My sub-species has finally been identified: fervent public autodidact
I was honestly very touched by this comment from Alexander Iwanow on my FaceBook page. I just had to save it here so I can look back on it on those days when I wonder whether anyone reads those reviews that I sometimes put so much into.
"Mr. Stark, I've been an admirer of your fervent public autodidactism for years now. You've turned me on to many great books (and off of many bad ones). You are among the most vibrant, reliable, and judicious voices to gift himself on a public website. (Jeff Bezos should give you a plaque for helping him to sell so many books!) I mean hell, man, you even got me to look into YOGA...!!! Thank you for responding warmly to my somewhat rude and impulsive kamikaze invite, and I look forward to whatever twists, turns, and elegant refinements your consciousness opts to undertake."
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Functional Training and Corrective Exercise
Functional Training and Corrective Exercise
In his T-Nation article, trainer Mike Robertson addresses the concept of functional training in terms of the popular trend toward using devices like BOSU balls, wobble boards, etc., that are said to help develop better stability and prevent injuries. Mike discusses why the current trend to using instability devices isn't always productive and how it actually gets away from the concept of functional training. I highly recommend Mike's article, and I want to give some additional context for it here.
The idea of "functional training" was originally to move away from isolation exercises like leg extensions and curls and instead have people do things that were more like the specific challenges they expect to face, forcing them to support, move, and stabilize themselves in controlled ways to prepare to handle real physical challenges better without injury, and in the process, correct more basic weaknesses.
Trainers began to notice that people don't use their bodies in the way that an isolation mentality would predict; the parts are interdependent in important ways when we move. Various neural and connective tissue mechanisms linkn our body parts together to stabilize them as they move through space and exert force against resistance. This led to increasing use of exercises emphasizing multi-joint movements that more closely mimicked real sports movements and real life movements, and led to a growing distinction between training specifically to lift heavy weights in particular ways, training to build big muscles, and training to perform better and avoid injury in other activities. "Corrective" and "functional" training came to increasingly mean doing exercises on unstable surfaces or training the abs, and this starts to drift away from the original concept.
Why is this a drift away from true functional training? ...
Two very important concepts underlie this trend: the "core" and the "kinetic chain."
When someone gets hurt, especially repeated patterns of injury that don't have another obvious cause, it is currently "best practice" to try to track this down to a problem somewhere stabilizing the body properly during movement. Particularly when someone experiences a range of different injuries on the same side of the body, trainers will tend to suspect a problem with the "core." This refers to the central trunk stabilizing muscles and structures.
The "core" obviously doesn't do all of the work of movement. You can think of it as like a platform that we push off in order to move. Actual movement occurs when muscles contract in a precisely timed sequences, where movement at one joint decelerates followed by acceleration at the next joint in the sequence. Thus a "kinetic chain" or simply chain of movements.
The motor cortex in the brain appears to be organized to coordinate muscles in terms of these sequences rather than to fire individual muscles, so this is considered a very fundamental idea. The constant alternation and interplay between producing force at one joint and reducing force at another is coordinated by complex neural mechanisms that are considered an important aspect of proprioception, a general term for our inner body sense.
A synopsis of this topic would be remiss if I didn't mention the first widely read book on the topic, and the one that first fascinated me with it: Total Body Training by Richard Dominguez and Bob Gajda. Many of the concepts that are now widely taken for granted in functional training originated in that very book which is now somewhat hard to find. In fact, this book appears to be the first place where the now ubiquitous late-night infomercial term "core" was used seriously to mean the stabilizing platform for movement. Dominguez is a sports medicine orthopedist and Gajda did his Ph.D thesis in biomechanics. Total Body Training was the result of that work. It is also worth noting that Gajda was a very successful bodybuilder before his work in functional training, having once beaten Arnold for the Mr. Universe title.
The trend toward using wobble boards and such to improve performance and prevent injury begins with Gajda and Dominguez's ideas and is based on improving proprioception skills. The idea is that weaknesses in "core" strength are transmitted by means of the "kinetic chain" to become problems that don't bear any obvious relationship back to the "core."
It's a little like the medical notion of referred pain. Problems in stabilizing the trunk get "referred" to injuries in more remote places in the body. When people try to correct for problems with their gait, their posture, and their basic movements, they compensate by using other muscles and end up with patterns that induce strain and eventually injury.
So one of the ideas is to improve proprioception by exercising on unstable surfaces, forcing us to develop better stabilization skills rather than overcompensating with the wrong muscles. Especially if we lack adequate balance, which isn't uncommon.
The problem is that while stabilization by learning balance skills is important, it is only part of the problem and not neccessarily the best focus for remediation. One of the most common "core" problems appears to be when certain tight core muscles inhibit other muscles through a neural mechanism called reciprocal inhibition. This causes a deep inefficiency that is transmitted to other areas of the body. One common example is when a tight muscle on the front of the hip diminishes hip extension and inhibits the use of the glutes. This imbalance is transmitted through the movement chain to cause problems with other parts of the leg during activity.
The point is that you won't neccessarily best fix this kind of problem by wobbling on a board or a ball. You have to assess the problem and come up with movements that help address the imbalance. Assessment isn't black magic, there are some basic tests that are widely used by therapists and trainers. It does take a little experience to watch a movement and recognize problems with it, but the assessment tests are designed to amplify the basic problems so you can see them better. If you don't have a trainer handy and want to know more about assessment, Gray Cook's book The Athletic Body in Balance is a good start. His "functional movement screen" is a good example of a simple assessment tool.
There's nothing wrong with doing work for proprioception skills and limb stabilizing strength, but it shouldn't be your primary focus since injuries are more likely to be the result of underlying deeper stabilizing muscle imbalances, somewhat obscured by the actions of the kinetic chain.
If you remember that movement starts from a platform, and operates through a chain, it makes sense to assess the integrity of the platform first rather than trying to adjust the wobbling at the end of the chain.
That's why I think Mike's approach to training with functional corrective exercise is so helpful.
In his T-Nation article, trainer Mike Robertson addresses the concept of functional training in terms of the popular trend toward using devices like BOSU balls, wobble boards, etc., that are said to help develop better stability and prevent injuries. Mike discusses why the current trend to using instability devices isn't always productive and how it actually gets away from the concept of functional training. I highly recommend Mike's article, and I want to give some additional context for it here.
The idea of "functional training" was originally to move away from isolation exercises like leg extensions and curls and instead have people do things that were more like the specific challenges they expect to face, forcing them to support, move, and stabilize themselves in controlled ways to prepare to handle real physical challenges better without injury, and in the process, correct more basic weaknesses.
Trainers began to notice that people don't use their bodies in the way that an isolation mentality would predict; the parts are interdependent in important ways when we move. Various neural and connective tissue mechanisms linkn our body parts together to stabilize them as they move through space and exert force against resistance. This led to increasing use of exercises emphasizing multi-joint movements that more closely mimicked real sports movements and real life movements, and led to a growing distinction between training specifically to lift heavy weights in particular ways, training to build big muscles, and training to perform better and avoid injury in other activities. "Corrective" and "functional" training came to increasingly mean doing exercises on unstable surfaces or training the abs, and this starts to drift away from the original concept.
Why is this a drift away from true functional training? ...
Two very important concepts underlie this trend: the "core" and the "kinetic chain."
When someone gets hurt, especially repeated patterns of injury that don't have another obvious cause, it is currently "best practice" to try to track this down to a problem somewhere stabilizing the body properly during movement. Particularly when someone experiences a range of different injuries on the same side of the body, trainers will tend to suspect a problem with the "core." This refers to the central trunk stabilizing muscles and structures.
The "core" obviously doesn't do all of the work of movement. You can think of it as like a platform that we push off in order to move. Actual movement occurs when muscles contract in a precisely timed sequences, where movement at one joint decelerates followed by acceleration at the next joint in the sequence. Thus a "kinetic chain" or simply chain of movements.
The motor cortex in the brain appears to be organized to coordinate muscles in terms of these sequences rather than to fire individual muscles, so this is considered a very fundamental idea. The constant alternation and interplay between producing force at one joint and reducing force at another is coordinated by complex neural mechanisms that are considered an important aspect of proprioception, a general term for our inner body sense.
A synopsis of this topic would be remiss if I didn't mention the first widely read book on the topic, and the one that first fascinated me with it: Total Body Training by Richard Dominguez and Bob Gajda. Many of the concepts that are now widely taken for granted in functional training originated in that very book which is now somewhat hard to find. In fact, this book appears to be the first place where the now ubiquitous late-night infomercial term "core" was used seriously to mean the stabilizing platform for movement. Dominguez is a sports medicine orthopedist and Gajda did his Ph.D thesis in biomechanics. Total Body Training was the result of that work. It is also worth noting that Gajda was a very successful bodybuilder before his work in functional training, having once beaten Arnold for the Mr. Universe title.
The trend toward using wobble boards and such to improve performance and prevent injury begins with Gajda and Dominguez's ideas and is based on improving proprioception skills. The idea is that weaknesses in "core" strength are transmitted by means of the "kinetic chain" to become problems that don't bear any obvious relationship back to the "core."
It's a little like the medical notion of referred pain. Problems in stabilizing the trunk get "referred" to injuries in more remote places in the body. When people try to correct for problems with their gait, their posture, and their basic movements, they compensate by using other muscles and end up with patterns that induce strain and eventually injury.
So one of the ideas is to improve proprioception by exercising on unstable surfaces, forcing us to develop better stabilization skills rather than overcompensating with the wrong muscles. Especially if we lack adequate balance, which isn't uncommon.
The problem is that while stabilization by learning balance skills is important, it is only part of the problem and not neccessarily the best focus for remediation. One of the most common "core" problems appears to be when certain tight core muscles inhibit other muscles through a neural mechanism called reciprocal inhibition. This causes a deep inefficiency that is transmitted to other areas of the body. One common example is when a tight muscle on the front of the hip diminishes hip extension and inhibits the use of the glutes. This imbalance is transmitted through the movement chain to cause problems with other parts of the leg during activity.
The point is that you won't neccessarily best fix this kind of problem by wobbling on a board or a ball. You have to assess the problem and come up with movements that help address the imbalance. Assessment isn't black magic, there are some basic tests that are widely used by therapists and trainers. It does take a little experience to watch a movement and recognize problems with it, but the assessment tests are designed to amplify the basic problems so you can see them better. If you don't have a trainer handy and want to know more about assessment, Gray Cook's book The Athletic Body in Balance is a good start. His "functional movement screen" is a good example of a simple assessment tool.
There's nothing wrong with doing work for proprioception skills and limb stabilizing strength, but it shouldn't be your primary focus since injuries are more likely to be the result of underlying deeper stabilizing muscle imbalances, somewhat obscured by the actions of the kinetic chain.
If you remember that movement starts from a platform, and operates through a chain, it makes sense to assess the integrity of the platform first rather than trying to adjust the wobbling at the end of the chain.
That's why I think Mike's approach to training with functional corrective exercise is so helpful.
Flowchart for responding to negative blogs
The Air Force (their Public Affairs Agency) has this simple but useful flowchart for responding to negative press online. I found this reading web marketing author David Meerman Scott's WebInk blog. It's largely commonsense, but as the saying goes, such isn't always so common.
The Air Force (their Public Affairs Agency) has this simple but useful flowchart for responding to negative press online. I found this reading web marketing author David Meerman Scott's WebInk blog. It's largely commonsense, but as the saying goes, such isn't always so common.
Which is Better: Conscious or Unconscious Decision Making?
Which is Better: Conscious or Unconscious Decision Making ?
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081224215542.htm
The snippet above from Science Daily reports on the superiority of unconscious decision making in the case of estimating likelihoods.
My thoughts ...
There's a fairly sizable literature on decision making, and typically the headlines hide the facts in this field. I'd estimate that about 70% of the recent experiments went the way of this article with their conclusion (and of course one of Malcolm Gladwell's popular books) and about 30% went the opposite way, saying that the work 'proves' that complex decisions should not be left to unconscious proceses. It's like the nature/nurture question, we feel compelled to slide toward the extremes.
My impression is that what the literature (collectively) has shown so far is:
1. There are perceptual tracking mechanisms and very powerful computational mechanisms that operate completely outside of awareness for the most part, yet are important in decision making (rapid cognition, etc., the "human intuition is so amazing" school)
2. Our conscious reasoning processes are built very recently (phylogenetically) on a substrate of other things, and so they have a lot of biases and blind spots and rely heavily on our limited and easily distrated working memory capacity (Kahnemann, Tversky, etc., the "human reasoning is so fallible" school)
3. The unconscious mechanisms don't work by magic, i.e. with the exception of some basic category templates for recognizing and sorting things, they still rely on an acquired store of experience built onto those templates (Kant plus Darwin)
4. Good decision making for complex problems is good largely because because it tends to use the unconscious processes effectively, and does this by focusing attention on the relevant aspects of the problem (knowing what is relevant and what is not is sometimes the meat of the problem, and sometimes a given)
5. Focusing attention on the relevant aspects of a complex problem generally requires us to draw from the skills that rely on working memory and are generally conscious and build on structural rules, sequencing, and explicit algorithms (the virtual von Neumann machine that many of us we believe we possess in our head)
So while the above is a very simplistic account of a big topic, I think it helps illustrate that "conscious" vs. "unconscious" is not really the important issue in decision making, although it is certainly useful to distinguish automatic processes. The more compelling issue is how to structure problems so we can use the powerful resources of the mind, and how to learn the skills for making best use of those abilities, and the skills for recognizing our own biases and blind spots when we structure problems.
Many natural mechanisms work best on imperfect information but fail when compared to systematic reasoning with good information. However most real and meaningful human problems in nature require responses with limited resources, limited time, and very limited information, so a lot of the research actually demonstrates that while we can do better than intuition in theory, we can't do better than intuition in practice.
That is, unless we have some way of "cheating" by having unusually good information or knowing the answer ahead of time. Our species dependence on social imitation probably reflects exactly that, a way of "cheating" the limitations of individual problem solving by copying what other people are doing. For every problem we find that legitimately shows that people screwed up by trusting systematic reasoning too far, we can find one where someone trusted an intuition that had catastrophic consequences. In my opinion, the key skill set is in learning clues for recognizing when to trust each tool. That is, rather than espousing either blind trust or mistrust in powerful automatic processes.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081224215542.htm
The snippet above from Science Daily reports on the superiority of unconscious decision making in the case of estimating likelihoods.
My thoughts ...
There's a fairly sizable literature on decision making, and typically the headlines hide the facts in this field. I'd estimate that about 70% of the recent experiments went the way of this article with their conclusion (and of course one of Malcolm Gladwell's popular books) and about 30% went the opposite way, saying that the work 'proves' that complex decisions should not be left to unconscious proceses. It's like the nature/nurture question, we feel compelled to slide toward the extremes.
My impression is that what the literature (collectively) has shown so far is:
1. There are perceptual tracking mechanisms and very powerful computational mechanisms that operate completely outside of awareness for the most part, yet are important in decision making (rapid cognition, etc., the "human intuition is so amazing" school)
2. Our conscious reasoning processes are built very recently (phylogenetically) on a substrate of other things, and so they have a lot of biases and blind spots and rely heavily on our limited and easily distrated working memory capacity (Kahnemann, Tversky, etc., the "human reasoning is so fallible" school)
3. The unconscious mechanisms don't work by magic, i.e. with the exception of some basic category templates for recognizing and sorting things, they still rely on an acquired store of experience built onto those templates (Kant plus Darwin)
4. Good decision making for complex problems is good largely because because it tends to use the unconscious processes effectively, and does this by focusing attention on the relevant aspects of the problem (knowing what is relevant and what is not is sometimes the meat of the problem, and sometimes a given)
5. Focusing attention on the relevant aspects of a complex problem generally requires us to draw from the skills that rely on working memory and are generally conscious and build on structural rules, sequencing, and explicit algorithms (the virtual von Neumann machine that many of us we believe we possess in our head)
So while the above is a very simplistic account of a big topic, I think it helps illustrate that "conscious" vs. "unconscious" is not really the important issue in decision making, although it is certainly useful to distinguish automatic processes. The more compelling issue is how to structure problems so we can use the powerful resources of the mind, and how to learn the skills for making best use of those abilities, and the skills for recognizing our own biases and blind spots when we structure problems.
