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.”
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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CB: Yes, it would spread fast, but not because of miming, but rather through symbolic and linguistic communication.
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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.
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CB; However, again, the main unique characteristic of human learning is not through imitation , but through symbolic thinking.
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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).
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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.
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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.”
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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).
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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 ( who knows what kinds
of weapons all the bourgeois state’s scientists might come up with)
obviously, this capitalist mode would have failed the Darwinian test for
survival. All previous material modes, no matter how impoverished in there
modes of _production_ in comparison with the capitalist mode, would make our
species more fit than the capitalist mode because of their correspondingly
low modes of destruction, especially mode of species self-destruction.
Capitalism’s anti-species being quotient is dangerously high for our
Darwinian fitness.
On this evidence, which type of society is more fit in the Darwinian sense ?
Stateless, primary cultural societies are more fit, by the best evaluation
of the material facts , by the most honest inferences from the practices of
the materially robust actually existing societies and the materially poor,
technologically primitive societies which were actualized predominantly over
thousands of years in the past. Despite the relatively low production , the
low level of destruction gives the older forms higher survival fitness.
Social Darwinists, evolutionary psychologists and sociobiologists need to
take note.
The thought that I have here that I haven’t seen elsewhere ( although my
knowledge of anthropological literature is not professorial) is , again, the
application of a kind of species fitness test to homo sapiens.
There are other “secrets” of anthropology and Marxism which are
corroborative evidence for my audacious conclusion that primary culture is
more fit than “civilization”. These secrets fit well with the 34,000 vs
6,000 figures. ( 200,000 years and more for the species lifespan makes the
argument even stronger , of course, as the stone age , low tech, culture was
biologically, evolutionarily fit to last so long).
As Alfonso Ortiz said, Western science is preoccupied with time. Well, those
time figures, 34,000 YEARS , 6 or 7,000 YEARS are bold enough for an
elementary school child to grasp. They are to be found in any 101 or high
school text book in anthropology and archaeology. The trend of fossil
discoveries and theoretical revisions over the last 35 years in anthropology
is to increase the estimate of timespan of the era of stateless , kincentric
societies. No one claims that the possibility that a state institution
existing increases as we look further back in time. On the contrary the
overwhelming consensus is the opposite. Nobody claims Neanderthals had
states that I know of. They didn’t even have developed stones ( another
Third World nation). All the professional discussion about different state
forms – ancient, archaic, slave, civilized, Western,Occidental , Oriental,
imperial, feudal, capitalist, tributary, etc.- does not push the origin of
any type before …
We will have to survive another 25,000 years at least, and with nuclear
weapons sitting around, to last as long as stone age society ; unless we
achieve nuclear disarmanent.
Of course, some would say that large population and high technology cannot
be had without a state, a special repressive apparatus. But what _is_ their
argument ? Does anyone believe that the state is necessary to keep they
themselves from committing crimes, making war or terrorism, to prevent men
from beating and raping women ? No. It is most often other people and
peoples whose natures must be suppressed and controlled. Today, it’s
“Islamofascists” ,yesterday it was “Communists”, before that it was “savage”
Indians and Africans who were “inherently” violent and dangerous. Is the
state necessary to keep _you_ in line ? Not me.
Some might say “that’s a crude, socalled Darwinian test ” I say what good is
Darwinism for us if we don’t use it to save ourselves ? Who cares that
“species” have come and gone, are fit and unfit, if we don’t seek fitness
for ourselves ? Of course life is about more than just surviving, but
without surviving , we can’t do anything else.
We might step back from the worst case scenario of species extinction. Even
2 February 2007, 4:26 pmif a nuclear holocaust doesn’t kill all humans, surely we can agree on the
Universal Human Value of avoiding nuclear war, and all war, which is
integral to the institution of the state. Our most ancient ancestors had
conflict no doubt, but, the best evidence seems to indicate that they did
not have the institutions of war and conquest. This supports the claim that
our natures do not prevent us from having world peace today and in the
future. The goal of world peace is not corny or hopeless.
Charles:
And for you, this is analogous to the predator-prey relationship, because predators capture more energy.
^^^^
CB: No. I don’t think this.
Capitalism doesn’t exactly “eat” primary cultures ( smile).
It is true that a predator gets energy from eating its prey. However, the still living members of the species of the prey may for some reason have more energy captured than the predator species. The prey population may be larger, like lions and wildebees or something. I’m this is a first thought, because I wasn’t thinking of what you say here.
Also, domestication of animals to become beasts of burden, rather than eating them as prey, was a main early form of socalled energy capture. Of course, they eat some of them, but that was agriculture, i.e. , they cultivated their domesticated prey, naturally :>)
^^^^^
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.
^^^^^
CB: Agree. I said this above. Predators want to preserve the survival of their prey species as much as the prey want to survive. A main form of cooperation between species is between predators and their prey, paradoxically.
Even more, it is therefore not predators that drive a prey species to extinction. It is other aspects of the environment. Like a comet hitting the earth.
And many of the species that humans are now causing to go extinct are not their prey. We aren’t destroying species that we eat, mainly. We are destroying future medicines in plants in the jungle and the like.
^^^^^^
Whereas high-energy consumption societies live at the expense of low-energy consumption societies, and cause those societies to die.
^^^^^
CB: Yea, but or and the lower energy capture societies are _not_ the prey of the high energy societies. Not only am I not saying that, but it’s not true. In fact, if they were predator and prey, the larger soieties would try to preserve them, ironically.
^^^^^
And so the analogy breaks down.
^^^^
CB: Indeed, it do.Who was it that thought of that analogy ? :>)
^^^^^
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.
^^^^^^^
CB: Thank you so much. Ah but I’m a worker, not a capitalist.
2 February 2007, 4:49 pmStan:
Entropy and thermodynamics are related but not synonymous. Heat and the transfer/dissipation of heat are something that happens by which we can observe and measure a more complex process of energy exchange.
Relating it to environment, life, and society requires a larger context for entropic processes. Prigogine is very helpful on this, because he identifies dissipative structures, which take order from the environment and dissipate it into a state of greater disorder. Life gets away with this, because the biosphere has a constant supply of photons that pour onto it from outside the system (incorporated, btw, in a completely non-predatory way, and forming the very basis of our lives).
Hornborg takes dissipative structure as a new framework for the study of unequal exchange, ie, imperialism.
Core industrial nations in the world system, because they have concentrated huge complexes of technomass, themselves become dissipative structures that require more and more inputs of “order” or negentropy from outside itself (in the peripheries), in order (no pun intended) to sustain the dissipative (industrial) structures of the core, and it exports the resulting disorder back into the peripheries.
2 February 2007, 6:25 pmDeAnander:
We aren’t destroying species that we eat, mainly.
well that’s tautological, ain’t it? obviously after we’ve finished destroying them, we no longer eat them.
many species that once were food for our ancestors are now “commercially” or literally extinct. we’re eating — as I have said before — fish that my granddad would only have used for bait. the cod are gone, for one. the salmon are going.
I take it you never eat fish? ‘cos we have pretty much destroyed all the fisheries in the N Hemi — river, coastal, and deep-ocean; and we’re working hard on destroying the S Hemi fish stocks even as I sit typing this. fish population levels 10 percent of what was surveyed only 50 years ago are not uncommon.
or, going back on shore: humans eat bananas. industrial cultivation, hybridisation, the pressures of global markets have reduced the quondam variety of domesticated banana species to just one “commercial banana” — the Cavendish — which iirc can no longer reproduce unaided, but must be grafted by human effort. just one specific virus could render this frail monocrop extinct, as happened to its monocropped predecessor, the Gros Michel cultivar. we eat it, and we engineered its frailty and vulnerability to extinction. a similar story can be told of the vindictive extirpation of varietal and traditional cultivars worldwide, whether the reason be cultural imperialism, colonial aggression against food security, physical or intelprop enclosure, subsidies ag dumping, or whatever. the elimination of diversity is a trademark of human civilisation, vastly accelerated by capitalism.
we ate them. we ate all of them. they’re extinct.
I think we need to invent a new word … maybe “bio-illiteracy”? … for our collective ignorance of our history as exterminists. these stories — and many more — should be at least as familiar to us as the plays of Shakespeare, Aesop’s Fables, and the general plot outline of Star Trek and Gilligan’s Island. “vulnerable as a Cavendish” ought to be a common figure of speech, along with “stupid as a factory trawler.”
