions of animals are
activities modifying the environment. The simplest
living things let their food swim into them. The
higher animals chase their food, catch it, and masticate it. In so
acting, they are transforming the environment for their own purposes.
Some animals
dig for their food, others stalk their prey. Of course
all these operations are meant by the common
doctrine of adaptation to the environment. But they
are very inadequately expressed by that statement;
and the real facts easily drop out of sight under
cover of that statement. The higher forms of life are
actively engaged in modifying their environment.
In the case of mankind this active attack on the environment is the
most prominent fact in his existence.
“I now state the thesis that the explanation of this
active attack on the environment is a three-fold
urge: (i) to live, (ii) to live well, (iii) to live better.
In fact the art of life is first to be alive, secondly to
be alive in a satisfactory way, and thirdly to acquire
an increase in satisfaction. It is at this point of our
argument that we have to recur to the function of
Reason, namely the promotion of the art of life.
The primary function of Reason is the direction of
the attack on the environment.
“This conclusion amounts to the thesis that Reason
is a factor in experience which directs and criticizes
the urge towards the attainment of an end realized
in imagination but not in fact.â€
Charles:
Adapting to the environment vs. adapting the environment to one’s species
seems a distinction without a difference. The only question for natural
selection is the result: do the activities involved enhance or undermine
reproductive success. Human modification of our own environment has
generated some mal-adaptive results that are looking like they could become
mal-adaptive we are now aware.
Human generated climate change is a species changing or modifying its
environment, but the full effect is looking like it could challenge human’s
reproductive success at some point. Thus, that human modification of its
environment which is extracting fossil fuels and using them as an energy
source ( modify our environment , control it, in many ways) is not looking
so evolutionarily “high” as it used to.
The development of nuclear weapons is an environmental modification that is
looking mal-adaptive too.
As humans have developed their modes of production, controlling and
modifying their environments more and more, evolving “higher and higher”,
they have not been able to avoid simultaneously developing the mode of
destruction/war, losing control and making their environment more
destructive to humans themselves, evolving “lower and lower. Humans have
become the greatest known “environmental” danger to themselves! The human
modification of their own environment has generated much _mal_-adaptive
results. The net effect is that humans are not “higher”. May have dug
themselves in a “hole” ( lower).
Of course, Stephen Jay Gould proposes the metaphor of the “bush” instead of
the “tree” for evolution, to move away from the lower to higher of the tree.
Charles
30 January 2007, 9:56 ampeggy:
Charles, I think the thing is to stop considering the individual species as the unit of analysis, but to consider the whole ecosystem instead. I am no more or less a part of the environment surrounding me than the tree outside my window or the cloud up in the sky. Therefore the question is not how “I” adapt to the environment, or how “it” adapts to “me” but how the environment as a whole changes to maintain some kind of homeostasis, rather like a living body.
30 January 2007, 4:08 pmCharles:
Hello Peggy,
Yes, it’s best that “we” ( not “I”) adapt to the environment.
By and large, the ecosystem is a “food chain”. Which is to say, there are a whole bunch of “predator-prey” relations. In this regard, most species are not trying to sort of fit all the other species into a coordinated ecosystem.
So, humans would be playing an unusual role to try and organize all the species into “one big happy” ecosystem. In any ecosystem, the one’s established “by Nature”, lots of animals get eaten (smile).
I’ve got to admit to you that I am unapologetically human-centric on this question. It is true that an “equilibrated” ecosystem, in the sense that all our “food” reproduces in sufficient quantities for us to survive, is necessary for human best interest. I agree. My definition of a optimum ecosystem is one in which we thrive. This does _not_ entail an ideology of “conquering nature” ,in my opinion. We have to coordinate with nature, though that will entail our being predators in relation to some species.
Gaia project analogizes earth to an organism. This analogy can only go so far, a mon avis.
31 January 2007, 6:24 pmStan:
Actually, both evolution and the biosphere are filled with symbiosis and cooperation. The prey-predator dipole is a profound oversimplification, and it masks the deeper thermodynamic cycle. There is no way to separate a clear anthro-centrism from a non-dualistic ecology. The destruction of biodiversity ends with our own destruction.