Many natural mechanisms work best on imperfect information but fail when compared to systematic reasoning with good information. However most real and meaningful human problems in nature require responses with limited resources, limited time, and very limited information, so a lot of the research actually demonstrates that while we can do better than intuition in theory, we can't do better than intuition in practice.
That is, unless we have some way of "cheating" by having unusually good information or knowing the answer ahead of time. Our species dependence on social imitation probably reflects exactly that, a way of "cheating" the limitations of individual problem solving by copying what other people are doing. For every problem we find that legitimately shows that people screwed up by trusting systematic reasoning too far, we can find one where someone trusted an intuition that had catastrophic consequences. In my opinion, the key skill set is in learning clues for recognizing when to trust each tool. That is, rather than espousing either blind trust or mistrust in powerful automatic processes.
Monday, December 29, 2008
Hack: using parity to burn more reliable disks
If you like to burn data disks and are concerned about their longevity, check out this great idea posted on LifeHacker. The example here uses a Windows freeware tool called QuickPar, and for recovery you will need another tool (such as ISOBUSTER) to read surviving data from bad disks so you can use this method.
Burn More Reliable Discs with QuickPar http://tinyurl.com/9j7hyb
The tip is about using that lump of extra space you usually end up with on your data disks to hold parity files for your data. Parity files have extra information that lets you recover your files if they are later found to be corrupted. I've had a number of cases where old disks started to have a few corrupted files before the entire disk became unreadable, and this tip would have saved a lot of anguish. Of course if you want to protect everything on the disk, you'll need to leave more space on your disks for the parity files.
This takes just a touch of tech savvy, but it's a beginner tip as "hacks" go. Anyone comfortable with using disk burners and disk reading tools like ISOBUSTER will find this an easy thing to use to make the most precious data on their CDs and DVDs much more reliable.
So why don't they build this functionality into all disk burning tools?
Todd
Burn More Reliable Discs with QuickPar http://tinyurl.com/9j7hyb
The tip is about using that lump of extra space you usually end up with on your data disks to hold parity files for your data. Parity files have extra information that lets you recover your files if they are later found to be corrupted. I've had a number of cases where old disks started to have a few corrupted files before the entire disk became unreadable, and this tip would have saved a lot of anguish. Of course if you want to protect everything on the disk, you'll need to leave more space on your disks for the parity files.
This takes just a touch of tech savvy, but it's a beginner tip as "hacks" go. Anyone comfortable with using disk burners and disk reading tools like ISOBUSTER will find this an easy thing to use to make the most precious data on their CDs and DVDs much more reliable.
So why don't they build this functionality into all disk burning tools?
Todd
Thoughts on Twitter (so far)
I just started using Twitter this week and have been wondering whether it would be of any use in the long run. It seems to leverage our instinct for gossip, effectively a giant ongoing chat room. But that doesn’t mean it can’t become a powerful tool.
First, so far, I think it's pretty clear that it is not the right medium for intelligent discussion and encourages a soundbite mentality that is already too common and too tempting. We can’t structure a thoughtful argument and provide context for an original thought in 140 chars, unless we have been involved in a dialog for a while or have common source of context, neither of which is encouraged by the Twitter format. It is possible but extremely inconvenient for that purpose. You can only give clues to your thinking, or give the impression of saying something useful, which hopefully will trigger thinking in other people.
However, that said, it also seems to me that Twitter seems particularly powerful when used as a source of quick pointers to potentially interesting things … a spur to creativity or looking in new directions. The more people think of it as a way to trigger ideas in others, the more selective they will be about giving ideas rather than statuses, and the more feeds we can read that trigger useful ideas. So long as the mundane “I am going out to the store for some bread and milk now” stuff doesn’t overwhelm the channel.
I think that (as with non-virtual relations), it works best if you surround yourself with people that have good ideas and diverse thoughts about similar interests to yours (and maybe a couple of offbeat friends). I can't see how people following 5,000 Twitter contacts can use it for anything more than random inspiration?
(This is an edit of a comment to Cameron Reilly's blog post about how he uses Twitter).
I just started using Twitter this week and have been wondering whether it would be of any use in the long run. It seems to leverage our instinct for gossip, effectively a giant ongoing chat room. But that doesn’t mean it can’t become a powerful tool.
First, so far, I think it's pretty clear that it is not the right medium for intelligent discussion and encourages a soundbite mentality that is already too common and too tempting. We can’t structure a thoughtful argument and provide context for an original thought in 140 chars, unless we have been involved in a dialog for a while or have common source of context, neither of which is encouraged by the Twitter format. It is possible but extremely inconvenient for that purpose. You can only give clues to your thinking, or give the impression of saying something useful, which hopefully will trigger thinking in other people.
However, that said, it also seems to me that Twitter seems particularly powerful when used as a source of quick pointers to potentially interesting things … a spur to creativity or looking in new directions. The more people think of it as a way to trigger ideas in others, the more selective they will be about giving ideas rather than statuses, and the more feeds we can read that trigger useful ideas. So long as the mundane “I am going out to the store for some bread and milk now” stuff doesn’t overwhelm the channel.
I think that (as with non-virtual relations), it works best if you surround yourself with people that have good ideas and diverse thoughts about similar interests to yours (and maybe a couple of offbeat friends). I can't see how people following 5,000 Twitter contacts can use it for anything more than random inspiration?
(This is an edit of a comment to Cameron Reilly's blog post about how he uses Twitter).
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Being "scientific" about exercise and weight control
I was looking for references to research on the relationship of appetite and exercise and I came across an interesting blog post that inspired some thoughts. I see a lot of people trying to interpret research results, which in general I like to see. But people also seem to commonly try to draw advice for themselves from selectively chosen studies, and that's the part that I wanted to comment on.
If you want to know how exercise effects your body, and you have confidence in science, try doing it and measure the effects. Make yourself the study population rather than trying to identify (or not) with the population in the latest study. Or, if instead you want to understand the research, get the background for the program and read the literature directly.
People tend to treat journalist's reports of research it as if it were "scientific advice" and then when it is nothing of the kind (which is generally the case), the researchers are accused of being hopelessly obscure, getting paid for results, or being contradictory about their advice. What a bum rap. That's not the point of research at all.
Research is most *interesting* when it contains contradictions and gets *boring* when the results become consistent. Sure, you want to prove your new hypothesis is right, but if it were easy to demonstrate someone would already have demonstrated it. You expect things to be fuzzy in a new area of research where there are interesting new hypotheses to test.You can almost never generallize "laws" (or advice) from a single study, nor should you expect to.
Conclusions vary even in very similar studies either because of the way the question was asked or because they didn't identify the right variables in the right way yet to address the question. That's assuming they're even studying something that can be characterized in a law-like way, which isn't always the case.
Sometimes individual differences outweigh generalized laws, even when there *are* underlying laws (this is a common finding in social psychology research). More to the point, this seems to be the case somewhat with nutrition as well. Conflicting results are a symptom of a fertile research topic.
IMO, if you want to draw good advice from research, stop jumping on every new study that comes out just because it seems to say something you'd like to hear, and learn to follow the *trends* in the research programs. That means reading technical books and journals rather than sound bites and blogs, and looking for commonalities rather than just reports that stand out because they are novel. But that's more work than you probably need to do.
There are a lot of people that have been spending decades researching obesity and there are some very useful conclusions. But you still have to do the work to see what works best for you.
I think there are many, many fat people out there exercising like crazy and not reaching their goals because they keep looking for magic bullets or excuses instead of starting with sound principles and then experimenting carefully to see what is working for them and what isn't.
I've noticed that there are also a number of chubby runners out there who stay chubby because they take in more than they put out, which I suspect is due to the putative appetite effect. It could well be that they would benefit by changing their training to briefer, higher intensity work, so that the appetite effect would lessen and the metabolic increase last longer. But that's speculation at this point and represents very hard work and many people would give up on such a regimen if they're used to jogging and elliptical machines and such. So they have to experiment to see what's right for them.
Well, anyway, personal experimentation (and brief high intensity training) is an approach that has always worked very well for me. Just remember, people tend to distort their own perception of what they take in and what they put out (*that's* a pretty well validated research result across many studies). So when you measure your compliance and your results, be sure to be specific and use accurate measurements and don't rely on memory and estimation.
I was looking for references to research on the relationship of appetite and exercise and I came across an interesting blog post that inspired some thoughts. I see a lot of people trying to interpret research results, which in general I like to see. But people also seem to commonly try to draw advice for themselves from selectively chosen studies, and that's the part that I wanted to comment on.
If you want to know how exercise effects your body, and you have confidence in science, try doing it and measure the effects. Make yourself the study population rather than trying to identify (or not) with the population in the latest study. Or, if instead you want to understand the research, get the background for the program and read the literature directly.
People tend to treat journalist's reports of research it as if it were "scientific advice" and then when it is nothing of the kind (which is generally the case), the researchers are accused of being hopelessly obscure, getting paid for results, or being contradictory about their advice. What a bum rap. That's not the point of research at all.
Research is most *interesting* when it contains contradictions and gets *boring* when the results become consistent. Sure, you want to prove your new hypothesis is right, but if it were easy to demonstrate someone would already have demonstrated it. You expect things to be fuzzy in a new area of research where there are interesting new hypotheses to test.You can almost never generallize "laws" (or advice) from a single study, nor should you expect to.
Conclusions vary even in very similar studies either because of the way the question was asked or because they didn't identify the right variables in the right way yet to address the question. That's assuming they're even studying something that can be characterized in a law-like way, which isn't always the case.
Sometimes individual differences outweigh generalized laws, even when there *are* underlying laws (this is a common finding in social psychology research). More to the point, this seems to be the case somewhat with nutrition as well. Conflicting results are a symptom of a fertile research topic.
IMO, if you want to draw good advice from research, stop jumping on every new study that comes out just because it seems to say something you'd like to hear, and learn to follow the *trends* in the research programs. That means reading technical books and journals rather than sound bites and blogs, and looking for commonalities rather than just reports that stand out because they are novel. But that's more work than you probably need to do.
There are a lot of people that have been spending decades researching obesity and there are some very useful conclusions. But you still have to do the work to see what works best for you.
I think there are many, many fat people out there exercising like crazy and not reaching their goals because they keep looking for magic bullets or excuses instead of starting with sound principles and then experimenting carefully to see what is working for them and what isn't.
I've noticed that there are also a number of chubby runners out there who stay chubby because they take in more than they put out, which I suspect is due to the putative appetite effect. It could well be that they would benefit by changing their training to briefer, higher intensity work, so that the appetite effect would lessen and the metabolic increase last longer. But that's speculation at this point and represents very hard work and many people would give up on such a regimen if they're used to jogging and elliptical machines and such. So they have to experiment to see what's right for them.
Well, anyway, personal experimentation (and brief high intensity training) is an approach that has always worked very well for me. Just remember, people tend to distort their own perception of what they take in and what they put out (*that's* a pretty well validated research result across many studies). So when you measure your compliance and your results, be sure to be specific and use accurate measurements and don't rely on memory and estimation.
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Creative Science, Naturally
[I am posting this to preserve a copy of it as much as to share it. It is a book review originally published in Fall, 2003 Entelechy. ]
A review of Nature’s Magic: Synergy in Evolution and the Fate of Humankind written by Peter Corning
by Todd I. Stark
In Nature's Magic, Peter Corning offers us good news and bad news. The he good news is that chance, necessity, and natural selection aren't the only factors in our evolution. There is also a very real role for purpose (or more specifically, purposiveness.) The role of purposiveness has continued to increase over time.
The bad news is that our efforts to seek an underlying grand law or force that governs history may be fundamentally flawed. We may be more responsible for our own survival than we have so far been willing to recognize. The true teleonomy inherent in Corning's view gives us a creative (and destructive) role that is discounted in theories that rely on grand laws of history. Corning refers to the various people who have searched in vain for an inherent mathematical law of evolution as "Neo-Pythagoreans" after the cult surrounding the legendary mathematician. He counts various well-known contemporary complexity theorists like Stuart Kauffman and physicists like Steven Weinberg among them.
Corning doesn't see the world as necessarily a glorious self-maintaining Gaia, he sees it as a place where living things through their relations and interactions have come to have certain responsibility for their own fate. This becomes an awesome burden once we apply this view to humans, where we take on the role of the Sorcerer's Apprentice in Goethe's (and Disney's) tale. The apprentice knows just enough magic to get himself into serious trouble.
The starting point is Arthur Koestler's insight that "true innovation occurs when things are put together for the first time that had been separate." Peter Corning takes this insight to heart and explores its remarkable implications, applying this "astonishing capacity" to nature in general.
The essence of the argument is not that nature creates things that cannot be explained or things that cannot be understood, but that no grand laws of nature predict her fruits. In effect, evolution is grounded in nature's astonishing capacity to create beyond what we foresee at every juncture.
Corning's theory of complexity in evolution is based on synergy, by which he simply and elegantly means the myriad effects of combining things where the result doesn't resemble what we'd expect simply by adding them together: the whole is different than the sum of the parts.
Corning's "Holistic Darwinism" is a way of viewing variety and selection in nature which is at once is fully consistent with the neo-Darwinian synthesis and also provides theoretical bridges with the cybernetic theory of self-regulating systems and much of the body of scientific literature in social and political sciences. Holistic Darwinism shifts the focus in natural selection from selection itself as a causal force to where the variety comes from.
Corning leans heavily upon John Maynard Smith's concept of "synergistic selection." If unrelated individuals are often locked into a shared reproductive fate with others, as Corning suggests, then it is reasonable to assume that they will evolve strategies for cooperation, not for "altruism" per se but for their own interests.
This is an ambitious task for a single book, but at least the foundation is put down extremely well here, persuading us that nature continually yields variety that is neither predictable nor random, but fundamentally economic in its operation. In other words, Holistic Darwinism sees nature as a great marketplace where the functional outcomes of new innovations are continually shaped by the consequences of their costs and benefits.
If combined effects in nature are really different in general than we would expect from simply putting things together, there are some unexpected implications. For one thing, it implies that history matters. If things combine in new ways to produce new features in nature that are not simply an extension of the laws governing the parts, then those new features can potentially have meaningful functional outcomes that play a role in natural selection. This is the core of Corning's argument.
Corning boldly claims that Lamarck was right after all (in a sense). Not that giraffes can create new genes by stretching their necks, but that they can create new ecological niches through their behavior that can later be reinforced by natural selection because of the successful outcomes of those new behaviors.
In a nutshell: "synergy" is combined effects all around us in various forms, it plays a causal role in differential reproductive fitness in a highly context-specific way, and it provides a scientific alternative to overreaching grand laws of history.
Instead of theorizing a vague new force or seeking a new law to help explain how natural selection can lead to biological complexity, Peter Corning supplies a fresh way of looking at the whole puzzle of complexity. He does this by reversing the usual logic about cooperation in living things. Rather than living things somehow cooperating to produce new outcomes through some unexplained form of 'altruism,' Corning sees 'nature's magic' of synergies underlying cooperation.
Corning makes his case with a massive amount of data drawn from a wide variety of fields. With obviously decades worth of research behind Nature’s Magic, it covers a lot of ground and has links to a number of other theories in both economics and biology. Because it is so lucid and well-written, it ought to appeal to a wide range of readers, from academics interested in systems science, bioeconomics, and the philosophy of biology, to those without an academic background in biology who want to keep up with what will most likely be a significant part of the future of biological science.
Todd I. Stark is a computer consultant and freelance medical and science writer. He is also an obsessive reader and has written hundreds of book reviews for Amazon. His formal background is in computer science, electrical engineering, mathematics, and psychology at Drexel University. His academic interests include hypnosis and suggestibility research, social psychology, and most recently, evolutionary approaches to behavioral science. Todd briefly moderated the HBE-L list on Yahoo for discussions in evolutionary psychology.
[I am posting this to preserve a copy of it as much as to share it. It is a book review originally published in Fall, 2003 Entelechy. ]
A review of Nature’s Magic: Synergy in Evolution and the Fate of Humankind written by Peter Corning
by Todd I. Stark
In Nature's Magic, Peter Corning offers us good news and bad news. The he good news is that chance, necessity, and natural selection aren't the only factors in our evolution. There is also a very real role for purpose (or more specifically, purposiveness.) The role of purposiveness has continued to increase over time.