2 February 2007, 8:33 pmpeggy:
Charles, for development of symbols in anthropology you might want to start with the work of Victor Turner. For a semiotician who has been very useful to anthropologists, try Charles Sanders Pearce. Or the work of Ferdinand de Saussure. An enormous amount of work in anthropology is done in this area.
2 February 2007, 10:57 pmFew if any anthropologists these days think of societies in terms of “stages of development”. Ecological anthropology is studied most carefully (imho) by archaeologists. Few if any anthropologists these days, with the exception perhaps of some historians of anthropology, cite Leslie White as a reference.
Societies used to be considered by anthropologists as isolates, at least for heuristic purposes, but that is not the case anymore, thank heavens. Now issues of globalization are very much at the forefront of anthropology. Consider the recent work of Arjun Appadurai (whom I like and who is fun to read and very highly respected, but has sold his soul to the devil as far as I’m concerned) and take off from there.
peggy:
sp: not Pearce but Peirce. Sorry. I am really getting old if I can’t even spell anymore.
2 February 2007, 11:00 pmpeggy:
To go with Stan and Prigogine (whom I’ve just looked up) one could say that in a certain way low-energy societies are indeed the “prey” of high-energy societies, because the latter take in energy (from outside themselves) and emit entropy (to outside themselves). Entropy in turn leads to equilibrium which for a living thing is death. You and I, Charles are in agreement (!!!!!) on the point that high-energy societies are eating their seed-corn, because they do not act like natural predators which conserve their prey (though I am pretty sure the latter do so unknowingly). High-energy societies take energy in the form of labor and material from smaller, lower energy societies, with no thought for the morrow of the latter.
We are still in disagreement on the matter of diversity.
On a side note, I found in a quick search through hist of anth that Leslie White was investigated by the FBI on suspicion that he had communist leanings. So it all fits together after all.
3 February 2007, 12:01 ampeggy:
Killer tornadoes in Florida.
3 February 2007, 12:07 ampeggy:
Many varieties of banana are grown and sold locally in India. They are quite tasty. India doesn’t grow any bananas for export, afaik. In general, the banana is not an endangered species.
4 February 2007, 3:58 pmDeAnander:
True Peggy, the banana as a species is OK — for the moment, until the First World gene vandals and copyrighted seed merchants fully infiltrate and dominate those farming communities… it’s the cultivar called Cavendish that is frail. I forget how many varieties of maize existed in S America before cash cropping began… now many are contaminated with GMO markers or have “fallen into disuse” (meaning: have been driven off the market by massive dumping of heavily subsidised US corn)…
Anyway, the general point being that humans — industrialised humans anyway — are quite stupid enough to saw off the branch they are hanging from, when it comes to food security.
5 February 2007, 12:52 amCharles:
Entropy and thermodynamics are related but not synonymous. Heat and the transfer/dissipation of heat are something that happens by which we can observe and measure a more complex process of energy exchange.
^^^
CB: Yes, I could be wrong, but I thought the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics says something like there’s a tendency ( in a “local” area or the like ?) for entropy to increase. I’ll look at wikipedia. They usually have statements of elementary principles like this.
^^^^
Relating it to environment, life, and society requires a larger context for entropic processes. Prigogine is very helpful on this, because he identifies dissipative structures, which take order from the environment and dissipate it into a state of greater disorder. Life gets away with this, because the biosphere has a constant supply of photons that pour onto it from outside the system (incorporated, btw, in a completely non-predatory way, and forming the very basis of our lives).
^^^^
CB: Yes, I think in the Leslie White scenario, life can almost be defined as processes which go against the 2nd Law of Thermodyanamics. The struggle for life is a struggle against the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics ( maybe ?).
By the way, just cause I mention predator-prey relations doesn’t mean I think they are somehow more fundamental than photosynthesis.
All the energy on earth comes from the sun. Always has. ( I guess except for a couple of blinks from distant stars) It’s stored in fossils and liquid “fossils”; that’s why they are fuel sources. Animal life depends on plant life, where the direct sunlight and photosynthesis do their thing.
^^^^
Hornborg takes dissipative structure as a new framework for the study of unequal exchange, ie, imperialism.
^^^^^^
CB: I don’t know if I’d reduce imperialism to physics (smile). That’s real reductive.
^^^^^
Core industrial nations in the world system, because they have concentrated huge complexes of technomass, themselves become dissipative structures that require more and more inputs of “order†or negentropy from outside itself (in the peripheries), in order (no pun intended) to sustain the dissipative (industrial) structures of the core, and it exports the resulting disorder back into the peripheries.
^^^^^
5 February 2007, 3:47 pmCB: I understand the concept. I’m listening. ( smile). Again , this would be as reductive as the most reductive theses there are. Leslie White’s theory is sort of on this level when he correlates energy capture and cultural evolution. I guess I should say that, as a student of Sahlins ( one of White’s famous students) I participate in Sahlins’ critique of White’s energy thesis. I think White’s work , properly criticized, is interesting because he brings into play the energy issues related to human society and culture; and he also inspired major ecological schools in anthropology, the work of which might be useful in discussions such as the current one here. But we have to use the energy data differently than Leslie White did. Sorry I didn’t mention that before.
Charles:
Comment by peggy — 2/2/2007 @ 10:57 pm
Charles, for development of symbols in anthropology you might want to start with the work of Victor Turner. For a semiotician who has been very useful to anthropologists, try Charles Sanders Pearce. Or the work of Ferdinand de Saussure. An enormous amount of work in anthropology is done in this area.
Few if any anthropologists these days think of societies in terms of “stages of developmentâ€. Ecological anthropology is studied most carefully (imho) by archaeologists. Few if any anthropologists these days, with the exception perhaps of some historians of anthropology, cite Leslie White as a reference.
^^^
CB; Thanks , Peggy. I’m familiar with some of this as I majored in anthropology (ethnology), got a BA in it, and then went on to grad school in it and got a masters degree ( then a couple years in the ph.d program). Both at the University of Michigan, where Leslie White founded the anthro dept. My “mentor” was Marshall Sahlins, author of _Evolution and Culture_ with Service. Both White and Sahlins are very “symbol” centered. Most of the theses I put out here are “white-sahlins” thought, with a couple of creative additions from me. The main thing I add is to interepret the symbol as important because it increases sociality, and the idea that it can get across the deathbarrier from one generation to the next.
I’d say White is still cited for his emphasis on the symbol. I mean Lewis Henry Morgan is still cited. You can read articles on him in _Current Anthropology_. And actually, the Morgan-Engels-White fundamentals are still correct in a number of ways, such as that kinship organized early society , and a big change came with the origin of the state. Engels _The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State_ is still valid anthropology in a number of very fundamental issues.
When Sahlins broke with White ( _Culture and Practical Reason_; basically his lectures from the senior theory class I had in 1972-3 with him) he became a Levi-Straussian structuralist, which is basically anthropology analogized to the structural linguistics of Saussure. So , I was reading Saussure back then. I was a Levi-Straussian structuralist before I was a Marxist. I read a little Pierce in a book on culture. Anyway, I got a pretty thorough training in “semiotics” and structural anthropology. Of course, majors have to take linguistics too.
I also took a lot of archeology, especially Mexican (MesoAmerican). I actually had classes with Kent Flannery, a main materialist anthropologist. And with Joyce Marcus on picture writing ( Flannery is her husband). There main area of work is the Valley of Oaxaco, where there is rebellion right now.
Anyway, archaeologists do still use stages of development – hunters and gatherers, gardeners, argriculture/archaic states, modern states. Take a look at Conrad Kottak’s textbook. ( I had my first theory class with Kottak in 1969). I had classes on “The Origin of the State” with Henry Wright whose area is Iraq (!), where the state originated. There are still materialist-evolutionist anthropologists, for example Eugene Ruyle at the University of California , Long Beach.
http://www.csulb.edu/~eruyle/
Stages of development are still important in our school of anthro, though, the later stages are not “superior” to the earlier stages. In fact , if you take a look at my “Indigenous Knowledge in Aboriginal Land Recovery”, you’ll see I make an argument that capitalism is less fit in the Darwinian sense than primary culture, original human societies.
^^^^^^
Societies used to be considered by anthropologists as isolates, at least for heuristic purposes, but that is not the case anymore, thank heavens. Now issues of globalization are very much at the forefront of anthropology. Consider the recent work of Arjun Appadurai (whom I like and who is fun to read and very highly respected, but has sold his soul to the devil as far as I’m concerned) and take off from there.