It cannot be equilibrated. Equilibrium, in ecological and thermodynamic terms, means death. See Prigogine (it’s here somewhere, or over at IA). Life and the biosphere are systems that exist “far from thermodynamic equilibrium.” This is more than semantics. You seem to be suggesting something more akin to stability (or sustainability). Complexity is what gives the biospheric system stability. Destruction of biodiversity equals destruction of complexity equals destruction of stability.
Life’s web is most fundamentally predicated, in fact, not on predation, but on photosynthesis.
Thriving today does not in any way suggest we will thrive tomorrow.
31 January 2007, 8:56 pmpeggy:
Actually, last time I heard, micro-organisms were at the top of the food chain.
31 January 2007, 11:07 pmDeAnander:
The prey/predator relation is far more complex than simplistic/gendered tropes repeated throughout patriarchal literature. Remember the lengthy quote I posted a while back about the salmon/bear/forest/ocean food cycle.
What makes humans unique (and suicidal) is that we try to remove ourselves from the cycle, trying to take and never repay. The madness must have started early when we began to try to prevent our dead from rotting and returning to the nutrient cycle as food for fungi, microorganisms, and plants. At first it was just royalty, and then by C20 all over the industrialised West everyone was trying to embalm their dead and bury them in hermetically sealed boxes, like a little kid trying to hide his crayons so no one else can play with them. It’s just a symptom, of course. But it’s a violation of the base condition of the predator/prey relationship in biotic systems, which is that the top predator concentrates nutrients which are then dissipated again at the base of the food chain when the predator dies. Salmon are predators. They bring concentrated nutrients from the ocean up into the rivers (or they would if we would let them); the forest does not thrive without the nutritional content of dead salmon, whether expiring in the shallows after reproducing, or being excreted by happy wellfed bears.
Humankind breaks the predation contract by taking more than we give back, by not ensuring the continuation of the species we prey upon. Our closest approach to the predation contract is animal husbandry, where we ensure the survival of the herds and flocks that provide our meat, milk, and fibre. But even there the advent of industrialism has led us to cheat, imperilling the whole enterprise.
Evolution is full of pvertly co-operative arrangements between species, as Stan points out. Co-operative and symbiotic relations far outnumber predatory ones; it is symbiosis on the micro level that provides the life of soil w/o which the entire food chain would crumble (and is, in fact, crumbling as we watch). But even where an apparently clear relationship of predation is observed, careful analysis at the energy-flow and biochemical level will almost invariably show a nutrient cycle in which the predator’s life and death benefit the prey — directly by culling weaker individuals from herds, indirectly by participating in the web that maintains a viable and rich habitat.
1 February 2007, 1:20 amDeAnander:
D8e, TV!
they don’t really need designer drugs. they’ve already got soma beamed into every living room.
1 February 2007, 4:00 pmpeggy:
The predator-prey myth also extends to warfare of the genocidal variety.
1 February 2007, 4:44 pmCharles:
I’d say there are relative equilibriums. This is the basis for Gould and partner’s notion of “punctuated equilibrium” , for example. Of course, it’s never “perfectly” “stable”. Things are always changing. That’s dialectics. Nothing stays the same forever. There is no Rock of Ages.
Natural history is a history of sudden, mass extinctions ( to paraphrase _The Manifesto_ , smile), followed by births of new species. These sudden mass extinctions are the “punctuations” in the relative “equilibriums” that Gould refers to. In between the great extinctions are longer periods of relative “survival”, although no doubt there are always extinctions going on and new species arising. Mother Nature has annihilated many more species than humans have and are.
Ironically, one of the greatest cooperations is between predators and prey ( that’s a unity and struggle of opposites). This point agrees with, does not contradict some of what DeAnander says above. Afterall, if the predator over eats its prey to extinction, the predator goes away too. So, the species with the most interest in another species not going extinct, is the species that is predator to the other species prey.
Even if cooperative relations outnumber predatory ones, no species can survive without food, food being eating some other species whether plant or animal. A species’s predatory status is a necessary condition of the existence of its living generation. Every species has to eat something, at least one other species, or it can’t survive.