The bad news is that our efforts to seek an underlying grand law or force that governs history may be fundamentally flawed. We may be more responsible for our own survival than we have so far been willing to recognize. The true teleonomy inherent in Corning's view gives us a creative (and destructive) role that is discounted in theories that rely on grand laws of history. Corning refers to the various people who have searched in vain for an inherent mathematical law of evolution as "Neo-Pythagoreans" after the cult surrounding the legendary mathematician. He counts various well-known contemporary complexity theorists like Stuart Kauffman and physicists like Steven Weinberg among them.
Corning doesn't see the world as necessarily a glorious self-maintaining Gaia, he sees it as a place where living things through their relations and interactions have come to have certain responsibility for their own fate. This becomes an awesome burden once we apply this view to humans, where we take on the role of the Sorcerer's Apprentice in Goethe's (and Disney's) tale. The apprentice knows just enough magic to get himself into serious trouble.
The starting point is Arthur Koestler's insight that "true innovation occurs when things are put together for the first time that had been separate." Peter Corning takes this insight to heart and explores its remarkable implications, applying this "astonishing capacity" to nature in general.
The essence of the argument is not that nature creates things that cannot be explained or things that cannot be understood, but that no grand laws of nature predict her fruits. In effect, evolution is grounded in nature's astonishing capacity to create beyond what we foresee at every juncture.
Corning's theory of complexity in evolution is based on synergy, by which he simply and elegantly means the myriad effects of combining things where the result doesn't resemble what we'd expect simply by adding them together: the whole is different than the sum of the parts.
Corning's "Holistic Darwinism" is a way of viewing variety and selection in nature which is at once is fully consistent with the neo-Darwinian synthesis and also provides theoretical bridges with the cybernetic theory of self-regulating systems and much of the body of scientific literature in social and political sciences. Holistic Darwinism shifts the focus in natural selection from selection itself as a causal force to where the variety comes from.
Corning leans heavily upon John Maynard Smith's concept of "synergistic selection." If unrelated individuals are often locked into a shared reproductive fate with others, as Corning suggests, then it is reasonable to assume that they will evolve strategies for cooperation, not for "altruism" per se but for their own interests.
This is an ambitious task for a single book, but at least the foundation is put down extremely well here, persuading us that nature continually yields variety that is neither predictable nor random, but fundamentally economic in its operation. In other words, Holistic Darwinism sees nature as a great marketplace where the functional outcomes of new innovations are continually shaped by the consequences of their costs and benefits.
If combined effects in nature are really different in general than we would expect from simply putting things together, there are some unexpected implications. For one thing, it implies that history matters. If things combine in new ways to produce new features in nature that are not simply an extension of the laws governing the parts, then those new features can potentially have meaningful functional outcomes that play a role in natural selection. This is the core of Corning's argument.
Corning boldly claims that Lamarck was right after all (in a sense). Not that giraffes can create new genes by stretching their necks, but that they can create new ecological niches through their behavior that can later be reinforced by natural selection because of the successful outcomes of those new behaviors.
In a nutshell: "synergy" is combined effects all around us in various forms, it plays a causal role in differential reproductive fitness in a highly context-specific way, and it provides a scientific alternative to overreaching grand laws of history.
Instead of theorizing a vague new force or seeking a new law to help explain how natural selection can lead to biological complexity, Peter Corning supplies a fresh way of looking at the whole puzzle of complexity. He does this by reversing the usual logic about cooperation in living things. Rather than living things somehow cooperating to produce new outcomes through some unexplained form of 'altruism,' Corning sees 'nature's magic' of synergies underlying cooperation.
Corning makes his case with a massive amount of data drawn from a wide variety of fields. With obviously decades worth of research behind Nature’s Magic, it covers a lot of ground and has links to a number of other theories in both economics and biology. Because it is so lucid and well-written, it ought to appeal to a wide range of readers, from academics interested in systems science, bioeconomics, and the philosophy of biology, to those without an academic background in biology who want to keep up with what will most likely be a significant part of the future of biological science.
Todd I. Stark is a computer consultant and freelance medical and science writer. He is also an obsessive reader and has written hundreds of book reviews for Amazon. His formal background is in computer science, electrical engineering, mathematics, and psychology at Drexel University. His academic interests include hypnosis and suggestibility research, social psychology, and most recently, evolutionary approaches to behavioral science. Todd briefly moderated the HBE-L list on Yahoo for discussions in evolutionary psychology.
Vox Libertas: On Sex and Evolution and Politics
I liked BRONS' post on altruism and evolution, and I responded to it with my own thoughts on the changing view of altruism in biology.
Vox Libertas: On Sex and Evolution and Politics
Vox Libertas: On Sex and Evolution and Politics
Friday, April 18, 2008
My Favorite Productivity Software
My Favorite Productivity Software
I'm someone who loses track of what he's doing 15 seconds into it unless there's something particularly interesting to hold my attention. So I've looked at a lot of different kinds of tricks and tools over the years to try to help me stay on track.
The list is:
Yosemite FileKeeper
Illium ListPro
SplashData SplashID
Snag-IT
WinDirStat
Microsoft Outlook 2007
Microsoft OneNote 2007
Netcentric Getting Things Done Add-in for Outlook
Franklin Covey PlanPlus V5 for Outlook
Details
Yosemite FileKeeper is a very nice thing to have, it saves versions of your files. Backup (saving a snapshot of everything on your disk) is essential in case of a really big problem, and FileKeeper doesn't replace that. But archival of individual file versions more likely to save your butt more often. It creates a copy of the file every time you perform a "save" operation. So if you deleted something mistakenly and then saved your work, you would normally be out of luck. Especially if you didn't realize your mistake until a few days later. With FileKeeper, you can just ask for the previous version before you made the mistake.
File versions is something that Windows has sorely lacked since the very beginning and it has only barely been implemented in Vista. Although Vista has added a sort-of versioning facility, it is very primitive compared to FileKeeper. FileKeeper lets you configure its archival process to include or exclude specific kinds of files based on rules and lets you specify either a discrete version mode (every time you save the file) or a snapshot mode (for databases and other things that don't save as versions). You can tell it how long to keep versions, and how long to keep them after the original file is deleted. You can create additional "data vaults" on other drives (such as your external USB drives) so that you have additional backup in case something happens to your hard drive.
I like the interface and it seems to work seamlessly and without impacting my work. I never know it's there unless I have to restore a file, and then it becomes invaluable.
ListPro runs on Windows and on the PocketPC handheld. It is a general purpose list utility that can be used for a lot of things you would normally just jot down, like shopping lists, lists of things you are collecting, gift suggestions, time tracking, and so on. It is almost as flexible as jotting things down and has the advantage of being able to structure your lists and move things around.
Even though I use Outlook to keep track of my tasks, I still use ListPro for reminders because it has a unique list-specific alarm feature. You can associate lists with a particular alarm that goes off at a particular time. So for example I create a list that has an alarm that goes off just before I leave for work and another that goes off just before I leave to go home. If I add anything to that list and date it for today, I get a reminder of all the things I need to do before I leave the house or things I need to pick up on the way home. I can then change the alarm for the whole list if my schedule changes, instead of having to change each task reminder.
SplashID is another list utility that can be used with handheld computers, similar to ListPro. However SplashID is optimized for keeping information safe rather than configuring lists with all sorts of different kinds of fields. SpashId only has a few different kinds of fields, but it saves copies of itself automatically whenever you exit it, and can be kept encrypted strongly with a single password so you can keep your combinations, social security numbers, and passwords safe. It is a tremendous convenience to remember one password instead of dozens. Just be sure you don't forget the SplashID password!
Snag-It is a great screen capture utility that lets you capture just about anything in a wide variety of modes and then annotate your captures very easily. I use it very heavily for documentation, for travel directions, and so on. It often lets me save things that would otherwise be very difficult to save.
WinDirStat is a brilliantly crafted visual display of what is on your disk. This is one of those utilities that les you see why you are running out of disk space. But the difference is that the display is a visual map of blocks where the size of a block represents the size of the file, the color represents the file type, and the position in the map represents the location. The reason this is so clever is that it gives you at a glance a complete understanding of where and how the space is being used. For example, you can instantly tell that the space is being taken up by a lot of small files in one place and a couple of huge files in another place, and you know what kinds of files they are.
One of the most useful things I've found David Allen's "Getting Things Done" methodology, and there is software that plugs into Microsoft Outlook to make use of it there. I use it along with Franklin Covey's PlanPlus V5 for Outlook to keep an organized list of things I have to do, appointments, and so on.
The GTD add-in makes it easier to use the email inbox as a way of tracking what I have to do and funnel incoming requests and reminders into tasks and calendar events.
PlanPlus helps organize tasks according to things I'm trying to accomplish. It is a very light form of project management that mostly just reminds me of my goals periodically so I don't lose sight of them while working on the details of things.
You can use either of those add-ins independently or together, or you do most of the same things with Outlook 2007 without the add-ins, if you are willing to put some work into it and establish some new habits.
The latest version of Microsoft's e-mail client (Outlook 2007) is a bit heavy on resources and slow off the blocks but lets you conveniently keep track of your RSS feeds, your SharePoint lists, and your forms, and lets you keep convenient offline copies of your SharePoint documents. I probably wouldn't buy Outlook 2007 for personal use by itself, but working in an environment where I use many Microsoft programs including Office and SharePoint for sharing information with other people, it becomes particularly useful.
The add-ins are a great convenience though if you don't want to have to learn a lot about Outlook 2007 or you don't want to write code, or you want to save on the amount of learning and customizing you have to do.
Microsoft OneNote is very a convenient repository for saving captures of things that you can annotate, and is well integrated with other Microsoft tools. It's particuarly nice if you use a Tablet PC (one of those small laptops where you can write with a digital pen instead of using a mouse). I use it with a standard laptop and still find it useful, especially with the various add-ins that let you print to OneNote and save from Outlook to OneNote directly. Probably the best thing about it is that it has a very good search facility built into it for helping find your notes later in case you didn't file them the way you thought you did.
I'm someone who loses track of what he's doing 15 seconds into it unless there's something particularly interesting to hold my attention. So I've looked at a lot of different kinds of tricks and tools over the years to try to help me stay on track.
The list is:
Yosemite FileKeeper
Illium ListPro
SplashData SplashID
Snag-IT
WinDirStat
Microsoft Outlook 2007
Microsoft OneNote 2007
Netcentric Getting Things Done Add-in for Outlook
Franklin Covey PlanPlus V5 for Outlook
Details
Yosemite FileKeeper is a very nice thing to have, it saves versions of your files. Backup (saving a snapshot of everything on your disk) is essential in case of a really big problem, and FileKeeper doesn't replace that. But archival of individual file versions more likely to save your butt more often. It creates a copy of the file every time you perform a "save" operation. So if you deleted something mistakenly and then saved your work, you would normally be out of luck. Especially if you didn't realize your mistake until a few days later. With FileKeeper, you can just ask for the previous version before you made the mistake.
File versions is something that Windows has sorely lacked since the very beginning and it has only barely been implemented in Vista. Although Vista has added a sort-of versioning facility, it is very primitive compared to FileKeeper. FileKeeper lets you configure its archival process to include or exclude specific kinds of files based on rules and lets you specify either a discrete version mode (every time you save the file) or a snapshot mode (for databases and other things that don't save as versions). You can tell it how long to keep versions, and how long to keep them after the original file is deleted. You can create additional "data vaults" on other drives (such as your external USB drives) so that you have additional backup in case something happens to your hard drive.
I like the interface and it seems to work seamlessly and without impacting my work. I never know it's there unless I have to restore a file, and then it becomes invaluable.
ListPro runs on Windows and on the PocketPC handheld. It is a general purpose list utility that can be used for a lot of things you would normally just jot down, like shopping lists, lists of things you are collecting, gift suggestions, time tracking, and so on. It is almost as flexible as jotting things down and has the advantage of being able to structure your lists and move things around.
Even though I use Outlook to keep track of my tasks, I still use ListPro for reminders because it has a unique list-specific alarm feature. You can associate lists with a particular alarm that goes off at a particular time. So for example I create a list that has an alarm that goes off just before I leave for work and another that goes off just before I leave to go home. If I add anything to that list and date it for today, I get a reminder of all the things I need to do before I leave the house or things I need to pick up on the way home. I can then change the alarm for the whole list if my schedule changes, instead of having to change each task reminder.
SplashID is another list utility that can be used with handheld computers, similar to ListPro. However SplashID is optimized for keeping information safe rather than configuring lists with all sorts of different kinds of fields. SpashId only has a few different kinds of fields, but it saves copies of itself automatically whenever you exit it, and can be kept encrypted strongly with a single password so you can keep your combinations, social security numbers, and passwords safe. It is a tremendous convenience to remember one password instead of dozens. Just be sure you don't forget the SplashID password!
Snag-It is a great screen capture utility that lets you capture just about anything in a wide variety of modes and then annotate your captures very easily. I use it very heavily for documentation, for travel directions, and so on. It often lets me save things that would otherwise be very difficult to save.
WinDirStat is a brilliantly crafted visual display of what is on your disk. This is one of those utilities that les you see why you are running out of disk space. But the difference is that the display is a visual map of blocks where the size of a block represents the size of the file, the color represents the file type, and the position in the map represents the location. The reason this is so clever is that it gives you at a glance a complete understanding of where and how the space is being used. For example, you can instantly tell that the space is being taken up by a lot of small files in one place and a couple of huge files in another place, and you know what kinds of files they are.
One of the most useful things I've found David Allen's "Getting Things Done" methodology, and there is software that plugs into Microsoft Outlook to make use of it there. I use it along with Franklin Covey's PlanPlus V5 for Outlook to keep an organized list of things I have to do, appointments, and so on.
The GTD add-in makes it easier to use the email inbox as a way of tracking what I have to do and funnel incoming requests and reminders into tasks and calendar events.
PlanPlus helps organize tasks according to things I'm trying to accomplish. It is a very light form of project management that mostly just reminds me of my goals periodically so I don't lose sight of them while working on the details of things.
You can use either of those add-ins independently or together, or you do most of the same things with Outlook 2007 without the add-ins, if you are willing to put some work into it and establish some new habits.
The latest version of Microsoft's e-mail client (Outlook 2007) is a bit heavy on resources and slow off the blocks but lets you conveniently keep track of your RSS feeds, your SharePoint lists, and your forms, and lets you keep convenient offline copies of your SharePoint documents. I probably wouldn't buy Outlook 2007 for personal use by itself, but working in an environment where I use many Microsoft programs including Office and SharePoint for sharing information with other people, it becomes particularly useful.
The add-ins are a great convenience though if you don't want to have to learn a lot about Outlook 2007 or you don't want to write code, or you want to save on the amount of learning and customizing you have to do.
Microsoft OneNote is very a convenient repository for saving captures of things that you can annotate, and is well integrated with other Microsoft tools. It's particuarly nice if you use a Tablet PC (one of those small laptops where you can write with a digital pen instead of using a mouse). I use it with a standard laptop and still find it useful, especially with the various add-ins that let you print to OneNote and save from Outlook to OneNote directly. Probably the best thing about it is that it has a very good search facility built into it for helping find your notes later in case you didn't file them the way you thought you did.
Sunday, November 25, 2007
The Problem: Home Backup
I don't want to lose my important data or my software. Files get deleted accidentally. Files get corrupted by various means. Sometimes I edit a document and then realize too late that I liked the previous version better and I didn't use software that saves versions. Sometimes a hard drive gets damaged. Backups can save a lot of grief. A lot of people don't back up their home computers and laptops, and when they do it is rarely done in any comprehensive way. It isn't surprising when you realize how difficult it is to do. You have to know a fair amount about computers to get it right, and you will probably throw a lot of money at it if you have a number
of computers and no corporate network available to you to centrallize the work the way business often do.
