Deacon 1

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On the Human: Rethinking the natural selection of hu

by: Terrence W. Deacon Introduction
Gary Comstock
Today, 10:32 AM
Since Darwins time, the human language capacity has been a perennially cited paragon of extreme complexity that defies the explanatory powers of natural selection. And it is not just critics of Darwinism who have argued that this most distinctive human capacity is problematic. Alfred Russell Wallacethe co-discoverer of natural selection theory and in many ways more of an ultraDarwinian than Darwin himselffamously argued that the human intellectual capacity which makes language possible, is developed to a level of complexity that far exceeds what is achievable through natural selection alone. While fiercely defending natural selection theory with respect to the traits of other species, he argued that in the case of humans, natural selection could only have endowed the savage with a brain a little superior to that of an ape. (p. 392) And Charles Lyellwho personally promoted Darwins work and generally supported the evolutionary perspectivealso worried that language was just too complex to have evolved by natural means. Not only are the vast vocabulary and baroquely structured grammar and syntax of even the most simple of natural languages orders of magnitude more complex than any other species communication system, but the capacity this all provides for expressing esoteric concepts and conveying aesthetic experiences seems far removed from anything with direct adaptive consequence. Darwin himself fretted over the possibility that natural selection alone might be incapable of accounting for exaggerated functional complexity in nature. In a letter he wrote to Asa Gray shortly after the publication of On the Origin of Species, he admits that The sight of a feather in a peacocks tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me feel sick! Despite the spectacular and elaborately formed details of this adornment, it was a burden that negatively impacted health and survival and so could not have been the subject to natural selection with respect to the environment. But it was the extravagance of traits such as this, despite their lack of utility, that suggested to Darwin an approach to the challenge of explaining human mental capacities. In the case of the peacock tail, and other similar traits, Darwin realized that, indeed, something other than natural selection with respect to environmental conditions was responsible. Recognizing that reproduction rather than individual survival was the critical factor in evolution, he argued that competition with respect to reproductive access (sexual selection) could result in runaway selection on certain traits, independent of their environmental suitability. Darwin argued that a display feature or fighting ability that led an individual to out-compete others in gaining access to mates would also favor proliferation and evolutionary exaggeration of these traits, even at some cost to individual health and survival. Analogously, he postulated that selection with respect to sex might also explain such extravagant and highly divergent traits as human language. In his book The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sexwhich is typically referred to by only the first half of its titlehe argues that language and other human traits that appear exaggerated beyond survival value, can be explained as consequences of sexual selection. So, for example, he imagines that language might have evolved from something akin to bird song, used as a means to attract mates, and that the ability to produce highly elaborate vocal behaviors was progressively exaggerated by a kind of arms-race competition for the most complex vocal display. Unfortunately, there are strong reasons for doubting the relevance of sexual selection to this most distinctive of human traits. This is because sexual selection inevitably produces complementary divergence of male and female traits, as is exemplified by peacock tails and moose antlers, which are exhibited only by males. While there are indeed a few highly divergent traits distinguishing women from men (e.g. patterns of fat deposition in breasts and hips, etc.), the sexes differ only very subtly in their intellectual and language abilities. Thus accounting for the extravagant complexity of language in terms of sexual selection requires explaining why it lacks this otherwise ubiquitous mark of extreme sexual dimorphism. To explain the origin of the highly structured human-unique adaptation inevitably requires addressing Wallaces challenge concerning the complexity and apparent non-adaptive aspects of these features. Long evolution in an artificial niche In my work I use the phrase, symbolic species, quite literally, to argue that symbols have literally changed the kind of biological organism we are. I believe that we think and behave in many ways that are quite odd compared to other species because of the way that language has changed us. In many respects symbolic language has become a major part of the environment to which we have had to adapt in order to flourish. In the same way that our ancestors bodies evolved in the context of the demands posed by bipedal foraging with stone tools and incorporating meat into the diet, their brains evolved in the context of a rich fabric of symbolic cultural communication. As it became increasingly important to be able to enter into the social web of protolinguistic and other early forms of symbolic social communication in order to survive and reproduce, the demands imposed by this artificial niche would have selectively favored mental capacities that guaranteed successful access to this essential resource. So rather than merely intelligent or wise (sapient) creatures, we are creatures whose social and mental capacities have been quite literally
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than merely intelligent or wise (sapient) creatures, we are creatures whose social and mental capacities have been quite literally shaped by the special demands of communicating with symbols. And this doesnt just mean that we are adapted for language use, but also for all the many ancillary mental biases that support reliable access and use of this social resource. But this claim depends on language-like communication being a long-time feature of hominid evolution. Theories suggesting that human language is a very recent and suddenly evolved phenomenon would not make this prediction. To them language is almost epiphenomenal. This is particularly true if the claim is that language appeared suddenly due to some marvelous accidental mutation that transformed dumb (but large brained) brutes into articulate speakers. This sort of scenario has become commonplace in recent years, though the evidence supporting it is mostly very indirect (e.g. archeological evidence of representational forms and objects for adornment, appearing in the Upper Paleolithic). I think that it is mostly a reflection of a caricatured view of the human/animal distinction and a sort of hero metaphor imposed upon the fossil evidence. The way that modern human brains accommodate language can be used as a clue to how old language is. If language is a comparatively recent feature of human social interaction, that is if it is only, say, a hundred thousand years old or so, then we should expect that it had little effect on human brains. Any structural tweaks of brain architecture that evolved to support it would have had to be either minimal or else major but dependent on comparatively few genetic changes. A recent origin of language would give it little opportunity to impose selection pressure on human brains, so language function would not be supported by any widespread and well integrated neurological changes. This would predict that language abilities are essentially an evolutionary after-thought, inserted unsystematically into an otherwise typical (if enlarged) ape brain. With little time for the genetic fixation of many supportive traits to occur, this adaptation would likely depend on only a few key genetic and neurological changes. As a consequence, language function should be poorly integrated with other cognitive functions, relatively fragile if faced with impoverished learning contexts, susceptible to catastrophic breakdown as a result of certain small but critical genetic defects, and severely affected by congenital mental impairment. None of these seem to be the case. On the other hand, if language has been around for a good deal of our evolutionary past, say a million years or so, that amount of time would have been adequate for the demands of language to have affected brain evolution more broadly. A large network of subtle gene changes and neurological adjustments would be involved, and as a result it should be a remarkably well integrated and robust neurological function. Indeed, there is ample evidence to suggest that language is both well-integrated into almost every aspect of our cognitive and social lives, that it utilizes a significant fraction of the forebrain, and is acquired robustly under even quite difficult social circumstances and neurological impairment. It is far from fragile. The co-evolutionary interaction goes both ways. Languages also have to adapt to brains. Since the language one learns has to be passed from generation to generation, the more learnable its structures, and fitted to human limitations, the more effective its reproduction in each generation. Languages and brains will evolve in tandem, converging towards each other, though not symmetrically. But brain evolution is a ponderously slow and unyielding process in comparison to the more facile evolution of languages. So we should expect that languages are more modified for brains than brains are for language. Nevertheless, if we have been evolving in a symbolic niche for a million years or more, we should expect that human brains will have been tweaked in many different ways to aid life in this virtual world. The world of symbols is an artificial niche. Its ecology is radically different than the biological niche we also find ourselves in (or at least our ancestors found themselves in). In the same way that beaver dam building has created an aquatic niche to which beaver bodies have adapted over their evolutionary history, our cognitive capacities have adapted to our self-constructed niche: a symbolic niche. This is not a new idea. Indeed the anthropologist Clifford Geertz suggested something like this many decades ago. I think that today we may be at a point in our evolutionary theorizing and our understanding of brains to begin to explore exactly what this might mean. The most intense and unusual demands of this niche should be reflected in the ways that human cognition diverges from patterns more typical of other species. Although it has long been popular to think of the human difference in terms of general intelligence, I think this bias may have misled us into ignoring what may be a more important constellation of more subtle differences. These likely included differences in social cognition (e.g. joint attention, empathy, the ability to anticipate anothers intended actions), differences in how we learn (e.g. superior transfer learning, a predisposition to assume that associations are bidirectionalknown as stimulus equivalence, a comparative ease at mimicking) or even just unusual motor capacities (e.g. unprecedented articulatory and vocal control). These are members of a widely distributed and diverse set of adaptations that fractionally and collectively contribute to our language abilities. With respect to the brain, we need to confront another mystery. How could these many diverse brain traits have become so functionally intertwined and interdependent as to provide such a novel means of communication? This is particularly challenging
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functionally intertwined and interdependent as to provide such a novel means of communication? This is particularly challenging to explain because language is in effect an emergent function, not some prior function just requiring fine-tuning. Our various inherited vocalizations, such as laughter, shrieks of fright, and cries of anguish, are comparatively localized in their neurological control (mostly subcortical) as are other modes of communication in animals. In comparison, language depends on a widely dispersed constellation of cortical systems, each of which can be found in other primate brains, but evolved for very different functions. These brain systems have become collectively recruited for language only because their previously evolved functions overlapped significantly with some processing demand necessitated by language, though evolved for quite different functions altogether. Indeed, the neural structures and circuits involved in the production and comprehension of language are homologous to structures found ubiquitously in most monkey and ape brains: old structures performing unprecedented new tricks. A related mystery concerns the extent to which this dominant form of communication depends on information maintained by social transmission. Even for theories postulating an innate universal grammar, the vast quantity and high fidelity of the information constituting even a typical vocabulary stands out as exceedingly anomalous from a biological point of view. How did such a large fraction of our communicative capacity wind up offloaded onto social transmission? And what explains the remarkable reliability of this process? Relaxed selection and complexity Perhaps the most surprising and controversial point to be made follows from the realization of the importance of relaxed selection. The higher-order synergy of systems that contribute to language requires that the cooperative functioning of component brain systems. But it appears to paradoxically require that this synergy among diverse systems must already be in place in order for selection to have honed it for language. The co-evolutionary niche construction scenario sketched above still does not account for the generation of the novel functional synergy between neural systems that language processing requires. The discontinuities between call control systems and speech and language control systems of the brain suggest that a co-evolutionary logic alone is insufficient to explain the shift in substrate. Recent investigation of a parallel shift in both complexity and neural substrate in birdsong may be able to shed some light on this. In a comparative study of a long-domesticated bird, the Bengalese Finch, and its feral cousin, the White-Rump Munia, it was discovered that the domesticated lineage was a far more facile song-learner with a much more complex and flexible song than its wild cousin. This was despite the fact that the Bengalese Finch was bred in captivity for coloration, not singing (Okanoya, 2004). The domestic/feral difference of song complexity and song learning in these close finch breeds parallels what is found in comparisons between species that are song-learners and non-learners. This difference also correlates with a much more extensive neural control of song in birds that learn a complex and variable song. The fact that this behavioral and neural complexity can arise spontaneously without specific breeding for singing is a surprising finding since it is generally assumed that song complexity evolves under the influence of intense sexual selection. This was, however, blocked by domestication. One intriguing interpretation is that the relaxation of natural and sexual selection on singing paradoxically was responsible for its elaboration in this example. In brief, with song becoming irrelevant to species identification, territorial defense, mate attraction, predator avoidance, and so on, degrading mutations and existing deleterious alleles affecting the specification of the stereotypic song would not have been weeded out. The result appears to have been the reduction of innate biases controlling song production. The domestic song could thus be described as both less constrained and more variable because it is subject to more kinds of perturbations. But with the specification of song structure no longer strictly controlled by the primary forebrain motor center (called nucleus RA), other linked brain systems can begin to play a biasing role. With innate motor biases weakened, auditory experience, social context, learning biases, and attentional factors could all begin to influence singing. The result is that the domestic song became more variable, more complicated, and more influenced by social experience. The usual consequence of relaxed selection is genetic driftincreasing the genetic and phenotypic variety of a population by allowing random reassortment of allelesbut neurologically, drift in the genetic control of neural functions should cause constraints to become less specific, generating increased behavioral flexibility and greater conditional sensitivity to other neurological and contextual factors. This is relevant to the human case, because a number of features of the human language adaptation also appear to involve a relaxation of innate constraints allowing multiple other influences besides fixed links to emotion and immediate context to affect vocalization. Probably the clearest evidence for this is infant babbling. This unprecedented tendency to freely play with vocal sound production occurs with minimal innate constraint on what sound can follow what (except for physical constraints on vocal sound generation). Babbling occurs also in contexts of comparatively low arousal state, whereas laughter, crying, or shrieking are each produced in comparatively specific high arousal states and with specific contextual associations. This reduction of innate arousal and contextual constraint on sound production, opens the door for numerous other influences to begin to play a role. Like
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arousal and contextual constraint on sound production, opens the door for numerous other influences to begin to play a role. Like the domesticated bird, this allows many more brain systems to influence vocal behavior, including socially acquired auditory experience. In fact, this freedom from constraint is an essential precondition for being able to correlate learned vocal behaviors with the wide diversity of objects, events, properties, and relationships language is capable of referring to. It is also a plausible answer to the combinatorial synergy problem (above) because it demonstrates an evolutionary mechanism that would spontaneously result in the emergence of multi-system coordination of neural control over vocal behavior. But although an evolutionary de-differentiation process may be a part of the story for human language adaptation, it is clearly not the whole story. This increased flexibility and conditionality likely exposed many previously irrelevant interrelationships between brain systems to selection for the new functional associations that have emerged. Most of these adaptations remain to be identified. However, if such a dedifferentiation effect has been involved in our evolution, then scenarios hypothesizing selection for increased innateness or extrapolation from innate referential calls to words become less plausible. Some concluding speculations In closing, I would like to reflect on some of the more esoteric features of humanness that may be illuminated by the paired processes of symbolic niche construction effects and relaxed selection. For example, I think it makes sense to think of ourselves as symbolic savants, unable to suppress the many predispositions evolved to aid in symbol acquisition, use, and transmission. In order to be so accomplished at this strange cognitive task, we almost certainly have evolved a predisposition to see things as symbols, whether they are or not. This is probably manifest in the make-believe of young children, the way we find meaning in coincidental events, see faces in clouds, are fascinated by art, charmed by music, and run our lives with respect to dictates presumed to originate from an invisible spirit world. Like the flight play of birds, the manipulation of objects by monkeys, the attraction of cats to small feathered toys, our special adaptation is the lens through which we see the world. With it comes an irrepressible predisposition to seek for a cryptic meaning hiding beneath the surface of appearances. Almost certainly many of our most distinctive social capacities and biasese.g. tendencies to conformity and interest in copying the speech we hear as infantsare also reflections of this adaptation to an ecosystem of symbolic relationships. And of course there is literature and theater. How effortlessly we project ourselves into the experiences of someone else, feeling the joys and sorrows almost as intensely as our own. Relaxation of selection, on the other hand, may have contributed to another suite of distinctively human traits. Widely distributed dedifferentiation at the genetic and epigenetic level would have increased flexibility of a variety of once phylogenetically constrained cognitive and motivational systems. Perhaps the most striking feature of humans is their flexibility and cultural variety. Consider the incredible diversity of marital and kinship organizations. Most species have fairly predictable patterns of sexual association, kin association, and offspring care, and although they are somewhat flexible, this variety is mediated almost entirely by individual motivational systems. In contrast, despite the evolutionary importance of reproduction, human mating and reproduction are largely controlled by symbolically mediated social negotiations. This offloading of one of the most fundamental biological functions onto social-symbolic mechanisms is perhaps the signature feature of being a symbolic species. Thus, because of symbols and with the aid of symbols, Homo sapiens has been self-domesticated and adapted to a niche unlike any other that ever has existed. We have been made in the image of the word. References Darwin C (1859) On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (John Murray, London), 1st Ed. Darwin C (1860) Letter 2743 Darwin, C. R. to Gray, Asa, 3 Apr 1860. Source: http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/entry-2743. Darwin C (1871) The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (John Murray, London). Deacon TW (1997) The Symbolic Species: the Coevolution of Language and the Brain (W. W. Norton & Co., New York). Deacon TW (2009) Relaxed selection and the role of epigenesis in the evolution of language. Oxford Handbook of Developmental Behavioral Neuroscience eds Blumberg MS, Freeman JH, Robinson SR (Oxford University Press; New York) pp 730-752. Lyell C (1863) Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man (John Murray, London). Okanoya K (2004). The Bengalese Finch: A window on the behavioral neurobiology of birdsong syntax. Annals NY Acad Sci 1016:724735.