The natural stupidity of the current human “ever growing GDP” is that we are destroying the basis for our own survival. It’s like eating own seed corn. That’s my focus. Survival of the human species. Best route to that is not to destroy a whole lot of other species upon whom we rely materially as part of the current food and other resource chain. In other words, true anthro-centrism, in the sense of having human survival and thriving at heart requires _not_ over consuming as we are now.
Diversity is sort of tricky. I’m not sure that greater diversity , in the sense of a larger number of different species automatically directly translates into greater “stability”. This seems an abstract question. To me the key issue is human survival. Human survival depends on a lot of other species surviving. There is no set number or level on the diversity “index”. There are an infinite number of diversities of the earth’s biosystem that are compatible with human survival.
On thermodynamics, the key “entropy” as far as I’m concerned is increased “disorder” in the human species, or threat of disorder. Since global warming involves heating things up, I’m not sure it increases the entropy around here, in the sense of physics or heatdeath. ( For that matter , nuclear explosions may decrease entropy; things certainly get hotter; with radiation they get hotter for a long time; not sure; have to check with the physicists; not funny) Seems like it( global heating) is going the opposite direction of heatdeath. Higher temperature means molecules are moving more, not less. We should not flatter ourselves that global warming is increased physical entropy; it is greater “entropy”/disorder in human society, yea.
On energy capture , thermodynamics and human society, see the work of Leslie A. White. Not saying he’s all correct, but he introduced these issues 50 years ago.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_White
[edit] White’s anthropology
White’s views were formulated specifically against the Boasians, with whom he was institutionally and intellectually at odds. This antagonism often took on an extremely personal form: White referred to Franz Boas’s prose style as “corny” in no less a place than the American Journal of Sociology, while Robert Lowie referred to White’s work as “a farrago of immature metaphysical notions” shaped by “the obsessive power of fanaticism [which] unconsciously warps one’s vision.”
One of the strongest deviations from Boasian orthodoxy was White’s view of the nature of anthropology and its relation to other sciences present. White understood the world to be divided into cultural, biological, and physical levels of phenomenon. Such a division is a reflection of the composition of the universe and was not a heuristic device. Thus, contrary to Alfred L. Kroeber and Kluckhohn or Edward Sapir, White saw the delineation of the object of study not as a cognitive accomplishment of the anthropologist but a recognition of the actually existing and delineated phenomena which comprise the world. The distinction between ‘natural’ and ’social’ sciences was thus not based on of method, but rather on the nature of the object of study – physicists study physical phenomena, biologists biological phenomena and culturologists (White’s term) cultural phenomena.
While the object of study was not delineated by the researcher’s viewpoint or interest, the method by which he approached them could be. White believed that phenomena could be explored from three different points of view, the historical, the formal-functional, and the evolutionist (or formal-temporal). The historical view was essentially Boasian, dedicated to examining the particular diachronic cultural processes, “lovingly trying to penetrate into its secrets until every feature is plain and clear.” The formal-functional is essentially the synchronic approach advocated by Alfred Radcliffe-Brown and BronisÅ‚aw Malinowski, attempting to discern the formal structure of a society and the functional interrelations of its components. The evolutionist approach is, like the formal approach, generalizing. But it is also diachronic, seeing particular events as general instances of larger trends.
While Boas claimed his science promised loving penetration, White thought that it would “emasculate” anthropology if it became the dominant position. White viewed his own approach as a synthesis of historical and functional approach because it combined the diachronic scope of one with the generalizing eye for formal interrelations provided by the other. As such it could point out “the course of cultural development in the past and its probable course in the future” a task that was anthropology’s “most valuable function.”
As a result White frequently championed nineteenth century evolutionists in a search for intellectual predecessors unclaimed or — preferably – denounced by Boasians. This can be clearly seen in his views of evolution, which are firmly rooted in the writings of Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin, and Lewis H. Morgan. While it can be argued that White’s exposition of Morgan and Spencer’s was tendentious, it can be safely said that White’s concepts of science and evolution were firmly rooted in their work. Advances in population biology and evolutionary theory passed White by and, unlike Steward, his conception of evolution and progress remained firmly rooted in the nineteenth century.
