Monthly Archives: August 2010

Blog

A world without mosquitoes

3 Comments

Years of popular science broadcasting (not to mention a few science fiction stories) have inculcated the idea that eradicating any one creature – no matter how undesirable and nasty – from its native ecosystem is to invite the collapse thereof. But that may not necessarily be a universal truth – it turns out that we might be able to wipe out mosquitoes (or at least the human-biting disease vector species thereof) with little risk [via Michael Anissimov]. Might.

… in many cases, scientists acknowledge that the ecological scar left by a missing mosquito would heal quickly as the niche was filled by other organisms. Life would continue as before — or even better. When it comes to the major disease vectors, “it’s difficult to see what the downside would be to removal, except for collateral damage”, says insect ecologist Steven Juliano, of Illinois State University in Normal. A world without mosquitoes would be “more secure for us”, says medical entomologist Carlos Brisola Marcondes from the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Brazil. “The elimination of Anopheles would be very significant for mankind.”

Collateral damage, eh? Poor choice of words, perhaps, given recent events. Still, wiping out some mosquitoes could not only deep-six malaria and dengue (still huge killers in developing nations), but allow the colonisation of huge tracts of land that mosquitoes have made impenetrable, such as the Arctic tundra. But those are exactly the areas where the lack of mosquitoes would have the strongest effect on the ecosystem… so it’s not a decision I’d want to be responsible for, myself.

But one thing’s for sure: if we’re going to kill mosquitoes, we should use frickin’ LASERS.

Blog

Neuroeconomics

4 Comments

What do you do with a discipline or field of endeavour that’s getting a bit stale and dated? Slapping the prefix neuro- onto it seems to be popular, and here’s the latest example: no one trusts economics any more (well, almost no one), so maybe that trust can be restored by looking at how trust itself – and the neurochemical basis for such – acts as a fundamental human component of the system that old economic models don’t account for [via BigThink]. Confused? Yeah, me too.

Zak and his collaborators at Claremont Graduate University have found that oxytocin, a hormone produced in the brain that promotes human bonding, plays a powerful role in shaping how generous people are. He calls it “the moral molecule.” “It’s a whole different model,” Zak says. “It tells us why global commerce works — because there is a motivation to reciprocate.”

People release oxytocin (pronounced ok-si-toh-sun) in settings that promote feelings of trust and safety, Zak has found, and their behavior becomes more trusting and generous in return. He envisions workplaces structured to reinforce this cycle.

[…]

Although Zak preaches the power of markets, he strongly agrees that rational-actor models fall short. “Economists get a bad rap for doing what I call ‘imaginary economics,’” he says. “You sit in your office, imagine some situation and scribble down a model. You get excited about it, ship it to your friends and publish it in a journal. It has nothing to do with any problem in the world.

“What neuroeconomics does is put human beings back in the center of economics. I can go inside the brain and measure what’s happening.”

[…]

Vernon Smith showed that people are naturally more generous than decision theory would predict. But what would happen if the players’ moods were enhanced by oxytocin? Zak had some of his game subjects inhale oxytocin before playing the Trust Game. Remarkably, more than twice as many people on oxytocin sent all of their money to a stranger (versus control subjects who were administered a placebo).

This is compelling evidence that oxytocin helps us to decide whom to trust and when to reciprocate, Zak says. “Civilization is dependent on oxytocin,” he says. “You can’t live around people you don’t know intimately unless you have something that says, ‘Him I can trust, and this one I can’t trust.’”

Obviously we can’t just start dosing people up with neurochemicals in an attempt to make the world a better place (or could we?), but the theory is that we can build a social and economic environment where people are more likely to have their oxytocin levels raised, leading to a sort of virtuous reciprocal circle of generosity. But if you’re thinking it sounds like something of a utopian technofix, don’t worry – this Zak character is looking at the bigger picture:

“How can we make the world more trusting, more cooperative, more generous? It’s not all oxytocin. It’s a much bigger brain circuit. It’s the people interacting with you, it’s the environment within which you interact — all those things matter. We have to peel away the layers of the onion to figure out how all those things fit together.”

All well and good… provided the current system doesn’t break irreparably before we’ve peeled our metaphor. Er, onion.

Blog

Defining society: the anthropologist’s dilemma

Keith Hart think’s he’s uncovered anthropolgy’s biggest challenge, and the issue that’s hampering its progress as a science: defining the word ‘society’ in a way that makes sense for the times we live in.

I believe that humanity is caught precariously in transition between two notions of where society is located, the nation-state and the world. The dominance of the former in the 20th century fed the ethnographic revolution in anthropology which, rather than following the needs of colonial empire as is commonly assumed, was in fact an attempt to make the national model of society universal by finding its principles everywhere, even in so-called primitive societies. These principles included cultural homogeneity, a bounded location and an ahistorical presumption of eternity. The centrality of the state to such a concept of nation was negated by the study of stateless societies in these terms.

Clearly world society is not yet a fact in the same sense as its principal predecessor. But the need to make a world society fit for all humanity to live in is urgent for many reasons that I don’t need to spell out. Retention of ethnography (which first emerged in Central Europe to serve a nation-building project) as our main professional model has made most of us apologists for a fragmented and static vision of the human predicament, reinforcing a rejection of world history that amounts to nothing less than, “Stop the world, I want to get off”. We no longer study exotic rural places in isolation from history, but, in abandoning that exclusive preoccupation, we have failed to bring the object, theory and method of anthropology up to date.