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1016:724735. Wallace AR (1869) Quarterly Review , April. Read more
Animalia: the Natural World, Art, and Theory

by: Suzanne Preston Blier Egb eja leja ?w t, egb eye leye ?w l Fish swim in a school of their own kind; Birds fly in a flock of their own kind. Yoruba Proverb We mention nature and forget ourselves in it. Friedrich Nietzsche
Phillip Barron
Feb 1, 5:57 AM
So engrained is the trope of the animal in the West that animal truisms are seared into our shared cultural memory: the Boy Who Cried Wolf, the Wolf in Sheeps Clothing, The Grannie-Masking Wolf of Red Riding Hood fame, the proverbial Fox in the Hen House, Chicken Little, Foxy Lady, Sly like a Fox, Marys Little Lamb, Lassie, Bambi, the Cheshire cat to say nothing of Puss in Boots, the Dog That Wont Hunt, Eating Crow, the Golden Egg Laying Goose, the Baby Bringing Stork, the Early Worm Catching Bird, Pop Goes the Weasel, Three Blind Mice, the Three Little Pigs, and the Little Piggy who cried Wee, Wee Wee all the way home. Animals have often served as potent metaphors, argues philosopher Max Black (1962:40-2; Blier 1987:206), because they force new forms of interaction and engagement delimited vis--vis long standing assumptions. These assumptions challenge credibility (are foxes any more sly than wolves, dogs, or cats?). Related assumptions also reify enduring perceptions of animalhuman complements that individually and together heighten the attendant potency of animal symbolism. Cary Wolfes Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and the Posthumanist Theory (2003) offers a provocative look into the role of animals in human thought and action. Addressing subjects such as animal sacrifice and debates about animal-human difference (the human potential evinced by the use of hands and fingers, for example),Wolfe also investigates larger symbolic systems and practices involving animals. Wolfes 2003 anthology (Zoontologies:the Question of the Animal) similarly takes up the boundaries between the animal and human worlds, addressing an array of ethical and philosophical questions posed therein. These are framed around core theoretical engagements (Heidegger, Freud, Lacan, Derrida, Deleuze, and Lyotard among others) as well as questions of interest to the arts. The latter range from Western visual artists (William Wegman and Joseph Beuys) to popular culture (Jurassic Park and Monty Roberts, the horse whisperer). One could easily add to this interest not only recent humanities explorations addressing evolution such as the Gottschall and Wilson anthology, The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative (Rethinking Theory , 2005) but also recent explorations in the field of Environmental Anthropology (Dove and Carpenter, eds., 2007). The co-joining of popular appeal and attendant religious uproar as related to animal portrayals in recent animated films is also striking. Among the recent examples are Avatar (2009) and Happy Feet (2006) (the latter a striking complement to attempts to turn a group of gay penguins in a Berlin zoo straight). Interesting too arenews stories highlighting of the split of the gay male penguin pair in New York Central Parks zoo as well as accounts of Bostons female swan couple, Romeo and Juliet, whose very names reveal the central role anthropomorphism assumes in our dealings with the animals around us. Theory as Trap When Alfred Gell writes of art as a trap (Vogels Net: Traps as Artworks and Artworks as Traps-1996), he addresses issues of human-animal engagement (the primacy of prey, the thrill of capture) as well as the enduring dialectic between the ordinary (the animal trap) and the richly articulated (works of art), here heightened by the provocative idiom of animal-human encounter within the context of visual engagement. Similar issues of human and animal cross currency come into play in various disciplinary and theoretical perspectives. One key early scholar whose work focused on animals in part is Mary Douglas (1957, 1970, 2002) whose writings pointed to core questions of taxonomy (animals seen to transcend standard classificatory boundaries) along with issues of pollution and taboo (forbidden animals). In 1982 as a young faculty member at Northwestern University, I co-taught a course with Douglas entitled Art and Culture. One of the studies she addressed in class in considerable detail was R. Blumers 1967 essay Why is the Cassowary not a Bird, a work she republished in her 1973 anthology Rules and Meanings: the Anthropology of Everyday knowledge. As Blumer argues in this article (1973:167), among the Karam (Schrader Mountains, New Guinea), the reasons why
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knowledge. As Blumer argues in this article (1973:167), among the Karam (Schrader Mountains, New Guinea), the reasons why these large emu-like birds are not classed as birds has no simple, single answer to it apart from the very general statement, The cassowary is not a bird because it enjoys a unique relationship in Karam thought to man.[i] Oceanic art scholar Douglas Newton would take up complementary portrayals of these unique birds in art shortly thereafter: Why is the Cassowary a Canoe Prow? (1973). Allen F. Roberts similarly has explored an array of issues concerning animal identity and representation in African art (1995), addressing among other questions why so few animal species became the subjects of African visual and performative engagement, and offering an answer that is as poignant as it is simple: namely, some animals are good to think with.[ii] Whether as a frame for larger philosophical engagement or as political tropes framed around African creation myths, royal divination icons, religion, and healing arts (see also Blier 1990-1, 1995, 2004), animals serve as a striking idiom through which human values and broader theoretical engagement are grounded. Some animals, such as elephants (Ross 1995), are particularly provocative subjects of both thought and art. Theories, like animals (and of course humans), have lives. Theories can be said to die not only when scholars prove them wrong but also offer viable alternatives. Hence the Lvi-Straussian Structuralism of Douglas and others of her generation was eventually superceded by Post-Modernism (Post-Structuralism), Neo-Evolutionism, or Environmental perspectives, among these the explorations of Cary Wolfe, or Gottschall and Wilson (2005 ), or Dove and Carpenter (2007). British artist and African art connoisseur Leon Underwood published a short illustrated poetry book entitled Animalia, or Fibs About Beasts, Engraved on Wood and Ensnared in Verse (1926). I bring the work into play here, not only because its title is reflected in my own, but also because in many ways the issues he raises are germane. Theories, like objects (and art works, artifacts, or persons) ensnare us with provocative fibs (partial views, unique vantages, half truths). In some ways, the primacy of theory lies not only in issues of universality (science) but also its art value (perspectives that press one to think about things in a new way). Theories, like animals, matter, in my view, not necessarily only because they are right or wrong but also because of the challenge they pose to us to think about (and through) things in a new way. The death blow to a given theoretical frame often can be sensed when everyone finally gets it. At the risk of pushback, I wonder how much it matters if a given theory is right or wrong as long as it is something good to think with, a frame (trap, ensnarement, vantage, partial view) that elicits new insight, even if it may have been proved outdated or false. Localities: Place/Time Trap Many portrayals of animals in African art (masks among other forms) are notable in part for their striking elements of anthromorphism, among these earrings (on Bamana Chiwara masks), royal regalia (Ife terracotta sculptures), performative elements (Dogon monkey maskers as pick pockets), and roles in human-deity communication (divination hornbills, spiders, crocodiles, and pale foxes, to name but a few). This is true not least in Ife, the ancient capital of the Yoruba in southwestern Nigeria. In this important center, one comes across numerous animal species on sale in the local animal market near the Ogun Mogun temple complex in front of the palace. One can find here not only domestic animals for sale but also an array of wild animals some of which are sold alive (chameleons, snails and certain birds), others sold as parts the skin of leopards, crocodile teeth, the meat and/or horns of varied antelope species among these. I visitedthis market on numerous occasions and observedthe sale of these animals in this setting near the main temple of Ifes hunting god, Ogun. Knowing the importance of diverse plant and zoological species in Ifa divination and other contexts, as well as the enduring significance of related beliefs in this center, makes clear the iconic complexity of animal portrayals in ancient Ife art. Local knowledge (place, time, social frame) is critical to our understanding of these works (Geertz 1985). The corpus of ancient Ife animal sculpture offers a rich template from which to examine similar concerns. Here too, there are also notable differences in how animals (even within the same species) are portrayed. Some are identified with regalia fit for kings. Others are secured with cord leads suggesting imminent sacrifice, offerings which in some respects complement human ritual deaths. In the end what is especially remarkable in these animal personifications is their primacy in the early art corpus and the remarkable detailing with which they are rendered, attributes which also conform with some Ife canons on human portrayal as well. In some ways, portrayals of animals are among of the most complex and interesting artistic exemplars because of expectations and the fact that models are not always readily available. Several days before the end of my first research trip to Ife, capital of the Yoruba in southwestern Nigeria, I learned that not far from the city there lived a mudfish, some five feet in length and residing in a spring and adjacent brook which was part of a local healing shrine. Years earlier an Ife acquaintance had been treated successfully here for a painful ear infection and fever. I decided to visit this amazing mudfish that purportedly would come out of the water and onto land for food treats. Like others of the lungfish species, the mudfish possesses ancillary lungs that enable it to survive out of water for weeks and months at a time. After accessing this shrine on foot via a long winding dirt track, I interviewed the priest healer in charge and learned something of the temples history. A devotee of Mami Wata (a water goddess linked to European and west Asian trade, who brings material
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the temples history. A devotee of Mami Wata (a water goddess linked to European and west Asian trade, who brings material and other benefits to believers) from the Urhobo in the Niger Delta area to the south, the priest had moved to the Ife area in his youth. From him I purchased a small bag of the mudfishs favorite cookies and waited expectantly at the edge of the spring as he tossed the crumpled cookies on the water surface while offering prayers intended for the ears of this remarkable being. Soon the springs surface began to shimmer with tiny bubbles and myriad mudfish and other aquatic denizens gulped down the proffered sweets. Alas, the giant mudfish, already satiated from a healing ceremony before my arrival, chose not to come to land. What little I did discern of this fish nonetheless reinforced the uniqueness of the species and why such animals figure so prominently in early Ife art.
Mudfish drawing by Blier A particularly striking thirteenth to fourteenth century C.E. terra cotta mudfish depiction historically was housed in the citys Omitoto shrine in Ilorin quarter under the supervision of Ifes powerful Chief Obaloran, head of the Ilode ward where the Obatala temple is located. The terra cotta mudfish long associated with his family is known locally as Orisa Ito. During the annual Odun Ose festival dedicated to Omitoto, held every year in October at the beginning of the dry season and related harvest-New Years activities, the sculpture (which most likely dates to the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century) was carried during the related rituals by a ritual specialist dressed in plantain leaves. While the exact origins of this procession are not clear, the term odun refers to year, and ose identifies the traditional five day Yoruba market week, underscoring the likely importance of this event (and the mudfish referent) with the cycle of time, and specifically the yearly transition from dry season to rainy season. The mudfish, with its unusual ability to estivate (that is, to survive for months in a hibernation-like state in dried spring or river beds using its ancillary lungs), seemingly comes back to life after rains again fill its resident pool or river bed with water. As such this animal is a particularly apt referent to the cycle of seasonal transition. Omitoto, who is also identified (Fasogun n.d.1) as having carried igba-iwa to Ile-Ife, was a central figure in the earths beginnings at Ife.[iii] This same igba-iwa vessel is said to have held the necessary Ife offerings conveyed to the heavens each year in exchange for well-being and plenty (Fabunmi (1985:194). The identity of the mudfish at once with the earths creation, and with rituals which preserved life more generally, also is in keeping with the mudfishs unique identity with seasonal transition not only the beginning of the dry season, but also the arrival of the rains. Indeed this unusual fish is said by some to vomit water at this time into the dried river beds and springs, thus assuring their renewal to meet the needs of local inhabitants. Mudfish are among a group of unusual animal species that figure centrally in the corpus of ancient arts from Ife and other Yoruba centers. A variant of these mudfish forms is conveyed through the image of a human form with outward extending fish or snakeform legs or feet. This is a form that in Benin royal art has come to be identified with both the ruler Oba Ohen (who was paralyzed) and with Olokun, god of the sea. The striking bi-morphism of these fish as denizens of both water and land provides them with unique symbolic potency, in relationship to (among other things) ideas of autochthony.
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Pennant wing nightjar drawing by Blier Two unusual birds share similar visual and symbolic potency in ancient Yoruba art. The first is the Pennant Wing Nightjar, a small owl-like bird species that migrates to this area during the rainy season, where it mates, during which time senior males grow long wing streamers double the normal size, that ripple in the air in flight, in a manner suggestive of snakes and or lightning. These birds figure in several ancient Yoruba area art works (a Janus terracotta man-bird figure from Ife and several bronzes from the Niger River area to the east that seem to be linked to this center). In both cases they appear to be identified with the ancient Ife thunder god, Oramfe. There is a somewhat complementary bird, the African Paradise Flycatcher (okin in Yoruba). Both birds are notable for their bi-morphism and for their rarity and distinctiveness, suggesting a possible conceptual link between them. During pairing season, senior males of the African Paradise Flycatcher species grow long tail streamers double the normal seventeeninch length of their tail feathers. These streamers, which ripple as the birds fly, are incorporated into royal Ife and Yoruba crowns. Both avian species suggest the importance of both anomaly and change in the animal world as a reference to ritual and political primacy. These three animal species all have unique local primacy (and symbolic power), yet all three appear to have early foreign roots, most likely in ancient Greek, Coptic, and Early Medieval European idioms of fish legged Sirens (the early source for Mami Wata here it appears[iv]) and snake winged Harpies (see below) as also do early Gorgon motifs in this area human heads with snakes emerging from the nostrils or ears). These motifspoint to notable visual and iconic similarities with, among others, twelfth to early fourteenth works from pilgrimage sites in Great Britain and France. Most likely complementary formsenteredinto the area of central Nigeria around the same time as part of richly colored Coptic textile forms from Egypt from this era.Arriving here perhaps around the same time were early forms of Nubian jewelry (see below), works that also appear to have left its imprint on one of the thirteenth to fourteenth century fragments from Ife, a ram head pectoral from the site of Oke Eso.
drawing by Blier, click to enlarge
Since the ram, like the mudfish and bi-morphic birds, is so closely integrated into the fabric of Yoruba belief, does it really matter where these motifs originally came from, when they arrived, or how? Or to the contrary, since all symbolic forms ultimately are delimited locally (their meanings, contexts, qualities of empowerment specific to place and time) one wonders whether these local perspectives necessarily carry more symbolic or theoretical weight than others that are in play.