It isn't easy finding a robust, reliable, affordable solution to backing up multiple desktops and laptops without a network backup server. Tape drives are unpopular in this arena because they are hard for most people to deal with for home systems. Even if yo find a great drive and software for it, you have to set up some sort of multiple pile storage of recycling tapes and keep replacing them properly as you move the drive from computer to computer. And that's the best case for a home tape backup with current technology. I don't want to use my company's business network to backup my own computers for various reasons and I don't want to set up a server at home for this purpose either. I want a purely local backup solution under my own control, using an external hard drive I can simply move from computer to computer.
Here's the vision I came up with:
I want a general purpose solution for backing up multiple computers locally to the same portable backup media that I can carry around from computer to computer. My criteria are simple but (especially for a Windows solution) very demanding.
1. The solution has to work through external drives on USB ports. The only thing I have in common between all my computers is USB and I don't want to install more cards in the computers or buy separate backup devices for each computer unless I absolutely have to. This means it will be slow, but that' a reasonable tradeoff to me if it can run overnight.
2. The solution must be able to restore individual files. I need to be able to restore individual files that might get accidentally deleted or large files that are deleted in the event I run out of disk space.
3. The solution must work for disaster recovery of drives and partitions. I need to be able to restore entire computers or entire drives in the event that I get a nasty virus or rootkit and have to reformat the drive, or in the event that the hard drive has to be replaced. I have a lot of important software installed and I don't want to have to reinstall it all manually one program at a time and then hope I saved all those license codes and that the software can all be re-registered another time. I don't want to have to rebuild a laptop and install an operating system and then reinstall the backup software just in order to restore the disk. So it must work entirely from external drives if neccessary.
4. I want to be able to re-use as much of the same solution as possible to backup multiple computers rather than use different devices and software on each computer.
5. It has to be reliable and easy enough to use that I don't have to study manuals to use it or remember arcane sequences of tasks. I'm a computer consultant but not a PC technician, and I don't have a of time and resources to put into tweaking. I don't want my backup solution to become a troubleshooting puzzle everytime I go to use it or restore from it. I want minimal updating of drivers, hacking of the registry or boot sectors, moving files around, etc. to get it to work.
6. I want it to work with Windows XP and Vista.
7. I don't want to spend more than about $200-$300 for a solution to back up several computers. Even a reasonably priced external hard drive multiplied by 4 systems already blows away that budget if I can't share the backup solution between systems.
I spent a lot of time and tried a number of different solutions of various kinds. The main thing I was surprised at was how many backup programs didn't do the job by my simple criteria, and how much work I had to do to find that out. After a long Thanksgiving Holiday weekend of experimenting I did find a solution that I'm very happy with so far and can recommend very highly to others with similar criteria.
================================================================================
My Solution: Maxtor USB Drive and Acronis True Image
Acronis TrueImage is exceptional backup software that works for my solution because it is extremely straightforward to use, creates external USB bootable media, worked with my USB external hard drives without additional drivers or configuration, and allows individual file backup and restore as well as entire drives and partitions. I tested it with a Sony external USB CD/DVD dual layer writable drive (about $150) and a Maxtor OneTouch4 500 Gb external hard drive (about $170). This solution takes about 3 hours to back up an 80 Gb laptop hard drive completely and can be moved from computer to computer using the same mobile drives. The thing that seals the deal is the cost of the software. Seagate and Acronis cut a deal to make some of this superb backup software available for free to anyone who owns a Maxtor or Seagate external hard drive.
Free Image Backup Software
Keep in mind that if you wanted to run the fully featured Acronis backup, you would be legally obligated to buy a license for each system. At $50 per license, this would make the solution less practical for me because it would add a couple of hundred dollars to an already fully utilized budget. If this were my only option, I would probably be tempted to stretch the budget and pay the price because of the value of the solution. In that case, Ghost (at about $70 per copy) becomes a closer competitor to TrueImage as a good home disaster recovery solution. However I found another option that saves the license cost for the backup software.
The features of Acronis are well worth the price I think, but I wouldn't need them on all of my systems. Fortunately I discovered that there are free versions available with just the limited features I need for most of my systems. These are versions of Acronis rebranded by Maxtor (Maxtor MaxBlast ) and Seagate (Seagate DiskWizard ). The catch is that you need to have a Seagate or Maxtor external hard drive to use these free versions of the softtware. I use Maxtor external hard drives, so this was no problem for me. If you want to try out this solution yourself and you haven't purchased your external hard drive yet, keep this in mind when you go to buy it. If you can take advantage of the free rebranded versions, you can save $50 per computer. I like the features of Acronis but I only really one them on one of my computers, so I chose to purchase one full version of Acronis TrueImage and then use the free version on my other computers as a compromise.
The Solution
The components of the solution
[Maxtor 500 GB OneTouch4 USB External Hard Drive] moved between several computers, each with
free [Maxtor MaxBlast 5] image backup software installed. [Writable CD/DVD drive] used to create a bootable
disk for recovery purposes, adn to boot from for systems with no internal CD drive. USB cables to connect each drive to the computers. A writeable CD.
Key Skills and Procedures
1. You have to download and install the backup software. Get the free offer from the Seagate web site using the above links, don't use the version of software that comes with the drive. The solution here depends on the Acronis TrueImage version of the software, which is a special offer from the web site and is completely different from the software that comes with Seagate and Maxtor drives. If the free offer goes away, you may end up having to license Acronis on each home system to use this solution ($50 per computer).
2. You have to be able to use the backup software to create a bootable CD. This is easy but you have to remember to do it before it is really needed.
3. You have to be able to configure your computer so it can boot from the CD drive. It may already be able to do this, depending on your computer. Try it out by putting a bootable disk in the drive and rebooting. If it doesn't work, you may have to hit a special key such as F10, F5, or F8 during boot to edit the BIOS and tell the computer it can boot from the CD drive. For a system without an internal CD drive, where you have to rely on a USB external CD drive, you can usually configure the BIOS to also boot from USB paths. I had no trouble doing this with my tablet PC which only has USB external drives, but the difficulty depends somewhat on the computer.
4. You have to be able to create the backup image using the backup software. This is very easy.
5. You have to be able to test the solution at least far enough to boot from the bootable CD and verify the integrity of your backup image. It would be nice, but usually impractical to test actually restoring a disk drive.
6. If you are using this solution, you probably won't want to install the backup software that comes with your external hard drive, so you should also learn to avoid installing it and disable any autolaunch that might try to install it when you connect the drive to a new computer. You probably will want to copy the backup software you are using to the external hard drive so it can be moved from computer to computer and installed on each one.
================================================================================
Things I Tried That Didn't Work For This Solution
Most of the backup software I tried simply didn't do a good job, or sometimes any job at all, at restoring entire drives and partitions intact. The software that comes with Windows XP and the software that comes with external drives is usually for file backups, not disaster recovery.
The Retrospect Express software that came with one of my Maxtor OneTouch hard drives is very convenient for routine incremental backups from one system but it is not a disaster recovery solution and is not intended to be used from multiple systems. To use it to restore a drive I would have to rebuild the operating system from scratch, reinstall Retrospect Express, and then try to restore the backups. This is not what I want to be doing, and more importantly, many critical steps in the process can't be conveniently tested.
The Nero Backitup2 that came with the Nero suite with my Sony DVD writer seems to be good for making CDs and DVDs but I found it problematic as a backup solution, much less a disaster recovery solution. The BackItUp software did single backups fine, and on paper it seems to have the needed features, but I had a lot of trouble figuring out how to get incrementals and differential backups to work properly. Also the software seems to have an odd disposition for finding conflicts with other things on my computer and coming up with "Server Busy" dialogs. I also found the job scheduling hard to use. I wasn't confident enough with the basic features to even try to test it for real disaster recovery. It could just be limitations of the "lite" version that came with the drive, but I didn't want to invest more in the product just to find out.
I have a copy of Uniblue's WinBackup as part of their performance and management suite. I found this to be very good backup software, reasonably easy to use, moderately featured, but not really a disaster recovery solution of the sort I needed because it required Windows to already be running and WinBackup installed in order to restore things.
The closest second place I found for my backup solution was Ghost . Ghost is designed specifically for disaster recovery and cloning entire drives and partitions and is a classic and traditionally superb way of doing that. Ghost works by setting up your computer to boot from DOS and run a backup program. This is great for disaster recovery because it means you don't need an operating system like Windows to be working to use it, and nothing in Windows can affect the backup or restore. It just creates a snapshot of your disk, regardless of what operating system is on it.
When I asked several IT consulting colleagues their opinions for personal disaster recovery solutions, they pretty much unanimously suggested Ghost. I didn't end up with Ghost for several reasons. Most of my reasons are strategic, I don't like the direction the product is going. It seems to me that it is progressively losing what made it such a good solution for so long, its operating system independence. Another thing I personally don't like about it is that it still feels like a product designed primarily for computer technicians cloning drives between systems, not regular people who just want to protect their computer hard drive.
First, Ghost was purchased by Symantec. I have terrible experience with Symantec technical support, but that's not enough to put me off a good solution. If it works, hopefully I shouldn't need much technical support. More importantly, Symantec has a bad reputation for purchasing great products and driving them into the ground by adding poorly integrated features. It looked to me like they were doing this with Ghost from what I was seeing in the support forums. This didn't prevent me from trying Ghost as a solution either, but it did limit how much I was willing to invest in making a Ghost solution work if it involved having to keep upgrading and tweaking it.
Ok, so the stage was set for a (very biased) test of Ghost. I installed Ghost 2003, which seemed to me from my research to be the best compromise of simplicity, good engineering, and features, of the Ghost versions that would work with XP. It might not work directly from Vista, but at least I'd have a basic recovery solution if it worked. This is an old Ghost version, which makes the test even more unfair. Ghost 2003 boots from DOS so it doesn't really care about your operating system, except for convenience in setting up the backup operation. However the DOS boot does need to have the right drivers to be able to see your external drives. That's where the real version dependence comes in. Later Ghost versions (e.g. 10, 11, 12, etc.) have drivers more specifically intended for external USB drives. So they would really be a more fair test. However I had never used Ghost for personal backup, so I just wanted to see what it could do for basic functions.
Right off the bat, it didn't see my external USB hard drive when from DOS, not entirely unexpectedly. None of the variations of drivers supplied with it would work. Ghost seems to be more particular about the kinds of USB devices it can use than other backup programs. That's perhaps a reasonable tradeoff for their disk cloning technology but it also means an ongoing dependence on having the latest drivers and keeping boot disks updated. That's one of the things I had hoped to minimize.
I checked the forums for solutions and found several, but they were more work than I wanted to do and most of them pulled me out of my comfort zone for things I wanted to rely on for a backup solution. I think I could probably have created a boot disk with updated drivers that would let Ghost backup to my external USB hard drive, or of course I could have upgraded my version of Ghost, but it would have been more expense and another day of work to build and test that I didn't want to spend if I didn't have to.
I was able to get Ghost to work with my external DVD writer, with a minor change to the settings to tell Ghost to boot with USB 1.1 drivers. So over about a 24 hour period I was able to cut an 11 DVD backup set using Ghost 2003. I was very disappointed that after all that, because I couldn't see the contents of the set using Ghost Explorer for some reason. Then the image verify looked like it would take nearly as long as the backup and require me to tie up the computer for a full day and keep feeding it disks every hour or so. So I'm not really confident in the backup because the verify process is impractical and I can't see even a list of the contents. Finally, the interface Ghost uses on the bootable CD is a little hard to figure out. I haven't ruled out Ghost as a solution, but neither have I been able to verify it yet.
In an online forum, someone was having the same problem I was with getting Ghost to see external USB drives, and they suggested Acronis. Since there was a full featured 15 day trial and also a limited feature free version available, I was able to test that. The Acronis software works from Windows XP and Vista. It backed up fine from Windows, which should not be a big deal of course. It took just under 3 hours to completely back up an 80 Gb tablet PC C drive.
The acid test was whether it could create bootable media that would let me restore a disk without having Windows available, and be able to see my USB external hard drive from that boot. It worked with my USB hard drive, and the interface on the bootable CD was very straightforward. I could use the bootable CD to verify the image backup. Verification took about 2 hours. The one quirk I found was that I couldn't verify the backup image from Windows, I had to boot to the CD to do it, or the operation died from "insufficient resources" a few minutes into the verification.
Conclusion
Acronis True Image turned out to be the only backup software I've tried so far that works for disaster recovery from USB devices without hacking or tweaking, and it has a very rich and easy to use feature set as well and is even available in a limited free version. I like the convenience and simplicity of USB devices and am willing to sacrifice the extra time it takes to backup a machine with them to make things easy for myself. So the solution that works best for me right now is TrueImage (or the free rebranded versions: Maxtor Maxtor MaxBlast and Seagate Seagate DiskWizard ) with my Maxtor USB external hard drives. Current versions of Ghost (Ghost 12 retails for about $70/copy) might be a viable alternative but I have no experience with those at this time.
Wednesday, September 05, 2007
MOSS Notes - reducing authentications
Tips for reducing the number of authentications (Windows XP)
Add the SharePoint sites to the list of trusted sites
1. In Internet Explorer, on the Tools menu, click Internet Options.
2. On the Security tab, in the Select a Web content zone to specify its security settings box, click Trusted Sites, and then click Sites.
3. Clear the Require server verification (https:) for all sites in this zone check box.
4. In the Add this Web site to the zone box, type the URL for the SharePoint site, and then click Add.
5. Click Close to close the Trusted Sites dialog box.
6. Click OK to close the Internet Options dialog box.
Configure user authentication settings for trusted sites
1. In Internet Explorer, on the Tools menu, click Internet Options.
2. On the Security tab, in the Select a Web content zone to specify its security settings box, click Trusted sites, and then click Custom Level.
3. In the Settings list box, under User Authentication, click Automatic logon with current username and password.
4. Click OK twice.
Note If you do not want to add the SharePoint Central Administration site to the list of trusted sites, but you do not want to be prompted for your user name and password every time you access the SharePoint Central Administration site, you can instead add the SharePoint Central Administration site to the Local intranet zone. If you do this, you must enable the Automatic logon only in Intranet zone user authentication setting instead of the Automatic logon with current username and password user authentication setting
Configure proxy server settings to bypass the proxy server for local addresses
1. In Internet Explorer, on the Tools menu, click Internet Options.
2. On the Connections tab, in the Local Area Network (LAN) Settings area, click LAN Settings.
3. In the Proxy Server area, select the Bypass proxy server for local addresses check box.
4. Click OK to close the Local Area Network (LAN) Settings dialog box.
5. Click OK again to close the Internet Options dialog box.
Remove extraneous cached logins that might override authentication
Start à Control Panel à User Accounts à Manage Passwords
Wednesday, May 24, 2006
Thursday, December 22, 2005
Review of Fiorina book on culture war rhetoric
Fiorina: Culture War rhetoric arises from an ideologically polarized political class
Since I think it is relevant to the politics of the ID issue that I've been discussing today, I am copying the text of my Amazon review of Morris Fiorina's book on culture war in American to here. For example, Bill Dembski (an Intelligent Design author) frequently states that culture war is important to us and demands that ID be made a political issue. Fiorina's argument would make his motivation seem rather hollow and parochial.
Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America (Great Questions in Politics Series) by Morris P. FiorinaEdition: Paperback
Price: $14.00
Political class is polarized, but the rest of us can think!, November 16, 2004
This is a very brief and tightly argued book of enormous relevance to us in 2004. It makes the following remarkable points:
(1) On close inspection of individual opinions, the vast majority of the electorate in the U.S. are *moderate*, not radically polarized into liberals and conservatives. That is, most of us are, as we would like to believe, capable of thinking independently for ourselves rather than strictly along party ideological lines.
We are a _closely_divided_ nation, as reflected in the very close recent elections, however we are NOT a _*deeply*_divided_ nation. That is, we are not really a nation of two distinct warring camps and a couple of swing states as the media sometimes present it for dramatic purposes. Fiorina sugests that we are actually something close to an ambivalent nation which divides itself in poltitical matters because we have no choice when presented with highly divided options.
Since I think it is relevant to the politics of the ID issue that I've been discussing today, I am copying the text of my Amazon review of Morris Fiorina's book on culture war in American to here. For example, Bill Dembski (an Intelligent Design author) frequently states that culture war is important to us and demands that ID be made a political issue. Fiorina's argument would make his motivation seem rather hollow and parochial.
Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America (Great Questions in Politics Series) by Morris P. FiorinaEdition: Paperback
Price: $14.00
Political class is polarized, but the rest of us can think!, November 16, 2004
This is a very brief and tightly argued book of enormous relevance to us in 2004. It makes the following remarkable points:
(1) On close inspection of individual opinions, the vast majority of the electorate in the U.S. are *moderate*, not radically polarized into liberals and conservatives. That is, most of us are, as we would like to believe, capable of thinking independently for ourselves rather than strictly along party ideological lines.
We are a _closely_divided_ nation, as reflected in the very close recent elections, however we are NOT a _*deeply*_divided_ nation. That is, we are not really a nation of two distinct warring camps and a couple of swing states as the media sometimes present it for dramatic purposes. Fiorina sugests that we are actually something close to an ambivalent nation which divides itself in poltitical matters because we have no choice when presented with highly divided options.
(2) The American public has *not* become dramatically polarized even over such hot topics as abortion. Rather, relatively small differences among us have been magnified by the rhetoric used to present the issues to us.
(3) The political choices we have are determined by a distinct class of politicians, party activists, and interest group leaders, who *have* become increasingly polarized over moral and religious ideology as well as economic ideology.
(4) A large part of the polarization of the political class has been the result of the realignment of the South, such that republicans aligned aggressive foreign policy with hostility to the welfare state, and democrats aligned antiwar sentiment with support of those at risk. This is represented particular well by the "gender gap" which widened at the same time this realignment or tuning of the ideologies of the parties was taking place.
Fiorina suggests that when Bill Clinton once said early in his presidency that he was Pro-Choice, but against abortion, most Americans knew what he meant, that most of us, liberal or conservative, do not want to legislate morality for others, even though we have a clear sense of what is right and wrong. Fiorina also points out for example that most 80% of us believe that abortion should be legal under some conditions (even if wrong), and illegal under others. The extremes at each end which promote unconditional rights for unborn babies or for mothers are roughly the 10% tail at either side of a normal curve.
Finally, he also provides data showing that the averaged opinions of self-identified liberals and conservatives regarding abortion differ only regarding under what specific conditions they think abortion should be legal, not the legality of abortion in general.
The result is that the supposed "culture war" is really a war between increasingly ideologically polarized political parties and their activists who arent really even aware of each others reasoning, with most of us in the middle getting hit by friendly fire from both sides, but being forced to choose between them.
The bottom line for Fiorina's argument here is that we are a nation currently creating unneccessary internal conflicts and indulging in "culture war" polarized issues like gay marriage or unconditional rights of various kinds that are really of concern to a relatively small and unrepresentative number of us. They are sold to us by political parties and the media because of their drama rather than their relative importance. It's hard for me to look at the political ads for either of the current candidates in 2004 without nodding agreement on this.
Our political system provides us with ideological extremism on both sides, and seems to have no desire or ability to change itself, whereas most of us caught in it would usually prefer pragmatic and non-ideological solutions to issues that address larger numbers of us.
I read this at the same time at Juergensmeyer's book "Terror in the Mind of God," and it is chilling how much the "culture war" among the political elites comes to resemble the "cosmic war" of good and evil that Juergensmeyer theorizes leads to real violence under some conditions.
If Fiorina is right, we may not really have a (popular) culture war at all, but we could create one if it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as we come to accept it uncritically. If Fiornia had a solution for this centrally important problem, this book would merit 6 or 7 stars. However, just by pointing it out so clearly, it merits the highest rating I can give it.
Please read this important and timely book.
Santorum's Response to Dover is Reassuring (and I think honest)
I have to give Pa. Senator Rick Santorum a lot of credit. According to an article in today's Philadelphia Inquirer, when he read through the testimony of the Kitzmiller "Intelligent Design" case and recognized the degree to which the proponents were religiously motivated, he no longer said he was in support of the case.
That reinforces the feeling I got from reading his book, "It Takes a Family" that he is sincere in his conservative political beliefs in general and not a religious extremist willing to lie to promote a cause as some of the folks at the Discovery Institute truly appear to be. From reading the testimony and responses to the trial, I've gotten the sense that there are a variety of different strands among those folks, from reasonably honest scholars trying to promote what they think will someday become a real scientific movement (I suspect that Behe and possibly Dembski fall into that category), to others with almost no scholarly integrity who simply want to wage culture war on secular philosophies like scientific naturalism above all else.
It is good to see honest conservatives who respect the different traditions, both religious and secular, differing with the extremist groups and coming closer to exposing them for the divisive, culture-war-obsessed parochial thinkers that they are. (That's just my interpretation of course).
The Inquirer article makes a very big deal out of the significance of ID as a re-election issue for Santorum, how his opponents are quoting him to show how he has "flip-flopped" on the issue.
Right now, from the quotes, I don't see it. I see quotes being taken out of context. There is a consistent pattern in all of them that Santorum, like many conservatives believes that:
1. ID is a theory that is compatible with the notion of a Creator but is also at least potentially and legitimately scientific
2. If ID is legitimate science, it shouldn't be legislated into curricula because of religious and political motivations but accepted by scientists themselves for evidential reasons within the life sciences
3. Scientists and educators have been loathe to accept alternatives to orthodox neo-Darwinism.
Now, I disagree with (1) to some extent, however I agree it is possible in principle, I think that (2) is absolutely dead on right, and that (3) is regrettably true to some degree.
I think the only place where Santorum actually flip-flopped on this issue is that he changed his mind that (2) was a neccessary evil in order to push past the problems caused by (3). Conservatism within science, I think even most conservatives would agree in principle, is best met by the promotion of new research from within science rather than legislation from without. ID has consistently been misrepresented as being a movement within science, when it most certainly is not. The testimony made that fact so well known to some of us much more obvious to others, and Santorum is one of the people reacting to that evidence.
I admire that wisdom even though I still can't quite see how ID or any other form of dualism could somehow morph into a form compatible with scientific naturalism and testability. The underlying philosophy of science is really a minor point compared to the kinds of deception that have been perpetrated by extremists in the name of culture war.
If Santorum is sincere, and I think he is at this point, he was as misled as most people as to what the ID case was about from the Discovery Institute perspective. They are not interested in teaching controversy over evolution, which is already done in science when it is taught properly, but in undermining legitimate scientific theories and replacing them with religiously rooted alternatives that aren't seen as "materialistic" and therefore less compatible with orthodox religious tradition.
Maybe I'm naive, but I'd like to think Santorum honestly didn't realize who he was in bed with, metaphorically speaking, when he voiced his support of the ID movement because he honestly but mistakenly believed the culture war propaganda that science was taken over by some sort of anti-Christian liberal elite atheist conspiracy and was no longer basing its theories on the richness of empirical data and full scientific creativity. Those of us who have a real interest in biology know how vital and dynamic it really is, and how scientifically productive, and it's good that the message is starting to get out in drips and drabs among conservatives.
Like the verdict of the court trial, the Santorum article today was good news to most of us that wisdom and common sense still sometimes prevail over extremism and political partisanship.
kind regards,
Todd
I have to give Pa. Senator Rick Santorum a lot of credit. According to an article in today's Philadelphia Inquirer, when he read through the testimony of the Kitzmiller "Intelligent Design" case and recognized the degree to which the proponents were religiously motivated, he no longer said he was in support of the case.
That reinforces the feeling I got from reading his book, "It Takes a Family" that he is sincere in his conservative political beliefs in general and not a religious extremist willing to lie to promote a cause as some of the folks at the Discovery Institute truly appear to be. From reading the testimony and responses to the trial, I've gotten the sense that there are a variety of different strands among those folks, from reasonably honest scholars trying to promote what they think will someday become a real scientific movement (I suspect that Behe and possibly Dembski fall into that category), to others with almost no scholarly integrity who simply want to wage culture war on secular philosophies like scientific naturalism above all else.
It is good to see honest conservatives who respect the different traditions, both religious and secular, differing with the extremist groups and coming closer to exposing them for the divisive, culture-war-obsessed parochial thinkers that they are. (That's just my interpretation of course).
The Inquirer article makes a very big deal out of the significance of ID as a re-election issue for Santorum, how his opponents are quoting him to show how he has "flip-flopped" on the issue.
Right now, from the quotes, I don't see it. I see quotes being taken out of context. There is a consistent pattern in all of them that Santorum, like many conservatives believes that:
1. ID is a theory that is compatible with the notion of a Creator but is also at least potentially and legitimately scientific
2. If ID is legitimate science, it shouldn't be legislated into curricula because of religious and political motivations but accepted by scientists themselves for evidential reasons within the life sciences
3. Scientists and educators have been loathe to accept alternatives to orthodox neo-Darwinism.
Now, I disagree with (1) to some extent, however I agree it is possible in principle, I think that (2) is absolutely dead on right, and that (3) is regrettably true to some degree.
I think the only place where Santorum actually flip-flopped on this issue is that he changed his mind that (2) was a neccessary evil in order to push past the problems caused by (3). Conservatism within science, I think even most conservatives would agree in principle, is best met by the promotion of new research from within science rather than legislation from without. ID has consistently been misrepresented as being a movement within science, when it most certainly is not. The testimony made that fact so well known to some of us much more obvious to others, and Santorum is one of the people reacting to that evidence.
I admire that wisdom even though I still can't quite see how ID or any other form of dualism could somehow morph into a form compatible with scientific naturalism and testability. The underlying philosophy of science is really a minor point compared to the kinds of deception that have been perpetrated by extremists in the name of culture war.
If Santorum is sincere, and I think he is at this point, he was as misled as most people as to what the ID case was about from the Discovery Institute perspective. They are not interested in teaching controversy over evolution, which is already done in science when it is taught properly, but in undermining legitimate scientific theories and replacing them with religiously rooted alternatives that aren't seen as "materialistic" and therefore less compatible with orthodox religious tradition.
Maybe I'm naive, but I'd like to think Santorum honestly didn't realize who he was in bed with, metaphorically speaking, when he voiced his support of the ID movement because he honestly but mistakenly believed the culture war propaganda that science was taken over by some sort of anti-Christian liberal elite atheist conspiracy and was no longer basing its theories on the richness of empirical data and full scientific creativity. Those of us who have a real interest in biology know how vital and dynamic it really is, and how scientifically productive, and it's good that the message is starting to get out in drips and drabs among conservatives.
Like the verdict of the court trial, the Santorum article today was good news to most of us that wisdom and common sense still sometimes prevail over extremism and political partisanship.
kind regards,
Todd
Wednesday, December 21, 2005
The verdict for the Dover School Board case on "Intelligent Design" is now in.
See: http://www2.ncseweb.org/wp/?p=98#more-98
The judge's opinion found (correctly, imo) that the case was essentially unsuccessful activism against the establishment clause of the 1st ammendment of the U.S. Constitution because ID is disguised religion being forced onto educators as part of the curriculum in science classes.
As I read the opinion:
1. ID is an untestable explanation which cannot be untangled from its religious creationist sources,
2. Weaknesses in evolutionary theory do not provide support for ID as an alternative scientific theory,
3. The ID proponents who may have sincere and bona fide scholarly intentions have however repeatedly lied about their motivations for supporting the movement and therefore place their loyalty to the movement above their integrity as scholars,
4. The bedrock claim by the ID proponents that evolutionary biology is antithetical to a belief in the existence of a supreme being and to religion in general is utterly false.
Therefore, on 1st ammendment grounds, the Dover School Board was permanently enjoined from maintaining the ID Policy in any school within the Dover Area School District, and from requiring teachers to denigrate or disparage the scientific theory of evolution, and from requiring teachers to refer to a religious, alternative theory known as ID.
My thoughts:
Not only is this ruling consistent with the establishment clause, but my feeling is that this should also be the common sense position of schools other than public schools where science is supposed to be taught competently. There should be no supreme being or intelligent designer entering into science classes, unless the consensus of scientists in that field is that the use such concepts is justified in their theories. As the testimony made clear, the ID proponents are a tiny and idiosyncratic minority of scientists who think in terms of a different tradition than other scientists and envision scientific theories differnently. Materialism is not given equal time in theology classes or catechism, theology should not be automatically given equal time in science classes just for the supposed sake of balance. You are no longer balancing yourself when you reach over to the person next to you for support. The interests of scholarly balance or charity do not require abandoning the core epistemic values of science and its distinct tradition of thinking.
I agree with the judge's opinion on all major points. For all of its variations in the different fields, science is conducted in accordance with a tradition that speaks with a single voice and a single set of epistemic values regarding inquiry into nature. This tradition is what is and should be the content of competently taught science classes, whether they are in public schools or not. ID is inconsistent with those epistemic values. Any role that research into "Intelligent Design," can play (explanations relying on something having planned nature itself, and explanations that rely on causes from outside of nature, violating physical causal closure of the scientific methodological naturalism) should be in other kinds of classes, not forced upon science classes by political or legal pressure as affirmative action alternatives. This is not just based on the abstract definition of science as physicalist, but on an observation of what scientists actually do and how they work. When they are speaking as ID proponents, professional technologists are not thinking as scientists in terms of constructing testable predictive hypotheses and testing them when they promote ID. They should certainly have the freedom to pursue those scholarly pursuits without prejudice, but scientists and educators in existing organizations are autonomous experts with their own ethical boards and have the right to decide on what is part of their own tradition and their own fields and what is not. Politicians should not be able to force alternate theories to be taught or to be able to interfere with topics of research in general unless the scientists are themselves doing something illegal.
The central ID argument that the naturalistic tradition of science is unfairly atheistic and therefore that religious explanations should be considered in the interest of religious tolerance is clever and unfortunately appears to be consistent with the way a lot of American conservatives think, but ultimately it is wrongheaded. Patriotism and religious faith are carried too far in emphasizing the moral criteria of loyalty over that of truth in this argument.
In my opinion, even apparently "non-religious" philosophical dualist arguments against materialism are ultimately inconsistent with the way science is and has been practiced for centuries and continues to be practiced, but the ultimate criteria should be their testability. I don't see how they could be tested, but I don't reject the possibility at some point. Notwithstanding, those arguments are not the basis for the ID movement as it now stands, nor do they seem to share the same motivations. They are another way in which some people have wrongly seen science as overly restrictive and want to expand it to be consistent with more intuitive ways of looking at nature.
To me, the reason science works as well as it does in certain domains of thinking is that it opposes our intuition in various ways, letting us get past it using other kinds of tools. That's why it is important that it remain autonomous as a domain of inquiry and not be pressured to conform with other traditions for social and political reasons.
By the same reasoning, neither do atheist radicals like Richard Dawkins who see no value whatsoever in religion speak for science. The constitution unambiguously protects freedom of the practice of religion. Science leaves little room for the operation of miracles, but it does not deny their possibility, nor the existence of a supreme being, nor is it a religious tradition or equivalent to religious traditions in any meaningful sense.
See: http://www2.ncseweb.org/wp/?p=98#more-98
The judge's opinion found (correctly, imo) that the case was essentially unsuccessful activism against the establishment clause of the 1st ammendment of the U.S. Constitution because ID is disguised religion being forced onto educators as part of the curriculum in science classes.
As I read the opinion:
1. ID is an untestable explanation which cannot be untangled from its religious creationist sources,
2. Weaknesses in evolutionary theory do not provide support for ID as an alternative scientific theory,
3. The ID proponents who may have sincere and bona fide scholarly intentions have however repeatedly lied about their motivations for supporting the movement and therefore place their loyalty to the movement above their integrity as scholars,
4. The bedrock claim by the ID proponents that evolutionary biology is antithetical to a belief in the existence of a supreme being and to religion in general is utterly false.
Therefore, on 1st ammendment grounds, the Dover School Board was permanently enjoined from maintaining the ID Policy in any school within the Dover Area School District, and from requiring teachers to denigrate or disparage the scientific theory of evolution, and from requiring teachers to refer to a religious, alternative theory known as ID.
My thoughts:
Not only is this ruling consistent with the establishment clause, but my feeling is that this should also be the common sense position of schools other than public schools where science is supposed to be taught competently. There should be no supreme being or intelligent designer entering into science classes, unless the consensus of scientists in that field is that the use such concepts is justified in their theories. As the testimony made clear, the ID proponents are a tiny and idiosyncratic minority of scientists who think in terms of a different tradition than other scientists and envision scientific theories differnently. Materialism is not given equal time in theology classes or catechism, theology should not be automatically given equal time in science classes just for the supposed sake of balance. You are no longer balancing yourself when you reach over to the person next to you for support. The interests of scholarly balance or charity do not require abandoning the core epistemic values of science and its distinct tradition of thinking.