For White, culture was a superorganic entity that was sui generis and could only be explained in terms of itself. It was composed of three levels, the technological, the social organizational, and the ideological. Each level rested on the previous one, and although they all interacted, ultimately the technological level was the determining one, what White calls “The hero of our piece” and “the leading character of our play”. The most important factor in his theory is technology: “Social systems are determined by technological systems”, wrote White in his book, echoing the earlier theory of Lewis Henry Morgan.
White spoke of culture as a general human phenomenon, and claimed not to speak of ‘cultures’ in the plural. His theory, published in 1959 in The Evolution of Culture: The Development of Civilization to the Fall of Rome, rekindled the interest in social evolutionism and is counted prominently among the neoevolutionists. He believed that culture – meaning the sum total of all human cultural activity on the planet – was evolving. White differentiated between three components of culture: technological, sociological and ideological, and argued that it was the technological component which plays a primary role or is the primary determining factor responsible for the cultural evolution. White’s materialist approach is evident in the following quote: “man as an animal species, and consequently culture as a whole, is dependent upon the material, mechanical means of adjustment to the natural environment”[1]. This technological component can be described as material, mechanical, physical and chemical instruments, as well as the way people use these techniques. White’s argument on the importance of technology goes as follows[2]:
Technology is an attempt to solve the problems of survival.
This attempt ultimately means capturing enough energy and diverting it for human needs.
Societies that capture more energy and use it more efficiently have an advantage over other societies.
Therefore, these different societies are more advanced in an evolutionary sense.
Composite image of the Earth at night, created by NASA and NOAA. The brightest areas of the Earth are the most urbanized, but not necessarily the most populated. Even more than 100 years after the invention of the electric light, some regions remain thinly populated and unlit.For White “the primary function of culture” and the one that determines its level of advancement is its ability to “harness and control energy”. White’s law states that the measure by which to judge the relative degree of evolvedness of culture was the amount of energy it could capture (energy consumption).
White differentiates between five stages of human development. In first, people use energy of their own muscles. In second, they use energy of domesticated animals. In third, they use the energy of plants (so White refers to agricultural revolution here). In fourth, they learn to use the energy of natural resources: coal, oil, gas. In fifth, they harness the nuclear energy. White introduced a formula
C= ET,
1 February 2007, 6:05 pmwhere E is a measure of energy consumed per capita per year, T is the measure of efficiency of technical factors utilising the energy and C represents the degree of cultural development. In his own words: “the basic law of cultural evolution” was “culture evolves as the amount of energy harnessed per capita per year is increased, or as the efficiency of the instrumental means of putting the energy to work is increased”[3]. Therefore “we find that progress and development are effected by the improvement of the mechanical means with which energy is harnessed and put to work as well as by increasing the amounts of energy employed”[4]. Although White stops short of promising that technology is the panacea for all the problems that affect mankind, like technological utopians do, his theory treats the technological factor as the most important factor in the evolution of society and is similar to the later works of Gerhard Lenski, the theory of Kardashev scale of Russian astronomer, Nikolai Kardashev and to some notions of technological singularity.
peggy:
Charles, please forgive my obtuseness, but I have read your clip from Wikipedia three times, and it is not clear to me how it addresses the topic we are discussing? Could you explain in your own words? Also, Leslie White wrote more than half a century ago, therefore I am not sure that all of his ideas still hold water.
1 February 2007, 10:49 pmpeggy:
Oh now I get it. White thought that the more energy per capita a society captured, the more evolved it was. And high energy-capture societies therefore had a selective advantage over low energy-capture societies. One may conclude from this line of thinking that ultimately, there would only be high energy (= evolved) societies.
And for you, this is analogous to the predator-prey relationship, because predators capture more energy.
But, as Stan pointed out, natural predators return the energy they capture back to the earth, and so it goes round. And natural predators do not cause the extinction of their prey: they are not in competition with their prey, predators and their prey are in a symbiotic relationship. Whereas high-energy consumption societies live at the expense of low-energy consumption societies, and cause those societies to die.
And so the analogy breaks down.