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local perspectives necessarily carry more symbolic or theoretical weight than others that are in play. Bibliography Blier, Suzanne Preston 1987 Anatomy of Architecture: Ontology and Metaphor in Batammaliba Architectural Expression. Chicago: Chicago University Press. 1990 King Glele of Danhom: Divination Portraits of a Lion King and Man of Iron (Part I), African Arts 23.4: 42-53, 9394. 1991 King Glele of Danhom: Dynasty and Destiny (Part II), African Art 24.1: 44-55, 101-103. 1995 African Vodun: Art, Psychology, and Power. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2004 African Creation Myths as Political Strategy in African Arts vol 37, no. 1, pp. 3945, 94. Forthcoming. Past Presence: Ife Art in Yoruba History. Blumer, R. 1967 Why is the Cassowary Not a Bird? A Problem of Zoological Taxonomy Among the Karam of the New Guinea Highlands in Man, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Mar., 1967), pp. 5-25. Republished in Why the Cassowary is not a Bird in Mary Douglas Rules and Meanings: the Anthropology of Everyday knowledge (1973: pp 167 ff) Douglas, Mary 1957 Animals in Lele Religious Symbolism, Africa, XXVII, 1: 46-58. 1966 Purity and Danger, Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge. 1970 Natural Symbols, Explorations in Cosmology. London: Barrie and Rockliff. 1975 Implicit Meanings, Essays in Anthropology. London: Routledge. Douglas, Mary, ed. 1973 Rules and Meanings: The Anthropology of Everyday Knowledge. London: Penguin. Drewal, Henry John et al. 2008 Mami Wata: Arts for Water Spirits in Africa and Its Diasporas. Los Angeles: Fowler Museum of UCLA and University of Washington Press. Durkheim, Emile and Marcel Mauss 1902 De quelques formes primitives de classification (trans. and repub., University of Chicago Press, 1967) Fabunmi, M. A. 1985 An anthology of historical notes on Ife cityIfe: The Genesis of Yoruba Race. Ikeja, Nigeria: John West Publications, Ltd. Fasogun, M. O. n.d.. A Brief Constitutional History of the Ancient City of Ile Ife Ooye Lagbo (the City of the Survivors) Seminar Paper presented at the Conference on Yoruba Civilization, University of Ife, Ile-Ife. July 1976. Geertz, Clifford 1985 Local Knowledge: Further Essays In Interpretive Anthropology. New York: Basic Books. Gell, Alfred 1996 Vogels Net: Traps as Artworks and Artworks as Traps Journal of Material Culture, Vol. 1, No. 1, 15-38. 1998 Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Clarendon: Oxford Gillison, Gillian
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1997 To see or not to see: Looking as an object of exchange in the New Guinea Highlands Rethinking Visual Anthropology, ed. Marcus Banks and Howard Morphy. London: Yale University Press (170-185). Gottschall, Jonathan and David Sloan Wilson, eds. 2005 The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative (Rethinking Theory). Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Ingold, Tim ed. 1988 What is an Animal? London: Routledge. Lakoff, George 1987 Women. Fire and Dangerous things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Newton, Douglas 1973 Why Is the Cassowary a Canoe Prow? Art Journal, Vol. 33, No. 1 (Autumn): 41-45. Roberts, Allen F. 1995 Animals in African Art : From the Familiar to The Marvelous. New York: Prestel. Ross, Doran ed. 1995 Elephant: The Animal and Its Ivory in African Culture. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Wolfe, Cary 2003 Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and the Posthumanist Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wolfe, Cary ed. 2003 Zoontologies:the Question of the Animal. Minnesota: University of Minnesota. Dove, Michael and Carol Carpenter, eds. 2007 Environmental Anthropology: A Historical Reader (Blackwell Anthologies in Social and Cultural Anthropology). London: Blackwell. Underwood, Leon 1926 Animalia, or Fibs About Beasts, Engraved on Wood and Ensnared in Verse. New York: Payson and Clarke. [i] See also Gillison 1997:174-5. Related issues extend back to Durkheim and Mauss (Primitive Classification 1902) and forward to the works of George Lakoff (1987) and Timothy Ingold (1988) that touch on cognitive issues and related metaphors. I thank Parker Shipton for reminding me of these sources and for other insights into this piece. [ii] This idea extending back to Claude Lvi-Strauss among others. [iii] Perhaps in part for this reason, Fabunmi suggests (1969:.5) that Omitoto-Ose held a very important office ingovernment [performing her role] with great credit. He adds: Some Ife historians say that she had no issue but she adopted Obaloran as a son and brought him from his home in Iloran to her own home at Ilode where the present Chief Obaloran still lives. Fasogun however identifies (n.d.1) Omitoto as one of the original thirteen chief-priests of Ife (Chapter-Op), suggesting that this chieftaincy only later was taken on by Obaloran. [iv] A later era diffusion of the siren motif in southern Nigeria has been advanced by Henry J. Drewal, whose Education Ph.D. (Teachers College, Columbia) rather than more standard academic degree program (Art History or Anthropology for example) seems to a more comparative rather than a more historical or theoretical vantage.
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seems to a more comparative rather than a more historical or theoretical vantage. Read more
Science and the Humanities

by Michael Allen Gillespie
Michael Gillespie
Jan 17, 10:27 PM
At odd moments, often when Im distracted, it occurs to me that a song or a piece of music has been repeatedly running through my head. Its an experience nearly everyone has. Sometimes its invigorating to realize that you have been striding through the day to the chords of Beethoven, but its often quite irritating because you realize youve been moping about for hours to some saccharine drivel that you just cant seem to get out of your head. But how did it get there? How did it escape from the neural cage where it is stored and begin to run loose through consciousness? This experience is characteristic of lots of our mental activities. If we glance at ourselves out of the corner of our minds eye, we often catch sight of many things that are going on just at the edge of awareness: a distant voice repeating over and over to remember to pick up the kids, a snippet of a conversation that we had with someone earlier in the day, a worried thought about a distant loved one, a moment of lingering anger that suddenly burns bright for no good reason, and on and on. Our conscious and near conscious minds are crowded and often very confusing places, and it sometimes seems as if we are holding a small candle trying to make out what is going on in the vast darkness that surrounds us. These experiences point toward the difficulties we have understanding the world in which we find ourselves. While we seem to live on what Lucretius called the coasts of light, in a world that is full of things, qualities and relationships, at least since the seventeenth century, we have come to doubt that this sensorium is reality, and instead have come to conceive of it as a merely mental construction that depends in part on sensation but also on memory, imagination, and language to give us a comprehensive view of the world. Moreover, we have strong evidence that there is a great deal more going on in those dark stretches beyond our immediate consciousness, in part because some of it occasionally wanders into our light: a word we were searching for yesterday is suddenly remembered; the source of some psychic agony that has troubled us since childhood now is surprisingly clear. It is apparent to us in moments like these that something has been going on for a long time that we were unaware of. And then, of course, the very fact that our heart continues to beat, our lungs to draw air, and our other bodily processes to function more or less successfully is an indication of activities of the brain that never come into the light. Modern biological science is convinced that all of this is not the activity of a trans-substantial soul but the result of electrochemical processes playing out across the structure of our brains. To paraphrase Hobbes objection to Descartes assertion that humans are thinking things, No body, no thinking. Modern science or at least modern scientism (to use the term Alex Rosenberg urges on us in his essay, The Disenchanted Naturalists Guide to Reality) goes a bit further: consciousness is not merely dependent on the motions of body, but these motions are completely independent of consciousness, which invariably misleads us when we try to understand ourselves. We may believe that we make choices or have goals and purposes, but everything we do is really only the result of dominos falling one after another according to an evolutionary logic that is independent of individual will or initiative. From this perspective we are left like Dorothy, the Cowardly Lion, Tin Man, and Scarecrow watching Toto pull aside the curtain beside the great and powerful Oz, but with the minor difference that what we discover is not a snake oil salesman from Kansas but, as Archibald MacLeish put it, Nothing, nothing, nothingnothing at all. This view of things has rather dire consequences for humanists (as well as for theists) and all of the works they have produced over the last several thousand years in art, religion, philosophy, history, etc. Some of their activities from this scientistic perspective are relatively innocuous forms of pleasure, akin to masturbation, fun but slightly disreputable, and not truly productive or reproductive. Many of the products of human imagination, purpose, or intention, however, are characterized as misleading and, in the case of religion, as downright dangerous, akin to the instinctual call of lemmings to their final swimathon. Amid these illusions of consciousness, only one is excepted from this general critique, and that is science. Science alone is true. Why among all of our mental activities is science accorded this special status? Science is after all a construction within consciousness and like most other constructions is crucially dependent upon shared consciousness, i.e., language in all of its forms including mathematics (which itself exists only in imaginary time and space). Why does science have any different status than literature, to take just one example? Obviously, it seeks empirical verification and has a method that allows it to measure the likelihood that its constructions reflect reality, but isnt that true for literature as well? Dont we sometimes remark when reflecting on a book or a film, Thats absurd, no one would act in that way. Moreover, can any scientist give an even plausible (let alone demonstrable) account of what he or she does that does not include intentions or goals that motivate and guide his or her behavior? If science denies the reality of such intentionality, then it is difficult to see how science itself is anything other than a (highly unlikely) random walk through language and how civilization is anything more than the result of millions of monkeys pounding away on millions of typewriters (and lots of other things) producing all the works of art, literature, science, etc. not merely in the British Museum but
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typewriters (and lots of other things) producing all the works of art, literature, science, etc. not merely in the British Museum but everywhere else as well. I dont mean to suggest that science is false or to diminish its importance for our lives. Indeed, as a collective enterprise it is one of, if not the greatest of, all human achievements. What I want to suggest is that science is only possible within consciousness and that any scientific attempt to explain the universe must accept the reality of the conscious activity that makes science itself possible. This does not mean, of course, that science must accept all forms of conscious experience as true, but it does mean that science cannot reject them all out of hand as illusory or misleading. In trying to make sense of the human, we need to understand the ways in which we are part of the natural world but also the ways in which we are different from other natural beings. Modern biological science since the middle of the nineteenth century has called into question all notions of human superiority. In earlier times humans were imagined to stand somewhere between beasts and gods. With Darwin the distinction between humans and the beasts was effaced. Molecular biology and biochemistry erased the basic distinction between living and not-living things, leaving us like all other beings merely collections of fermions and bosons. While this may well be true, all things that make any difference are the result of different organizations of these particles. Life may be the continued development of self-replicating molecules within an environment, but the differences between these self-replicating structures are of considerable importance. So what then distinguishes the human? Humans are distinct because we are not merely a part of an environment but exist in a world that is much greater than us and yet that is as it is only in and though our understanding of it. My two cats eat, sleep, and play, and are blithely unaware of global warming, the possibility of a catastrophic earth-asteroid collision, and the fact that millions of people (though still very few fellow felines) can hardly wait to know who will be the next American Idol. We humans are concerned (to differing degrees) with all of these things. We have a concept of ourselves existing in a world that is not just a collection of things but a whole (of some sort). It is only because of this that we have and are able to employ science as one of our possible ways of being. The world opens up to us in consciousness not just as the here and now that we sense but as a past that we remember and a future that we anticipate. Because we live in anticipation of a future, we formulate purposes. This process is aided immensely by language that allows us to represent and develop our projects in very complicated ways and to coordinate our efforts not just with proximate individuals but on a global scale. Science is one form of intentional activity within this world that aims at achieving purposes that we have constructed. It seeks to understand how things work in order to more effectively produce what we want and to protect us from what we fear.
"A Pair of Shoes." 1885 oil painting by Vincent Van Gogh. Science, however, is not the only form of conscious activity through which we engage with the world. Art, literature, and history, to take just three examples, serve a similar function in giving us an image of the ways in which we exist in the world. The picture science gives us of the world may be extraordinarily powerful and useful to human life, but so is the Henry Fieldings portrayal of Tom Jones development as a human being or Van Goghs depiction of a pair of boots. And they are all products of the imagination and are represented in consciousness, although in quite different ways. Indeed, art and the imagination provide the ground on which science becomes possible, for without the first (poetic/imaginative) act of naming a thing or the relationship between things whether in images, words, or mathematical symbols, no science would be possible.
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between things whether in images, words, or mathematical symbols, no science would be possible. Science is also only useful to us because we have a conception of ends and purposes that is not derived from science. Bacon was undoubtedly correct in his claim that knowledge is power. While science tells us how things work and thus opens up the possibilities for manipulating our world in countless ways, it does not tell us what to do with this power. The question of purposes is not one that most other beings face. They respond to their circumstances instinctually and achieve lasting change (as a species) only through random variation or chance migration. We change the world intentionally (and also obviously unintentionally). Humans like beavers build dams but if the river dries up we build a different kind of power plant while the beavers can only migrate or die out. We have a notion of the good or goods (whether naturally given, imposed by the powerful, sociallyconstructed, the result of the belief in divine revelation, or in consequence of a utilitarian aggregation of preferences, etc.) and without such a notion we would have no idea at all of what to do with the power that science gives us. Art, religion, philosophy, history, literature and the humanities in general are crucial to the determination of the nature of the good(s). This is sometimes a rhetorical process in which individuals attempt to convince others that their vision of the good(s) should be the good(s) for all. At other times individual artists or writers present a vision of the good in order to open up the possibility of conversation and a deliberative process to arrive at an understanding of our goals. The motivation behind these practices is not always conscious, but it is only when they are put in a conscious and communicable form that they become relevant to us. This notion that we are distinctive because of consciousness does not mean that we are somehow above or free from the evolutionary process. Indeed, our form of consciousness and our concern with the good(s) may be the result of random variation, but it undoubtedly is very useful and helps explain our ability to dominate so many environmental niches. This debate about the good(s), however, is vitally important to what we are and what we will be. Each artist, writer, sculptor, historian, and scientist takes part in this debate in an attempt to shed some light into the darkness beyond the limits of our individual and shared consciousness. That we disagree about what is out there is not surprising. That our anxieties populate the unseen stretches of darkness with bogey men, ghouls, demons, (increasingly sexy) vampires and other such creatures is not surprising. We should not for that reason conclude that all of the products of the imagination are misleading or illusive. Indeed, it is only by means of the representations of the imagination that we have come to have any idea of what it means to be human and to engage in such practices as science. Read more
Narrative and Personal Good

by: Connie S. Rosati University of Arizona [1]
Phillip Barron
Jan 4, 7:00 AM
It is now something of a commonplace that we think about our lives in story form. According to a recent article in the New York Times, psychological research into the personal narratives we tell supports the idea that we are natural storytellers. [2] The human brain, the article reports, has a natural affinity for narrative construction, and this affinity apparently informs our efforts at self-understanding and influences our efforts at self-governance; we naturally construct personal narratives, which both frame how we see ourselves and guide how we conduct ourselves. From an explanatory standpoint, psychologists have sought to understand how the fact of our being storytellersand storytellers with particular authorial bentsmight help to explain how different individuals experience their lives. Normatively, and from the standpoint of clinical practice, they have been concerned to exploit what they learn in order to help people become the sorts of storytellers who tend sincerely to report leading more satisfying lives. Research of the sort that the Times article briefly summarizes would seem to lend at least some support to the work of philosophers who have appealed to the notion of narrative in addressing a host of philosophical questions. [3] My interest lies with appeals to narrative that seek to address philosophical questions about welfare or, as I prefer to call it, personal good. [4] According to what I will call the narrativity thesis, the welfare value of a life depends, at least in part, on its narrative unity or narrative structureon the holding of narrative relations among events in that life. I shall explain and raise doubts herein about that thesis. Nevertheless, I am sympathetic to the thought that some connection exists between personal narratives and personal good, and so I shall also offer some preliminary thoughts about how our storytelling might make an impact on our good. As I shall understand it, the narrativity thesis combines three claims. According to the first claim, relationalism, the welfare value of a persons life depends not solely on its components or parts at various times (on momentary welfare), but also on its shape on the value-affecting relations among its parts over time. According to the second claim, narrativity, the relevant value-affecting relations are narrative relations. Finally, according to the third claim, irreducibility, the holding of narrative relations among parts
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relations are narrative relations. Finally, according to the third claim, irreducibility, the holding of narrative relations among parts of a life affects the welfare value of a life in a way that is not reducible to the contribution any other factor makes to the value of a persons life. The first claim rests on the recognition that for creatures like uscreatures that are persons or autonomous agents individual welfare is not simply a matter of how well ones life is going at particular moments. An individual might be engaged, at many moments, in activities she enjoys, for example, while failing ever to realize her principal aims. Persons have capacities for reason, memory, and imagination, for goal-setting, evaluation, and higher-order reflection. The ordinary exercise of these sundry capacities has the result that persons can attend to their lives not only from moment to moment; they can also take up a view of their lives as a whole, reflecting on themselves and their existence over time. These facts about persons surely affect what it takes for a life to be good for a person. [5] The second claim invokes the idea of a specifically narrative relation. As best I can understand it, a narrative relation is a distinctively meaning affecting relation. Two events, E1 and E2, stand in a narrative relation to one another if the occurrence of E2 can plausibly be seen as affecting the meaning or significance of E1, either alone or together with other events. To affect the meaning or significance of another event is to constrain the evaluations one can truthfully make about the event, as well as the range of appropriate emotional responses. This seems to be the idea that is at work, for example, when David Velleman argues that the reason well-being isnt additive and that the welfare value of a life depends on the narrative relations among events in that life is that later events alter the meaning of earlier events, thereby altering their contribution to the value of ones life. [6] For example, subsequent events might alter the meaning of ones efforts, making them a waste of energy or an expenditure that paid off. [7] The third claim simply makes clear what I assume to be true, namely, that those who have explored the relationship between narrative and personal good take themselves to be saying something distinctive about the nature of personal good. That is to say, talk about narrative structure and narrative relations isnt merely a fancy or metaphorical way of talking about aspects of personal good equally well-expressedperhaps better expressedin other terms. A plausible case can be made for the first claim. David Velleman has provided particularly compelling examples in support of the idea that the welfare value of a life depends in part on its shape, or as he puts it, on the order of events. Here is just one: Consider two different lives you might live. One life begins in the depths but makes an upward trend: a childhood of deprivation, a troubled youth, struggles and setbacks in early adulthood, followed finally by success and satisfaction in middle age and a peaceful retirement. Another life begins at the heights but slides downhill: a blissful childhood and youth, precocious triumphs and rewards in early adulthood, followed by a midlife strewn with disasters that lead to misery in old age. Surely, we can imagine two such lives as containing equal sums of momentary well-being. Your retirement is as blessed in one life as your childhood is in the other; your nonage is as blighted in one life as your dotage is in the other. [8] I have tried to offer elucidation of the second claim and will not explore it further here. In my view, the thesis is in need of greatest elucidation and support with respect to the third claim. How does narrative structure make a distinctive contribution to the welfare value of a life? How is it that by affecting the meaning of events in a life narrative relations affect its welfare value? Now some have suggested that the order of events in a life affects its welfare value by affecting its meaningfulness. For example, Jeff McMahan writes that the order of events makes a life better by making it more meaningful. [9] Relatedly, Johann Brnnmark observes that two kinds of narrative meaning are relevant to how events affect the quality of our lives, what he calls contrastive meaning, which arises from the way in which an event is situated relative to others, and purposive meaning, which concerns the way in which some of the things we do have a purpose or point that infuses other things we do with meaning. [10] The difficulty for this suggestion is that we lack a satisfactory account of what distinguishes assessments of a lifes meaningfulness from assessments of its welfare value, and so it is not clear what it would mean to say that narrative relations among events in a life make a life better for a person by making it more meaningful. The basic difficulty for the narrativity thesis itself is that narrative relations and narrative structure seem to contribute nothing distinctive to the welfare value of a life; so the appeal to narrative would seem to capture nothing not already captured by extant theories of welfare. [11] Consider just two ways of illustrating the problem. As objective list theories emphasize, a life that is good for a person usually includes at its core engagement with or realization of at least some putatively objective goods. It includes what Stephen Darwall has called valuing activitiesparenting, involvement with the arts, pursuit of knowledge, athletic endeavors, and other forms of development of personal excellences. [12] We know that engagement with a variety of goods takes time; indeed, it often occurs over quite an extended period of time. Moreover, valuing activities realize a good only through the activity of agents themselves, acting with a certain constancy of purpose and effort over time. No wonder, then, that the value of
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activity of agents themselves, acting with a certain constancy of purpose and effort over time. No wonder, then, that the value of a life isnt a matter merely of the value of momentary engagement in activities, undertakings, or relationships. But narrative relations do no independent work in understanding the welfare value of a life. To be sure, we can say, for example, that a persons current success as a pianist means that her earlier years of study paid off. But the appeal to later events as conferring meaning captures nothing not already captured by appealing to the achievement of objectively valuable things over time, the successful engagement in valuing activities; and it is the latter achievement or success that partly determines the welfare value of a persons life. A second way of illustrating the problem appeals more explicitly to an alternative picture of the shape of a good life. John Rawls maintains that a good life for a person consists in the (approximate) realization of a rational life plan. [13] A persons life plan will, as Rawls envisions it, involve certain central, though revisable, aims rooted in an agents reflective desires, with details of the planvarious sub-plansfilled in over time, and at the appropriate times, and in ways that are sensitive to an agents circumstances, including her options and available resources. A plan is, on Rawls picture, roughly a temporal and pragmatic ordering of rational desires. If a good life for a person consists in realizing a rational life plan, then failure to succeed in ones plan amounts to failure to succeed in ones principal aims and so failure to satisfy ones central rational desires. Of course, we can say, for example, that the fact that a person has a successful medical practice means that her earlier investments of time and effort paid off. But the appeal to meaning, to narrative relations, captures nothing not already captured by appeal to successful realization, at least in part, of a rational plan of life. Again, the notion of narrative relations, the appeal to how later events affect the significance of earlier events, appears to make no independent contribution to the welfare value of a life.[14] Undoubtedly, events in a life provide the materials from which a narrative can be constructed, and we can sensibly describe subsequent events as altering the meaning of earlier events. From the standpoint of value, however, all the work appears to be done by value-relevant facts about a persons life, facts about her success or failure relative to aims, ends, desires, plans, or goods. It seems clear enough how, given earlier events, subsequent events might alter the value of ones life. Earlier events were events of pursuing central desires, setting out to achieve a good, take steps to fulfill a plan of life. Later events determined whether one successfully pursued ones desires, achieved something of genuine value, effectively implemented ones plan. A life in which a person satisfies her most central and informed desires, attains genuine goods, succeeds in her rational aims, seems, ceteris paribus, a better life for her than one in which she does not. Despite the doubts I have just raised about the narrativity thesis, I am sympathetic to the idea that our personal narratives make some distinctive contribution to personal good. Here, I want to offer some brief speculations. If we are to see how narrative relations can, by affecting meaning, make a distinctive difference to the welfare value of a life, we need to think about narrative functionally: we need to think about the effects of our storytelling about our lives. Where narrative does its distinctive work, I suggest, lies in the way that constructing and internalizing narratives about our lives can help us to effect or sustain a certain relationship to our lives and to ourselves as author/protagonist. I have argued elsewhere that something is good for a person when she stands in a relation of fit or suitability to that thing and that this relation has certain characteristic features.[15] When a person is so related to a thingan activity, undertaking, or relationship with anotherher engagement tends to support her sense of her own worth or value. It tends to be enlivening rather than enervating. It tends to provide an important component of her identity and a sense of direction in life, and so to contribute to her self-understanding. And finally, it provides a source of internal motivation. We can stand in the good-for relation to a variety of pursuits and people. Although some of the things that comprise our good may fit us right off the rack, so to speak, many others become a part of our goodcome to be related to us in the right wayonly through our effort. Partly through our choices, training, and action, our adjustments of our attitudes and expectations, we work to bring ourselves into a relationshipa fitwith what come to be our central vocations and avocations. Through our efforts, we bring ourselves into the interpersonal connections that come to be our central human loves. My hunch is that what our storytelling does in affecting our good is of a piece with what our other activities do in bringing us into the good-for relation with many of those things that come to be a part of our good. [16] The narrative relations that hold between events in a life constrain the evaluations a person can truthfully make about events, but they do not ordinarily necessitate a particular life story. It is open to a person to entertain many faithful narratives about her life, depending on how she interprets events and on which events she emphasizes. My suggestion is that internalizing certain narratives can affect a persons good by helping her, as she reflects on events in her life, and as she takes up a view of herself and her life, to see herself and her life in a way that supports her sense of her own worth, that helps to secure her sense of who she is and a sense of direction, and that motivates her to move forward. I am suggesting that it is, in partthough only in partthrough our storytelling that we secure a relatively ongoing relation of fit to our lives and to ourselves as the author/protagonist of those lives. I say only in part, because, of course, the way that we secure a fit with ourselves and our lives is, in the first instance, by doing what it takes to provide the materials from which attractive
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a fit with ourselves and our lives is, in the first instance, by doing what it takes to provide the materials from which attractive stories can be constructed. Lives in which we have successful relationships, careers, commitments, and pastimes, not merely at a time, but over time, naturally provide the makings for compelling narratives. So do lives which develop in ways that can be represented in stories of overcoming hardship, of redeeming past mistakes, of steady improvement lives, that is, with generally uphill trajectories. Part of the reason for this, of course, is that in living such lives, we actually achieve things of value that benefit us; we actually succeed in aims that matter to us. But we also get the benefit that comes of being the controlling authority over ourselves and our lives, of being able to make sense of our lives and to represent them to ourselves as a product, ultimately, of our own autonomous efforts. If my speculations are on the right track, we can see why our storytelling would be especially important in the face of failure, while contributing to our welfare across the range of more or less successful lives we might find ourselves living. When we have experienced relative success in securing our goodwhen we have embarked on careers we find stimulating and in which we can find some real success, when our principal relationships are healthy, when we are able to pursue our aims effectivelywe will almost automatically thereby have secured a fit with ourselves and our lives; we will have a sense of ourselves as controlling authority over ourselves and our lives. It is when we fall short, when our careers are marred by failure or misfit, our principal relationships are unhealthy, we are ineffective in pursuing our aims, that effort may be needed to prevent ourselves from becoming alienated or disconnected from ourselves and our lives or to restore a connection when disconnect has occurred. I conjecture that it is the effects of our storytelling which I have been describing that psychologists try to exploit insofar as they seek to enable us to be happier autobiographers. [17] Notes: [1] This brief essay is drawn from a manuscript entitled The Story of a Life. [2] See Benedict Carey, This is Your Life (and How You Tell It), New York Times, May 22, 2007, nytimes.com. [3] Of course, some would question the psychological research. They would deny that they think about themselves or their lives in narrative terms, that they are authorial agents, that they take any concern with how their lives cohere considered as a whole. They would insist that the only self of which they are aware and in which they take any interest is the self they are now, and that their only concern with respect to their own lives is for the here and now. See Galen Strawson, Against Narrativity, Ratio (new series) XVII 4 December (2004): 00340006. [4] For some examples of work that suggests connections between narrative and personal good, see Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue , 2d ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), J. David Velleman, Well-Being and Time, reprinted in The Possibility of Practical Reason , Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 78-79, Jeff McMahan, The Ethics of Killing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), and Johan Brnnmark, Leading Lives: On Happiness and Narrative Meaning, Philosophical Papers 32 (2003): 321-343. [5] For related ideas, see Velleman (2000: 78-79): a person himself has both a synchronic and a diachronic identity. The perspectives from which synchronic interests are assessed, unlike the financial perspective, are not optional points of view that a person may or may not adopt from time to time. They are perspectives that a person necessarily inhabits as he proceeds through life, perspectives that are partly definitive of who he is. An essential and significant feature of persons is that they are creatures who naturally live their lives from the successive viewpoints of individual moments, as well as from a comprehensive, diachronic point of view. [6] Velleman (2000: 58). [7] See Velleman (2000: 68). Velleman concludes that the value of a life is what he calls a strongly irreducible second-order good, where a second-order good is a valuable state of affairs consisting in some fact about other goods and its irreducibility requires that it possess value over and above that of its component first-order goods Velleman (2000: 69-70). [8] Velleman (2000: 58). [9] McMahan (2002: 178, and, more generally, 175-180). [10] Brnnmark (2003: 337). In discussing the importance of narrative meaning to the value of our lives, Brnnmark rejects Susan Wolfs position of regarding meaning and happiness simply as two components of the human good. He insists that Once we truly grant importance to such matters it does seem more reasonable to understand meaning as something more pervasive, as something that modifies, or at least is potentially able to modify, the value contributed to our good by most of the things that make up our lives (337).
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things that make up our lives (337). [11] For skeptical worries different from the one I consider, see Brnnmarks brief discussion (2003: 321-322). [12] See Stephen Darwall, Welfare and Rational Care (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), Ch. IV. [13] See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 63-64. [14] Perhaps those who have emphasized the importance of narrativity, or the holding of narrative relations among events in a life, merely meant to call attention to the fact that the value of our lives requires the presence of goods the attainment of which requires sustained and successful effort over time. Or perhaps they meant their talk merely to be another way of expressing the need for the sort of structure in a life that others would express by talking in terms of a rational life plan. I assume, however, that if this were all they meant to say, they would have made that clear. But see, e.g., Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 47-51, where he discusses the idea of our having a narrative understanding of our lives in relation to our need, as agents, to have an orientation toward the good. [15] See Connie S. Rosati, Personal Good, in Terry Horgan and Mark Timmons (eds.), Metaethics After Moore (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). [16] See Rosati (2006). [17] According to the Times article briefly discussed in the introduction of this essay, psychologists have observed , among other things, that persons who are able to reinterpret painful episodes with greater compassion fare better. And some of the effects of psychotherapy, when it works, are attributed to the way in which it enables people who feel helpless to alter their self-stories so as to restore a sense of their own power. Assuming that the research on which these claims rest is reliable, my philosophical speculations fit nicely with the empirical findings. Read more
Does Culture Prevent or Drive Human Evolution ?

by Mark Stoneking
Mark Stoneking
Dec 21, '09, 5:25 AM
As a molecular anthropologist, my research involves using genetic data to address questions of anthropological interest about the origins, history, migration, structure, and relationships of human populations. I frequently am asked to give lectures to nonspecialist audiences on insights from genetics into human evolution, and invariably during the ensuing discussion period the viewpoint will be expressed that while yes, humans may have evolved during the distant past, surely humans have stopped evolving, because of culture: if something changes in our environment, we respond culturally, not biologically. For example, if the ozone layer continues to disappear, and levels of ultraviolet radiation reach life-threatening levels, we will most likely respond by developing protective skin creams and clothing, moving our cities underground, etc., and not by evolving thicker skin or hair. Conversely, many research groups (including my own) have become interested in detecting and analyzing recent biological evolution in humans, which would seem to contradict the above viewpoint. I therefore have been thinking a lot lately about the role of culture in human evolution, and I thought this might make an interesting topic for this forum (at least, I would be interested in the responses I get). First, some terminology and background, especially for the nonspecialist. Evolution has different meanings to different scientists; a population geneticist, for example, views evolution simply as changes in allele frequencies (that is, the frequencies of the variant forms of a gene) over time. Such changes are usually random, reflecting the fact that not everybody leaves offspring, so by chance some alleles increase in frequency and others decrease in frequency over time. These random fluctuations, known as genetic drift, occur more rapidly in small populations than in large ones. Genetic drift results in loss of genetic variation within populations and increases in genetic differences among populations over time, and is countered by migration among populations, which restores genetic variation within populations and decreases genetic differences among populations. Thus, to a population geneticist, since allele frequencies are always changing because of drift and migration, by definition evolution is always happening, and it therefore makes no sense to say that humans are no longer evolving. But to most people who are not population geneticists, biological evolution means natural selection, in the Darwinian sense: increase in the frequency of an inherited trait which enhances the survival and/or reproductive success of individuals with that trait, also referred to as genetic adaptation. Often, this is expressed as a response to a change in the environment, which in turn leads to a change in those traits that confer enhanced survival/reproduction. Familiar examples of genetic adaptations that resulted in human evolution include bipedality, increased brain size, loss of body hair, and variation in skin pigmentation. To say
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resulted in human evolution include bipedality, increased brain size, loss of body hair, and variation in skin pigmentation. To say that humans have stopped evolving, then, is to say that such inherited traits no longer matter when it comes to how humans respond to their environment. This is the view that I often hear: culture acts as a barrier or a buffer between us and the environment, thereby preventing human evolution. However, if culture is a buffer, it is an imperfect one. For example, humans are plagued by a variety of infectious diseases, and for every success story (e.g., eradication of smallpox and polio) there are diseases that resist our efforts at finding vaccinations or cures (e.g., malaria and AIDS). And you can be sure that if our culture is unable (or unwilling) to do what it takes to prevent or cure a disease, then genetic resistance will indeed occur and will increase in frequency. Some classic examples of natural selection in humans involve genetic variants that increase resistance to malaria, such as sickle-cell anemia. Genetic variants that increase resistance to AIDS have been identified, and it is a safe bet that such variants will increase in frequency if there is no cure/vaccination for AIDS but such increase comes at the expense of individuals who do not carry such genetic variants. Evolution in response to infectious disease is thus an ongoing story in humans. But there is an alternative view to that of culture as a (leaky) barrier to human evolution, which can be expressed as follows: humans have been evolving and continue to evolve, not just in spite of culture, but because of culture. That is, cultural practices have actually caused humans to evolve, and a classic example is lactose tolerance. The story goes as follows: lactose is the major sugar present in mammalian milk, and most mammals stop making lactase, the enzyme that digests lactose, shortly after weaning because they are never again exposed to lactose in their diet. This, incidentally, is a nice example of the evolutionary principle of use it or lose it: there is no need to continue making lactase if there is no lactose in the diet. Some humans are weird, however, in that they retain the ability to digest lactose into adulthood. It turns out that the frequency of this trait, known as lactose tolerance (or lactase persistence), is highly correlated with milk-drinking populations in Europe and Africa, and was apparently driven to high frequency by natural selection in those populations. Thus, a human cultural trait domestication of cattle, thereby providing cows milk as a new source of nutrition resulted in human evolution (namely, an increase in lactose tolerance). Even more provocatively, recently the view has been put forth that not only has culture influenced human evolution, culture has actually increased the rate of human evolution. According to this view, cultural traits such as the invention and spread of agriculture, domestication of animals, increasing population density and urbanization, etc., have influenced recent human evolution much more dramatically than has the environment. The evidence for this view comes largely from studies that find numerous signals of selection in the patterns of genome-wide genetic variation in human populations. That is, we expect that selection for an inherited trait in a particular population will alter patterns of variation at the responsible gene(s): in general, we expect larger than average genetic differences between populations, and unusually long haplotypes (chromosomal segments), to be associated with such genes. There have been numerous studies looking for such signals of selection in genome-wide data from various human populations, and invariably numerous signals of selection are claimed to have been found. Moreover, some analyses indicate that such signals of selection in our genomes have been accumulating recently, indicating that selection has become more prevalent of late, rather than less prevalent as might be expected if culture is increasingly acting as a barrier to human evolution. The most likely explanation for an increase in recent times in genomic signals of selection would appear to be that culture is indeed driving human evolution. However, some caveats are in order. First and foremost, there is an ongoing controversy over the reliability of genome scan approaches for detecting selection. It turns out that demographic processes in particular, population growth and geographic expansion, both of which have certainly been important in human history can mimic the expected genomic signals of selection. Thus, at least some signals of selection are likely to be false positives and not due to selection at all and there are those who would argue that this holds for the majority of such signals. If the critics are right and the majority of such signals are indeed false positives, then the evidence for culture driving human evolution disappears. My own view is that the role of demographic processes in producing spurious genomic signals of selection certainly deserves more attention. However, I am fairly confident that the genome-wide approaches do provide at least some evidence for selection in humans, for two reasons. Firstly, one of the predictions we would make is that if a signal of selection on a particular gene is real, then there should be a functional difference between the putatively-selected and non-selected variants of that gene. We have tested that prediction in three cases, and in all three cases we do indeed find a functional and/or phenotypic difference (for further details, see Hughes et al. 2008, Bryk et al. 2008, and Ryan et al., 2009) . This is a necessary, albeit not sufficient, indication of selection it still needs to be demonstrated that the functional difference has resulted in a trait subject to selection but I emphasize that in all three cases that we tested, the gene was selected for further study solely on the basis of exhibiting a strong signal of selection in a genome-wide study. So this makes me think that some of the candidates identified by genome-wide studies have indeed experienced selection. Secondly, there is good reason to think that there are many more false negatives than false positives in genome-wide studies of selection. We know, from computer simulations, that genome-wide methods only detect very strong selection weak selection, in which the fitness advantage provided by those with the trait is only slightly larger than for those lacking the trait, will be missed.
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And since it is quite likely that weak selection is far more prevalent than strong selection, our present genome-wide studies are detecting only the tip of the iceberg. Thus, I do think that that genome-wide studies are, if anything, underestimating the role of selection. But there is a more important and less widely-appreciated caveat to the assertion that culture is driving recent human evolution, and that is that our current methods for detecting signals of selection based on genome-wide studies can only detect recent selection. The genomic signature of selection that has happened in the distant past will be erased by subsequent mutations and recombination, and after some time will no longer be detected by our methods. So a crucial question is: how far back in time can selection be detected reliably? The answer is we dont know for sure, but a best guess would be on the order of 10,000 20,000 years for our current methods of detecting selection, which happens to coincide with the period of time when the rate of selection has supposedly increased during human evolution. Thus, the apparent recent increase in signals of selection that supposedly has been driven by culture could in fact be just an artifact of our methods for detecting selection; maybe there was just as much or even more selection in the distant past, that was driven by the environment and not by culture, but our methods cannot detect the signal of such older selective events in our genome. To conclude, it is clear that humans have been evolving recently and are continuing to evolve. It is also clear that humans have evolved because of culture, as witness the lactose tolerance trait. However, whether or not culture has been the main driving force in recent human evolution remains to be seen. Some Selected References: Balter, M. (2005). Are humans still evolving? Science 309, 234-237. Bryk, J., Hardouin, E., Pugach, I., Hughes, D., Strotmann, R., Stoneking, M., and Myles, S. (2008). Positive selection in East Asians for an EDAR allele that enhances NF-kappaB activation. PLoS One 3, e2209. Cochran, G., and Harpending, H. (2009). The 10,000 Year Explosion: How civilization accelerated human evolution. New York: Basic Books. Hancock, A., and Di Rienzo, A. (2008). Detecting the genetic signature of natural selection in human populations: models, methods and data. Annu Rev Anthropol 37, 197-217. Hawks, J., Wang, E.T., Cochran, G.M., Harpending, H.C., and Moyzis, R.K. (2007). Recent acceleration of human adaptive evolution. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 104, 20753-20758. Hofer, T., Ray, N., Wegmann, D., and Excoffier, L. (2009). Large allele frequency differences between human continental groups are more likely to have occurred by drift during range expansions than by selection. Ann Hum Genet 73, 95-108. Hughes, D.A., Tang, K., Strotmann, R., Schoneberg, T., Prenen, J., Nilius, B., and Stoneking, M. (2008). Parallel selection on TRPV6 in human populations. PLoS One 3, e1686. Kelley, J.L., and Swanson, W.J. (2008). Positive selection in the human genome: from genome scans to biological significance. Annu Rev Genomics Hum Genet 9, 143-160. Lopez Herraez, D., Bauchet, M., Tang, K., Theunert, C., Pugach, I., Li, J., Nandineni, M.R., Gross, A., Scholz, M., and Stoneking, M. (2009). Genetic variation and recent positive selection in worldwide human populations: evidence from nearly 1 million SNPs. PLoS One 4, e7888. Pickrell, J.K., Coop, G., Novembre, J., Kudaravalli, S., Li, J.Z., Absher, D., Srinivasan, B.S., Barsh, G.S., Myers, R.M., Feldman, M.W., et al. (2009). Signals of recent positive selection in a worldwide sample of human populations. Genome Res 19, 826-837. Ryan, A.W., Hughes, D.A., Tang, K., Kelleher, D.P., Ryan, T., McManus, R., and Stoneking, M. (2009). Natural selection and the molecular basis of electrophoretic variation at the coagulation F13B locus. Eur J Hum Genet 17, 219-227. Sabeti, P.C., Varilly, P., Fry, B., Lohmueller, J., Hostetter, E., Cotsapas, C., Xie, X., Byrne, E.H., McCarroll, S.A., Gaudet, R., et al. (2007). Genome-wide detection and characterization of positive selection in human populations. Nature 449, 913-918. Voight, B.F., Kudaravalli, S., Wen, X., and Pritchard, J.K. (2006). A map of recent positive selection in the human genome. PLoS Biol 4, e72. Read more
Wild Animals and a Different Human Face

by Stuart A. Marks Independent Scholar I have always depended on the kindness of strangers. Tennessee Williams
Stuart Marks
Dec 7, '09, 5:42 AM
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Tennessee Williams To understand portions of ones own culture demands a lifetime; to become familiar with anothers depends upon a host of enthusiastic interpreters, attentive listening, experiencing a multitude of unfamiliar activities, a receptive heart, and good fortune. Throughout my life, a major focus has been the contrast between Northern (Western) and African perceptions (neither of which is homogeneous) and their relationships to wildlife and how these motives and practices have played out in conservation policies and through political-economic power. How have such policies affected local or indigenous populations? How thoroughly have they disrupted earlier relationships? What about the impacts on ecological interactions? Undoubtedly, my concern is part of a legacy from a childhood and youth spent equally in temperate North America and tropical Central Africa, of immersions in dissimilar cultural and environmental settings, an early absorption of three languages, of childhood roles and adventures under conditions favoring explorations in both cultural and environmental domains, and of subsequent career choices allowing the time, resources and the connections to follow these interests and to write about them (Marks, 1984,1991,2005, nd.). This passion for different world views and for wild animals came as I reflected upon earlier experience while temporarily stationed among the Inuit in the Bering Straits in 1962. While there, I realized that my Inuit associates were not seeing the same animals that I was taught in graduate studies. My hosts on St. Lawrence Island possessed a more inclusive connectedness to the lives of neighboring creatures, expressive of longer term relationships, both spiritual and epistemological, upon which their welfare depended. These exposures and thoughts challenged me to expand my own awareness beyond what was considered then appropriate in the academy. Accepting this ordeal has taken most of a life time to observe cultural and environmental processes in just two small places. In the process of completing intermittent field studies with members of one central African society (Marks, 2008; nd), I am asked to share some musing with readers of On the Human. I will give some background and findings from this longitudinal study before posing some questions that may affect, if not implicate, us all. In Zambias central Luangwa Valley, the Valley Bisa share their landscape with dense populations of large and small wild animals. These Bisa have been my hosts and teachers during intermittent stays spread over half a century. Like many of their neighbors, this society is matrilineal and organized into chiefs and commoners lineages. They are subsistence hoe cultivators, dependent upon rain-fed sorghums/maize, upon collecting and hunting wild products, as well as upon wage employment. Gender largely determines who farms, cooks, raises children, collects, hunts, or seeks wages. Residents numbers have doubled in fifty years (10,000 people in 2006), now skewed decidedly towards the younger ages while their communities are challenged by a weak governments retrenchment in education and in other social services. Today most residents are experiencing growing poverty and persistent resource scarcities as shifting climate regimes affect their subsistence agriculture and as government edicts restrict their gathering and hunting of bush products. Unlike their neighbors, the Valley Bisa were a comparatively small and marginal group somewhat distanced from outside administration until recently (accessible by a rough, unimproved road since 1960), yet with sizeable portions of their land appropriated initially by the colonial and later the Zambian state as game reserve and as national parks respectfully. Today, they inhabit a narrow Game Management Area (a buffer corridor of some 2500 km2) surrounded on three sides by national parks with a steep escarpment on the fourth which separates them somewhat from developments elsewhere. Since the 1980s, these imposed institutional boundaries, supported in the mental furniture of conservation officials, backed by considerable international funding and enforcement on the ground, have had a devastating impact on Valley Bisa welfare and culture. One way to illustrate this quandary is to list the names given to their domestic dogs, which, as the state has disarmed the local population, have become residents close associates in their conspiracy against the states limited economic vision for wildlife. Unlike the domesticated dogs found in many Northern societies households, which are brought into the family hearth, well-fed, and treated much as kin, the names of and condition of Valley Bisa dogs are symbolic of their despair and fragmenting social relations. Dogs are rarely fed or cared for and, in times of duress, are sold sometimes to safari operators for target practice. In 2006, these given-names reflect the recent individualization and social alienation taking place under increasing uncertainty and poverty, for the monikers were either derogatory or punitive evocative of unsanctioned sentiments (even in translation): we have no relatives [after no one came to inquire about a wife maimed by a crocodile], hatred, not yours, no justice, remember me, not sure why I married this woman, if your marriage is unstable- you will travel, mistake, shut up, you offend the whole household, jealousy, rudeness, chaos, no appreciation, stinginess, and you will see. To me, this litany is symptomatic of the depth to which a once brave and resourceful people have descended in their relationships with their neighboring animals and to each other. Valley residents depend upon wildlife as an important complement to their agricultural products and especially as a safety net in times of famines. For some of their men, the hunting of and protection from wildlife are both necessary and customary. The necessity comes from the endemic presence of the tsetse fly, which prevents livestock husbandry, and from the need to protect human life and crops from wildlife competitions both in its large and smaller forms. Wild meats are important supplements in diets and the produce of a few men selected by their lineages. Gender roles dictate that women engage in mundane agriculture and serve as the structural core of villagers, while most men assume the expansive and chancy activities of hunting, trading, and
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serve as the structural core of villagers, while most men assume the expansive and chancy activities of hunting, trading, and local or migrant labor. Valley Bisa relationships with the wild animals around them are diverse, complicated, and, in some cases, seem contradictory. While wildlife competes with cultivators and collectors for food, some animals reciprocally become important sources of meat and of power when used as medicines and in witchcraft. This dialectic is the basic social organizing principle in which matrilineallyrelated women, identified symbolically with subsistence agriculture and the community, are contrasted to wildlife and its potential destructiveness of human life and sustenance. Men (mainly marrying into the group) with their wide-ranging activities are identified with wild animals, hunting, trade, and the bush (Morris 1998). Local people employ familiar concepts to classify wild animals including their grouping, relations between these categories as well as the same images to interpret behaviors, spirits, and power. Their folk classifications express utilitarian and anthropocentric values. Historically, relationships with and knowledge of wildlife were the domain of few men belonging to specific lineages. Whereas mammals are presumed to have their own autonomous reality, local hunters categories encapsulate lineage interests, needs, and uses as well as expressions of personal fears, histories, and experiences. Historically, hunters managed and addressed their roles tangentially through beliefs in spirits, through the tangible uses of culturally mediated rituals and prescriptions, and through following the normative distributions of its products and procedures. Lineage elders used unseen agents (spirits, ancestors) and observable agency to monitor the compliance of their subordinates while imaginatively structuring and legitimizing the ethical order in times of crisis and uncertainties. Linguistically and historically, the Valley Bisa did not separate themselves from other forms of life nor do they typically objectify nature. No indigenous word exists for the Northern idea of nature, or environment as such, although their noun nchende is sometimes translated as such by outsiders pushing a conservation ethic. The vernacular meaning of this term includes people, place, and the resources (fipe-baggage, goods, or properties) necessary to sustain people within a particular site. The term to convey something of the meaning for a natural resource is ifilingwa waleza (literally Gods gifts). The ideal of wildlife conservation requires a whole phrase- kusunga ifilingwa waleza (caring for Gods gifts). Yet, this indigenous term denotes more intrinsic and spiritual meanings than the English term, as it assumes that humans and the other lives around them constitute a seamless whole. Both are integral parts: no nature exists outside the morality of the human community, for reciprocal obligations extend outward from the village embracing other forms of life as well as spirits. The bush becomes responsive and responsible to residents as their ancestral spirits reside there as former embodiments of the current community. Causality embedded in moral principles and human intentionality are the bedrock explanations for why good and bad things happen; the latter might happen even to good or innocent people because someone, somewhere has violated ethical expectations and norms. The how and the why questions of life are often embedded in the same search. For most Valley Bisa, their recent transformations have been precipitous and traumatic, brought on by many dynamics seemingly outside their influence, and expressed through the consciousness of increasing scarcities and decreasing welfare. Within this synthesis of progressive factors is a steady inflation in the national economy since the late 1970s, the death of a long-reigning chief in 1984 with an interregnum until 1990, a weak and truculent government unresponsive to local needs, uncertain rainfall regimes and climatic shifts. In addition, the AIDS epidemic and a doubling in population size (since the 1960s) mean that the majority of residents are young, with little formal education and facing local resource and productive land scarcities as well as few opportunities for employment. This demographic shift has brought its losses in cultural and local ecological memories as many residents reject the earlier limited communal worldview of ancestors for conversions to Pentecostalism with its individualistic expectations and anticipated rewards. Under donor pressures, government has further aggrieved local welfare by legally commoditizing the value of wildlife to generate revenues, thereby privileging access by safari hunters and international tourists rather than local users. Towards this goal, the administration employs large cadres of wildlife police officers to arrest those killing wildlife without formal licenses and harassing others while dispossessing residents of the firearms formerly used to feed and to protect themselves. Officials offer no proactive protection to residents or compensation for their losses. While enduring a high level of arrests and losses, residents resort to hidden transcripts (secrecy) and earlier devices (snares, downfalls) to deliver their protests, to protect their properties, and to acquire their animal protein. Another way is through the recent husbandry of domesticated dogs as co-conspirators in protection and for acquiring prey. I do not pretend to present a final, definitive picture for these cultural dynamics or for the biological commons in this central Luangwa Valley. What I have witnessed will continue in various shapes and versions as current cultural tragedies and policies continue in that part of the world. Finding the words to match the meanings and expressions for my experiences in this distant valley has, for me, become an instructive hunt, if only a mental one. Nevertheless, this quest has enlarged my range in curiosity, taken me across new conceptual terrain and provided different targets of opportunity. The pursuit to reconfigure the place of nature within the space of culture essentially becomes one of redefining ownership, possessions, and belonging and remains necessarily elusive as the perpetrators in time often become victims (Buell, 2001). Comments of fellow trekkers, as well as those of others, are welcome as what I have learned leads me to some inferences about the acquisitive structures and
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as those of others, are welcome as what I have learned leads me to some inferences about the acquisitive structures and presumptive natures of our (northern) societies. I conclude with a few of these reflections. For an indeterminate past, wild animals were around and with us, in our minds if not in our stomachs, and vice versa. According to our myths, these associations were essential for humans evolving and for reflective definitions of our humanity. Humanitys place within nature became a topic of modern European philosophers, who agreed on human superiority even as they differed on the specifics as to what humans had that other animals lacked. It is assumed that only humans have language and practical intelligence that allows imagination, speculation, and deliberation about death and what comes after. With European exploration and colonization worldwide, and later its own industrialization, wild animals began to disappear from human life as environments became fundamentally transformed under the egis of ideas about hierarchy, dominance, and utility. Today most descendants of and operatives within these European worldviews must travel far to witness the diversity of wild animals, even if these animals are now found in contrived surroundings elsewhere; otherwise, they remain surrounded by domesticated types bearing human utilities as pets and food. As human livelihoods and wants have become the major impact on the evolutionary trajectories of most forms of life, I wonder if animals, particularly in their wilder forms, will continue as a major epistemological category in human development and thought. If animals are no longer the standards, what might take their place as holistic contexts on life recede and comparisons become increasingly reductionist? (Thomas, 1963; Lippit, 2000) Scott Atran and Doug Medin (2008) show how the remarkable breadth in biological and ecological knowledge of some indigenous people compares with that of modern literates in the United States. Some of these smaller groups, whose worldviews include spiritual and ethical links to their environments, strive to maintain sustainable resources within livable environments, often while in conflict with more powerful and imperial groups claiming privileged (but truncated) worldviews based in distant and unsustainable cultural appetites for material resources. Other indigenous groups, such as the Valley Bisa, resist the odds by persisting with their own claims and identities despite its high cost. What I find remarkable about this discrepancy in biological knowledge is that many people in the Northern Hemisphere, even those working for organizations proclaiming their mission as protecting the environment, seem oblivious to the limitations of their own perspectives and prefer to remain in the dark about the high hidden human costs in their own overseas activities. My view is that we would learn a lot from listening and learning from people who know about formal, and even informal, restraints and from long term perspectives that our histories have repeatedly yet to teach us. Unfortunately, we seldom venture beyond our invented environments and the comforts of our insulated lives, including the pets that bear our marks, as seekers rather than as tourists. What I have described for the Valley Bisa is not a unique event, for similar episodes have occurred in the past and continue into the present. In many respects, these incidents are reminiscent of persistent biological drives submerged in imperial cultural demands for resources and territory. In this case, it would be a basic biological need for territory and resources sanctioned as a cultural necessity controlling (managing) disorder, unknowns, and diversity spatially (Sheets-Johnstone, 2009). In a recent remarkable book, Anderson (2004) depicts how colonists in North America used their domestic livestock to undermine indigenous Indians of their rights to land and resources, which once obtained, settlers then transformed into commodities that they considered more manageable. Anderson (2004:246) concludes this tragic story thus: Indians found room in their world for livestock, but the colonists and their descendants could find no room in theirs for Indians. My experience leads me to think that those who strive to preserve biological diversity in terms of their own worldviews, restrictive in its visions of cultural diversity, are imperially pushing their own control of nature rather than broadening our common understanding about what sustainability of life might be about. For the Valley Bisa, the story begins with wild animals, a cultivated and cultured landscape; it ends with domesticated animals bearing the imprints of their makers, with the human vision dimmed, the land cartelized by new proprietors none the wiser. The national park might just be Americas best idea, according to the recent Ken Burns documentary; yet a closer look at this cinema graphic shows that it is really about our violent history and displacement of indigenous peoples, about our heroes and villains, about the cultured versions of our interpreters and scholars, about our technologies and acquisitiveness, about our class-based disparities in wealth, about our cultural concepts of work, play, and leisure, as well as our definitions of a good life. How can such an idea be expanded and disciplined to serve a more universal ideal? Some References Anderson, Virginia 2004. Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America. New York: Oxford University Press. Atran, Scott & Douglas Medin 2008. The Native Mind and the Cultural Construction of Nature. Cambridge: MIT Press. Buell, Lawrence 2001. Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Crist, Eileen 1999. Images of Animals: Anthropomorphism and Animal Mind. Philadelphia: Temple University Press
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Diamond, Jared 2005. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York: Penguin Goodman, Nelson 1978. Ways of Worldmaking. Hassocks UK: The Harvester Press. Hughes, David M. 2008. Requiem for the Zambezi Valley? Conservation and protected areas under climate change. Policy Matters 16:108-115. Lippit, Akira M. 2000. Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Marks, Stuart A. 1984. The Imperial Lion. Boulder, CO: Westview Press _________ 1991. Southern Hunting in Black and White: Nature, History, and Ritual in a Carolina Community. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. _________ 2005. Large Mammals and a Brave People. New Brunswick, NJ: Transactions (2nd edition) _________ 2008. On the Ground and in the Villages: A Cacophony of Voice Assessing a Community-based Wildlife Program after 18 Years in Zambia. under review _________nd. Life as a Hunt: Thresholds of Identities, Images, and Illusions on a Central African Landscape. under review Morris, Brian 1998. The Power of Animals: An Ethnography. New York: Berg Posey, Darrell A. (compiler and editor) 1999. Cultural and Spiritual Values of Biodiversity. London: Intermediate Technology Publications for the United Nations Environment Program. Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine The Descent of Man, Human Nature and the Nature/Culture Divide. Public Lecture given in symposium Darwin Across the Disciplines at Duke University, November 6, 2009. Shepard, Paul. 1978. Thinking Animals: Animals & the Development of Human Intelligence. New York: Viking. Sinton, John. 1993. When Moscow Looks Like Chicago: An Essay on Uniformity and Diversity in Landscapes and Communities. Environmental History Review 17(3):23-41. Tambiah, Stanley J. 1990. Magic, Science, Religion, and the Scope of Rationality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thomas, Keith 1983. Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility. New York: Pantheon Books. Read more
Hunting and Science

by Sir Patrick Bateson
Patrick Bateson
Nov 22, '09, 8:36 PM
The use of hounds in hunting excites great passions. Hunting deer is particularly hated by those who are opposed to it and ardently loved by those who support it. If you wept as a child at the death of Bambis mother, you know what it is like to be hunted. On the other side, the Hunt supporters have believed sincerely that very little suffering is involved in hunting with hounds. They regard this method of culling red deer not only as necessary for the protection of the environment but also as an entirely natural process. Wolves chase deer, the argument runs, so deer should be adapted to being hunted by hounds. The battles have raged for the best part of a century in terms that have changed not one bit. In 1997 I submitted to the National Trust my report on a scientific study of the welfare issues involved in the management of red deer on Exmoor and the Quantock Hills. Among other things, I had been asked to examine the evidence for stress induced in red deer by hunting with hounds and to compare this with the stress resulting from other culling methods. The law is stringent about the use of animals in scientific work. Like hunting, scientific research involves great companionship, much skill and the thrill of the chase. However, as attitudes to animals changed, scientists have had to temper their enthusiasms for their work with concerns for the welfare of the animals they use. The Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act of 1986 stipulates that: If procedures used in research involve pain or discomfort, the investigator must consider whether the knowledge that may be gained justifies the stress and pain inflicted on the animals. Pain is clearly defined in terms of human subjective experience. So, for that matter, are fear, distress and suffering. Nevertheless, those who must obey the existing legislation on animal welfare have to project these unpleasant states into animals. They are required to make the same sort of assessment of another creatures condition as they do implicitly and routinely when dealing with a fellow human being. In humans each unpleasant state is associated with observable behaviour and with identifiable physiological processes. A profile of these characteristics may be built up and considered when taking any particular case of questionable animal welfare. Weighing suffering against human benefit is inherently unsatisfactory because they are not measured in the same terms. What can be done is to find an acceptable space in which suffering is kept to a minimum and humans maximise what they can get out of the use of the animals. When I started my investigation of the hunting of deer with hounds, I supposed that here again we should probably finish up with some notion of acceptable space. Hunting undoubtedly gives great pleasure to those who partake
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in this activity as sport. To many people, witnessing a hunt is to feel part of English history. I had supposed that, if the suffering of the hunted deer were contained, the positive aspects of stag-hunting could be supported. However, the science led my Research Associate, Dr Elizabeth Bradshaw, and me to a very different position. Science can make contributions to the hunting debate at various levels. The movements of red deer may be monitored by radiotracking. This method involves fitting a collar on the animal which contains a small transmitter emitting a regular signal which can be detected at some distance by a receiver. Apart from long excursions by the stags before and after the rut in the autumn, red deer on Exmoor spend 95% of their time within about half a mile of the same place. The ancestral habitat of red deer is woodland and, in such habitats, wolves do not chase them for long distances. Instead wolves rely on stealth, short bursts of speed and ambushing to catch the deer. Further, red deer are not equipped with sweat glands, easily over-heating when chased, and their muscle fibre type is not that of an animal adapted for endurance running. Armed with this knowledge, it is startling to discover that the average hunt with hounds last about 3 hours in which time the deer has been run 12 miles. The use of a standard technique in behavioural biology and the gathering together of some well-established facts about red deer suggested already that hunting with hounds is not natural. However, even this did not prepare Dr Bradshaw and myself for the astonishing changes in the physiology of the hunted deer which we discovered from their blood after they had been hunted. The absolute levels of stress hormones are as high as have ever been found in red deer and do not differ from animals with very serious injuries. The carbohydrate resources for the muscles are totally depleted in animals that have been hunted for long periods. Acidity of the blood, resulting from great exertion, is very high at an early stage in the hunt. At an early stage in the hunt the level of haemoglobin in the plasma jumps to eight times what is found in undisturbed animals and then continues to rise. Much of this is probably due to the break up of the red blood cells. In longer hunts extensive leakage of enzymes from the muscles occurs. In some deer these levels are so high that they are likely to be due to actual damage to the muscles. In short, many of the physiological changes are seriously maladaptive and would not be expected to occur in normal conditions. The pattern of the data is entirely consistent with the view that the hunted animals are extremely frightened, pushing themselves as much as they are able and risking a great deal in their attempts to escape. If deer are to be culled, the only realistic alternative to hunting red deer with hounds is to shoot them. We compared the suffering resulting from stalking with that produced by hunting with hounds. The critical issue is the frequency of wounding. While just over 11% of red deer are wounded when shot, the majority of these were then quickly killed. A maximum of 5% of shot deer are likely to escape wounded. At the time of assessment, which occurred immediately after death, the physiological effects of wounding by shooting are comparable to those of a long hunt. An important missing dimension is the length of time for which a deer has to endure its suffering. In this context, it should be appreciated that half the hunted deer escape. Some escaping deer may die from the effects of the long chase. Others are likely to experience the consequences of the long stressful chase for days afterwards. Of the 130 or so red deer killed annually by the Hunts, we believe that all experience an unacceptable level of suffering because of the stresses and strains put on them. At least a further 100 that escape would suffer because of the distance travelled before they escaped. This makes a conservative total of 230 deer a year presenting a serious welfare problem. If the 130 or so animals killed by the Hunts were culled by stalkers instead, then on the basis of the 5% wounding estimate we obtained, less than seven deer would suffer because of their injuries. These are broad calculations but the great reduction in numbers of suffering animals is obvious. Hunting with hounds can no longer be justified on welfare grounds given the standards applied in other fields such as the transit and slaughter of farm animals, the use of animals in research and so forth. This is the key conclusion of my report to the National Trust. The Trust had to weigh this conclusion against other issues, including their wider responsibilities, considerations about the social and economic benefits of hunting and the problems of conservation. At the time of writing this article, I was uncertain what the Council of the National Trust would decide. The result of a ban on hunting could be an increase in indiscriminate and inexpert shooting which might increase the proportion of deer injured from shooting and also reduce the overall red deer population on the Quantocks. The judgements involved are not easy ones and lie outside the realms of science. Even so, the application of orderly method has led to findings which are likely to change the perception that many people have of hunting. Before the study was carried out, it was possible to argue that views about suffering in hunted deer were subjective and open to debate. I was convinced that supporters of the Hunts were sincere in their belief that stag-hunting was not cruel. This position is, I believe, no longer tenable. Both those who hunt red deer and those who are concerned more widely with the welfare of these animals will need to take the new evidence into account. Addendum This article was written before the outcome of my report to the National Trust was known. The day after the report was published, the National Trust banned the hunting of red deer with hounds on their land. I was vilified by those who supported the hunting of
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the National Trust banned the hunting of red deer with hounds on their land. I was vilified by those who supported the hunting of mammals with dogs and the Stag-hunting organizations commissioned a second study by Professor Roger Harris and colleagues, hoping that this group would disprove what we had discovered. However, they obtained exactly the same physiological results as we had obtained. While they made no claim to study the welfare aspects of hunting, they concluded incorrectly that the deer ceased to run when they had exhausted their stores of carbohydrate. Later still, Professor Harris and I collaborated on a report for a Government Inquiry into the hunting of mammals with dogs. This Inquiry led eventually to an Act of Parliament that introduced radical curbs on the hunting of mammals with dogs in England and Wales. Sir Patrick Bateson is a Fellow of the Royal Society, Emeritus Professor of Ethology (Animal Behaviour) at the University of Cambridge, and former Provost of Kings College, Cambridge. An earlier version of this essay appeared in Times Higher Education on 11 April 1997 and is used here with permission. Read more
The Disenchanted Naturalist s Guide to Reality

by Alex Rosenberg
Alex Rosenberg
Nov 9, '09, 5:03 AM
This is a prcis of an argument that naturalism forces upon us a very disillusioned take on reality. It is one that most naturalists have sought to avoid, or at least qualify, reinterpret, or recast to avoid its harshest conclusions about the meaning of life, the nature of morality, the significance of our consciousness self-awareness, and the limits of human self-understanding. This is a vast agenda and its presumptuous to address it even in a format 30 times longer than this one. My excuse is that I stand on the shoulders of giants: the many heroic naturalists who have tried vainly, I think, to find a more hopeful version of naturalism than this one. 1. Why Leave Lifes Persistent Questions to Guy Noir? We all lie awake some nights asking questions about the universe, its meaning, our place in it, the meaning of life, and our lives, who we are, what we should do, as well as questions about god, free will, morality, mortality, the mind, emotions, love. These worries are a luxury compared to the ones most people on Earth address. But they are persistent. And yet they all have simple answers, ones we can pretty well read off from science. Attempts to do so will be accused of scientismthe unwarranted and exaggerated respect for science. I plead guilty to the charge, while taking exception to the unwarranted and exaggerated part. In the book here summarized I take a page out of the PR of the gay and lesbian community and (mis)appropriate the word scientistic the way they did to gay and queer. Scientism is my label for what any one who takes science seriously should believe, and scientistic is just an in-your face adjective for accepting sciences description of the nature of reality. You dont have to be a scientist to be scientistic. In fact, most scientists arent. Why not? Most scientists are reluctant to admit sciences answers to the persistent questions are obvious. There are more than enough reasons they are reluctant to do so. The best reason is that the answers to the persistent questions are not what people want to hear, and the bad news may lead them to kill the messengerscientific research. Its people who pay for science through their support of the NIH, the NSF, and the universities where most research happens. So, scientists have an incentive to cover up. They have a couple of other reasons too: science is fallible and scientists are taught never to be definitive even about their own conclusions; the persistent questions are so broad that no scientists research program addresses them directly, and few are prepared to stick their necks out beyond their specialty when they dont have to. For scientists staying mum about sciences real answers to the persistent questions is overdetermined. Even if scientists came clean however, most people wouldnt accept the answers science gives to the persistent questions because they cant understand the answers. The reason is that the answers dont come in the form of stories with plots. What science has discovered about reality cant be packaged into whodunit narratives about motives and actions. The human mind is the product of a long process of selection for being able to scope out other peoples motives. The way nature solved the problem of endowing us with that ability is by making us conspiracy theoristswe see motives everywhere in nature, and our curiosity is only satisfied when we learn the meaning of thingswhose purposes they serve. The fundamental laws of nature are mostly timeless mathematical truths that work just as well backwards as forward, and in which purposes have no role. Thats why most people have a hard time wrapping their minds around physics or chemistry. Its why science writers are always advised to get the science across to people by telling a story, and why it never really works. Sciences laws and theories just dont come in stories with surprising starts, exciting middles and satisfying dnouements. That makes them hard to remember and hard to understand. Our demand for plotted narratives is the greatest obstacle to getting a grip on reality. Its also what greases the skids down the slippery slope to religions greatest story ever told.