^^^^^^^
5 February 2007, 4:12 pmCB: Well, European imperialism and capitalism is destroying all the primary cultures. This is the unfortunate truth in White’s schema that I referred to. High energy capturing societies are not morally superior to primary cultures. But high energy capturing societies physically destroy the low energy ones. Didn’t have to, but the ideology of European civilization considers them “savage” , as we well know.
Charles:
We are still in disagreement on the matter of diversity.
^^^^^
CB: Are we ? What’s the disagreement ?
^^^^^
On a side note, I found in a quick search through hist of anth that Leslie White was investigated by the FBI on suspicion that he had communist leanings. So it all fits together after all
^^^^^
5 February 2007, 4:18 pmCB; Yea, he was in the Socialist Workers’ Party or something. He single handedly revitalized the Morganian-materialist-cultural evolutionist school in anthro outside the Soviet Union.
Charles:
Ruyle Writings
on
Anthropology and Marxism
http://www.csulb.edu/~eruyle/writings.html
Material available in Electronic Format
The Human Adventure: From Ancestral Communism to the Seventh Generation. This is my major work, still in progress. It will have three parts: 1. The Nature of Human Societies (including Social Thermodynamics); 2. Human Development through 1500 A.D.; 3. Capitalism and World Revolution. I completed a draft in 1990 which I used as a textbook in several courses. This version was slightly edited in 2003 and is available in both pdf and html formats.
“Hobbits and Humans.” (htm) (2005) This paper has been submitted to Monthly Review as a response to Richard York’s article, “Homo Floresiensis and Human Equality: Enduring Lessons from Stephen Jay Gould,†in the March 2005 issue of Monthly Review.
“With Marx and Jesus: Toward an Ecumenical Communism.” (htm) Unpublished mansucrpipt, written in 2004.
“The Two Faces of Capitalism: Underdevelopment and Overdevelopment.# (htm) Unpublished manuscript, written about 2001. Also available as a pdf file.
“The Communist Manifesto in the Light of Current Anthropology.” (htm) Paper Presented at the International Conference to Commemorate the 150th Anniversary of the Communist Manifesto. Social Emancipation 150 Years After The Manifesto. Havana, Feb. 17-20, 1998. Also vailable as a pdf file.
Earlier work available
NOTE: These are all published and should be available in any University Library. Some are availabe in htm or pdf format and are so indicated. If there are problems, please let me know. I can email a file or snail mail a xerox copy of any of these on request.
“On Protosocialist Nations.” (htm) University of Dayton Review 19(2):109-125 (Summer 1988-89).
“Anthropology for Marxists: Prehistoric Revolutions.” htm) Nature, Society, and Thought: A Journal of Dialectical Materialism 1(4):469-499 (1988).
“Rethinking Marxist Anthropology.” In Perspectives in U.S. Marxist Anthropology. Edited by David Hakken and Hanna Lessinger. Boulder and London: Westview Press. Pp. 24-56. (1987)
“Capitalism and Caste in Japan.” (pdf) In New Directions in Political Economy: An Approach from Anthropology. Edited by Madeline Barbara Leons and Frances Rothstein. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. Pp. 201-233. (1979)
“Conflicting Japanese Interpretations of the Outcaste Problem (Buraku Mondai).” pdf) American Ethnologist 6:55-72. (1979)
“A Socialist Alternative for the Future.” (pdf) In Cultures of the Future. Edited by Magoroh Maruyama and Arthur Harkins. The Hague: Mouton Publishers. Pp. 613-628. (1978)
“Energy and Culture.” In The Concepts and Dynamics of Culture. Edited by Bernardo Bernardi. The Hague: Mouton Publishers. Pp. 209-237. (1977)
“Labor, People, Culture: A Labor Theory of Human Origins.” (pdf) Yearbook of Physical Anthropology 20:136-163. (1976)
“Mode of Production and Mode of Exploitation: The Mechanical and the Dialectical.” (pdf) Dialectical Anthropology 1:7-23. (1974)
“Slavery, Surplus, and Stratification on the Northwest Coast: The Ethnoenergetics of an Incipient Stratification System.” (pdf) Current Anthropology 14:603-631 (with CA* comment by 14 scholars and reply). (1973)
“Genetic and Cultural Pools: Some Suggestions for a Unified Theory of Biocultural Evolution.” )pdf) Human Ecology 1:201-215. (1973)
5 February 2007, 4:24 pmCharles:
We aren’t destroying species that we eat, mainly.
well that’s tautological, ain’t it? obviously after we’ve finished destroying them, we no longer eat them.
^^^^^
CB: Yes, indeed. One thing not always mentioned about tautologies is that they are true. The reason I said the above is because it’s obvious. Also, it’s not just that we can ‘t eat them anymore, but if we destroy our food, we threaten our own existence.
The “mainly” in the above is because, as you say later in your post, there are _some_ species we have eaten in the past that we have exterminated.
On the other extreme, we have probably boosted enormously the animal populations of cattle, chickens, catfish, corn, wheat, rice and other favored foods.
On this note, notice that humans have also boosted and protected and fed and housed (!) our various pet species that we don’t even eat. (and they don’t even do any work for us like beasts of burden) There is this odd other side to the human relationship to other species, in that with pet species, we are doing the opposite of exterminating them, and they aren’t even our food. It’s not even based on the self-interest of retaining our food. It’s just gratuitous “niceness-welfare” to other species. Then there are species – like Stan’s squirrels- that aren’t pets but they are preserved and protected by the human custom and theenvironment created for them by humans. How ever many squirrels are being killed by cars, I don’t think their population is diminishing. It’s even illegal to kill squirrels that “squirrelnest” into your house, at least in Michigan.
This all shows that the human attitude to other species is contradictory. Some species we are exterminating. Some species we are promoting.
5 February 2007, 4:37 pmpeggy:
Charles, I was at the University of Chicago, probably around the same time as you were at Michigan. Marxist materialism was not in vogue there at that time – in fact, Sahlins published a tract against it. I still have not seen a lot of Marxist anthropology. There have been some recent stage theories (“Plough, Sword and Book” by Gellner) but I do not like them at all. Overtly or quietly, they all posit some form of progress, as Marx does (does he not?) where certain things are inevitable, and although we (humanity) may go through some rough patches, ultimately everything will work out for the better. Like you, I am an admirer of the late Stephen Jay Gould, who as I read him said it is up to us (humanity) to make what we will of our situations: there is no destiny, biological or otherwise. And there is no overall progress of any species, there is just adaptation to one or another environment.
We could have some good conversations about this and other things, but I don’t want to take up too much FS space on matters tangential to FS concerns.
5 February 2007, 6:31 pmpeggy:
De, I did not mean to question your overall point, with which I completely agree: we humans are definitely in danger of sawing off the branch on which we sit, or devouring our seed corn, or whatever metaphor one chooses. But I also wanted to make the point that we humans – industrial, post-industrial, whatever – are not destroying *everything*, nor is it inevitable that we will do so.
Bananas are an interesting case, if you look them up on Wikipedia, as I did last night. Bananas have been cultivated since the beginning of cultivation, they rank FOURTH IN THE WORLD after wheat, rice, and maize in human consumption, and they are of great value to subsistence farmers, not only because of their high nutritional content, but because they are productive year-round and thus can fend off starvation when seasonal crops run low.
In addition – and this is important – bananas are of limited commercial value, because, unlike the three most consumed crops in the world – wheat, rice and maize – bananas, the fourth most consumed crop, in most of their varieties do not ship well, and the varieties that do ship well are precariously susceptible to disease. Therefore, AFAIK, big-time commercial agribusiness has shown no tremendous interest in bananas. And thus, bananas are mostly left to local subsistence farmers in India. And so may it always be.
My larger point is that we have to be given some tangible cause for hope. Because if we are led to believe that all means of subsistence have been or are being taken over or destroyed by capitalist enterprise, we might as well throw in the towel right now. Do you see?
5 February 2007, 7:11 pmDeAnander:
Hi Peggy
yes, the preservation of the many variants on banana and plantain in their native biomes is to be celebrated — the preservation of any uncopyrighted cultivar in its appropriate local climate and soil is an investment in food security. The “does mot travel well” aspect of the banana family plus the western desire for increased fructose content has driven the unnatural evolution of the Cavendish and its doomed predecessor… many commercially patented, monocropped and basically unviable cultivars (plants that habe to be kept on fossil-intensive life support) are optimised for their resistance to shipping damage, not for taste or nutritional value.
some chatter about Efficiency and optimisation here
meanwhile @Charles, this discussion — the ethics of animal husbandry — will quickly get too deep for a long thread like this… but I take serious exception to the notion that animal species are being helped or benefitted by their perpetuation under human control in industrialised agriculture. the average dairy cow, pumped full of hormones and kept immobilised often in darkness, is “burned out” in 3 years and slaughtered, having never raised a living calf; the same cow on a subsistence farm might have livd productively for 20 years and seen at least some of her offspring survive. is it helpful to the species in any sane reading of the word, to raise turkeys so grotesquely fat and breast-heavy that they can barely walk during their miserable and short caged existence? chickens whose beaks are seared off in infancy so that, when they go mad from close confinement in giant overheated sheds reeking of ammonia, they will not be able to injure themselves and each other during their own short, miserable, and unthinkably unnatural and tortured lives? gee, we might as well say that prostitution benefits poor women, when they are “preserved” in cages and fed/”protected” for only so long as they are useful for men to consume. or that slavery in Anglo-land benefitted Africans because they were fed and bred in captivity, leading lives so stunted, pain-filled and heartbreaking that the imagination stutters even trying to encompass them — as it does if we make any honest attempt to encompass the lives of factory farmed livestock.
if success in the enterprise of life is realised only by numbers, then quality of life has been dismissed from the equation and there is no value in freedom, no such concept as dignity, no value in happiness; if we count humanity as helpful stewards of domesticated critters then I suppose that makes Pharaoh a good and helpful steward of his pyramid-building slaves. there were a lot of them and he ensured that their gene pool was perpetuated by forced breeding, what more could they want?
as to the preservation of companion or pet animals, the overbreeding of many dog varieties has produced nonviable animals (dogs with severe genetic flaws such as predisposition to hip dysplasia, to take just one example — oversize breeds with shortened lifespans, breeds with fashionably deformed skull structure who suffer from breathing difficulties throughout their lives); is it “helping” a species to pollute its gene pool with countersurvivalist modifications, producing creatures incapabale of surviving without constant human protection and intervention? doesn’t any resonance make itself felt here with the dynamic of Dependency, Ownership and Control that characterises colonial occupations and patriarchal attitudes to women and children?
the evolution of non-working companion animals is as a status indicator for humans — a sign that the family is wealthy enough to waste food on a non-functional or trophy pet — not as any kind of favour to the animals. what do we make of people who declaw their cats, rendering them incapable of unaided survival? or the practise of blinding “pet” songbirds of nocturnally active species so that they will sing all day? stewardship and kindness, or warping and debasing? how about the summary destruction of pet animals who do not conform to human demands for obedience and convenience? does a rich man keep a trophy wife as a favour to womankind in general, or for his own ego gratification? (do we need three guesses?)
I am as sentimental about my companion animals as the next person and I try to permit them as natural a life as is compatible with the terrifyingly unnatural built environment of a town. but I don’t kid myself that the larger structural relationship of humans to their pets is set up to benefit the pets. we all make our separate peace and salve our separate consciences, or try to model a better relationship — but the structural relation of humans to animals under patriarchy is about as friendly, protective and helpful as the structural relationship of men to women. claims of benign human authority “benefitting” other species — or a mutually beneficial contractual relation – should be examined with equal skepticism in either case.
laws against shooting squirrels may be as much intended to militate against self-sufficiency (particularly among the homeless) and ensure the completeness of food Enclosure by the money system, as for the preservation of squirrels. I an not dismissing the genuine humanitarian (what a word) impulses that prompt people to seek bans on fox hunting and other sadistic sports, or the feeble attempts made to protect fisheries and other wild populations with catch limits and licensing. I admire the SPCA in its ever-losing, ever-hopeful battle against the widespread abuse of animals. but to regard these minor anomalies as indicative of industrial humanity’s relationship to the “lower orders” (another dead giveaway there) strikes me as … well… let’s just say less than insightful.
5 February 2007, 9:04 pmAudrey:
This all shows that the human attitude to other species is contradictory. Some species we are exterminating. Some species we are promoting.
I don’t know that we’re contradictory in our attitude toward other species, either plants or animals. We have a very narrow range of favored species for consumption, and an equally narrow range of favored species we keep about for our personal amusement, and all the rest are disregarded and devalued. In that we are entirely consistent.
We breed domesticated cats and dogs and don’t worry too much about the extinction of other animals that actually benefit the food cycle in some way. We grow lawns of a few varieties of imported grass, and the native species of grasses and flowers, which are supposed to form the meadows that support the natural food cycle, are forgotten, abandoned.
Seems to me this is how we deal with every aspect of our lives – by picking one or two things we consider mainstream, dumping all our assets into them, and completely ignoring the value of diversity. We could be talking about cats and dogs, we could be talking about Walmart vs. small handcrafted products, we could be talking about McDonalds, or about the media, or about political parties.
6 February 2007, 3:00 amCharles:
Charles, I was at the University of Chicago, probably around the same time as you were at Michigan. Marxist materialism was not in vogue there at that time – in fact, Sahlins published a tract against it.
^^^
CB: (I just typed a response and then accidently deleted the whole thing !)
Yes, _Culture and Practical Reason_ and the 72 lectures I had had Sahlins criticizing Marxism, and breaking with the “evolution and culture” paradigm of White. He then left Michigan and went to Chicago ( smile)
I don’t think “Marxist” anthro was in vogue at Chicago at anytime. Even at Michigan , few if any ( maybe Mick Taussig) were calling themselves “Marxists”. No jobs for Marxists in the U.S. We have serious anti-communism. Only France with Godelier or the Soviet Union.
Because I was a student of Sahlins, I was a structuralist before I became a Marxist. I later developed some (Marxist) criticisms of Sahlins, though I retain some of his basic ideas. _Stone Age Economics_ is still important. Also, Sahlins still puts kinship at the center and the main organizing institution of primary cultures. And he is focussed on the symbol and culture as the unique human qualities. I still go with that. That doesn’t contradict Marxist basics.
^^^^^^
I still have not seen a lot of Marxist anthropology.
^^^^^
CB: You are not likely to see it by that name because of anti-communism. A lot of anthros don’t seem to have a heavy theory anyway. I believe there are still many materialist-cultural evolutionists. Archaeology especially usually has some form of levels of development of societies in the framework, if only as a way to categorize the different eras and material cultures they find.
^^^^
There have been some recent stage theories (â€Plough, Sword and Book†by Gellner) but I do not like them at all. Overtly or quietly, they all posit some form of progress, as Marx does (does he not?) where certain things are inevitable, and although we (humanity) may go through some rough patches, ultimately everything will work out for the better.
^^^^
CB: My take on this is as follows ( and I had written it out so well when I accidently deleted it !): Originally, of course all societies were variations of foragers, with different local specifics. At some point, some , but not all societies started to accumulate surpluses through domestication of plants and animals. My guess is that the change was triggered by “necessity as the mother of invention”. In other words, some economic/ecological crises caused some , not all, societies to use techniques that had been latent, but now brought forward by the need. Once the logic of accumulating surpluses and class division is introduced ( fall from the Garden of Eden ?) the societies that choose that path grow. Then they grow territorially to the point of starting to destroy the societies that retained the old ways, the primary cultures. The clearest example we know is the Europeans wiping out the Indigenous American primary cultures.
Once the ideas of surplus accumulation and commodity production are introduced , there is a certain “unfolding” of internal logic tending toward capitalism. In other words, there is a kernel of capitalism in the original slave societies, and commodity production; and it comes to the fore over the millenia. It does “unfold” to a certain extent, regardless of environment.
With Marx’s use of inevitability, I think there is a dose of “promotion”. The revolution requires people who have some certainty in socialism. It doesn’t only automatically, objectively occur. It takes conscious, inspired human actors. So, Marx cheerleads a little.
Marx and Engels said that the past class struggles either resulted in revolution or the mutual destruction of the contending classes. So, they knew of the possible outcome in what Rosa Luxemburg later termed “barbarism” ( “Socialism or barbarism”). But why not state it optimistically to build the enthusiasm needed to make it come out for the best , even if it’s not literally inevitable ?
^^^^^
Like you, I am an admirer of the late Stephen Jay Gould, who as I read him said it is up to us (humanity) to make what we will of our situations: there is no destiny, biological or otherwise. And there is no overall progress of any species, there is just adaptation to one or another environment.
^^^
CB: I say something analogous about human society above.
The slight difference with human society is that once the idea of surpluses and wealth and commodities is introduced, they do create a tendency to develop in that direction. And then the big “energy capturing” societies are able to “push aside” ( to use a euphemism) the low energy capture societies, just by their greater physical and military force (greater energy capture)
^^^^
We could have some good conversations about this and other things, but I don’t want to take up too much FS space on matters tangential to FS concerns.