In recompense for the intellecual labor I have performed (again) for you, fifty dollars. Cheap at the price. I accept Paypal, Visa, bank check or direct deposit.
2 February 2007, 4:23 amCharles:
Peggy,
I’m sorry , I should have clipped more of it. The main thing is the discussion of energy capture. Also, and I see they didn’t even specifically mention this, White was so into “energy capture” over the history of humanity, that he was even talking about the Second Law of Thermodynamics and human society back in the forties. Mark Jones, the crashlist ,A-list and other net comrades very concerned about the current energy crisis-pollution crisis-climate change crisis have tossed around the concepts of the 2nd Law of Thermodyanmics in relation to them. When that started, it reminded me of Leslie A. White’s theories about the unfolding of human technological development, energy capture, and the opposite of entropy.
Also, socalled energy capture is an interesting way to think about what biological “adaptation” is.
Leslie White’s approach to anthropology gave rise to Ecological schools of anthropology. So, this is another way that Leslie White is pertinent to some of this discussion.
Finally, Leslie White is an anthropologist who clearly formulated the concept of symbol as defining culture centrally. The passage is weak on that too. I’ll look for further mention of White on the symbol.
^^^^^^^^^
Oh now I get it. White thought that the more energy per capita a society captured, the more evolved it was. And high energy-capture societies therefore had a selective advantage over low energy-capture societies. One may conclude from this line of thinking that ultimately, there would only be high energy (= evolved) societies.
^^^^
CB: Malheureusement, this implication of White’s theory is largely true. Believe me, I have often lamented that captialism destroys stone age societies. I have worked on an Indian reservation in land recovery projects. I have cried many tears for the destruction of indigenous cultures.
Here’s the beginning of one of my papers on this:
” Indigenous Knowledge in Aboriginal Land Recovery ”
By John Henry
Introduction
This paper argues for return to primary (primitive) culture and social
organization , if not material technique. Both Australian and American
aboriginals have focussed on land recovery as a way of liberating and
reviving their cultures. Thus, I develop the argument for Aboriginal Land
Recovery.
+++
Ethnology has discovered that “primitive” or primary cultures put people
before “things”. That is, they gave and still give more priority to ordering
good relations between people, and they order “things” to that end ,as
contrasted with Western Civilization. Primary cultures are stateless
societies as well. They had (and to some extent still have after contact
with civilization) no or little hierarchy ( outside of age grade)with
attending oppressive apparatus for controlling subjects and objects in
territorial boundaries. By implication, primary cultures are not
imperialistic on the capitalist, Roman, Greek , Mesopotamian or other
models. Furthermore, despite the evident poverty in present day primary
cultures, life in those cultures had a certain affluence , as was famously
demonstrated by Marshall Sahlins. That poverty is likely the result of
contact with imperialist exploitation, and bourgeois thought and propaganda,
commodity fetishism, but not of primary cultural structure, knowledge or
potential. Primary culture does not treat land and resources as commodities
and private property. Finally, and this is perhaps my most unusual claim,
anthropology has discovered that in the Darwinian or evolutionary sense,
primary cultures are more fit for survival strategy than civilization, at
least based on the best evidence so far.
From the above, I conclude that primary culture is spiritually and
materially superior to civilization. What is the evidence supporting the
premises to this conclusion ?
Or , is not the following true ?
A fundamental and well accepted fact of anthropology is that _homo sapiens_
came to be at least 34,000 year ago ( e.g. Lasker 1976, page 304). But maybe
even 200,000 years ago ( Kottak 2000; 2004) . It is a well settled
in archaeology that no state came about before about 6,000 years ago (
Kottak 1974; page 213; 7,000 years ago Kottak, Wright). Therefore, it is
assumed in archeology and paleoanthropology, that most of human existence
time wise has been in stateless societies. Stateless societies have existed
for 34,000 years or more. Until the fall of the Soviet Union , civilization
and states which had only existed for 6 or 7,000 years were moving in an
arms race and confrontation toward nuclear holocaust , and potential species
self-extinction , more than any other recorded or known time in human
history. If we were to extinguish ourselves in this mode of destruction with
nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction