Give Thanks

Is Civilization a Bad Idea?

via  

by Adam Frank

The ice ages came and the ice ages went. For more than a half-million years Homo sapiens endured the changing climate by adapting. Then, deep in the frozen expanse of the last global big chill, something new happened. We woke up to ourselves in a new way.

We became self-conscious, creating art, culture and tools of far greater complexity than anything that had come before. When the ice pulled back yet again, we eventually took a step of even greater consequence. We domesticated ourselves and put the Earth to the plow.

With agriculture came surplus and with surplus came new social arrangements. Eventually, we built cities and far-ranging empires to support them. Human beings began building civilization. In doing so we set ourselves and the entire planet onto a new trajectory.

But did anyone ever stop to ask if it was a good idea?

Now before you give in to the easy snort and chortle that accompanies a seemingly absurd question like this, I am going to ask you to take the long view. In this case long means billions of years, and billions of planets.

We don't want to ask the question: Is civilization good for you (or me)? Instead we want to ask: Is civilization good — in the long term — for planets and their capacity to support life (or at least technologically adept civilizations)?

In other words, we want to frame the question of sustainability in an astrobiological setting.

As of this writing we are pretty sure that at least 10 percent of stars in the galaxy harbor their own worlds. That number translates into at least a billion planets. And that's just in our galaxy. The numbers for the universe are much larger still.

Some of these planets may form biospheres. Some of those biospheres may lead to intelligence. Some of those intelligences may marshal the energy reservoirs of their worlds to build technological civilizations. Where, in the long term, does that lead?

The conflict between potentially stable forms of hunter-gatherer cultures and the new agrarian way of life here on Earth was the theme of Daniel Quinn's award winning philosophical novel Ishmael. Quinn leaned heavily on anthropological research showing that hunter-gather life was not, in general, "brutish and nasty" as we tend to believe. Instead hunter-gather cultures had their good points, including a tendency to be fairly equalitarian. They also required far fewer hours of work for daily subsistance than a modern person puts in. Most importantly for our purposes, hunter-gathers tended to live roughly in balance with the prevailing ecology.

Quinn's general point was that civilization was never inevitable. It simply constitutes a different way of being human compared to what came before. While Quinn was not suggesting a return to that "other way," he did argue much could be learned by looking beyond the bias that urbanized civilization is inherently the best and only mode of being human.

Some more radical writers, John Zerzan and Derrick Jensen for instance, take a far more strident stand on the issue. For them, the development of agriculture was the beginning of a long violent process of denuding the planet and reducing its potential for habitation. "Civilization can never be sustainable" is the first premise of Jensen's book Endgame.

The long-term sustainability of civilization is also a theme that has taken up in modern science fiction. In Charles Wilson's Spin series, intelligent technological species have a tendency to exist for only short periods (galactically speaking), rapidly over-consuming their planetary resources.

Even scientists thinking about SETI (the search for extraterrestrial intelligence) have raised the question of civilization's long-term prospects. This line of reasoning takes shape in the Fermi Paradox, which can be stated as: "If ET's are common why haven't we seen them already?" A number of researchers have proposed a so-called "sustainability solution" to Fermi's Paradox, whereby we don't see technologically adept extraterrestrial civilizations because very few are able to manage their own growth curves. Collapse, in the Jared Diamond sense of the word, may be endemic.

Of course, like most folks in the "developed" world, I too am digging the fruits of civilization. Long life span, low infant mortality, a general freedom from famine, amazing images from the Hubble Space Telescope; these are all good things in and of themselves. But the very science and technologies that make this civilization possible also allow us to see how critical the question of sustainability has become.

Perhaps they also let us see how critical the question os sustainability always was, even if it lay hidden behind history and "progress."

For the last few centuries, science, paired with the availability of cheap energy, allowed us to imagine futures of infinite expansion. Those imagined futures cast a long shadow, blinding us, perhaps, to the complex dynamics linking planets and intelligence that make such futures exceedingly difficult — if not impossible — to obtain.

In that case, solving the problem of sustainable civilization may, in the long run, be nature's greatest challenge to us.

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You can keep up with more of what Adam Frank is thinking onFacebook and Twitter. His new book is About Time: Cosmology and Culture at the Twilight of the Big Bang.

Humans And Other Animals

Humans And Other Animals: NPR

by: Barbara J King

Humans, and almost all the primates with whom we share a recent common ancestor, are intensely social creatures. Evolving over many millions of years to thrive in the collective, we come together naturally in societies, groups, families (families of various configurations, not only nuclear) and, nowadays, in online communities.