I agree with the judge's opinion on all major points. For all of its variations in the different fields, science is conducted in accordance with a tradition that speaks with a single voice and a single set of epistemic values regarding inquiry into nature. This tradition is what is and should be the content of competently taught science classes, whether they are in public schools or not. ID is inconsistent with those epistemic values. Any role that research into "Intelligent Design," can play (explanations relying on something having planned nature itself, and explanations that rely on causes from outside of nature, violating physical causal closure of the scientific methodological naturalism) should be in other kinds of classes, not forced upon science classes by political or legal pressure as affirmative action alternatives. This is not just based on the abstract definition of science as physicalist, but on an observation of what scientists actually do and how they work. When they are speaking as ID proponents, professional technologists are not thinking as scientists in terms of constructing testable predictive hypotheses and testing them when they promote ID. They should certainly have the freedom to pursue those scholarly pursuits without prejudice, but scientists and educators in existing organizations are autonomous experts with their own ethical boards and have the right to decide on what is part of their own tradition and their own fields and what is not. Politicians should not be able to force alternate theories to be taught or to be able to interfere with topics of research in general unless the scientists are themselves doing something illegal.
The central ID argument that the naturalistic tradition of science is unfairly atheistic and therefore that religious explanations should be considered in the interest of religious tolerance is clever and unfortunately appears to be consistent with the way a lot of American conservatives think, but ultimately it is wrongheaded. Patriotism and religious faith are carried too far in emphasizing the moral criteria of loyalty over that of truth in this argument.
In my opinion, even apparently "non-religious" philosophical dualist arguments against materialism are ultimately inconsistent with the way science is and has been practiced for centuries and continues to be practiced, but the ultimate criteria should be their testability. I don't see how they could be tested, but I don't reject the possibility at some point. Notwithstanding, those arguments are not the basis for the ID movement as it now stands, nor do they seem to share the same motivations. They are another way in which some people have wrongly seen science as overly restrictive and want to expand it to be consistent with more intuitive ways of looking at nature.
To me, the reason science works as well as it does in certain domains of thinking is that it opposes our intuition in various ways, letting us get past it using other kinds of tools. That's why it is important that it remain autonomous as a domain of inquiry and not be pressured to conform with other traditions for social and political reasons.
By the same reasoning, neither do atheist radicals like Richard Dawkins who see no value whatsoever in religion speak for science. The constitution unambiguously protects freedom of the practice of religion. Science leaves little room for the operation of miracles, but it does not deny their possibility, nor the existence of a supreme being, nor is it a religious tradition or equivalent to religious traditions in any meaningful sense.
Saturday, April 16, 2005
A recent exchange on evolution and human nature between myself, Paul Armstrong, and others on Boston.Com boards ...
http://boards.boston.com/n/pfx/forum.aspx?msg=281.27&nav=messages&webtag=bc-news
TS editing note: I've intentionally eliminated some unhelpful responses from people. I also eliminated John Landon's ("nemonemini" -- http://eonix.8m.com/) responses although they have some value. I did this because they are a distraction more than a help to the threads I am most interested in. He sometimes makes good points, but he is so combative that constructive dialog with him is almost impossible. I think he essentially makes two points: (1) he supports a periodic ("Eonic") theory of cultural evolution which is entirely non-Darwinian, and (2) he argues that Darwinian mechanisms "cannot explain human evolution." This second point is problematic because of his systematic refusal to either distinguish biological from cultural evolution or to acknowledge even in principle what natural selection can potentially explain.
Treating his ideas fairly would require a whole separate discussion (and a more reasonable advocate to represent them!).
Here are the selected posts ...
News board
Folder: Ideas
Discussion: Understanding human nature
1 Mar-26 From: BostonDotCom To: ALL
In ''The evolutionary revolutionary,'' Drake Bennett profiles Robert Trivers, who wrote a series of papers in the 1970s that provided the intellectual basis for evolutionary psychology, a discipline which holds that human behaviors from rape to religion are inborn products of evolution. Does natural selection provide the key to understanding human nature? Or do such explanations neglect the importance of culture?
4 Mar-28 From: sabine To: BostonDotCom
Trivers, Pinker and their followers grossly undestimate the power of culture in their explanations of human behavior. Dawkins seems to be allowiing culture back into the picture in his most recent contribution. All three, however, rely heavily on anecdotal data when dealing with homo sapiens (as versus quantifiable evidence in other realms). Bio-reductionism has, I suppose, gained favor due to its association with "real" science and the abject failure of the social sciences to generate a satisfactory pardigm. S.J. Gould's untimely death silenced the most promising voice on these matters. He understood cultural evolution as well or more insightfully than the bulk of current anthropologists, and certainly better than his selectionist peer group.
5 Mar-28 From: jsb To: BostonDotCom
Some thoughts on the Robert Trivers article:
1 What a fascinating guy!
2 The objections I’ve had, as an amateur, to socio-biology, aren’t so much to the subject itself, but to the stupid popularizations, where it quickly becomes just a version of the “Playboy Philosophy”. As if it took Stephen Pinker to discover that tendencies towards adultery are part of human nature. I think Hank Williams discovered that a while ago, without going to Harvard....
An interesting project would be to try to tease out the evolutionary meaning of the very human project of trying to resist the all too human temptations to lie, cheat and steal, etc. In other words, where did this morality come from, that we can’t get away from? Hugh Heffner can just blame it on the Puritans, and say to hell with it, but that’s not really good enough. Puritans, and all other moralists, are products of evolution, too, in some sense, aren't we?
3 The self-deception project: great topic! Sartre wrote some brilliant stuff about it. Trivers’ early version, as presented in the article, isn’t very convincing. He says self-delusion helps you lie more effectively, but:
a. Liars in general aren’t notably self-deluded. The seducer doesn’t believe that he (or she) isn’t already married, and the con-artist doesn’t believe he or she is going to make you rich. The corrupt politician doesn’t believe anything at all. And yet they all lie and deceive pretty successfully.
b. Many self-delusions aren’t about things you lie about to other people. A classic case is when someone like me starts thinking “Hey, the grey hair looks rakish, and from some angles, you wouldn’t even notice the extra thirty (or forty) lbs: basically, I’m still the attractive guy I was twenty (or thirty) years ago. Only smarter.” This common kind of delusion isn’t something you can fool anybody else about, only yourself.
c. So, Trivers is (in the Ideas article, at least) only looking at a small corner of the large realm of self-deception, and a small corner of the large realm of deceiving others, and suggesting there may be interesting overlap in there. Well, maybe so. But there are still the large categories of cynical deceivers, and poor slobs who fool only themselves. So, there are a few more chapters to write in the book of deception. I’m looking forward to reading it.
17 Apr-4 From: toddstark To: BostonDotCom
Asking whether natural selection is "sufficient" or "the answer" to explaining human nature seems to involve a misunderstanding of the concept itself. Selection is a model for explaining the spread of variation. It seems to me that it should be logically obvious that explaining the spread of variation cannot by itself be a complete explanation of the nature of anything. However by the same token, failing to explain how some variation spreads through a population and other variation does not would make us blind to a big part of the picture.
Selection is most probably neccessary and almost certainly not sufficient for the most interesting explanatory tasks relevant to human nature. I think natural selection is an important and perhaps essential tool of analysis for both the genetically inherited aspects of our species, and the elements of culture that we transmit by other means.
Culture evolves just as genomes do, although by different mechanisms. Yet selection still plays a role. Inherited learning mechanisms of a variety of kinds play an important role in individual differences; while economics, cultural heritage, and selection all probably play more important roles in group differences. Sure, there is potentially much merit to periodic and linear theories of history as well, but they aren't neccessarily mutually exclusive with the explanatory power of selection theory and population mathematics.
Two recent thought-provoking books relevant to explaining human behavior in broad terms relevant to cultural or biological evolution ...
Richard Nisbett --> "The Geography of Thought" -- reviews experimental evidence that Nisbett believes shows how the way we live affects what we focus on, which affects the way we think and perceive things in a globally pervasive manner. Shows how the influence of geography, ecology, economics, and social structure influences cognitive processes in important ways not limited to the controversial effects of different languages on cognition. Culture and ecology do matter, and affect our thinking in a fundamental way that a universal model of human cognitive modules might not do justice to.
Boyd and Richerson --> "Not By Genes Alone" -- their model of gene-culture coevolution, showing why culture matters and how it is affected by selection in a different manner than the genome. Also how genes and culture influence each other in both directions. Roughly speaking, a more scientific and less narrow version of the "meme" idea. Again, culture does matter, but not in a way that makes human beings a blank slate.
kind regards,
Todd Stark
18 Apr-5 From: kristier To: BostonDotCom
Natural selection states that only those who are best adapted to their environment will survive and those who have less adapted are more likely to be eliminated. Humans naturally select groups based on characteristics that are similar. This group association is something that is in our nature, just like how we gravitate towards forming our own family groups and social networks. Humans form their own groups and tend to exclude others from their groups and sometimes develop preconcieved notions about these other groups. Group selection can be a good or bad thing, but it all depends on how ones groups treats others outside ones group. Groups that form preconcieved notions about other groups may consider themselves superior or inferior to certain groups. One example would be groups of conflicting ethnicities that will sometimes claim that one group is superior over the other, also known as Social Darwinism. Social Darwinism, which the Nazi's used in WWII, caused groups who believe they are superior to wipe out other groups they consider inferior. Natural Selection can not be prevented. As long as we associate ourselves with others by forming groups, this hierarchy can't be stopped.
19 Apr-5 From: Dr._Paul_Armstrong To: toddstark
Thank you Todd for your input.
If I may make a couple of comments.
I agree that there are other means of evolution, like drift. However, natural selection is a sufficient process by which evolutin can occur, i.e. sufficient, but not necessary. On the other hand, for adaptation and/or speciation, then natural selection is both necessary and sufficient.
Regarding, the origin of variation; it IS NOT natural selection. Natural selection decreases variation. Consider 2 alleles at a locus in a population. One allele is slightly advantageous over the other. Selection will eventually eliminate the less advantageous allele, i.e. decrease variation.
Culture DOES NOT evolve as genomes do. Cultural evolution evolves in a Lamarkian manner, i.e. the passing on of acquired characterisitics. This is precluded in biological evolution.
Finally, memes are in no way like genes (I know you did not claim this, but that is what the memeists contend). In fact, that are not real entities, and therefore are not amenable to scientific experimentation.
Thank you for the references, another is Dennet, Darwin's Dangerous Idea. However, I agree with Stepehn J. Gould's assessment, that cultural evolution is not evolution at all.
For more on the subject from Gould, see;
http://www.stephenjaygould.org/
22 Apr-10 From: peterkirk To: BostonDotCom
To explain religious preferences or acts of crime according to Bennett is to attribute such actions to Natural Selection. By doing so, Bennett's theory undermines and denies human free will. Embracing religion has certainly not been proven to lead to a genetic advantage. Likewise, one does not see single men raping woman out of a "natural selective" need to propagate. While there can be no dismissing the argument that genetic traits survive and are passed from one generation to the next, people still posses a mind, a conscience, and a soul. These factors allow humans to make decisions regarding a rejection of religion or commiting a crime like rape. To act out of reason, and not passion or instinct, is what separates humans from other animals. We are all born with a soul, and we all have a choice.
23 Apr-11 From: toddstark To: Dr._Paul_Armstrong
Paul,
Thank you very much for your comments.
Paul: I agree that there are other means of evolution, like drift. However, natural selection is a sufficient process by which evolutin can occur, i.e. sufficient, but not necessary. On the other hand, for adaptation and/or speciation, then natural selection is both necessary and sufficient.
Todd: I'm a little confused by this. By my understanding, natural selection is not a theory of speciation. This would seem to me to trivialize a lot of important work that has been done to model the reproductive isolation of populations, and a lot of work still to be done.
Paul: Regarding, the origin of variation; it IS NOT natural selection. Natural selection decreases variation. Consider 2 alleles at a locus in a population. One allele is slightly advantageous over the other. Selection will eventually eliminate the less advantageous allele, i.e. decrease variation.
Todd: Again, I agree insofar as natural selection is not a model of the origin of variation, it is a model for the spread of variation.
Paul: Culture DOES NOT evolve as genomes do. Cultural evolution evolves in a Lamarkian manner, i.e. the passing on of acquired characterisitics. This is precluded in biological evolution.
Todd: Certainly, but neither of these statements precludes the Darwinian evolution of culture. The Darwinian mechanism doesn't require a genome nor does it require Mendelian inheritance. Neither is Darwinian evolution precluded by Lamarckian inheritance. For extended discussions, see Boyd and Richerson (Not By Genes Alone), also Peter Corning (Nature's Magic), and Steve Gould's doorstop has much of value to say about the root of the Darwinian evolution vs. its branches. In addition, David Hull has a wonderful example of Darwinian processes in the cultural activity of science in "Science as a Process."
The root is simply that (1) variation arises in a population, (2) that the variation affects its own reproduction, and (3) that the total number of variants is limited in some way.
Paul: Finally, memes are in no way like genes (I know you did not claim this, but that is what the memeists contend). In fact, that are not real entities, and therefore are not amenable to scientific experimentation.
Todd: My opinion is that this isn't entirely true, that there are some cultural variants that are somewhat like genes, however the more important point I want to make is that population models make no assumption that variants must be strictly particulate. I also don't think that cultural variants are themselves replicators in the sense that genes are often considered to be, but this doesn't neccessarily break the natural selection model either.
What matters most, I hope you'll agree, is not whether other mechanisms happen to come into play, but the empirical question of whether selection affects the spread of cultural variants more than the "Lamarkian" guidance does. If so, then we are justified in using natural selection to model the spread of cultural variation, even though it is not the only mechanism in play. Why? ...
One main reason that I find it plausible that natural selection remains a viable factor in cultural evolution is that our cumulative achievements are so much greater than anything that anyone manages to achieve in a single generation. Henry Petroski has a series of books about engineering that point out how much cultural evolution is involved in something as simple as a paper clip or a pencil. We easily lose track of how much cultural variation has accumulated prior to the invention of something useful. The time frame over which useful cultural innovation actually happens is what makes it plausible to me that selection has an important effect.
As to whether cultural evolution is Darwinian, I admit that the jury is still out, but I insist that the idea should not be rejected out of hand just because simplistic versions of the idea have been abused or because cultural variants are very different from genes. The potential of applying population models to cultural innovation is great and the idea potentially quite testable.
kind regards,
Todd
24 Apr-11 From: toddstark To: peterkirk
I don't put much trust in sociobiological models that ignore the seemingly obvious fact that we often systematically do things that violate our own reproductive fitness. If genetic fitness were a good predictor of human behavior, we would be using it in a positive way as our behavioral science, rather than spending most of our time trying to explain the cases where it doesn't apply, like nationalism, moralistic punishment, suicide cults, and other phenomena that defy direct explanations based on the adaptation of small bands of hunter-gatherers to the Pleistocene environment. Trivers' reciprocal altruism concept works beautifully for small band reciprocal behavior, but fails completely for large group behavior where we cannot possibly track or manage the neccessary relationships for reciprocation.
That said, I don't agree with the "free will" argument either.
Mechanical models don't negate free will because they have nothing to do with free will, they are from a completely different tradition of reasoning. One is causal explanation, the other is folk psychology. It isn't adequate to say that because a mechanical model violates the intuitions of folk psychology that this proves that the mechanical model must be wrong. Of course formal causal models violate our folk psychological intuitions, that's exactly why they work so well (when they do). They allow us to predict things that our intuitions fail at. They provide us with deductive validity for our theories.
The folk psychological notion of free will is essentially an uncaused cause, whereas the scientific notion of cognitive choice is something closer a complex loop of causation. For example, so long as there is some way in which the frames and goals of reasoning can be influenced by information, there is no reason why "free will" cannot be represented in principle by information processing models. To say that mechanical explanations of human behavior are wrong simply because they don't allow for uncaused causes is circular reasoning in my opinion. The rejection of uncaused causes is quite deliberate and tremendously useful in science.