Note the similarities to concerns about the nation-state as dominant identifier coming from all sorts of other disciplines (as frequently documented on this ‘ere blog, among other places). Nationality is increasingly coming to be seen as the hollow sham it has always been. Think about it: the problem with identifying with a nation is that you’re identifying with nothing more than a word and a piece of multicoloured cloth. The ideological continuity that nationality implies is a complete fiction: if I’m “proud to be English”, am I proud of the same things Churchill would have held dear? Is it the citizens of England I identify with, or its values and laws, or even the physical ground itself, that territory which is no longer the map? None of these things are constants; they are different now to how they were a year ago, a decade ago, a century ago. No one chose where to be born… so why this fanaticism for a fluke of geography and childhood survival statistics? You don’t see people born on a Wednesday singing anthems about the wonderfulness and well-earned superiority of Wednesdays, do you?

“England” (or “America”, or “China”, or or or… ) is a hollow word, and the vacuum at its heart is easily filled by people with agendas that have nothing to do with bringing people together. You don’t bring people together by labelling them, by gathering them beneath a banner; that’s the definition of segregation. Nationality is at best meaningless, and at worst extremely dangerous. Nationality is apartheid.  It’s an idea that makes no logical sense in a networked world, where geography increasingly constrains only your individual access to physical resources. Until we get past the idea of ‘society’ being something to which we may belong, but to which some (most!) other humans do not, solutions to all our most pressing problems as a species will continue to elude us.

My two cents, there. 🙂

Blog

Expansion tectonics: the secret of Planet Earth that THEY don’t want you to know!

Thanks in part to spending my early teens as a stubborn geek outcast in a public boarding school*, I was once deeply involved with occultism and conspiracy theory, and the attraction of wild ideas and crazy-yet-almost-coherent philosophies has never truly dimmed… though I like to think I’m a lot more rational and critical of received information as an adult. (My loss, the world’s gain? Maybe… )

So here’s a corker of an oddball theory [via MetaFilter], and one I can’t believe I’ve never stumbled across before. What’s the secret? Plate tectonics is a myth. The Earth is expanding.

This modified map shows clear empirical evidence that Asia and Australia were originally conjoined with North and South America approximately 200-250 Ma, prior to creation of the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans.

This earlier connection of Asia and Australia with the Americas is also confirmed geologically by the deep ocean trenches that delineate the Andesite Line containing andesite, the primary mineral of the Andes Cordilleran mountains running the length of South America. [Carey, 1976, p.256]

The evidence is empirical and the conclusions are obvious—the Earth ~200-250 million years ago was a single planetary landmass ~40% smaller than it is today, and at that moment in geologic time there were NO OCEANS!

Every island and seamount, and most of the water In today’s ocean basins that now cover over 70% of the planet, has evolved in the very short period of 200 million years! The Earth has been, and still is, steadily growing in size and expanding in diameter at an accelerating rate—contrary to what scientists believe because they are currently unable to detect and measure this relatively slow rate of growth.

THIS RAPID GROWTH AND EXPANSION HAS GRAVE IMPLICATIONS FOR THE FUTURE OF MANKIND!

Every hallmark of web-based outsider science crankdom is there, with the exception of explicit references to Biblical quotations and animated gifs. Fat blocky font, check; BLOCK CAPITALS used for emphasis of salient yet hard-to-swallow FACTS, especially when the word PROOF appears in a headline, check; cutting edge web design circa 2001, checkity-check check check. (It should be noted, however, that the spelling and grammar is of unusually high quality.)

Oh, it’s so easy to be cynical, isn’t it? We’ll all be sorry when this dude’s theory turns out to be true. “First they came for the anthropogenic climate change denialists, and I said nothing…”

[ * To preemptively answer the three usual questions that follow this revelation: 1) yes, there was; 2) no, I didn’t; 3) if I could explain that, I’d probably have my own successful psychology practice and a lucrative career as a public speaker on the hedge fund circuit. ]

Blog

Hawking still hawking the Great Diaspora

3 Comments

Stephen Hawking made a fair media splash back in 2006 when he announced that humanity needs to clamber out of the gravity well if it wants to ensure its survival. But the internet’s memory is short, despite its theoretical depth, and hence Hawking’s reiteration of the call for a Great Diaspora in a video interview at BigThink is rippling around the world again.

The logic of the argument is pretty inescapable – when all your eggs are in one basket, the odds of losing the game to the statistical inevitability of a global extinction event tend towards unity – but it will be interesting to see how the response differs this time round, given how much the world has changed since 2006. We seem a lot more focussed on the immediate future than we were… and that’s not necessarily a bad thing, though I think we’d be wise to keep one eye on the horizon. Is it just me, or did everything seem a whole lot more optimistic back then, before the economic implosion was anything more than a grim warning on the lips of a few outsider economists?

Or was it just me that was more optimistic, perhaps? Strange how five years of blogging about the future has made me a lot less confident that everything will work out just fine.