^^^^^^
CB: I’ll follow your lead. I think Stan and others may have some interest in these issues.
It’s becoming pretty clear that capitalism is “capturing” too much energy, such that it is setting the sky on fire, so to speak.
Seems to me we might look at the examples of prior lower energy “capturing” societies for models of how to organize ourselves in the “deesculation” from capitalism and industrialism.
( Let me submit this before I accidently delete yikes !)
6 February 2007, 2:45 pmStan:
There are some important and interesting points coming up in this conversation now, so I’ll see if I can make the time to play outside with y’all for a little while.
Charles makes an important point about the straw-Marxes that abound out there,and that are promoted most unfortunately by many marx-ISTS themselves… back to beating that dead horse of mine on the difference between method and doctrine.
Marx was a social scientist, like many of us arguably are, and he never made claim to omniscience. He and Engels were also activists like many of us are, so they engaged in tactically driven polemics — as Charles points out: cheerleading. Just like we do sometimes, they threw things at the wall to see if they would stick.
In retrospect, my own take is that Marx developed an excellent microscope, but a poor telescope… or perhaps I should say, crystal ball. You can still unpack a helluva a lot from that little ol’ commodity; but the inevitability thing (which many Marxist-religionists still cling to tighter than trans-substantiation) hasn’t worked out well.
So we can see the dynamic of capital accumulation advancing rapaciously, but we have more tools to understand it now than we did 150 years ago, as well as to understand its context. I tend to think if the old man were to come back and have a couple years to catch up, he’d be more post-marxist than many of us. He was puzzling pretty hard over the implications of soil exhaustion when the tobacco killed him. He certainly wasn’t standing still. It took hostilely encircled state socialism and the defense of it to truly ossify the method into the doctrine; as well as to accelerate the headlong rush into developmentalism.
I don’t see this as a hijacked thread, so much as an evolving one, because the mystery of consciousness is still right there under us when we take these little excursions.
In that spirit, I’ll quibble about “energy capture,” because I still think this goes to the heart of challenging the Man-Nature dualism that lurks nearby. This is the reason Hornborg and others use thermodynamics as a frame, just as Marx used the commodity as a frame, not to reduce the question, but to try and apprehend it in another dimension. The labor-power theory, as both Hornborg and Pateman have pointed out, presents us with quite a few gaps and contradictions… and neither of them want to resort to the sociological equivalent of string-theory (pure mental constructs) to get to that next synthetic step.
Energy is a really difficult thing to apprehend, because as some point it becomes indistinguishable from matter. Electrons, for example, are not little balls orbiting a lumpy planet of protons and neutrons, but as Maewan Ho notes:
We don’t capture energy, we dissipate it. That’s why this emphasis on dissipative structures is extremely important in determining what the thermodynamic dimension of social development actually is. Metropolitan cities don’t just “capture” energy; then use their strength to bully around the “backward” societies. They exist structurally in a parasitic relationship to the peripheries. They must establish peripheries in order to survive.
The Europeans didn’t just get strong then establish the slave trade and the North American land theft. They were driven to both by soil exhaustion and a lot of other material constraints on growth.
Okay, time’s up. Gotta go back inside. (-:
6 February 2007, 4:03 pmpeggy:
Okay, Stan or anybody who can answer, I have a question about just plain physics. From what I learned in high school way back, certain complex physical structures bind energy within themselves, and that energy will then be released if that structure is dismantled. And that is how energy is gotten from matter. On a certain level, matter is directly convertible to energy, but that is a different thing, I think, and I do not pretend to understand the mathematics of it. I thought that entropy was the lowest energy state. My question is: have I got this all right so far?
In building a society, we do not “capture” energy, but we do use it, and in an imperial society we get the sources of energy from the periphery, which we create in the process of taking stuff from it. In that sense we “capture” energy – i.e., we steal its sources from the periphery we create in teh process of stealing from it.
A lot of energy is wasted in a built society, or as the theory above puts it, dissipated. (By contrast, living bodies are virtually miraculous in their precise and parsimonious organization of energy flows). Now according to my understanding, “dissipation” of energy is the same thing as what is called in other contexts “wastage.” Have a got this right? If not, can anybody explain?
Entropy seems to have two definitions: (1) reversion to lower energy state, and (2) loss of organization and complexity. The two definitions converge because complex organisation entails the binding of energy. In a totally entropic universe, everywhere would be a homogenous mass of … nothing. So the Big Question is, why is there something instead of nothing?
I am suspicious of the use of physical metaphors to describe social processes. For instance, when social scientists talk of “power” in a society, they always use physical metaphors. It seems that such metaphors are impossible to avoid (in the languages of the so-called “core” anyway). But I will insist nevertheless that they are just metaphors, and therefore misleading.
That being said, is it not misleading, and perhaps also obfuscatory, to describe the imperial process as dissipation? Is anything gained by this new terminology? If so, what?
Those are my final questions, and sorry for this long post.
7 February 2007, 2:22 amStan:
I’ll take a brief run at it, Peggy. I’m still trying to understand this myself. BTW, Paul Tillich the great existentialist used to begin his philosophy classes with the question: Why is there something, and not nothing?
Break that code, and see into the mind of God.
Heat death (a speculative state of total entropy) doesn’t mean there is nothing, but that it doesn’t do anything. The universe is a thin, cold haze. I’m not at all sure I buy all that, but it’s unlikely I’ll be around to find out who was right about it, in any case. (-:
The use of physical dynamics, as in Hornborg, in describing social processes is not metaphorical. This is an important point. That’s why Prigogine’s attention to structures, as opposed to a more abstracted natural law, is an important breakthrough, so to speak. Social processes are embedded in physical substrates.
Marx looked at capital, and said this is not money and stuff. Economics is treating the commodified world as if it just sprang into being like a genie. If that’s not true, then what does this “fetish” explanation (an ahistorical “market”) conceal? Then Marx turned the microscope onto the commodity and discovered (gasp!) a Social Relation. Capital is a social relation! Seems awfully simple, unless you’ve never thought about it, in which case, it seems wildly counter-intuitive and sends people running back to Familiarland, where everyone uses the language and episteme of Supply & Demand, Homo Economus, etc.
A similar thing happens when we associate someone saying that a messy office is a consequence of (figurative) entropy; then along comes this group of eggheads who say the connection between physical and social entropy might be more substantial than figurative.
Most definitions of energy say that it is “the power to change forms,” but this is tautological, imo. It still takes us back to Tillich’s (and Peggy’s) question, and to the Big Question: Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
In a sense, the obstacle here is that energy has been thing-ified, and so we are wondering how we can grab hold of it like we would one of those floating plastic duckies in the circular stream at a carnival booth. We have teachers telling students that electricity is electrons, “like BB’s, flowing through a tube (wire).”
So Schrödinger comes along and helps out with that, by giving us negentropy. Complex emergent structures (like life) “may be said to become more complex by feeding not on energy but on negentropy.” Negentropy is manifested in a cell, in an underground lake of oil, or in a stable biome.
I remember that little video about Cuba’s permaculture experiments, in which a young permaculturist stated quite simply, “We have to learn how not to work against nature, and how to work with nature.” Of course, there is no such thing as an “unnatural” process, or it couldn’t exist at all. But if life (a process in which we may feel a vested interest) “feeds” on negentropy, then social processes that learn to “dance with negentropy” instead of conquer it, will maintain that complexity that is a necessary substrate, instead of destroying it.
Think about New York City. What flows into that vast constructed environment every day just ot maintain it? Where does it come from? What is left behind in the places that “feed” NYC, not just people, but the structured environment itself?
Hornborg’s book does something similar to Marx (I knew I’d get back here somehow), and in fact takes that very marxian notion of “fetishism,” and applies it to high-tech society (marked linguistically as The Machine,/i>). Marx said capital is a social relation, and that “profit” produced at the point of production can be exposed as an exploitative relation between people. Hornborg says, take this a step further. The technology itself represents an inescapably exploitative relation, and we can show that by seeing The Machine itself as a dissipative core structure that “feeds” on negentropy that is strip-mined from a periphery.
What is gained from this description is a decisive break with the developmentalist Left, that clings to a techno-utopian vision of the future that is simply not possible. The technological optimist vision is a “conquest” vision, not a “dance” vision, that will — as we have noted here — saw off the very limb upon which we are perched. And the reasons can be found in a simple examination of the actual physical substrates of social organization — which are ontologically inescapable.
It’s not a cornucopia. Industrial technology is inherently exploitative.