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Scientism helps us see how mistaken the demand for stories instead of theories really is. 2. The Nature Of Reality? Just Ask Physics What is the world really like? Its fermions and bosons, and everything that can be made up of them, and nothing that cant be made up of them. All the facts about fermions and bosons determine or fix all the other facts about reality and what exists in this universe or any other if, as physics may end up showing, there are other ones. In effect, scientisms metaphysics is, to more than a first approximation, given by what physics tell us about the universe. The reason we trust physics to be scientisms metaphysics is its track record of fantastically powerful explanation, prediction and technological application. If what physics says about reality doesnt go, that track record would be a totally inexplicable mystery or coincidence. Neither science nor scientism stands still for coincidence. Physics is by no means finished, and it may hold out even more surprises for common sense than it already has provided. In addition it faces several problemsthe nature of dark matter and dark energy, superstring theory v. quantum loop gravity or even some other way of unifying the standard model of particle physics and general relativity. Finally, there is the problem of attaching a coherent interpretation to quantum mechanics basic notion of a superposition. Scientism needs to grasp just enough about these problems to show that no matter how things turn out in physics, they wont make any difference for sciences answers to the persistent questions. All scientism needs for that job is the 2d law of thermodynamics and the repudiation of future causes, current purposes, or past designs. And these were purged from science by the Newtonian revolution in the late 17 th century. 3: The Purpose Of The Universe And Other Easy Questions Ever since Newton physics has ruled out purposes in the physical realm. If the physical facts fix all the facts, however, then in doing so, it rules out purposes altogether, in biology, in human affairs, and in human thought-processes. Showing how it could do so was a tall order. Until Darwin came along things looked pretty good for Kants pithy observation that there never would be a Newton for the blade of grassthat physics could not explain living things, human or otherwise, because it couldnt invoke purpose. But the process that Darwin discoveredrandom, or rather blind variation, and natural selection, or rather passive environmental filtrationdoes all the work of explaining the means/ends economy of biological nature that shouts out purpose or design at us. What Darwin showed was that all of the beautiful suitability of living things to their environment, every case of fit between organism and niche, and all of the intricate meshing of parts into wholes, is just the result of blind causal processes. Its all just the foresightless play of fermions and bosons producing, in us conspiracy-theorists, the illusion of purpose. Of course, that is no surprise to scientism; if physics fixes all the facts, it could not have turned out any other way. In fact, the mechanism Darwin discovered for building adaptations is the only game in town. Any explanation of the very existence of even the slightest adaptation must be Darwinian. All you need to see this is the 2d law of thermodynamics. 4. Blind Variation And Natural Selection: What A Waste Of Energy! It is not difficult to show that the process Darwin discoveredthe appearance of adaptation through blind variation and environmental filtrationis the inevitable result of the operation of the 2d law of thermodynamics in a universe like ours, filled with numberless atoms and molecules bonding to each other or not in accordance with the laws of chemistry. What is more, it can also be shown that given the 2d law, the only possible source of adaptations in the universe that was originally bereft of them is the process Darwin discovered. When it comes to life, natural selection, it turns out, is the only game in town. There are several reasons for this. Scientism, and for that matter science too, needs an explanation of adaptation in general that starts from the complete absence of any. Otherwise, we have not explained how even the simplest, most minimal sliver of adaptation could have emerged in a world with zero adaptation. Since the process of adaptational evolution is, unlike the basic processes in physics, a one-way past to future process, it can only be driven by the 2d law of thermodynamics, since that is the source of all irreversible processes in the universe. In a deterministic world, or one asymptotically close to it, ticking over in accordance with laws like Newtons or their quantum successors, the only way the first, slightest sliver of an adaptation could have emerged is completely randomlythrough the good offices of the 2d law (or much, much, much more improbably, some quantum event percolating up to the molecular level). Therefore, the process that produces adaptations had to be energetically expensive, wasteful, inefficient, full of imperfections and useless improvements. The initial adaptation had to be random, and subsequent adaptations built on it had to be wasteful, had to lock-in prior steps, and as they enhanced local order, had to pay for it by moving in directions that accelerated the waste of energy. Only the process of blind and mainly wasteful variation (on this planet mostly produced by wasteful sexual recombination), together with accelerating changes in the environment that does the filtering, could meet these demands. But that process is the one Darwin discovered. Ergo , its the only game in town.
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5. Nice Nihilism: The Bad News About Morality and The Good News If there is no purpose to life in general, biological or human for that matter, the question arises whether there is meaning in our individual lives, and if it is not there already, whether we can put it there. One source of meaning on which many have relied is the intrinsic value, in particular the moral value, of human life. People have also sought moral rules, codes, principles which are supposed to distinguish us from merely biological critters whose lives lack (as much) meaning or value (as ours). Besides morality as a source of meaning, value, or purpose, people have looked to consciousness, introspection, self-knowledge as a source of insight into what makes us more than the merely physical facts about us. Scientism must reject all of these straws that people have grasped, and its not hard to show why. Science has to be nihilistic about ethics and morality. There is no room in a world where all the facts are fixed by physical facts for a set of free floating independently existing norms or values (or facts about them) that humans are uniquely equipped to discern and act upon. So, if scientism is to ground the core morality that every one (save some psychopaths and sociopaths) endorses, as the right morality, its going to face a serious explanatory problem. The only way all or most normal humans could have come to share a core morality is through selection on alternative moral codes or systems, a process that resulted in just one winning the evolutionary struggle and becoming fixed in the population. If our universally shared moral core were both the one selected for and also the right moral core, then the correlation of being right and being selected for couldnt be a coincidence. Scientism doesnt tolerate cosmic coincidences. Either our core morality is an adaptation because it is the right core morality or its the right core morality because its an adaptation, or its not right, but only feels right to us. Its easy to show that neither of the first two alternatives is right. Just because there is strong selection for a moral norm is no reason to think it right. Think of the adaptational benefits of racist, xenophobic or patriarchal norms. You cant justify morality by showing its Darwinian pedigree. That way lies the moral disaster of Social Spencerism (better but wrongly known as Social Darwinism). The other alternativethat our moral core was selected for because it was true, correct or rightis an equally far fetched idea. And in part for the same reasons. The process of natural selection is not in general good at filtering for true beliefs, only for ones hitherto convenient for our lines of descent. Think of folk physics, folk biology, and most of all folk psychology. Since natural selection has no foresight, we have no idea whether the moral core we now endorse will hold up, be selected for, over the long-term future of our species, if any. This nihilistic blow is cushioned by the realization that Darwinian processes operating on our forbearers in the main selected for niceness! The core morality of cooperation, reciprocity and even altruism that was selected for in the environment of huntergatherers and early agrarians, continues to dominate our lives and social institutions. We may hope the environment of modern humans has not become different enough eventually to select against niceness. But we cant invest our moral core with more meaning than this: it was a convenience, not for us as individuals, but for our genes. There is no meaning to be found in that conclusion. 6. Descartes Cave Understanding our own psychological make-up and our thought processes are among the most daunting of problems facing science. Thats why less progress has been made understanding the mind than understanding the rest of the universe. On the other hand, because we have immediate introspective access to our minds, most people think they really understand their minds better than anything else. Descartes got sucked into this delusion 500 years ago and made introspective certainty the foundation of knowledge instead of the most tempting distraction from it. Neuroscience will eventually enable us to understand the mind by showing us how the brain works. But we already know enough about it to take nothing introspection tells us about the mind on trust. The phenomenon of blindsightpeople who dont have any conscious color experiences can tell the color of a thingis enough to give us pause about the most apparently certain conclusion introspection insists on: that when you see a color you have a color experience. Then there is the fact, discovered by Libet, that actions are already determined by your brain before you consciously decide to do them! (As for determinism and the denial of real free will, that is a conclusion which, so to speak, goes without saying for scientism.) We have to add to these illusions of the will and sensory experience, robust experimental results which reveal that we actually navigate the world looking through the rear-view mirror! We dont even see what is in front of our eyes, but continually make guesses about it based on what has worked out in our individual and evolutionary past. Discovering the illusion that we are looking through the windshield in stead of the rear view mirror, along with so much more that neuroscience is uncovering about the brain, reveals that the mind is no more a purpose-driven system than anything else in nature. This is just what scientism leads us to expect. There are no purposes in nature; physics has ruled them out, and Darwin has explained them away. Perhaps the most profound illusion introspection foists on us is the notion that our thoughts are actually recorded anywhere in the brain at all in the form introspection reports. This has to be the profoundest illusion of all, because neuroscience has been able to show that networks of human brain cells are no more capable of representing facts about the world the way conscious introspection reports than are the neural ganglia of sea slugs! The real challenge for neuroscience is to explain how the brain
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introspection reports than are the neural ganglia of sea slugs! The real challenge for neuroscience is to explain how the brain stores information when it cant do so in anything like the way introspection tells us it doesin sentences made up in a language of thought. 7. Never Let Your Conscious Be Your Guide The interior monologue that introspection carries on is a sub-vocal version of the play (the tokening) of noise, ink-marks and pixels that passes for public communication. Like public speech and writing, our introspective stream of consciousness doesnt record or report what the brain is actually doing, because the brain cant store or manipulate information in words and sentences of any language, including mentalese. Conscious introspection is not just wrong about sensory experience, its no guide to cognition either. Whatever the brain does, it doesnt operate on beliefs and wants, thoughts and hopes, fears and expectations, insofar as these are supposed to be states that contain sentences, and are about things, facts, events that are outside of the mind. That the brain no more has original intentionality than anything else does is the hardest illusion to give up, and we probably wont be able completely to do so till neuroscience really understands the brain. Meanwhile, knowing what is not on the cards, is still enough to put in proper perspective the humanities endless absorption with meaning, and the persistent demands for interpretative understanding made in the human sciences. If linguistic meaning is anything at all it has got to be something like what the philosopher of language Paul Grice discovered about it: at bottom its a nested set of beliefs and desires that speakers have about their listeners and themselves. Grices own set of conditions necessary and sufficient for linguistic meaning might need to be fine- tuned. But he showed at least to a first approximation what linguistic meaning consists in. Scientism must treat this conclusion as devastating to any attempt to take semantic meaning seriously as a fact about reality. If there literally are no beliefs and desires, because the brain cant encode information in the form of sentences, then there literally is no such thing as linguistic meaning either. Its just a useful heuristic device, one with only a highly imperfect grip on what is going on in thought. Consequently, there is no point asking for the real, the true, the actual meaning of a work of art, or the meaning of an agents act, still less the meaning of a historical event or epoch. The demand of the interpretive disciplines, that we account for ideas and artifacts, actions and events, in terms of their meanings, is part of the insatiable hunger for stories with plots, narratives, and whodunits that human kind have insisted on since natural selection made us into conspiracy-theorists a half a million years ago or so. That is a taste it will be too hard to shake in everyday life. The fiction best-seller list will always be with us. But we need to move most of the works now on the non-fiction list to their rightful places among the magic realist romances, the historical and biographical novels, and the literary confessions. Nevertheless, if the mind is the brain (and scientism cant allow that it is anything else), we have to stop taking consciousness seriously as a source of knowledge or understanding about the mind, or the behavior the brain produces. And we have to stop taking our selves seriously too. We have to realize that there is no self, soul or enduring agent, no subject of the first-person pronoun, tracking its interior life while it also tracks much of what is going on around us. This self cannot be the whole body, or its brain, and there is no part of either that qualifies for being the self by way of numerical-identity over time. There seems to be only oneway we make sense of the person whose identity endures over time and over bodily change. This way is by positing a concrete but non-spatial entity with a point of view somewhere behind the eyes and between the ears in the middle of our heads. Since physics has excluded the existence of anything concrete but nonspatial, and since physics fixes all the facts, we have to give up this last illusion consciousness foists on us. But of course Scientism can explain away the illusion of an enduring self as one that natural selection imposed on our introspections, along with an accompanying penchant for stories. After all it is pretty clear that they solve a couple of major design problems for anything that has to hang around long enough to leave copies of its genes and protect them while they are growing up. 8. History Is Bunk Having come this far, scientism has the resources to explain the frustrations and the failure of the social sciences and history, and it provides a firm basis on which to establish reasonable expectations about the prospects for the human sciences, qua sciences. The nature of meaning and its at-best merely instrumental grasp on real events in our brains and in the world gives scientism manifold reasons not to expect history and the historical versions of the social sciences to provide anything more than diverting stories, post hoc explanations and very short term expectations about the human future. But there is a much deeper reason to be pessimistic about the uses of history: reason enough to conclude that Santayanas or Churchills reasons for taking history seriouslyto know the futurewill never be borne out. The process that appears to give history its meanings by making almost everything in human affairs an adaptation for some thing or person or other, is the same as the one that gives so much of biology its appearance of purpose to us. Human history, like natural history is composed of a sequence of events, states, processes and individuals, all of which are adaptations of various sorts. In the human case a few have been contrived by human design (or so introspection misleadingly tells us). But most have
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sorts. In the human case a few have been contrived by human design (or so introspection misleadingly tells us). But most have arisen through the same process of blind variation and environmental filtration that produces adaptations in the biological realm. Of course the mechanism in the human case rarely involves genetic transmission; what it requires and in fact utilizes is cultural transmission. In human cultural evolution, the relevant selective environment is ever-increasingly other people, other families, other groups, other cultures, societies, their mores, norms, institutions, technologies, etc. Since the environment in which humans operate is largely one created by humans, it changes with accelerating rapidity over time, and almost from the beginning of social history it is driven by arms races. Its arms races between people, groups, their institutions and the social practices that parasitize them, that make history bunk as a guide to the future. It does so first of all by making the human target of cultural adaptation a moving one. It is also changing the target all the time, in ways to which the target-tracking adaptations are blind, and to which even the target-bearing subjects are blind. Human history is not the blind leading the blind. Its the blind wrestling with the blind. Its a fight in which neither side can see the other sides current moves clearly, nor reliably predict their next move or its outcome. Human history is a nested series of arms races that never attain more than a temporary and unstable equilibrium. The obstacle to useful knowledge from history that is posed by the arms race character of human affairs is not avoidable by social science, no matter how scientistic (in the old pejorative sense) it aims to be. The easy way to see this is to recognize that in all the social sciences we face exactly the same explanatory problem that Darwin faced in biology. Since, as science can show, Darwins solution is the only one possible in biology, it must be the only one possible in social science. Almost everything in human affairs has a functioneither for everybody, or for some favored class of people, or for a group, an institution that people participate in; or else it is something like religions, which survive by creating and adaptation to niches composed of people and their beliefs. If almost everything of interest that has come about in human history and human life has functions or components with functions, then it would be yet another coincidence if this featurein which everything human shareswas not systematically related to the mechanisms that brought it about and/or keeps it in business. Once purposes are ruled out of naturebiological, social, psychologicalthere is only one way that somethings functions can bring it about or maintain it, or explain its changes over time: the process that Darwin discoveredblind variation and environmental filtration. And that is a process in which arms races, and the reflexive, nested instability they entrain, makes human sciences only a little less myopic than the history that has been familiar to us since Thucydides. So much for the meaning of history, and everything else we care about. Alex Rosenberg, 2009. No quotation without express permission, please. Read more
Qualitative Experience in Machines

by William G. Lycan
Bill Lycan
Oct 25, '09, 8:51 PM
Abstracted from Qualitative experience in machines, The Digital Phoenix: How computers are changing philosophy. 1. Many people, perhaps most people, have the idea that, however problematic qualitative experience is for the case of human beings, it is a lot more so for that of machines constructed by human beings. Few philosophers doubt that human beings experiences have qualitative characters, but many doubt or disbelieve outright that robots and computers (much less backhoes and can openers) could ever have qualitative experiences at all. Often the latter denial is just evinced, as an intuition, though occasionally it has been argued. There are even some philosophers who think that the big problems have been pretty well solved for human beings or can be solved without much further effort, but who also think that machines simply could not be conscious, have qualitative or subjective experiences, etc.; that is the most extreme version of the idea I am considering. My purpose in this paper is to defend the goose-gander thesis that the disparity here is specious: There is no problem for or objection to qualitative experience in machines that is not equally a quandary for such experience in humans. It is, I contend, mere human chauvinism or at best fallacy to suppose otherwise. Just for the record, here are the leading problems regarding the phenomenal character of human experience: Leibniz-Law objections; the immediacy of our access to qualia; essentialistic and other Kripkean (alleged) modal features of qualia; zombieand absent-qualia-type puzzle cases; first-person/third-person asymmetries of several kinds and the perspectivalness of the mental; putative funny facts as claimed by Thomas Nagel and Frank Jackson; qualia in the strict sense, the introspectible monadic properties of apparent phenomenal individuals; the grainlessness or homogeneity of qualitative features, emphasized by