There is nothing about Darwinian explanation that requires all human behavior to directly serve the interests of our genes. Much of our behavior is demonstrably maladaptive from the perspective of reproductive fitness.
The tradeoffs involved in learning and performance probably prevent a powerful general purpose learning mechanism from evolving, or from being particularly useful to us even if it does evolve. However this doesn't prevent us from evolving information processing mechanisms and biases that serve what we now think of as our "free will."
The idea that we choose "freely" is rather more illusion than reality as it turns out. People rarely adopt a religion or political or social attitude that isn't predictable from their history and circumstances. Of course it makes sense to them, so they don't neccessarily view it as being coerced into that choice, and they say it is "freely made." Saying that people "freely" chose what we expect them to choose seems to me to beg the question of what "choosing freely" means. It appears that there is no substantive difference between the idea that our choices are the result of a complex deterministic causal model and the idea that they our choices are the result of "reasoning freely" from predictable conditions.
For the most part, it seems to me that criminal behavior can be explained in terms of impulsiveness of various kinds, leading us to violate the norms that normally constrain us by means of legal coercion, moral emotions, and moralistic punishment.
kind regards,
Todd
To explain religious preferences or acts of crime according to Bennett is to attribute such actions to Natural Selection. By doing so, Bennett's theory undermines and denies human free will. Embracing religion has certainly not been proven to lead to a genetic advantage. Likewise, one does not see single men raping woman out of a "natural selective" need to propagate. While there can be no dismissing the argument that genetic traits survive and are passed from one generation to the next, people still posses a mind, a conscience, and a soul. These factors allow humans to make decisions regarding a rejection of religion or commiting a crime like rape. To act out of reason, and not passion or instinct, is what separates humans from other animals. We are all born with a soul, and we all have a choice
25 Apr-12 From: Dr._Paul_Armstrong To: peterkirk
I presume you mean Dennett ("Darwin's Dangerous Idea") and not Bennett (Wayne Bennett from Rockland High School).
Many evolutionary biologists would agree with you. We are uncomfortable with the idea of an adaptive explanation for behavioral and cultural characteristics. We are not sure that they are testable, and therefore are not sure they are science.
An example of a good book that ends up being misleading to the educated lay person is Diamond's "The Third Chimp" where he induces these adaptive explanations for all sorts of human behavior, and I just cannot agrre with some of what he purports.
Regarding rape: if rape was a successful reproductive strategy, i.e. it would increase the fitness of the raper, then we would see more of it. For some number of reasons, it is not.
I don't agree with your last statements. How would one know that they're not acting insinctively. There's just no way to test that, nor the following statements about humans possessing a soul.
I'm a scientist, and evolutionary biology is a science, so I suggest we leave theology out of it.
26 Apr-12 From: Dr._Paul_Armstrong To: toddstark
Todd: I'm a little confused by this. By my understanding, natural selection is not a theory of speciation. This would seem to me to trivialize a lot of important work that has been done to model the reproductive isolation of populations, and a lot of work still to be done.
Paul: Natural selection is the process discovered by Darwin (and coincidentally, Wallace) by which the origin of species arise. So, in a Darwinian sense, it's not a theory of speciation, but the process by which speciation occurs. I.e., the source of biodiversity.
Todd: Again, I agree insofar as natural selection is not a model of the origin of variation, it is a model for the spread of variation.
Paul: If you're talking about the "spread" of biodiversity, then I now understand what you mean.
Todd: Certainly, but neither of these statements precludes the Darwinian evolution of culture. The Darwinian mechanism doesn't require a genome nor does it require Mendelian inheritance. Neither is Darwinian evolution precluded by Lamarckian inheritance. For extended discussions, see Boyd and Richerson (Not By Genes Alone), also Peter Corning (Nature's Magic), and Steve Gould's doorstop has much of value to say about the root of the Darwinian evolution vs. its branches. In addition, David Hull has a wonderful example of Darwinian processes in the cultural activity of science in "Science as a Process."
The root is simply that (1) variation arises in a population, (2) that the variation affects its own reproduction, and (3) that the total number of variants is limited in some way.
Paul: I think that, yes, it does. Darwinian evolution by natural selection requires 1) variation at a trait, 2) that trait to be heritable, 3) that more individuals are born than the environment can support so that natural selection can occur at that trait. Culture does not fall into this explanation (much like Lamarkianism) so it cannot be explained by evolutionary theory. I.e., culture does not evolve.
Regarding memes, I won't get into that discussion, since their existence is invented and their evolution is precluded by my explanation above. They are merely an analogy of genes, and a poor analogy at that.
Selection, in and of itself, is nothing without variation and heritability. Consider a population of mice living in and around a dump contaminated with a toxic substance that leaves 10% od the mice with no right back leg. This is a developmental defect and is not heritable. These mice are at a selective disadvantage but this selection is meaningless without heritability. Just so with culture. Cultural traits can change, be lost, be picked up again and not affect the lineages that have them, because they are not heritable, they are learned. So, without affect the lineages, the GENETIC LINEAGES, then, evolutionarily, they are blind.
Todd: One main reason that I find it plausible that natural selection remains a viable factor in cultural evolution is that our cumulative achievements are so much greater than anything that anyone manages to achieve in a single generation.
Paul: There is no endgame, no progression, in evolution. Progressin is an artefact, because we HAD to start out knowing less than we know today. Organismically, we had to start out simpler, as single cells, or the precursors to single cells. Therefore it LOOKS like life progresses from simpler to more complex, but that's an artefact of life's origins, independent of evolution.
Todd: As to whether cultural evolution is Darwinian, I admit that the jury is still out, but I insist that the idea should not be rejected out of hand...
Paul: I won't, because there is behavior that is testable, heritable, predictable and Darwinian. However, I will insist on any credible theory of cultural evolution or the evolution of cultural traits show how these traits have a genetic component, else, it's sociology and NOT evolutionary biology.
Todd, Thanks for your comments.
27 Apr-12 From: Dr._Paul_Armstrong To: toddstark
If I may intercede with some comments:
Todd: Trivers' reciprocal altruism concept works beautifully for small band reciprocal behavior, but fails completely for large group behavior where we cannot possibly track or manage the neccessary relationships for reciprocation.
Paul: This is true in today's society. But, what if these traits did not evolve in today's society. Have you heard of the 'ghosts of evolution past?' Perhaps, when these altruistic traits evolved, humans lived in small isolated bands of closely related individuals, with little migration between groups. Then, one could envision the evolution of altruism explained by inclusive fitness. This trait could have been retained even though our culture has changed. Consider how fast our cultures have changed relative to evolutionary time scales. We probably have many traits evolved during a time which, or a culture that is very different evolutionarily than the one we live in today.
29 12:06 PM From: toddstark To: Dr._Paul_Armstrong
Paul: However, I will insist on any credible theory of cultural evolution or the evolution of cultural traits show how these traits have a genetic component, else, it's sociology and NOT evolutionary biology.
Todd responds ...
A light dawns. Ok, this finally helps me make sense of why we have been going back and forth arguing over things we seem to agree about in principle.
Yes, a Darwinian theory of cultural evolution would indeed be a Darwinian sociology, not evolutionary biology. (Nor would it be a form of "Social Darwinism," since that was not a scientific theory but a political ideology based on competition between individuals or groups rather than culture). It would have to be consistent with evolutionary biology, but I agree that it would be confusing to say it was the same field because it is not based on genes, nor neccessarily any other discrete particulate unit of inheritance, it is Darwinian only in the sense that it is based upon the core principles of natural selection and therefore likely that some different form of population mathematics could potentially be useful in helping to model its spread.
Thank you very much for the help clarifying these points.
kind regards,
Todd
30 12:20 PM From: toddstark To: Dr._Paul_Armstrong
Todd: Trivers' reciprocal altruism concept works beautifully for small band reciprocal behavior, but fails completely for large group behavior where we cannot possibly track or manage the neccessary relationships for reciprocation.
Paul: This is true in today's society. But, what if these traits did not evolve in today's society. Have you heard of the 'ghosts of evolution past?' Perhaps, when these altruistic traits evolved, humans lived in small isolated bands of closely related individuals, with little migration between groups. Then, one could envision the evolution of altruism explained by inclusive fitness. This trait could have been retained even though our culture has changed. Consider how fast our cultures have changed relative to evolutionary time scales. We probably have many traits evolved during a time which, or a culture that is very different evolutionarily than the one we live in today.
I think one main reason that many evolutionary theorists assume that Pleistocene humans lived in small bands is that it seems to make at least some sense of our social nature, as you suggest. However, I just don't see how living in small bands could explain nationalism, the psychology of religion, or much of human social psychology. I suspect that various fundamental aspects of human social behavior, such as role-taking, mass "strong" reciprocity, and the massive alignments of social and political movements are difficult or even impossible to explain in terms of adaptations to life in small bands. The hypothesis that Pleistocene humans may have lived in linked tribal organizations of thousands, (similar to the Plains Indians) is probably equally consistent with the available evidence as is the small band hypothesis.
If our social behavior is an adaptation to life in tribes of thousands rather than small bands, additional mechanisms become plausible to explain some of the things like nationalism that currently make little sense (to me) as some extension of a "ghost" of small band behavior. If people adapted to distinguish one small band from another, why should they suddenly see themselves as members of the same nation or religion as enormous numbers of others and act on that identity?
Ignoring the social reality isn't the right choice for evolutionary biology, explaining it is the right choice, and that probably requires some form of co-evolutoonary theory between genes and culture, where the undeniable role of culture in our social behavior can be better understood.
kind regards,
Todd
http://boards.boston.com/n/pfx/forum.aspx?msg=281.27&nav=messages&webtag=bc-news
TS editing note: I've intentionally eliminated some unhelpful responses from people. I also eliminated John Landon's ("nemonemini" -- http://eonix.8m.com/) responses although they have some value. I did this because they are a distraction more than a help to the threads I am most interested in. He sometimes makes good points, but he is so combative that constructive dialog with him is almost impossible. I think he essentially makes two points: (1) he supports a periodic ("Eonic") theory of cultural evolution which is entirely non-Darwinian, and (2) he argues that Darwinian mechanisms "cannot explain human evolution." This second point is problematic because of his systematic refusal to either distinguish biological from cultural evolution or to acknowledge even in principle what natural selection can potentially explain.
Treating his ideas fairly would require a whole separate discussion (and a more reasonable advocate to represent them!).
Here are the selected posts ...
News board
Folder: Ideas
Discussion: Understanding human nature
1 Mar-26 From: BostonDotCom To: ALL
In ''The evolutionary revolutionary,'' Drake Bennett profiles Robert Trivers, who wrote a series of papers in the 1970s that provided the intellectual basis for evolutionary psychology, a discipline which holds that human behaviors from rape to religion are inborn products of evolution. Does natural selection provide the key to understanding human nature? Or do such explanations neglect the importance of culture?
4 Mar-28 From: sabine To: BostonDotCom
Trivers, Pinker and their followers grossly undestimate the power of culture in their explanations of human behavior. Dawkins seems to be allowiing culture back into the picture in his most recent contribution. All three, however, rely heavily on anecdotal data when dealing with homo sapiens (as versus quantifiable evidence in other realms). Bio-reductionism has, I suppose, gained favor due to its association with "real" science and the abject failure of the social sciences to generate a satisfactory pardigm. S.J. Gould's untimely death silenced the most promising voice on these matters. He understood cultural evolution as well or more insightfully than the bulk of current anthropologists, and certainly better than his selectionist peer group.
5 Mar-28 From: jsb To: BostonDotCom
Some thoughts on the Robert Trivers article:
1 What a fascinating guy!
2 The objections I’ve had, as an amateur, to socio-biology, aren’t so much to the subject itself, but to the stupid popularizations, where it quickly becomes just a version of the “Playboy Philosophy”. As if it took Stephen Pinker to discover that tendencies towards adultery are part of human nature. I think Hank Williams discovered that a while ago, without going to Harvard....
An interesting project would be to try to tease out the evolutionary meaning of the very human project of trying to resist the all too human temptations to lie, cheat and steal, etc. In other words, where did this morality come from, that we can’t get away from? Hugh Heffner can just blame it on the Puritans, and say to hell with it, but that’s not really good enough. Puritans, and all other moralists, are products of evolution, too, in some sense, aren't we?
3 The self-deception project: great topic! Sartre wrote some brilliant stuff about it. Trivers’ early version, as presented in the article, isn’t very convincing. He says self-delusion helps you lie more effectively, but:
a. Liars in general aren’t notably self-deluded. The seducer doesn’t believe that he (or she) isn’t already married, and the con-artist doesn’t believe he or she is going to make you rich. The corrupt politician doesn’t believe anything at all. And yet they all lie and deceive pretty successfully.
b. Many self-delusions aren’t about things you lie about to other people. A classic case is when someone like me starts thinking “Hey, the grey hair looks rakish, and from some angles, you wouldn’t even notice the extra thirty (or forty) lbs: basically, I’m still the attractive guy I was twenty (or thirty) years ago. Only smarter.” This common kind of delusion isn’t something you can fool anybody else about, only yourself.
c. So, Trivers is (in the Ideas article, at least) only looking at a small corner of the large realm of self-deception, and a small corner of the large realm of deceiving others, and suggesting there may be interesting overlap in there. Well, maybe so. But there are still the large categories of cynical deceivers, and poor slobs who fool only themselves. So, there are a few more chapters to write in the book of deception. I’m looking forward to reading it.
17 Apr-4 From: toddstark To: BostonDotCom
Asking whether natural selection is "sufficient" or "the answer" to explaining human nature seems to involve a misunderstanding of the concept itself. Selection is a model for explaining the spread of variation. It seems to me that it should be logically obvious that explaining the spread of variation cannot by itself be a complete explanation of the nature of anything. However by the same token, failing to explain how some variation spreads through a population and other variation does not would make us blind to a big part of the picture.
Selection is most probably neccessary and almost certainly not sufficient for the most interesting explanatory tasks relevant to human nature. I think natural selection is an important and perhaps essential tool of analysis for both the genetically inherited aspects of our species, and the elements of culture that we transmit by other means.
Culture evolves just as genomes do, although by different mechanisms. Yet selection still plays a role. Inherited learning mechanisms of a variety of kinds play an important role in individual differences; while economics, cultural heritage, and selection all probably play more important roles in group differences. Sure, there is potentially much merit to periodic and linear theories of history as well, but they aren't neccessarily mutually exclusive with the explanatory power of selection theory and population mathematics.
Two recent thought-provoking books relevant to explaining human behavior in broad terms relevant to cultural or biological evolution ...
Richard Nisbett --> "The Geography of Thought" -- reviews experimental evidence that Nisbett believes shows how the way we live affects what we focus on, which affects the way we think and perceive things in a globally pervasive manner. Shows how the influence of geography, ecology, economics, and social structure influences cognitive processes in important ways not limited to the controversial effects of different languages on cognition. Culture and ecology do matter, and affect our thinking in a fundamental way that a universal model of human cognitive modules might not do justice to.
Boyd and Richerson --> "Not By Genes Alone" -- their model of gene-culture coevolution, showing why culture matters and how it is affected by selection in a different manner than the genome. Also how genes and culture influence each other in both directions. Roughly speaking, a more scientific and less narrow version of the "meme" idea. Again, culture does matter, but not in a way that makes human beings a blank slate.
kind regards,
Todd Stark
18 Apr-5 From: kristier To: BostonDotCom
Natural selection states that only those who are best adapted to their environment will survive and those who have less adapted are more likely to be eliminated. Humans naturally select groups based on characteristics that are similar. This group association is something that is in our nature, just like how we gravitate towards forming our own family groups and social networks. Humans form their own groups and tend to exclude others from their groups and sometimes develop preconcieved notions about these other groups. Group selection can be a good or bad thing, but it all depends on how ones groups treats others outside ones group. Groups that form preconcieved notions about other groups may consider themselves superior or inferior to certain groups. One example would be groups of conflicting ethnicities that will sometimes claim that one group is superior over the other, also known as Social Darwinism. Social Darwinism, which the Nazi's used in WWII, caused groups who believe they are superior to wipe out other groups they consider inferior. Natural Selection can not be prevented. As long as we associate ourselves with others by forming groups, this hierarchy can't be stopped.