So what this implies is not that imperialism can be reduced to “dissipation,” but that a Prigoginian examination of imperial metropoles shows that we cannot “correct” imperialism by simply putting workers in charge of factories.
Hornborg is, btw, an anthropologist. (-:
7 February 2007, 9:26 amR.S. Morris:
Hi All!
I’m going to venture into simplification (and I’m not being glib here):
The only thing that fights the universal trend toward a “final entropic state” is Life.
Imagine the rubber sheet that Carl Sagan used to demonstrate the effect gravity has on the “fabric of space.” Now take that tired cliche and turn the rubber sheet into the “fabric of energy” in the universe (instead of space and gravity). Somehow, peaks are created throughout that universal energy sheet that represent “Life” taking hold and consolidating ambient energy: galaxies, stars, planets, “biotic” life, etc. Why? *shrug* Universal Attraction, maybe? Sounds hopelessly romantic, but also seems to be what happens.
I remember a few years ago when my best friend was doing his med school undergrad work, he called me up and told me about this term his physics professor had used: Heat Death. As he explained the concept to me I became increasingly agitated. I had already graduated from college with a degree in quasi-ecophilosophy (a B.S., to be sure) and I was saying to him, “That’s crap; if this ‘Heat Death’ was really the ultimate trend, then why is there anything out there but lukewarm space-paste?”
He couldn’t answer and neither could I, but the question nagged me for a long time. Part of my problem has subsequently been revealed as my resistance to anything that smacked of faith or “New-Age-ism” (I was a pretty hardcore empiricist back then). After all, what possible scientific rationale could be applied to explain “Universal Attraction”? Sounded like anthropomorphization to me!
Anyway, I think my point is that I believe in both Entropy and in Negentropy, I’d just never heard the second word before now. The implications from this understanding lead down a decidely Luddite path (not that I’m on that path yet—I’m still in material denial). At what level of production do we, as a species, go from enhancing the anti-entropic effect to accelerating it? What is an acceptable mode of activity if we embrace a collective vision of Homo Negentropus?
Building on Stan’s explaination of the nature of industrial society and technology, I think De’s focus on sustainable farming is a great way to wean ourselves away from our tendency to wait for “the Fix” that will never come.
As a species, we may or may not recover from our trip down Entropy Lane; however, the more revolutionaries and insurgents successfully incorporate the Negentropic lessons of Life into our struggles, the more likely we are to develop a reasonable blueprint for those that survive the inevitable “restructuring” of our social arrangement.
All that as I sit at my computer…how pathetically ironic.
Randy
7 February 2007, 2:16 pmDeAnander:
another metaphor we could drag in is the old addiction model. we know that a truly addictive habit is entropic in the confines of the addict’s life: it sucks in all energy and effort and produces disorder — literal and figurative, in the home and in the cells of the body.
so step one, the addict has to get out of denying that there is a problem at all. step two, the addict has to admit that the problem not only does exist, it is not small. step three, the addict says, “I can cut back. I can limit myself to just one smoke a day, just one drink, just one line on the weekend to celebrate.”
in the case of genuine physical addiction, as with nicotine, this is never true. one dose is enough to start up the accelerating cycle of need. I hear civilisation-addicts all around me, including myself, asking “can we cut back? can we keep some of our toys and luxuries and still have a habitable planet and reasonable social justice? what level of luxury is sustainable? what can I bear to give up? do we really have to go cold (Luddite) turkey?” I think what we all fear is that our computers and our easy, entertaining, childlike lives are fundamentally incompatible with a habitable (negentropic) planet — that if we want to avoid the Big Crash we may need to go teetotal. I’m still hoping for a third way, myself: solar panels, wifi networks and LED lighting, steel hand tools and online libraries in the permaculture forests of our future.
but it is hard also to get past the historical catch-22 that the liquidationist, brutal lifeway of empire gives empire the decisive short term physical advantage over more sustainable lifeways. it’s poor consolation that the empire must totter and fall from its own entropic enthusiasm for destruction, if you are one of the many tribes and cultures it exterminated on its way to the endgame.
if we look at some of the lands where great empires flourished and fell and devastated the landscape, we often find an impoverished (desertified) biome where the local lifeways tend towards paternalist patriarchal warlordism. the cultural treasure of less destructive social behaviour was destroyed along with the languages, religions, folkways and foodways of the “competing” inhabitants. what is left is impoverished masculinity strutting and squabbling among ruins. I might even suggest that some of the Angry White Man BS in the betrayed middle and working classes of USian culture is the precursor of this state….
I have heard it said that some first nations people say they are waiting for the White Nations to implode, trying to conserve indigenous beliefs and social capital so that in the aftermath there will be a core of knowledge and wisdom to rebuild from. a nice thought, if the fall is not so hard that it takes all of us out, indigenous and coloniser together.
7 February 2007, 3:59 pmpeggy:
Many thanks, Stan and Randy. What you said helps a lot, and I will buy (our library doesn’t have it) and read Hornborg’s book. I get that capital is a social relation and not a thing, and I get that commodities are not things-in-themselves but social constructions, or one big social construction upon which the social construction of capital is dependent, and vice versa.
And yes, a totally entropic universe is more like a lukewarm soup than absolutely nothing at all. I knew I as wrong about that. Somehow that correction is comforting. Wouldn’t it be a terrible waste of potential if there were nothing? (Hey, wait … “potential” … hmmm …)
I still don’t get (though I would like to believe) that negentropy is a thing-in-itself. Will have to read up on that.
And I am still not convinced that industrial technology is anything more than a clumsy effort to imitate life (= negentropy in this discussion) that ends up doing the opposite of what it is intended to do, a la Frankenstein.
But I shall read up some more and get back to you on this someday. Meanwhile thanks again. I know my persistent questioning can annoy people to distraction. Have lost more than one boyfriend that way (to bring in the feminist dimension
).
7 February 2007, 5:14 pmpeggy:
Here is an interesting quote I found on Wiki, under the topic, “Life and Entropy”
“The general struggle for existence of animate beings is not a struggle for raw materials – these, for organisms, are air, water and soil, all abundantly available – nor for energy which exists in plenty in any body in the form of heat, but a struggle for entropy, which becomes available through the transition of energy from the hot sun to the cold earth.”
Note the observation: “(life) is a struggle FOR entropy” (emphasis added). Reminds us to avoid oversimplification.
8 February 2007, 12:24 amCharles:
Marx looked at capital, and said this is not money and stuff. Economics is treating the commodified world as if it just sprang into being like a genie. If that’s not true, then what does this “fetish†explanation (an ahistorical “marketâ€) conceal? Then Marx turned the microscope onto the commodity and discovered (gasp!) a Social Relation. Capital is a social relation! Seems awfully simple, unless you’ve never thought about it, in which case, it seems wildly counter-intuitive and sends people running back to Familiarland, where everyone uses the language and episteme of Supply & Demand, Homo Economus, etc.
^^^^^^
“First of all, Wakefield discovered that in the Colonies, property in money, means of subsistence, machines, and other means of production, does not as yet stamp a man as a capitalist if there be wanting the correlative — the wage-worker, the other man who is compelled to sell himself of his own free-will.
_ He discovered that capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons, established by the instrumentality of things_ (-emphasis CB)[4]
Mr. Peel, he moans, took with him from England to Swan River, West Australia, means of subsistence and of production to the amount of £50,000. Mr. Peel had the foresight to bring with him, besides, 3,000 persons of the working-class, men, women, and children. Once arrived at his destination, “Mr. Peel was left without a servant to make his bed or fetch him water from the river.†[5] Unhappy Mr. Peel who provided for everything except the export of English modes of production to Swan River!”
4. “A negro is a negro. In certain circumstances he becomes a slave. A mule is a machine for spinning cotton. Only under certain circumstances does it become capital. Outside these circumstances, it is no more capital than gold is intrinsically money, or sugar is the price of sugar…. Capital is a social relation of production. It is a historical relation of production.†(Karl Marx, “Lohnarbeit und Kapital,†N. Rh. Z., No.266, April 7, 1849.)
http://marxists.nigilist.ru/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch33.htm#n4
Karl Marx. Capital Volume One
——————————————————————————–
Chapter Thirty-Three: The Modern Theory of Colonisation [1]
8 February 2007, 3:20 pmCharles:
There is nothing but matter and it’s mode of existence is motion, said Fred. Energy makes or is motion.
Another famous quantification of energy:
E = M x Csquared , where “E” is energy.