On the Human
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monadic properties of apparent phenomenal individuals; the grainlessness or homogeneity of qualitative features, emphasized by Sellars; and Joseph Levines now celebrated explanatory gap. That is an impressive array of difficulties for the materialist (1). It is so impressive, in fact, that it immediately lends support to my goose-gander claim. For if there is a problem about qualitative experience in machines that is not equally an objection to a materialist view of people, that problem must be additional even to the many and wide-ranging ones I have listed. It must also be grounded in some substantive difference between machines and human beings. 2. For present purposes, then, we must mean by machine something that contrasts interestingly with human being. (In one sense, uncontroversially, human beings are machines.) Let us mean a kind of artifact, an information-processing device manufactured by people in a laboratory or workshop, out of physical materials that have been obtained without mystery or magic. A paradigm case would be a robot driven by a present-day supercomputer. But I want to allow technologically imaginable extensions of that paradigm; a machine need not have von Neumann architecture, or even digital architecture (whatever that means) at all. And let us idealize a bit: I shall assume that problems of information storage and retrieval, such as the notorious frame problem, are solved. (A fairly outrageous assumption, true. The reason I get to make it is that my chauvinist opponents do not think that their objection could be overcome even if the frame problem and its ilk could be; they think their obstacle arises no matter how good our machine might be at mere information storage and retrieval.) What, then, are the most obvious differences between machines in the foregoing sense and natural-born human beings, that might support the chauvinist position? Let us begin by abstracting away from the most obvious deficiency of actual, 1990s machines: that no such thing has a humanoid behavioral repertoire or anything remotely approaching it, because no present-day machine is anywhere nearly as complex as a human being or gifted with a biologic brains almost unthinkably vast informationprocessing capacity. Here again, my opponents deny that more information processing (per se) would help; no further amount of the same, no matter how large, would convert a mere machine into a sentient creature capable of subjective, qualitative experience. So let us help ourselves to some futuristic, science-fiction technology, and suppose that such resources have afforded us an expert human simulator. Elsewhere I have introduced a character called Harry(2), who through amazing miniaturization and cosmetic art is an entirely lifelike android. He is also a triumphant success of AI: his range of behavior-in-circumstances is equal to that of a fully acculturated and rather talented late 20th-century American adult. No one would ever guess that he is not an ordinary person. (Let us further suppose that his internal functional organization is very like ours; his total pattern of information flow is parallel to ours, even though it runs on considerably different hardware.) But our question is, in the relevant sense, is Harry a person at all? He is, remember, only a computer with limbs; his humanoid looks are only a brilliant makeup job. Some philosophers will readily grant that he has beliefs or belief-like states; after all, he stores and deploys information about his environment and about the rest of the world. But desires are a bit harder; hopes, embarrassments and other conative attitudes still harder. Yet even those who would award Harry a full range of propositional attitudes might still balk at qualitative experience. Even if in some sense he thinks, he does not feel in the most immediate sense in which we doso says the chauvinist. 3. Before we go on to look at some further differences between Harry and the rest of us, let us note that there is a heavy presumption in favor of my egalitarian goose-gander claim (3). First, how do we now tell that any familiar humanoid being is conscious? Normatively pursued, this is just the Problem of Other Minds. But we need not take a stand on the best solution to that problem in order to note its origin. The problem begins with the fact that the ordinary persons evidence for ascribing mental states, including qualitative states, to another human being is the latters behavior, broadly construed, in the circumstances, broadly construed. How we justify the epistemic move from that behavior to the mental ascription is a topic of notorious controversy, but unless we succumb to global skepticism about other minds, we do not doubt that the mental ascription is justified by our observation of the behavior. (Of course the justification is defeasible.) Few readers will have failed to foresee my next move: By hypothesis, Harry is a flawless human simulator and behaves, in any circumstance, just as a human being might. So, over time, he provides his viewers with just the same sorts of behavioral evidence for mental ascriptions that you or I doincluding ascriptions of qualitative experience. So far as we have evidence for ascribing qualitative phenomenal states to each other, we have just as strong prima facie evidence for ascribing them to Harry. And common sense, at least, counts that evidence as very strong, so strong that we rarely even entertain potential defeaters. Notice further that in the case of human beings, such behavioral evidence does not require assumptions about the subjects innards (4). We mature and educated people do know that other human beings are biologic organisms and we presume that the others biology is like theirs, but the standard tacit behavioral reasoning does not depend on that presumption. 1) A child or naf who did not know those things would be just as well justified in her/his mental ascriptions, or at least very nearly as well justified, as we. And 2) if we were watching a videotape of humanoid creatures which might be from another planet and might have a
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as we. And 2) if we were watching a videotape of humanoid creatures which might be from another planet and might have a biology quite different from ours, then if those beings behaved just like humans, we would still be justified in imputing human mental states to themindeed, I submit we would not even think about it, unless our philosophical guard were up. The foregoing points, especially subargument 2), might be thought to beg the question against the chauvinist. But they do not. I have granted (and would insist) that the justification conferred by the behavioral evidence is in every case defeasible. That leaves open the possibility that for machines, or even for aliens, the class of potential defeaters is wider than that which attends mental ascription to human beings, and I have not assumed otherwise. My present point is only that powerful defeat is required in Harrys case; the chauvinist is already onea big onedown. Here is my second argument for the same conclusion. (Science fiction again:) Suppose that Henrietta, a normal human being, requires neurosurgery; indeed her entire CNS is under attack by a virus that will gradually destroy it. The surgeons start replacing it (and if you like, much of the rest of Henrietta) with prostheses. First a few neurons are replaced by tiny electronic devices. These micromachines so sucessfully duplicate the functions of the neurons they replace that Henriettas performance is entirely unimpaired. Then a few more neurons are removed and substituted for; complete success again. And so on until there is no wetware lefteventually, Henriettas behavior is controlled entirely by (micro)machinery, yet her intelligence, personality, poetic abilities, etc., and most importantly her perceptual acuity, sensory judgments and phenomenological reports remain just as always. Now, a chauvinist must maintain that at some point during the sequence of operations, Henrietta ceased to have qualitative experiences; she has become cold and dead inside and is now no more sentient than a pocket calculator. One can imagine a particularly boorish chauvinist asserting this to her face. She would protest, of course, and tell him that her inner life is as rich and vivid as ever, describing it as lyrically as time and his rudeness allow. It is hard to imagine how the boor, or any other chauvinist, would be able to draw a line and state with assurance that after the nth operation, Henrietta ceased to have a phenomenology (whatever she may think to the contrary). It is a hard position to defend. Here again, I do not want to beg the question against the chauvinistor to commit a slippery slope fallacy, either. For there may be a defeater that cuts in at some point and does override the behavioral evidence; and the point may be a vague one to boot (5). As before, I am not asserting that no such defeater exists, but only emphasizing that the chauvinist bears the burden of coming up with one and that it is a considerably heavier burden than one might think. 4. What, then, are the defeaters specific to machinekind? I can think of three possibilities. First: There is Harrys origin. He is an artifact; he was not of woman born, but was cobbled together on a workbench by a group of human beings for purposes of their own. Perhaps a workshop is not a proper mother (imagine Dame Edith Evans enunciating, A workshop?). I do not think any sound chauvinist argument can be based on that difference. For suppose we were to synthesize billions of human cells and stick them together, making a biologic humanoid organism. (We could either make a mature adult straightway or, what is technologically easier, make a fetus and nurture it.) We might further suppose that the resulting pseudo-humanlet us call him Hubertis a molecular duplicate of a prexisting human being. There is little doubt that such a creature would have qualitative experience; at least, if he did not, that would probably not be simply because of his early history (6). So artifactuality per se seems not to count against having phenomenal states. Our first difference is no defeater (7). Second: It may be said that Harry is not a living organism. (Paul Ziff made such an appeal in his well-known article, The Feelings of Robots [8].) If something is not an organism at all, properly speaking, then there does seem to be something odd about ascribing sensations and feelings to it. Much depends on what is considered criterial for living organism. We have already failed to find reason to think that artifactuality per se precludes qualitative experience. Parallel reasoning would show that artifactuality per se does not preclude somethings being a living organism either, for surely our synthesized pseudo-human would count as a living organism. Putting artifactuality aside, then, what constitutes living? Automotion? Autonomous growth and regulation of functions? Reproduction or self-replication? Metabolism? Being made of protein? Whatever. Some of these thingsthe first three, at leastcould be done by a machine, in which case the machine would be alive in the relevant sense and the objections minor premise goes false. Others, very likely the last two, could not be done by machines; but in that case we should ask pointedly why they should be thought germane to consciousness, qualia and the rest. E.g., why should a things metabolizing or not bear on its psychological faculties in so basic a way as to decide the possibility of qualitative experience? It is hard to see what the one has to do with the other, or to imagine a plausible argument leading from no metabolism to no qualitative experience. And likewise for being made of protein. Also, remember Henrietta. She started out as a normal human being but was gradually turned into a machine. Did she go from being a living organism to being non-living, inanimate? In that caseif she had been alive and then ceased to liveshe died, and
On the Human
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being a living organism to being non-living, inanimate? In that caseif she had been alive and then ceased to liveshe died, and obsequies are in order. It would be both hard and easy to make her funeral arrangements: Hard, because we would first have to persuade her that she was dead and that services should be held at all; she might resist that suggestion fairly indignantly, especially when we got around to the question of burial vs. cremation. But then easier, because we would not have to guess posthumously at her wisheswe could just ask her what hymns she wanted, whether there should be a eulogy or a general sermon, and so forth, right up till the last minute. I must say I think I would enjoy attending that funeral; I am not so sure that Henrietta would, herself. Notes 1 As is perhaps surprising and certainly far from well enough known, every one of those problems is resolved in my books Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books / MIT Press, 1987) and Consciousness and Experience (Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books / MIT Press, 1996). Incidentally, in this paper I shall concentrate only on feels in the sense of qualia. But for explicit defense of the thesis that machines can have feelings in the sense of emotions, see (e.g.), A. Sloman and M. Croucher, Why Robots will Have Emotions, in the P roceedings of the 7th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (Vancouver, B.C., 1981), and N.H. Frijda, Emotions in Robots, in H.L. Roitblat and J.-A. Meyer (eds.), Comparative Approaches to Cognitive Science (Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books / MIT Press, 1995). 2 Abortion and the Civil Rights of Machines, in N. Potter and M. Timmons (eds.), Morality and Universality (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1985), pp. 141ff.; and the Appendix to Consciousness, loc. cit. 3 The following two arguments are reprised from the Appendix to Consciousness, loc. cit., pp. 125-26. (Hereafter I am going to spare myself typing loc. cit. in references to my own works.) 4 This claim is contested by Christopher Hill, in Ch. 9 of Sensations (Cambridge University Press, 1991), and by Andrew Melnyk in Inference to the Best Explanation and Other Minds, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 72 (1994): 482-91. What follows in this paragraph is in part a reply to their objections. 5 Ch. 2 of my Consciousness and Experience defends the claim that the notion of conscious awareness is vague and comes in degrees of richness or fullness. 6 My suggestion about molecular twinning is not meant to suggest that qualiaphenomenal propertiesare narrow in the sense of supervening upon molecular constitution. In Ch. 6 of Consciousness and Experience I argue that they are wide and do not. But there is no reason to think that the external factors needed to determine qualitative character include the circumstances of ones coming into existence. 7 In fact, I think that discrimination against Harry on the basis of his birthplace and/or his genesis would be almost literally a case of racism. 8 Analysis 19 (1959): 64-68. In reply, see also J.J.C. Smart, Professor Ziff on Robots, Analysis 19 (1959): 11718, and Hilary Putnam, Robots: Machines or Artificially Created Life?, Journal of Philosophy 61 (1964): 668-91. Interestingly, I have found that young children uniformly resist the anthropomorphizing of computers on the grounds that computers are not alive. Read more
Empathic Concern and Altruism in Humans

by Dan Batson
Dan Batson
Oct 12, '09, 4:25 AM
We humans spend a remarkable amount of time, money, and energy to benefit others, including family, friends, and strangers. Why do we do it? Do we ever care about others for their sakes and not simply for our own? Is our ultimate goal always and exclusively self-benefit, or are we capable of caring about another persons welfare as an ultimate goal? These questions are asking about the existence of altruistic motivation in humans. Dan Batson delivers an address on empathy at the 2007 Autonomy Singularity Creativity conference.
On the Human
2/14/10 1:03 PM
The orthodox answer to such questions, at least in Western thought, is clearly stated by La Rouchefoucauld: The most disinterested love is, after all, but a kind of bargain, in which the dear love of our own selves always proposes to be the gainer some way or other. The empathy-altruism hypothesis offers a very different answer. It claims that empathic concern (other-oriented emotion felt for someone in needsympathy, compassion, tenderness, and the like) produces altruistic motivation (a motivational state with the ultimate goal of increasing the others welfare). Over the past 35 years, other researchers and I have attempted to test the empathy-altruism hypothesis using laboratory experiments and have, overall, found quite strong support (for a partial review see Batson & Shaw, 1991; Batson, forthcoming provides a more complete review). Altruistic motivation does seem to be within the human repertoire. Of course, fundamental questions remain: What produces empathic concern? Can we give a plausible account of the evolution of empathy-induced altruism? What are the practical and theoretical implications if empathy-induced altruism exists? In everyday life, empathic concern seems to be a product of (a) perception of another as in need and (b) intrinsic valuing of that others welfare. Contrary to what is often thought, empathic concern is not a product of perceived similarity of the other to the self. We do not simply feel for ourselves in the other. We can feel empathic concern for a wide range of others in need, even dissimilar others, as long as we value their welfare. In terms of evolutionary history, I do not think that reciprocal altruism, inclusive fitness (kin selection), or group selection in its various forms can account for empathy-induced altruistic motivation in humans. Rather, generalized parental nurturance now seems the most likely evolutionary basis of empathic concerneven for strangers. Human parental nurturance is far more flexible and future-oriented than the parental instincts found in mostperhaps allother mammalian species. It is need-oriented, emotion-based, and goal-directed. And it can be generalized well beyond our own childrenin the case of pets, even to members of other species. If parental nurturance is the prototype for empathy-induced altruism, then the intensity of tender, empathic feeling for strangers should vary with perceived similarity to progeny, not perceived similarity to self. Is this true? Colleagues and I sought to address this question with an experiment (Batson, Lishner, Cook, & Sawyer, 2005). Undergraduate women were asked to read a pilot article for a new feature for the Daily Kansan, the local university newspaper. The feature was called Helping Hands, and was to run articles in which students described their volunteer experiences in the local community. Some of the women read about a female student helping Kayla, a university student much like themselves, with rehabilitation exercises after a severely broken leg. Others read about exactly the same volunteer experience, except that Kayla was a child, a dog, or a puppy. This variation produced four experimental conditions: Student: a badly hurt and struggling 20-year-old junior at KU Child: a badly hurt and struggling 3-year-old child Dog: a badly hurt and struggling 5-year old adult dog Puppy: a badly hurt and struggling 4-month-old puppy After reading, the women were asked to rate the similarity to themselves of Kayla. As you would expect, the student-Kayla was rated as more similar than the child, and far more similar than the dog and puppy. But when the women reported the empathic concern they felt for Kayla, it was significantly lower for the student-Kayla than for the other three. Clearly, the reported empathic concern was not tied to perceived similarity to self. Rather, it was tied to Kayla being more progeny-like, either as a child or as a pet. Empathic Concern in Each Experimental Condition Student: 4.25 Child: 5.42 Dog: 5.22 Puppy: 4.84 (Empathic concern was measured on a 1-7 scale, with 1 = not at all, 7 = extremely.) Results of this experiment underscore the need for increased attention to the classical, but currently neglected, suggestion that empathy felt for strangers is based on cognitive generalization of the human parental instinct that is so vital for the survival of children. The extensive evidence for the empathy-altruism hypothesis supports the conclusion that the human motivational repertoire is broader than self-interest (egoism). When we feel empathic concern, we can care for the welfare of others (altruism) and not simply for the dear love of our own selves (egoism). Indeed, the human motivational repertoire may be broader than egoism
On the Human
2/14/10 1:03 PM
simply for the dear love of our own selves (egoism). Indeed, the human motivational repertoire may be broader than egoism and altruism combined. We may also care for the welfare of a group or collective (collectivism), and we may be motivated to uphold moral principles such as justice or fairness (principlism). One implication of this broadened motivational repertoire is that we cannot justify our callousness by an appeal to human nature; we are capable of more. Another implication is that we have more motivational resources than self-interest in our attempts to address important social problems. We are no longer limited to the carrots and sticks of egoism. Notes: Batson, C. D. (forthcoming). Altruism in humans. New York: Oxford University Press. Batson, C. D., Lishner, D. A., Cook, J., & Sawyer, S. (2005). Similarity and nurturance: Two possible sources of empathy for strangers. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 27, 15-25. Batson, C. D., & Shaw, L. L. (1991). Evidence for altruism: Toward a pluralism of pro-social motives. Psychological Inquiry, 2, 107-122. Read more
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