19 Apr-5 From: Dr._Paul_Armstrong To: toddstark
Thank you Todd for your input.
If I may make a couple of comments.
I agree that there are other means of evolution, like drift. However, natural selection is a sufficient process by which evolutin can occur, i.e. sufficient, but not necessary. On the other hand, for adaptation and/or speciation, then natural selection is both necessary and sufficient.
Regarding, the origin of variation; it IS NOT natural selection. Natural selection decreases variation. Consider 2 alleles at a locus in a population. One allele is slightly advantageous over the other. Selection will eventually eliminate the less advantageous allele, i.e. decrease variation.
Culture DOES NOT evolve as genomes do. Cultural evolution evolves in a Lamarkian manner, i.e. the passing on of acquired characterisitics. This is precluded in biological evolution.
Finally, memes are in no way like genes (I know you did not claim this, but that is what the memeists contend). In fact, that are not real entities, and therefore are not amenable to scientific experimentation.
Thank you for the references, another is Dennet, Darwin's Dangerous Idea. However, I agree with Stepehn J. Gould's assessment, that cultural evolution is not evolution at all.
For more on the subject from Gould, see;
http://www.stephenjaygould.org/
22 Apr-10 From: peterkirk To: BostonDotCom
To explain religious preferences or acts of crime according to Bennett is to attribute such actions to Natural Selection. By doing so, Bennett's theory undermines and denies human free will. Embracing religion has certainly not been proven to lead to a genetic advantage. Likewise, one does not see single men raping woman out of a "natural selective" need to propagate. While there can be no dismissing the argument that genetic traits survive and are passed from one generation to the next, people still posses a mind, a conscience, and a soul. These factors allow humans to make decisions regarding a rejection of religion or commiting a crime like rape. To act out of reason, and not passion or instinct, is what separates humans from other animals. We are all born with a soul, and we all have a choice.
23 Apr-11 From: toddstark To: Dr._Paul_Armstrong
Paul,
Thank you very much for your comments.
Paul: I agree that there are other means of evolution, like drift. However, natural selection is a sufficient process by which evolutin can occur, i.e. sufficient, but not necessary. On the other hand, for adaptation and/or speciation, then natural selection is both necessary and sufficient.
Todd: I'm a little confused by this. By my understanding, natural selection is not a theory of speciation. This would seem to me to trivialize a lot of important work that has been done to model the reproductive isolation of populations, and a lot of work still to be done.
Paul: Regarding, the origin of variation; it IS NOT natural selection. Natural selection decreases variation. Consider 2 alleles at a locus in a population. One allele is slightly advantageous over the other. Selection will eventually eliminate the less advantageous allele, i.e. decrease variation.
Todd: Again, I agree insofar as natural selection is not a model of the origin of variation, it is a model for the spread of variation.
Paul: Culture DOES NOT evolve as genomes do. Cultural evolution evolves in a Lamarkian manner, i.e. the passing on of acquired characterisitics. This is precluded in biological evolution.
Todd: Certainly, but neither of these statements precludes the Darwinian evolution of culture. The Darwinian mechanism doesn't require a genome nor does it require Mendelian inheritance. Neither is Darwinian evolution precluded by Lamarckian inheritance. For extended discussions, see Boyd and Richerson (Not By Genes Alone), also Peter Corning (Nature's Magic), and Steve Gould's doorstop has much of value to say about the root of the Darwinian evolution vs. its branches. In addition, David Hull has a wonderful example of Darwinian processes in the cultural activity of science in "Science as a Process."
The root is simply that (1) variation arises in a population, (2) that the variation affects its own reproduction, and (3) that the total number of variants is limited in some way.
Paul: Finally, memes are in no way like genes (I know you did not claim this, but that is what the memeists contend). In fact, that are not real entities, and therefore are not amenable to scientific experimentation.
Todd: My opinion is that this isn't entirely true, that there are some cultural variants that are somewhat like genes, however the more important point I want to make is that population models make no assumption that variants must be strictly particulate. I also don't think that cultural variants are themselves replicators in the sense that genes are often considered to be, but this doesn't neccessarily break the natural selection model either.
What matters most, I hope you'll agree, is not whether other mechanisms happen to come into play, but the empirical question of whether selection affects the spread of cultural variants more than the "Lamarkian" guidance does. If so, then we are justified in using natural selection to model the spread of cultural variation, even though it is not the only mechanism in play. Why? ...
One main reason that I find it plausible that natural selection remains a viable factor in cultural evolution is that our cumulative achievements are so much greater than anything that anyone manages to achieve in a single generation. Henry Petroski has a series of books about engineering that point out how much cultural evolution is involved in something as simple as a paper clip or a pencil. We easily lose track of how much cultural variation has accumulated prior to the invention of something useful. The time frame over which useful cultural innovation actually happens is what makes it plausible to me that selection has an important effect.
As to whether cultural evolution is Darwinian, I admit that the jury is still out, but I insist that the idea should not be rejected out of hand just because simplistic versions of the idea have been abused or because cultural variants are very different from genes. The potential of applying population models to cultural innovation is great and the idea potentially quite testable.
kind regards,
Todd
24 Apr-11 From: toddstark To: peterkirk
I don't put much trust in sociobiological models that ignore the seemingly obvious fact that we often systematically do things that violate our own reproductive fitness. If genetic fitness were a good predictor of human behavior, we would be using it in a positive way as our behavioral science, rather than spending most of our time trying to explain the cases where it doesn't apply, like nationalism, moralistic punishment, suicide cults, and other phenomena that defy direct explanations based on the adaptation of small bands of hunter-gatherers to the Pleistocene environment. Trivers' reciprocal altruism concept works beautifully for small band reciprocal behavior, but fails completely for large group behavior where we cannot possibly track or manage the neccessary relationships for reciprocation.
That said, I don't agree with the "free will" argument either.
Mechanical models don't negate free will because they have nothing to do with free will, they are from a completely different tradition of reasoning. One is causal explanation, the other is folk psychology. It isn't adequate to say that because a mechanical model violates the intuitions of folk psychology that this proves that the mechanical model must be wrong. Of course formal causal models violate our folk psychological intuitions, that's exactly why they work so well (when they do). They allow us to predict things that our intuitions fail at. They provide us with deductive validity for our theories.
The folk psychological notion of free will is essentially an uncaused cause, whereas the scientific notion of cognitive choice is something closer a complex loop of causation. For example, so long as there is some way in which the frames and goals of reasoning can be influenced by information, there is no reason why "free will" cannot be represented in principle by information processing models. To say that mechanical explanations of human behavior are wrong simply because they don't allow for uncaused causes is circular reasoning in my opinion. The rejection of uncaused causes is quite deliberate and tremendously useful in science.
There is nothing about Darwinian explanation that requires all human behavior to directly serve the interests of our genes. Much of our behavior is demonstrably maladaptive from the perspective of reproductive fitness.
The tradeoffs involved in learning and performance probably prevent a powerful general purpose learning mechanism from evolving, or from being particularly useful to us even if it does evolve. However this doesn't prevent us from evolving information processing mechanisms and biases that serve what we now think of as our "free will."
The idea that we choose "freely" is rather more illusion than reality as it turns out. People rarely adopt a religion or political or social attitude that isn't predictable from their history and circumstances. Of course it makes sense to them, so they don't neccessarily view it as being coerced into that choice, and they say it is "freely made." Saying that people "freely" chose what we expect them to choose seems to me to beg the question of what "choosing freely" means. It appears that there is no substantive difference between the idea that our choices are the result of a complex deterministic causal model and the idea that they our choices are the result of "reasoning freely" from predictable conditions.
For the most part, it seems to me that criminal behavior can be explained in terms of impulsiveness of various kinds, leading us to violate the norms that normally constrain us by means of legal coercion, moral emotions, and moralistic punishment.
kind regards,
Todd
To explain religious preferences or acts of crime according to Bennett is to attribute such actions to Natural Selection. By doing so, Bennett's theory undermines and denies human free will. Embracing religion has certainly not been proven to lead to a genetic advantage. Likewise, one does not see single men raping woman out of a "natural selective" need to propagate. While there can be no dismissing the argument that genetic traits survive and are passed from one generation to the next, people still posses a mind, a conscience, and a soul. These factors allow humans to make decisions regarding a rejection of religion or commiting a crime like rape. To act out of reason, and not passion or instinct, is what separates humans from other animals. We are all born with a soul, and we all have a choice
25 Apr-12 From: Dr._Paul_Armstrong To: peterkirk
I presume you mean Dennett ("Darwin's Dangerous Idea") and not Bennett (Wayne Bennett from Rockland High School).
Many evolutionary biologists would agree with you. We are uncomfortable with the idea of an adaptive explanation for behavioral and cultural characteristics. We are not sure that they are testable, and therefore are not sure they are science.
An example of a good book that ends up being misleading to the educated lay person is Diamond's "The Third Chimp" where he induces these adaptive explanations for all sorts of human behavior, and I just cannot agrre with some of what he purports.
Regarding rape: if rape was a successful reproductive strategy, i.e. it would increase the fitness of the raper, then we would see more of it. For some number of reasons, it is not.
I don't agree with your last statements. How would one know that they're not acting insinctively. There's just no way to test that, nor the following statements about humans possessing a soul.
I'm a scientist, and evolutionary biology is a science, so I suggest we leave theology out of it.
26 Apr-12 From: Dr._Paul_Armstrong To: toddstark
Todd: I'm a little confused by this. By my understanding, natural selection is not a theory of speciation. This would seem to me to trivialize a lot of important work that has been done to model the reproductive isolation of populations, and a lot of work still to be done.
Paul: Natural selection is the process discovered by Darwin (and coincidentally, Wallace) by which the origin of species arise. So, in a Darwinian sense, it's not a theory of speciation, but the process by which speciation occurs. I.e., the source of biodiversity.
Todd: Again, I agree insofar as natural selection is not a model of the origin of variation, it is a model for the spread of variation.
Paul: If you're talking about the "spread" of biodiversity, then I now understand what you mean.
Todd: Certainly, but neither of these statements precludes the Darwinian evolution of culture. The Darwinian mechanism doesn't require a genome nor does it require Mendelian inheritance. Neither is Darwinian evolution precluded by Lamarckian inheritance. For extended discussions, see Boyd and Richerson (Not By Genes Alone), also Peter Corning (Nature's Magic), and Steve Gould's doorstop has much of value to say about the root of the Darwinian evolution vs. its branches. In addition, David Hull has a wonderful example of Darwinian processes in the cultural activity of science in "Science as a Process."
The root is simply that (1) variation arises in a population, (2) that the variation affects its own reproduction, and (3) that the total number of variants is limited in some way.
Paul: I think that, yes, it does. Darwinian evolution by natural selection requires 1) variation at a trait, 2) that trait to be heritable, 3) that more individuals are born than the environment can support so that natural selection can occur at that trait. Culture does not fall into this explanation (much like Lamarkianism) so it cannot be explained by evolutionary theory. I.e., culture does not evolve.
Regarding memes, I won't get into that discussion, since their existence is invented and their evolution is precluded by my explanation above. They are merely an analogy of genes, and a poor analogy at that.
Selection, in and of itself, is nothing without variation and heritability. Consider a population of mice living in and around a dump contaminated with a toxic substance that leaves 10% od the mice with no right back leg. This is a developmental defect and is not heritable. These mice are at a selective disadvantage but this selection is meaningless without heritability. Just so with culture. Cultural traits can change, be lost, be picked up again and not affect the lineages that have them, because they are not heritable, they are learned. So, without affect the lineages, the GENETIC LINEAGES, then, evolutionarily, they are blind.
Todd: One main reason that I find it plausible that natural selection remains a viable factor in cultural evolution is that our cumulative achievements are so much greater than anything that anyone manages to achieve in a single generation.
Paul: There is no endgame, no progression, in evolution. Progressin is an artefact, because we HAD to start out knowing less than we know today. Organismically, we had to start out simpler, as single cells, or the precursors to single cells. Therefore it LOOKS like life progresses from simpler to more complex, but that's an artefact of life's origins, independent of evolution.
Todd: As to whether cultural evolution is Darwinian, I admit that the jury is still out, but I insist that the idea should not be rejected out of hand...
Paul: I won't, because there is behavior that is testable, heritable, predictable and Darwinian. However, I will insist on any credible theory of cultural evolution or the evolution of cultural traits show how these traits have a genetic component, else, it's sociology and NOT evolutionary biology.
Todd, Thanks for your comments.
27 Apr-12 From: Dr._Paul_Armstrong To: toddstark
If I may intercede with some comments:
Todd: Trivers' reciprocal altruism concept works beautifully for small band reciprocal behavior, but fails completely for large group behavior where we cannot possibly track or manage the neccessary relationships for reciprocation.
Paul: This is true in today's society. But, what if these traits did not evolve in today's society. Have you heard of the 'ghosts of evolution past?' Perhaps, when these altruistic traits evolved, humans lived in small isolated bands of closely related individuals, with little migration between groups. Then, one could envision the evolution of altruism explained by inclusive fitness. This trait could have been retained even though our culture has changed. Consider how fast our cultures have changed relative to evolutionary time scales. We probably have many traits evolved during a time which, or a culture that is very different evolutionarily than the one we live in today.
29 12:06 PM From: toddstark To: Dr._Paul_Armstrong
Paul: However, I will insist on any credible theory of cultural evolution or the evolution of cultural traits show how these traits have a genetic component, else, it's sociology and NOT evolutionary biology.
Todd responds ...
A light dawns. Ok, this finally helps me make sense of why we have been going back and forth arguing over things we seem to agree about in principle.
Yes, a Darwinian theory of cultural evolution would indeed be a Darwinian sociology, not evolutionary biology. (Nor would it be a form of "Social Darwinism," since that was not a scientific theory but a political ideology based on competition between individuals or groups rather than culture). It would have to be consistent with evolutionary biology, but I agree that it would be confusing to say it was the same field because it is not based on genes, nor neccessarily any other discrete particulate unit of inheritance, it is Darwinian only in the sense that it is based upon the core principles of natural selection and therefore likely that some different form of population mathematics could potentially be useful in helping to model its spread.
Thank you very much for the help clarifying these points.
kind regards,
Todd
30 12:20 PM From: toddstark To: Dr._Paul_Armstrong
Todd: Trivers' reciprocal altruism concept works beautifully for small band reciprocal behavior, but fails completely for large group behavior where we cannot possibly track or manage the neccessary relationships for reciprocation.
Paul: This is true in today's society. But, what if these traits did not evolve in today's society. Have you heard of the 'ghosts of evolution past?' Perhaps, when these altruistic traits evolved, humans lived in small isolated bands of closely related individuals, with little migration between groups. Then, one could envision the evolution of altruism explained by inclusive fitness. This trait could have been retained even though our culture has changed. Consider how fast our cultures have changed relative to evolutionary time scales. We probably have many traits evolved during a time which, or a culture that is very different evolutionarily than the one we live in today.
I think one main reason that many evolutionary theorists assume that Pleistocene humans lived in small bands is that it seems to make at least some sense of our social nature, as you suggest. However, I just don't see how living in small bands could explain nationalism, the psychology of religion, or much of human social psychology. I suspect that various fundamental aspects of human social behavior, such as role-taking, mass "strong" reciprocity, and the massive alignments of social and political movements are difficult or even impossible to explain in terms of adaptations to life in small bands. The hypothesis that Pleistocene humans may have lived in linked tribal organizations of thousands, (similar to the Plains Indians) is probably equally consistent with the available evidence as is the small band hypothesis.
If our social behavior is an adaptation to life in tribes of thousands rather than small bands, additional mechanisms become plausible to explain some of the things like nationalism that currently make little sense (to me) as some extension of a "ghost" of small band behavior. If people adapted to distinguish one small band from another, why should they suddenly see themselves as members of the same nation or religion as enormous numbers of others and act on that identity?
Ignoring the social reality isn't the right choice for evolutionary biology, explaining it is the right choice, and that probably requires some form of co-evolutoonary theory between genes and culture, where the undeniable role of culture in our social behavior can be better understood.
kind regards,
Todd
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