8 February 2007, 3:41 pmCharles:
http://www.complexsystems.org/publications/pdf/thermoecon.pdf
8 February 2007, 4:40 pmCharles:
In that spirit, I’ll quibble about “energy capture,†because I still think this goes to the heart of challenging the Man-Nature dualism that lurks nearby. This is the reason Hornborg and others use thermodynamics as a frame, just as Marx used the commodity as a frame, not to reduce the question, but to try and apprehend it in another dimension. The labor-power theory, as both Hornborg and Pateman have pointed out, presents us with quite a few gaps and contradictions… and neither of them want to resort to the sociological equivalent of string-theory (pure mental constructs) to get to that next synthetic step.
^^^^^
CB: Let me say that Leslie White’s paradigm is obviously too technological determinist at one level. But, since the fall of ancient society and the rise of class divided society ( socalled civilization; Engels’ the patriarchal family, private property and the state), unfortunately human society has been dominated by the cultures that accumulate surplus wealth, and this is identical with “technologically determined” or “energy capture determined” development. That’s because when a society determined by increasing surpluses has contact with an ancient or primary cultural society, the former destroys the latter.
So, I am not saying that there is an iron law that human society must evolve or develop more an more energy capture. But that _in fact_ human society has been development in that way, sadly. I guess there is a dose of the negentropy theory in White, and White probably was right up with Schoedinger ( he of the famous Schoedinger’s cat thought experiment in quantum mechanics) because White’s theories developed in the 20′s, 30′s and 40′s contemporary with Schoedinger. I have to see if White mentions Schoedinger.
At any rate, I’m not saying we have to keep on increasing “energy capture”. In fact, we’ve got to allow a bit more entropy to accumulate. We need to cool down, chill out. Global warming is “too much” negentropy, too much energy capture, too much burning.
We are in the age of Prometheus Rebound. Prometheus stole fire from the Gods and gave it to humans. Now the Gods anger with Prometheus is seen to be wise ? Human control of fire, energy capture, is making things too hot ( not enough entropy) for optimum human existence.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus_Unbound
Prometheus Unbound
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This article is about the plays. For the episode of the television show Stargate SG-1, see “Prometheus Unbound”.
There are two plays named Prometheus Unbound. Both are concerned with the torments of the Greek mythological figure Prometheus and his suffering at the hands of Zeus.
[edit] Aeschylus
The first Prometheus Unbound was a sequel to Prometheus Bound, traditionally attributed to Aeschylus. It depicted the release of Prometheus from his torments by Heracles. Unfortunately, it, and a third play, Prometheus Pyrphoros, are lost. Certain fragments have survived, however, and from these we can glean a general cast: Prometheus, a chorus of Titans and Hercules. In the appendix of James Scully and C. John Herington’s translation of Prometheus Bound it is hypothesized that the cast also included Earth and/or Sky, as part of an elemental cycle across the entire trilogy.[1]
[edit] Shelley
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This article has been tagged since January 2007.
The second Prometheus Unbound is a four-act play by Percy Bysshe Shelley first published in 1820. It is inspired by Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound and concerns the final release from captivity of Prometheus. However, unlike Aeschylus’s version, there is no reconciliation between Prometheus and Zeus in Shelley’s narrative. Instead, Jupiter is overthrown, which allows Prometheus to be released. Shelley’s play is closet drama, meaning it was not intended to be produced on the stage. In the tradition of William Wordsworth and the other poets creating what we now call Romantic Poetry, Shelley wrote for the imagination, intending his play’s stage to reside in the imaginations of his readers. Shelley wrote another play called The Cenci at almost the same time – perhaps moving from one text to the other. This other play was meant to be produced and has been done in New York[2] and elsewhere from time to time. What is remarkable about Shelley writing both plays and at the same time is that while Prometheus Unbound is an exalted, idealistic vision of a perfect bloodless revolution, The Cenci is a horror-stricken Macbeth-like drama of injustice, showing that Shelley was not naive about the realities he sought to change through his writing.
8 February 2007, 5:23 pmR.S. Morris:
Charles, could you do me a favor since I am not an educated Marxist—would you clarify your point for me please? I’m not trying to be nasty, I’m just really having a hard time synthesizing all these disparate viewpoints.
Thanks,
Randy
8 February 2007, 5:41 pmR.S. Morris:
I would argue that Global Warming is more the opposite: a result of releasing captured energy (i.e., energy captured in the form of previously photosynthetic plant material compressed and transformed into various fossil fuels) and distributing it broadly into the biosphere, making it entropic in nature. I’m thinking that true Negentropy can only be achieved by plants in general.
Now my head hurts.
Randy
8 February 2007, 5:53 pmCharles:
Randy,
Do you mean the Prometheus Rebound point ?
Charles
^^^^
I would argue that Global Warming is more the opposite: a result of releasing captured energy (i.e., energy captured in the form of previously photosynthetic plant material compressed and transformed into various fossil fuels) and distributing it broadly into the biosphere, making it entropic in nature. I’m thinking that true Negentropy can only be achieved by plants in general.
^^^^
CB: You could be right. I’m just thinking that the effect on the sort of whole earth seems to be to raise temperatures. Raised temperature indicates more energy and more concentrated energy, I think. And more concentrated, as opposed to more dispersed energy is less entropic, I think.
I realize the energy is being released into a large atmosphere place, but the end result seems to be for more heat to be captured around the earth overall, thus global warming/heating.
In some sense, if there is increased heat, I think there is decreased entropy.
Again, I could be wrong. What you see above is what you get as far as the argument. A physicist-meterologist might correct it.
9 February 2007, 12:02 pmStan:
I think we’re crossing a lot of linguistic-epistemological boundaries here. That really is emblematic of how male-bourgeois-metropolitan science and education subdivide the world into neat, separable categories ruled over by specialists.
Heat is not energy, per se, even though it is in everyday parlance. It is an outcome of energy dissipation. A certain quantity of negentropy is concentrated in a piece of wood. In the process of combustion, that negentropy is dissipated in the form of heat.
When this same process is replicated with gasoline, say, in an internal combustion engine, the majority of the energy does not do “work,” that is, move a piston, which rotates a shaft, which rotates a wheel, which pushes a car forward. Most of it is “lost” as heat, which the Law of Entropy shows moves toward generalized equilibrium through dissipation (and raises ground ozone levels so we have to keep our asthmatic kids indoors during the summer). The heat that arrives on earth is the outcome of fusion combustion on the sun.
Heat that we facilitate – at all levels – generally represents INCREASED entropy.
That is why negentropy is an important concept that clarifies things in conjunction with attention to structures from the molecular to the global cycles.
9 February 2007, 12:43 pmR.S. Morris:
Ok, I’m working hard here…
Heat is a measurement of energy transfer between particles of matter?
Please check me on this:
Entropy = more generalized distribution of energy throughout a system;
Anti-entropy = the concentration of energy into pools within a system;
Negentropy = the counterintuitive process through which Life seemingly defies the Second Law of Thermodynamics, arising into complexity out of simplicity and, as a result, increases Anti-entropy in a system.
What I’m getting between the equations in Stan’s referenced paper ( http://www.ratical.org/co-globalize/MaeWanHo/negentr.html ) is that Negentropy is something else besides the matter and energy we’ve been taught about in school. Wow.
I think we’re crossing a lot of linguistic-epistemological boundaries here. —Stan
That is exactly why Feral Scholar is SO important, Stan. I haven’t found a discussion site that comes close in terms of interest and focus crosspollination (politics, feminism, physics, psychology/physiology, military, philosophy…and humor!) all the while keeping the discourse civil and generally pointed in a constructive direction. Unfortunately, these features self-limit access since most people don’t seem to be able to break the habit of compartmentalization.
Anyway, thanks for the continued mental workout. It does seem to be coming together toward something good…I just can’t see exactly what yet.
Randy
9 February 2007, 2:44 pmCharles:
I realize the energy is being released into a large atmosphere place, but the end result seems to be for more heat to be captured around the earth overall, thus global warming/heating.
^^^^^^
9 February 2007, 3:13 pmCB: Correcting this, the “greenhouse” gases are not energy being released. They are the result of energy being used, the byproduct. The gases evidently put a sort of blanket around the earth, which , I guess, holds heat “in”.
Charles:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy
Energy
From Wikipedia,
This article is about energy in terms of natural sciences. For other uses, see Energy (disambiguation).
In the natural sciences, energy can be described as the capacity of a system to do work. In turn, work is defined as the result of application of a force (gravitational, electromagnetic, etc) through a physical distance. Due to the existence of a variety of forces in nature, energy and work have many different forms (gravitational, electric, heat, etc.), most of which can be grouped into two major categories: kinetic energy and potential energy.