It is through the social bonds experienced in these collectives that we most readily forge our cognitive and emotional responses to the world. It's a process beset as much by edgy negotiation and messy dissent as it is by coordinated thinking and harmonious cooperation.

Anthropology asks some big questions about how this state of affairs emerged. How did Homo sapiens come to be the primate for whom social meaning-making is as natural as bipedal striding, technology making and communicating through endlessly inventive words and gestures? In what ways do we overlap with, and in what ways do we diverge from, other primates in this regard, indeed from other animals generally? How has our evolutionary journey been shaped by our interactions with the other animals who share our habitats, and who — in many cases — approach their lives as thinking, feeling beings in their own right.

In a series of guest posts over the coming weeks, I will fling an anthropological voice into the 13.7 blogging mix. I invite you to engage with me as we pick through some of these big ideas.

By way of background, I am a biological anthropologist at the College of William and Mary in Virginia; a monkey-and-ape observer who has collected primate data on the Kenyan savannas and in zoos here at home; and a writer of non-fiction science books, most recently Being With Animals.

I'm also an avid consumer of contemporary fiction; half of a cat-rescue team that helps feral and homeless cats in southern Virginia; and a Twitter addict.

The biological anthropology I practice today centers largely on topics that continue to captivate me more than 30 years after I first stumbled onto the field as an undergraduate. The extent of nonhuman primates' ability to reason and to feel is coming more fully to light by the year. For instance, we know now that the nonhuman great apes — chimpanzees, bonobos, the gorillas of Africa, the orangutans of Asia — are hotbeds of political intrigue, technology aided problem solving and an all-too-familiar mix of compassion and cruelty.

It's too limiting to think only at the species level, though. Jane Goodall appreciated this fact soon after launching her studies of wild chimpanzees 50 years ago. It's just taken decades to become widely accepted. Individual animals are behaviorally distinct, within as well as across populations. This variation, far from being mere statistical noise, is central to scientific understanding of animal behavior.

The species-level trap is an easy lure. You've heard the claims, maybe, about chimpanzees and bonobos? Chimpanzees are the male-violent, make-war apes, whereas their close cousins the bonobos are female-empowered and sexy-pacific. Don't believe it, at least not in this overly-simple form. Gentle chimpanzees and feisty bonobos exist, as do apes who one day are kind and the next cruel, shaped (as are we humans) by some combination of how they were raised, their day-to-day social encounters and their genetics.

Often defined as the comprehensive study of humankind, anthropology increasingly embraces the natural world. I lean towards what the anthropologist Eduardo Kohn has called "an anthropology of life," an embrace of elephants, bison, monkeys, crows, dogs, frogs and a thousand other species. Or, more precisely, it's an embrace of the intersection of the lives lived by these animals with the lives lived by human animals.

From the ancient days when our hunter-gatherer ancestors first brushed color on cave walls, leaving glorious animal images behind, or when the first village settlers entered into an unspoken contract of domestication with goats and sheep, our lives have been entwined.

Questions about meaning-making in humans and other animals are not just fodder for reflection. They are a practical matter. How can an appreciation for evolved plasticity, the responsiveness of the human brain and body to learning and social change, speak back to overly-biologized theories of human behavior? To cede too much power to ancient genes and brain modules is to miss a key aspect of the human evolutionary story, the impact of evolving cultural forces on our behavior.

How can an understanding of other creatures' lives guide us beyond study of animals to acting for animals? Whether from habitat loss and poaching in the wild or from abuse and exploitation in captivity, animals face unprecedented threats in the 21st century. Science, broadly speaking, presents an exciting counterpoint to these threats. Science is leading a sea change in our thought as we wake up to the intrinsic value of the lives all around us.

I look forward to touching on these issues, and others, as I write for 13.7. A shared foray into meaning-making with those who read (and write) this blog is certain to be a pleasure.

Mutant Planet

gracías por http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet

How Many U.S. Americans Aren't Heterosexual?

^^That is probably a better title for the concept behind the original story, but anyhow... I digress.

Read this article first:

Study Asks How Many Americans Are Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender

And here are a few thoughts concerning this discussion.

According to Alfred Kinsey's 1948 report on the Sexuality of the Human Male, he puts the number at 10%. This was largely the generic figure held throughout most of the rest of the century. Now, however, according to a Gallup poll, about 70% of Americans now believe that number is as high as 25%. Of course, statistically speaking, that it nigh unto impossible (meaning 1 in every 4 people is GLBT).

The problems inherent in the study are many, mainly: The UCLA study presupposes that the people the polled were A) willing to admit to any sort of non-traditional sexual desire or practice; B) largely representative of the actual ratio between GLBTQ and strictly heterosexual-identifying people. Also, women are more likely than men to have same-gender attraction, and this is also a trend likely reflected in the data: whereas 6-8% of all men may identify as GLBTQ, it jumps to between 11-13% for women. 

Furthermore, many women that ID as hetero admit to having had feelings of same-gender attraction, and it is likely that as many as 40% of all women have had such desire. (For an in-depth look at why this stimulation/behavior occurs in adult women, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wi​ki/Women_who_have_sex_with​_women) This is a largely a hormonal phenomenon (and largely unsurprising), as estrogen and testosterone levels vary widely among adults, and in specific concentrations play a significant part in the individual's perception of their own sexual impulses, as well as social, religious, and emotional values.

Women are likely to develop a psycho-sexual relationship with other women very, very easily. For instance, among groups of women, after having been grouped together for some time, many may begin to menstruate at the same time, in regular intervals, due to the exchange in testosterone and estrogen levels between the women. In short, they are wired to become emotionally and physically stimulated by both men and women, and this is largely a anachronistic feature of reproductive necessity in order to propagate the species and assure its continued genetic survival. As a rule, women find strength, comfort, and understanding among female compatriots. The likelihood is that women band together to survive more effectively, efficiently, and affluently, as well as to increase the quality of childcare by closely sharing the physical as well as emotional duties with close female friends. It is then small wonder that these emotional and psycho-sexual relationships may transcend into physical as well as emotional sexual desire (or that they are often acted upon).

Strangely enough, the determination of human sexuality and of one's own sexual identity are largely disconnected from the person's libido, or sex drive. Though these hormones (testosterone and estrogen) play a significant role in sexual attraction, they do not get the real credit for the determination of sexual identity, as this ID is determined from a host of physical, emotional, and psycho-social factors, as well as socio-cultural ones.

In general, the trends of less traditional human sexuality have curved sharply upward after the mainstreaming and public acceptance of the discourse concerning bi/homo/trans sexualities, and only in the last decade have we been able and willing to ask ourselves pertinent questions about human sexuality on a credible scientific basis.

Still, it makes you think. Truth be told, the whole of human sexuality is a continuum, the parameters of which continue to grow and mold to fit our collective culture. It is also more than simply a biological phenomenon, and to try to narrow any one cause is like saying the only thing that makes a pizza a pizza is to have pepperoni on it.

An interesting thought is that as secular humanism continues to define the at-large philosophical theory of the young'uns, the broad acceptance of various forms of human sexuality will continue to spurn the opportunity for the human organism to be able and willing to allow the general populous to get freaky however they damn well please (as long as it doesn't really hurt anybody). The absence of a real need as a species for the majority of the population to reproduce in order to secure the continuation of said species, as well as the socio-cultural factors enumerated above, will likely continue to contribute to the rise in diverse human sexualities.

Boost Your Immune System: Breed With An Extinct Human Species

Boost your Immune System: Breed with an Extinct Human Species

via Anthropology.net

Last week at the Royal Society in London, research was presented suggesting that Neandertals not only interbred with H. sapiens sapiens, but that their genes were helpful to modern people moving out of Africa.

This pioneering study was led by Peter Parham of Stanford University, and was only possible after the draft genome of H. neanderthalensis was published. The researchers looked at human leukocyte antigens (HLAs), genes important to the functioning of the immune system.

Different regions of the world are known to have unique HLAs, because different variations create specific disease resistances. It would have been advantageous for the earliest modern humans to breed with a species (or subspecies) already adapted to living in a different climate. Moderns could have picked up helpful genes that were already in existence from Neandertal populations, which would have possibly allowed their populations to expand more rapidly. Why wait for random mutation when you can interbreed with a people already successfully adapted to an area?

Neandertal Child Reconstruction

While only approximately 6% of the modern European genome was contributed from earlier hominins, around half of specific HLAs can be attributed to these earlier forms of people. As a form of further substantiation, Europeans have HLA variations present within the Neandertal genome not found in Africans. Interestingly, Asian populations today also have a variation not present anywhere else, which could indicate Denisovan (mystery Siberian hominin) admixture.

As if the draft sequence showing interbreeding was not enough last year– this study has raised the bar on the type of information we can hope to glean from looking at ancient DNA. There was a time when archaeology and anatomy were the only windows we had into our ancestral relatives. It will be exciting to see what is uncovered next.

By Matthew Magnani