The SI unit of energy is the joule. In physics, energy has no direction in space and is therefore considered a scalar quantity.
Energy is a conserved quantity, meaning that it cannot be created or destroyed, but only converted from one form into another. Thus, the total energy of the universe always remains constant. ( I think that’s the First Law of Thermodynamics – CB)
Lightning is a highly visible form of energy transfer.Contents [hide]
1 Etymology
2 Historical perspective
3 Energy and contexts in science
3.1 Physics
3.2 Chemistry
3.3 Biology
3.4 Meteorology
3.5 Geology
3.6 Astronomy and cosmology
3.7 Methods of measurement
4 Different forms of energy and their inter-relations
4.1 Kinetic
4.2 Potential
4.2.1 Gravitational potential energy
4.2.2 Electric potential energy
4.2.3 Magnetic potential energy
4.2.4 Thermal potential energy
4.2.5 Chemical potential energy
4.2.6 Elastic potential energy
4.2.7 Nuclear potential energy
4.3 Transformations of energy
5 Law of conservation of energy
6 See also
7 Other links
8 References
9 External links
[edit] Biology
Main articles: Biological thermodynamics, Cellular respiration, Photosynthesis, and Chemosynthesis
Growth, development and metabolism are some of the central phenomena in the study of biology. They cannot be explained without invoking the energy concept. Indeed sustenance of life itself is critically dependent on energy transformations; living organisms survive because of exchange of energy within and without. In a living organism chemical bonds are constantly broken and made to make the exchange and transformation of energy possible. These chemical bonds are most often bonds in carbohydrates, including sugars. Other chemical bonds include bonds in chemical compounds that are important for the cell metabolism, for example, those in a molecule of ATP or fats and oils.[3] These molecules, along with oxygen, are common stores of concentrated energy for the biological processes. One can therefore assert that transformation of energy from a more to a less concentrated form is the driving force of all biological processes or chemical processes that are responsible for the life of a biological organism. Molecular biology and biochemistry are in fact scientific studies concerning the making and breaking of chemical bonds in the molecules found in biological organisms.
As with other natural phenomena, the exchange of metabolic energy in biological organisms also increases the entropy of the universe. Nearly all energy transformations studied in biology are due to the chemical synthesis and decompositions ultimately brought about by the energy absorbed from photons in sunlight through insolation[4] and photosynthesis.[5] The total energy captured by photosynthesis in green plants from the solar radiation is about 2 x 1023 joules of energy per year.[6] This is about 4% of the total sunlight energy which reaches Earth.
The predator-prey relationships, food chains, are in effect energy transformations within ecosystems that are studied in ecology.
9 February 2007, 4:40 pmCharles:
Biological thermodynamics
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article is about the biological study of energy transformation. For the body-oriented psychotherapy, see Bioenergetic analysis.
In thermodynamics, biological thermodynamics (Greek: bios = life and logikos = reason + Greek: thermos = heat and dynamics = power) or bioenergetics is the study of energy transformation in the biological sciences. More definitively, biological thermodynamics may be defined as the quantitative study of the energy transductions that occur in and between living organisms, structures, and cells and of the nature and function of the chemical processes underlying these transductions. Biological thermodynamics may address the question of whether the benefit associated with any particular phenotypic trait is worth the energy investment it requires.
Contents [hide]
1 Overview
2 References
3 Further reading
4 External links
[edit] Overview
Living cells and organisms must perform work to stay alive, to grow, and to reproduce themselves. The ability to harness energy from a variety of metabolic pathways so to channel it into biological work is a fundamental property of all living organisms. Thermodynamically, the amount of energy capable of doing work during a chemical reaction is measured quantitatively by the change in the Gibbs free energy.
Typical emphasis is on thermodynamic applications in biology and biochemistry. Principles covered include the first law of thermodynamics, the second law of thermodynamics, Gibbs free energy, statistical thermodynamics, binding equilibria, reaction kinetics, and on hypotheses of the origin of life. Presently, biological thermodynamics concerns itself with the study of internal biochemical dynamics as: ATP hydrolysis, protein stability, DNA binding, membrane diffusion, enzyme kinetics, and other such essential energy controlled pathways.
[edit] References
Haynie, D. (2001). Biological Thermodynamics (textbook). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lehninger, A., Nelson, D., & Cox, M. (1993). Principles of Biochemistry, 2nd Ed (textbook). New York: Worth Publishers.
[edit] Further reading
Thermodynamics
Reactions and Enzymes Chapter 10 of On-Line Biology Book at Estrella Mountain Community College.
[edit] External links
9 February 2007, 4:41 pmBiochemical Thermodynamics – Course Lecture (Andrew Howard, Illinois Institute of Technology)
Cellular Thermodynamics – Wolfe, J. (2002), Encyclopedia of Life Sciences. http://www.els.net/els/public/home/, London
Charles:
A big thing with energy is that it transforms, or takes different forms. Much of the study of energy is the study of it changing forms in this way.
Ecological relations involve a lot of energy tranfer systems and pathways.
In physiology, they have us study the Krebs cycle and ATP as energy storage and tranformation systems.
Photosynthesis is a critical energy tranformation process by which the energy in sunlight is stored in plants. The form of storage in plants can be “unlocked” to do work in the body of an animal that eats the plant, i another energy storage and transformation process involving a Krebs cycle and ATP molecules.
Energy stored in animal flesh and plants aged is , of course, in fossil fuels and released through burning as gasoline, etc. in another energy transformation. It originally came from the sun in that photosynthesis transformation process.
11 February 2007, 10:47 amCharles:
We don’t capture energy, we dissipate it. That’s why this emphasis on dissipative structures is extremely important in determining what the thermodynamic dimension of social development actually is. Metropolitan cities don’t just “capture†energy; then use their strength to bully around the “backward†societies. They exist structurally in a parasitic relationship to the peripheries. They must establish peripheries in order to survive.
^^^^^^
CB: I have to study dissipative structures. The sense of “energy capture” is that energy systems do work, in the technical physical sense. The processes of life, and their perpetuation, require that work be done. So, to the extent that humans ( and other species) act to have various forms of energy work for them, they “capture” energy, control energy, direct energy to do work for them in many ways.
An ox pulling a plow is controlled energy, directed to do work toward the human goal of growing food. The food grown and eaten is energy “captured” to perpetuate the lives of living human organisms. etc. etc.
11 February 2007, 1:31 pmCharles:
However, unlike Aeschylus’s version, there is no reconciliation between Prometheus and Zeus in Shelley’s narrative. Instead, Jupiter is overthrown, which allows Prometheus to be released.
^^^^^^
Hey , that’s kind of revolutionary.
12 February 2007, 4:41 pmCharles:
Here we go.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organisation#Self-organization_vs._entropy
Self-organization vs. entropy
The idea of self-organization challenges an earlier paradigm of ever-decreasing order which was based on a philosophical generalization from the second law of thermodynamics in statistical thermodynamics where entropy is envisioned as a measure of the statistical “disorder” at a microstate level. However, at the microscopic or local level, the two need not be in contradiction: it is possible for a system to reduce its entropy by transferring it to its environment.
In open systems, it is the flow of matter and energy through the system that allows the system to self-organize, and to exchange entropy with the environment. This is the basis of the theory of dissipative structures. Ilya Prigogine noted that self-organization can only occur far away from thermodynamic equilibrium.
It would appear that, since isolated systems cannot decrease their entropy, only open systems can exhibit self-organization. However, such a system can gain macroscopic order while increasing its overall entropy. Specifically, a few of the system’s macroscopic degrees of freedom can become more ordered at the expense of microscopic disorder.
In many cases of biological self-assembly, for instance metabolism, the increasing organization of large molecules is more than compensated for by the increasing entropy of small molecules, especially water. At the level of a whole organism and over longer time scales, though, biological systems are open systems feeding from the environment and dumping waste into it.
At a more global level, the Earth approximates a closed system in that little matter is exchanged with the surrounding solar system. Life and evolution can occur because of the local input of primarily solar energy, while the global entropy of the solar system as a whole continues to increase towards a cold, dead endpoint. In that sense, life is “swimming upstream” against the larger thermodynamic trends only because of direct sunlight.
12 February 2007, 4:55 pmCharles:
Young chimp beats college students
——————————————————————————–
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071203/ap_on_sc/chimp_memory
^^^^^^
3 December 2007, 4:33 pmCB: The main difference between human thinking and the thinking of other primates and mammals and animals is that humans think symbolically.